| AdminHistory | St Matthew Vestry directly administered two parochial charities that sought to provide assistance to the poor:
George Fournier's Charity - recipients were elected by ballot and awarded £10 in June each year. Applicants had to be resident in a house, tenement or other lodging within the parish; they were also required to have been at one time a parish householder.
The Leverington Charity - 'honest and industrious poor persons' elected by the Vestry were to receive £1 per annum; the Vestry re-elected each year the former recipients who survived and continued to qualify. No specific records of the administration of this Charity appear to survive.
There were numerous other local charities in Bethnal Green, of which Parmiter's School and Almshouse Foundation was the most important. Parmiter's was administered under a scheme of the Charity Commissioners dated 19 May 1884 (amended 20 November 1894), and in 1900 the St Matthew Vestrymen James George HiIditch, Felix Loughlin and Charles Wood were also governors of Parmiter's; the clerk to the Charity's governors - Robert Voss - was also clerk to the Vestry. The main body of Parmiter's records is at LMA (ref: ACC/1844), but there is further material comprising fee books, pupil records and monitors' minutes at THLHLA (ref: BG 555-62); the presence of these records in the St Matthew Vestry archives is probably explained by the overlap of personnel mentioned above. |