The story of Glasgow's Dorcas societies who helped city's poor

Dorcas Societies, named after a figure from the New Testament who sewed clothes for the poor, were a popular way for women to take part in charity and civic engagement in a way that was seen as appropriately feminine.

In today’s column from Glasgow City Archives, archivist Kate Guariento looks into the history of the Glasgow societies, which had a huge impact on the lives of the city’s poorest and most vulnerable residents.

Glasgow's Victoria Infirmary (Image: Glasgow City Archives)

Early in 1897, Mr Maylard, a surgeon at the Victoria Infirmary in Glasgow’s Southside, returned home from work feeling dejected.

He lamented to his wife that patients left the infirmary badly clothed and in poor circumstances, such that the good work done at the hospital to bring people back to health was often quickly undone by the grinding poverty faced by many of his working-class patients.

Mrs Maylard wasted no time. On March 10, 1897, she and the Young Women’s Christian Association held a public meeting at which the Dorcas Society of the Victoria Infirmary was founded.

Children in a Cowcaddens close, c1910 (Image: Glasgow City Archives)

The objects of the society, as outlined in its inaugural annual report, were established at this meeting.

The most pressing concern for the society was to provide necessitous patients with decent clothing, “so that they might be fitted to go home to begin the battle of life”.

In addition to clothing, the society would “provide medical and surgical appliances for poor patients when leaving the Infirmary for their own homes” and “give temporary assistance to the families of patients”, particularly in cases where the primary breadwinner could no longer work due to illness.

As well as raising funds and procuring clothing and medical supplies for those discharged from hospital, Dorcas Society representatives would visit patients and their families in their homes.

At these visits, according to annual reports held at Glasgow City Archives, the Dorcas women would not only assess the practical requirements of the family, but also provide “kindly counsel and friendship” for those to whom “present and future seemed dark and mysterious.”

Royal Infirmary, 1958 (Image: Glasgow City Archives)

The Dorcas Society of the Victoria Infirmary was not Glasgow’s first society of this kind. The Dorcas Society of the Glasgow Royal Infirmary had been established more than 30 years earlier, in 1863, with the aim of supplying “destitute patients leaving the Infirmary with warm clothing, and thus to prevent them from relapsing into illness”.

Beatrice Clugston (Image: East Dunbartonshire Council)

The founder of the Royal Infirmary Dorcas Society, Beatrice Clugston, was a prominent philanthropist and a prodigious fundraiser.

Clugston’s work in prisons and hospitals had convinced her, in the words of a journalist on our sister title the Glasgow Herald n 1871, that “a discharged patient was only half a cure, and a very uncertain one.”

Beyond founding the Dorcas Society of the Glasgow Royal Infirmary, Clugston also established two convalescent homes in the west of Scotland “for that large class of working people whose homes may not be adapted for speedy or complete recovery”.

As was typical in Victorian philanthropy, assistance from Dorcas societies was contingent on an evaluation of deservedness, and subscribers are regularly reassured in the annual reports of the Victoria Infirmary Dorcas Society of the moral character and respectability of those to whom help is extended.

Reading the annual reports of the Dorcas Society of the Victoria Infirmary gives a sense not only of the variety of the work of the Dorcas Society, but also of the terrible poverty and circumstances faced by so many Glaswegians in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

While the main object of the society was to provide clothing and medical equipment such as artificial limbs, almost every annual report includes a case in which the Dorcas ladies are called upon by desperate people to cover rent arrears. 

In the annual report of 1903, the Dorcas Society of the Victoria Infirmary reports on the provision of a wig for a girl whose hair had been destroyed due to burns to her scalp in a factory fire.

In 1924, the Dorcas-ladies cover a railway fare for a patient and his family to have a holiday, “which considerably hastened his convalescence, and allowed him to take up business again.”

During World War II, when the Victoria Infirmary was “inundated by homeless people”, the Dorcas storeroom was “requisitioned to provide clothing for many in their desperate need.”

The Dorcas Society of the Victoria Infirmary was wound up in 1979, after more than 80 years of providing assistance to patients of the Victoria Infirmary.