Identifying tontines

Tontines were used for two main purposes relating to mutual assurance and building. The first aimed to provide short-term annuities, usually by investing in government funds known as Consols. The second operated as a means to provide money for building, with dividends paid to investors out of rental income or tolls, or in the case of schemes set up by local vestries and corporations, from the rates. In both cases, however, tontines depended on survivorship: as subscribers to a scheme or their nominees died, so the number of individuals who shared the dividends and final capital amount diminished with the survivors therefore receiving an ever larger portion. However, for the promoters, the financial commitment remained the same until the last survivor had died, and this could take place many decades after the scheme had begun. Therefore, although the death of the nominee on which the share had been purchased brought an end to a subscriber's interest in a tontine, it did not diminish the promoter's financial liability. In that respect, tontines were fundamentally different to life insurance, which paid out on the death of a policy holder.Footnote ¹⁵ With a tontine, the longer a subscriber lived, the more valuable the investment became. In other words, investing in a tontine was a means of gambling on longevity.

There is no simple way of identifying the existence of tontines. They operated at a variety of geographical scales with some assurance schemes having very widely dispersed national and regional networks of agents and subscribers, and others operating in highly localized settings. Lying outside any formal registration process, in contrast to friendly societies, identifying tontines therefore relies on different kinds of evidence. For the purposes of this research, the main body of evidence was derived by using a keyword search (=tontine) for the British Library online newspaper collection together with other contemporary sources.Footnote ¹⁶ Hundreds of newspapers were founded in the eighteenth century and although some failed to survive, by the mid-nineteenth century there were few towns with any pretensions to civility that did not have their own paper. They were crucial to the development of print culture and associational life in Britain, lending coherence to communities less by their reporting than by the listing of local events, advertising of services and decisions by local government and other agents of the state.Footnote ¹⁷ They were, as Eastwood noted, ‘the medium through which the activities that defined the local community were most apparent’ and for these reasons they are a particularly useful source with which to identify tontines.Footnote ¹⁸

The setting up of a tontine relied on generating subscriptions and for that reason they were normally advertised widely in the local press, often appearing in several editions of newspapers in different parts of the country. However, schemes ranged in size from those that involved many thousands of subscribers investing hundreds of thousands of pounds to the smallest with only a few members and very modest amounts of capital. In some cases, the initial advertisement to alert investors to the creation of the tontine provided evidence of its proposed foundation but in others the existence of a scheme is only evident from a report of a meeting or notification of sale of shares. The Tewkesbury Regency Tontine Society, for example, was tiny, with only 20 members, but its existence can be established by a report of a ‘convivial’ evening dinner for members at the Swan Inn.Footnote ¹⁹ In similar fashion, the sale of shares in the Fosdyke Bridge Tontine arising from bankruptcy proceedings provided evidence of the existence of the scheme to build a wooden bridge to improve communication between Boston and King's Lynn.Footnote ²⁰ Although the continued existence of most schemes identified in the papers was evident from repeated notices, not all tontines were launched successfully. Some clearly failed such as the British Metropolitan Tontine which commenced in 1821 but which appeared to have been suspended shortly afterwards because of lack of interest.Footnote ²¹ Nor was it always obvious whether a subscription scheme to erect a building operated as a tontine, even though advertisements for investment normally stated the means by which subscribers would be repaid.Footnote ²² By contrast, there were many inns, hotels and other meeting places that included the term tontine in their title but unless specifically mentioned as being part of a tontine scheme, these were not included in the database. Nor were other mentions of tontine included, such as the duke of Grafton's racehorse of the same name, stagecoaches or ships called the ‘Tontine’. For this analysis, therefore, only those schemes which could be positively identified as either being set up or operating as a tontine were included.

Using these sources, between 1770 and 1829 nearly 200 different local schemes have been identified ranging in size from the Tewkesbury Tontine noted above to the British Universal Tontine, based in Bristol but operating nationally, with many thousands of subscribers.Footnote ²³ Similarly, the amount of money raised by a tontine varied considerably, depending on its purpose and scope of operations. Building tontines tended to include the amount required to complete the undertaking, ranging from a proposal to raise over £800,000 to build docks in London to £1,200 needed to erect a school for the poor in Northampton. Assurance tontines sought to attract as much investment as they could within the registration period for subscribers, usually several months to a year from the date of the foundation, and therefore the amounts raised also varied from a few hundred to many thousands of pounds depending on whether the scheme was local or national in scope.

