Canon Blackley

In the November 1878 issue of the journal the Nineteenth Century there was published an article on ‘National Insurance’ by a somewhat obscure rural vicar, Canon William Blackley. Blackley's scheme has passed into history more for its timing than for its originality: it appeared just before that great decade of social discussion and structural economic change, the 1880s, and thus engendered public controversy. It is one of the paradoxes of British social policy history that a plan for state-funded old age pensions, seen by many in the early twentieth century as a piece of radical socialist welfare policy, should have originated in one of such conservative views.

William Lewery Blackley was born in Dundalk, Ireland, on 30 December 1830. He came from a prosperous landowning family, wealthy enough to send him to school in Brussels, and thereafter he attended Trinity College, Dublin. Ordained in 1854, he became a curate of the parish of St Peter's in Southwark – a very poor part of London, subject to all the problems of Victorian inner-city working-class life. One of these caught up with Blackley very soon after his arrival: he contracted cholera and nearly died. It was largely for the sake of his health, therefore, that in 1855 he was transferred to Frensham, in Surrey, to be vicar. He thus spent most of his working life in the relative tranquillity of rural parishes: first, Frensham until 1867; then North Waltham, in Hampshire, until 1883; then King's Somborne, also in Hampshire, until 1889. Finally, in 1889 Blackley moved to St James the Less, Westminster, and remained there until his death in 1902.