Band of Hope temperance medal

The Amersham Grove Band outlined the general programme of meetings across the year: ‘Each meeting includes an address dealing essentially with practical temperance teaching, […] several musical evenings […] three chemical lectures […] three lantern lectures […] the usual winter recitation competitions; the year closing with a Christmas tea […] at which the recitation and attendance medals and prizes were distributed.’6

Awards were a key component of the Band of Hope programme, and medals became conspicuous symbols of members’ commitment. The 1900 Band of Hope Manual lists four different medals: the New Member’s Medal; the One Year’s Membership Medal (to which a bar would be attached for each successive year); the Badge of Honour; and the Recruiting Member’s Medal.7 The last was the rarest, requiring a member to recruit six other children into their band. This process was described in the Band of Hope Review, compelling children ‘to become recruiting-sergeants, and to get your school-fellows and play-fellows, and all the boys and girls that you know, whose parents are willing, to join the Band of Hope. Every new soldier we get in our army makes it easier to fight the cruel foe Strong Drink’.8

The rarity of a recruiting medal can be seen in the record of medal distribution at the annual meeting of the Deptford Congregational Church Band of Hope on 12th February 1901. Sixteen attendance medals and four spelling bee medals were given out, but no recruiting ones.9 To receive a recruiting medal, one had to be especially dedicated to the cause and therefore likely to have received the other medals also. This was the case for Margaret Jessie Gosling. At the 24th anniversary meeting of the Creek Street Mission Hall Band of Hope in November 1911, Jessie was ’presented with a medal for recruiting, and as this was the fourth medal she had gained a book prize was also given to her’.10

As she was the only child named, the receipt of a recruiting medal was evidently especially noteworthy. With a name, we have a window into the life of one of the children who received a medal exactly like the one found on the Thames foreshore by mudlark Nicola White. Born in January 1902 in Dacca Street, Jessie Gosling was baptised at St. Nicholas’ church; by 1911 she was living with her parents and two younger siblings in Crossfield Street.11 Her father was a labourer for Deptford Borough Council, having previously worked as a sawyer.12 Perhaps the ‘respectable’ job of her father contributed to Jessie’s own commitment to temperance; their street, by contrast, was deemed highly ‘unrespectable’. One of Booth’s investigators found it to be ‘very neglected, broken and dirty windows, doors open, children playing about […] squalid poverty’.13 While not in the worst category on Booth’s poverty scale, Crossfield Street nonetheless sat with a cluster of ‘blue’ streets on the map, concentrated around the creek and its industries.

Regardless of the conditions, Jessie evidently found a place of solace in one of her local Bands of Hope, whether out of religious conviction or simply for the community it offered her. It is impossible to say whose medal this is, and how it ended up in the Thames. Perhaps it was cast in, fell in, was lost, or dumped in with other possessions. There is joy in its anonymity, though. Without a direct association to an individual child, it now stands as a unique reminder of an overlooked and obsolete religious movement; a movement characterised by a culture of collective action and purpose. Who knows? It might even have belonged to Jessie.