1842: Manchester Unity
January 26, 2022
By AHNZ
The last refuge of freedom against Big Brother is memory; The greatest horror of Orwell’s 1984 is the dictator’s attempt to wipe out history. Libertarians in New Zealand have long argued that we didn’t need The State to run our schools, build our roads, or provide social welfare. In reading our State-approved history books you would never know that free people once did all of these things and more. Manchester Unity Independent Order of Oddfellows was one such institution where by Kiwis took voluntary responsibility for their own welfare and it has been around just as long as systematic colonisation.
Leo Tolstoy wrote in his book The Slavery of Our Times (1900) that in the most diverse matters people in our times arrange their own lives incomparably better than those who govern them arrange things for them. “Without the least help from Government, and often in spite of the interference of Government, people organise all sorts of social undertakings-work men’s unions, co-operative societies, railway companies, cartels, and syndicates. If collections for public works are needed, why should we suppose that free people could not, without violence, voluntarily collect the necessary means and carry out anything that is now carried out by means of taxes, if only the undertakings in question are really useful for everybody?”
Who were these Oddfellows? They were your New Zealand ancestors, men and women. What did they do? They pooled their resources to care to offer medical, dental, maternal, pharmaceutical, sickness, optical, and, at last, funeral services to their mermbership. All without pointing a gun at anyone, all without taxing anybody. But you will not find mention of them in our history books. The Welfare State will not suffer competition. Although the government has expanded to take over the work Oddfellows once did for one another they are, interestingly, not extinct yet. When I was a kid I’d heard of Manchester Unity but thought it must be a foreign football team or something. They still have the same 1980s-looking logo today as they must have created during their last great gasp. The above image of a Manchester Unity teacup comes from a private museum visited in 2016. It belonged to the last mainstream generation to have nourished the society, my grandfather’s generation, which the Americans call The Greatest Generation. Such people as Captain Charles Upham, Doctors Douglas Robb and Brian Barratt-Boyes, Edmund Hillary, Selwyn Toogood, William Pickering, Jean Batten, and Bill Hamilton were all part of that generation.
“The ship arrived in Nelson on Monday 4th April 1842. It was reported that “those members of Manchester Unity were made of the right stuff” as just 3 days after landing they held their first meeting, on 7th April 1842 at about 4.00pm, in the fern. Thus the Nelson Lodge was formed. Appropriate dispensation was sought via the Australian Order to the UK. It was the beginning of Manchester Unity. Hence, Manchester Unity is New Zealand’s oldest Traditional Friendly Society. We can state that we have been here since 1842.” – Our History, manchesterunity.org.nz
“The Manchester Unity of Odd Fellows is a world-wide fraternity, which exists to promote the moral and material welfare of its members…A particular system of morality designated its ritual..A particular system of Benefits against misfortunes arising from Sickness and Death…through a long process of experience, a sound contributory self-help organisation, enabling men and women…to provide for the morrow, so that when no longer able to perform the daily task they might not be thrown on the mercy of the world. The Order, founded in 1810, operates throughout the world…the Mother Order, whose offices in Manchester, England, are the headquarters of the Unity. The first Lodge in New Zealand was established in 1842…” – Preface to Manchester Unity Handbook for Westland District (1969)
Manchester Unity Independent Order of Oddfellows
On 7 April 1842 New Zealand’s first Manchester Unity group formed as the Nelson Lodge. Oddfellows have been around a very long time before this, back to 1730 or earlier. Manchester Unity is a particular phylogenetic outcrop that reached New Zealand which claimed, in 1969, to be the ‘oldest, wealthiest, numerically strongest’ thereof. MU extended only as far south as as Ashburton, seemingly because another group of Oddfellows or others had claimed that territory. This sounds like a similar deal as the Methodists and Anglicans made to divide up territory back in their early days. New Zealand also had such strong Friendly Societies as United Ancient Order of Druids and Freemasons and Orange Lodge during the same long period.
For a way for free people to look after one another without The State look no further than a Manchester Unity annual Handbook or their standard book of rules. I’ve read both and they are brim-full with every eventuality and clause and explanation you can possibly think of. They had officers, meeting halls, rituals, regalia, and “degrees” of rank. Why wouldn’t they be great at looking after people in need? Manchester Unity has been providing voluntary welfare a lot longer than the welfare state has.
