Dr Andrew Cormack - A Well-Recorded People: The Chelsea Out-Pensioners in the Early 18th Century
Wednesday 22nd March 2023
Dr Andrew Cormack spoke to the Society about Chelsea Out-Pensioners in the early eighteenth century on 22 March 2023.
The talk is now available via the Society's YouTube channel: https://youtu.be/4k7ywsuKtsM
Synopsis
The lecture concerns the Out-pension of the Royal Hospital Chelsea bestowed on superannuated or disabled soldiers of the British Army from the late seventeenth century onwards. The records up to the end of the War of the Spanish Succession, 1712, have not survived, so we are left with those generated from the reign of George I onwards. My study stopped at 1755, which was a key date in the administration of the pension, because from that time onwards the Government took the payment of money into its own hands, in a somewhat round-about way though more direct and efficient than it had been previously. And the method established in 1755 continued to be followed with little alteration well into the nineteenth century. It should be borne in mind, of course, that in the mid-eighteenth century there was essentially no Civil Service - no government officials - outside London who could undertake the work. This talk is, to a large degree, about administration, how things happened and why they happened in the way that they did, but it is also shot through with numerous personal stories that bring the Other Ranks of the eighteenth-century army to life. We know so little of them as individuals because vey few left any written record of their experiences, Corporal Todd, of course, is a notable exception, and it was his entry onto the Out-pension that really inspired my interest in the subject. He went back to Yorkshire in 1763 and lived for almost another 30 years and there were thousands of men like him who had served and been pensioned. So how did the system work? How much pension money did he receive? He married after service and produced at least one child, so was his pension enough to keep him and his little family? And how was it paid in an era when there were no banks or Post Offices as we know them today.
These questions, posed at the level of one individual, prompted an examination of the system as it applied to all of Todd's predecessors, but it also gave rise to an examination in person-by-person detail - all 25,000 of them who were examined between 1715 and 1755 - of how and why soldiers got to the stage of being released from the Army and what the reasons were for their discharges, but also why some received pensions and others, the majority, did not.
Speaker Biography
Dr Andrew Cormack is a specialist in the eighteenth-century Army. He edited The Journal of Corporal William Todd, 1745-1762 for the Army Records Society and contributes regularly to the JSAHR. He became the Honorary Editor in 2008. His doctorate is a study of the Out-pension of the Royal Hospital, Chelsea, which was published as 'These Meritorious Objects of the Royal Bounty'; The Chelsea Out-Pensioners in the Early Eighteenth Century. It was a runner-up in the Templer Medal Book Prize for 2017.