Members could be men or women, they didn’t discriminate, aged 15 1/2 years old to 60 in good health. After 65 there were no fees to pay at all. MU also had junior members. If a member got sick, they were covered. Payment to a hospital was not limited to those licensed by Government! A reminder that the further back in our history we go the more Libertarian New Zealanders are by default nature. These days all hospitals have long since become captured by government licencing if they are to practise.
Manchester Unity also functioned as an insurance company. Members could cover their building and contents from risk. They also had life insurance.
Manchester Unity offered banking services to members who could earn interest on their savings. This included house finance; Mortgage services. Imagine banking being free of Government to this extent today and financial services being in the hands of a voluntary group whose money it was. A teenager, man or woman, in good standing with their lodge would be in a position to buy their own home before they were 16 years old and be helped by experts into all the complications of life who held their interests at heart.
Thus, your banker and insurance agent etc. was part of your extended family. These Friendly Societies around New Zealand built their own Oddfellow’s Halls which were a nucleus of town’s social life. Meetings of all sorts, dances, sports, weddings were all held in these halls. The Westland District Handbook even mentions a Beatles night in Greymouth’s Lodge. If anything went wrong with a Lodge there was oversight, well covered and with hundreds of years of experience in what to do about it. If a new town or an old one wanted to start up its own Lodge there was provision for that too; Everything you can imagine is covered in the rule books every member received.
Manchester Unity even had holiday home cottages around the country with reduced rates to its members. It seems that all these homes from the 1960s have been retained to this day according to the New Zealand website.
“The demands of total war were such that many administrations around the world felt justified in extending state control over the economy and society to unprecedented levels…The war made it easier for Labour to do things but the road had already been chosen.” – Goldsmith (2008)
“In the 1960s and early 1970s, poverty was associated mainly with the elderly, as families and children were well supported, while pensions were low. The situation is now reversed.” – NZ Herald, quoted in Mitchell (2016)
The End
Needless to say, Friendly Societies such as Manchester Unity were dealt an all but fatal blow by the deliberate actions of Labour 1.0. Michael Joseph Savage’s Government, Labour 1.0 (1935-1949) inserted “cradle to the grave” welfare for New Zealanders by force. All the things New Zealanders had been doing for themselves with great success were ‘crowded out’, regulated, abolished, criminalised, banned, and/or taken over by Big Brother. Over 100 years of successful voluntarily self-government was colonised by Statists and its true history redacted.
The Slump and World War 2 were used as excuses for our Executive Government to grab unprecedented power and control over everyday New Zealand life. When the war ended the emergency powers were not given up, Labour 1.0 kept going and going. New Zealanders became accustomed to having The State do everything for them that they once did for themselves.
As the Greatest Generation grew old and died off the memory of Manchester Unity (with due respect to the organisation still alive today) faded away. I think the Baby Boomers, when young, scared the remaining older generations by their reckless antics. The Manchester Unity model depends on young people joining up and connecting with the organisation to pay in and keep the system going. I think the Greatest Generation and Silent Generation turned to The State in fear of a new Boomer generation that made it clear it wanted no part of a free society if the government could be given the job instead.
People now ask how we could afford maternity care, dentists, drugs etc. or supply banking or insurance services without Central Government providing it. Perhaps in the future a crisis will come and the Nanny State will fail. In re-building our world we could do a great deal worse than turning to the likes of Manchester Unity who know how to run a world without putting a gun to people’s heads.
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Image ref. Teacup, AHNZ Archives (2016)
Image ref. Manchester Unity services, M.U. Handbook for Westland District (1969)
Ref. We Won, You Lost, Eat That!- A political history of tax in New Zealand since 1840, Paul Goldsmith (2008)
Ref. Child Poverty and Family Structure: What is the evidence telling us?, Lindsay Mitchell; Family First NZ (2016)
https://www.manchesterunity.org.nz/history/
William Massey
10 Jul 1912–10 May 1925
Oddfellow member- ie pre-Welfare State institutionalist
– The likes of which was about to be wiped out
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