In terms of geographical coverage, tontines involving a building project were relatively easy to locate but in other cases, particularly those relating to the larger, national assurance schemes, the secretary's address was used to identify the main place of operation. The British Tontine, established in Bristol in 1791, for example, claimed to be ‘The most Numerous, Advantageous, and Respectable TONTINE Ever established in the UNIVERSE’, with over 20,000 subscribers and a capital fund of nearly £40,000 invested in government securities.Footnote ²⁴ Although its headquarters was in Bristol, it also had offices in London and agents in towns spread throughout southern England from Lincolnshire to the south-west. In the database, almost every county in England, together with the main towns in Scotland, was covered by a local newspaper suggesting that identifying the location of tontines using this kind of evidence was less the outcome of geographical bias in the sources and more to do with their existence in particular places.Footnote ²⁵ In similar manner, establishing when tontines were established, and the shift from assurance to building schemes discussed below, was less a reflection of the availability of sources than of other factors associated with economic conditions that influenced investment decisions. While recognizing the limitations of both the sources and the methodology, not least the incomplete online coverage of the many hundreds of newspaper titles in existence, nevertheless this research provides the most comprehensive record of private and public local tontine schemes to date.

Investing practices

Tontines operated on the principle of survivorship and this distinguished them from ordinary life insurance and other kinds of annuities.Footnote ²⁶ Subscribers to tontines could nominate themselves or another person, frequently a child or a younger relative, and sometimes even royalty, as the life against which the share was held. To prevent gambling on complete strangers’ lives, the Gambling Act of 1774 stipulated that the subscriber had to have a legitimate interest in the life of his or her nominee.Footnote ²⁷ Based on the age of their nominee, subscribers were usually divided into categories, sometimes paying different amounts and receiving different rates of return depending on these classes. As long as the person on whose life the subscription had been made survived, dividends were paid. For that reason, subscribers with younger nominees often received lower rates of return than older ones on the grounds that they were more likely to live longer and therefore could expect to receive more in the long run. And if he or she was lucky enough to be the sole survivor of the scheme, or amongst a small group, the number of which had been specified at the outset, a subscriber stood to benefit from the outright ownership or sale of the building or the entire capital stock that remained. Nor did the death of the subscriber necessarily mean an end to the tontine share since, providing the nominee on whose life the policy was held remained alive, it could be passed on to heirs or sold to another person. In addition, the longer a subscriber (or a nominee) lived and the smaller the pool of survivors became, the more the investment increased in value, leading to a secondary market for the sale of tontine shares.

Typically, assurance tontines invested in government bonds or, less frequently, in rentals from freehold estate, and stipulated a period of time, usually seven years, at the end of which any capital was to be shared out between the survivors.Footnote ²⁸ However, the way in which they attracted subscriptions varied, depending on the social class of investors that the organizers wished to encourage. Typically, schemes which required subscribers to invest £50 to £100 in single payments or in instalments were aimed at those higher up the social scale who could afford these relatively large sums whereas those that involved smaller subscriptions, which could be as low as 6d a week usually paid in monthly instalments, sought to attract the lower middle class or respectable working class. These regular returns promised a reward for prudence and their praise was sung by the Hampshire Chronicle in 1792 which stated that ‘Societies of this nature are found beneficial to the country at large; they promote industry, secure a certain provision for old age, and give men an opportunity, by small weekly savings, to provide for families, from the subscriptions being placed at interest and continually accumulating.’Footnote ²⁹ The Winchester Tontine, for example, established in 1788, modelled itself on others newly set up in Oxford, Bristol and other towns. Subscribers paid 6d a week with the sum total being invested in Consols with the interest and principal remaining for seven years, at the end of which every surviving member was to receive an equal dividend which, it was claimed, would amount to £20 on an investment of just over £9. ‘The fairness of this easy mode of increasing property’, it was stated, ‘must be obvious to everyone, and its advantages very considerable, particularly to persons in middling stations’.Footnote ³⁰

At this lower end, tontines vied with friendly societies for subscribers though without any of the insurance elements that the latter provided.Footnote ³¹ Rather, tontines offered small savers a means of investing capital and for those who were either unable or who did not wish to purchase Consols in their own name, subscribing to a collective scheme such as the Winchester Tontine provided an alternative way of saving for themselves or leaving an inheritance.Footnote ³² For this reason, it was argued that investing in a tontine was one of the best ways of providing for the future of one's children, relatives, friends and even servants. As the Cumberland Pacquet informed its readers, tontines offered something for everyone: wealthy subscribers could invest on behalf of poor widows; servants could save enough money to marry; and industrious journeymen could earn enough to set themselves up as a master. Investing the smallest of sums in this apparently safe and equitable kind of scheme could, it was argued teach the ‘Art of Economy’ and by so doing would ‘promote the Practice of Morality’.Footnote ³³

What attracted subscribers perhaps more than the annual returns, however, was the hope of surviving longest and therefore reaping an ever increasing return on investment. For time-limited assurance tontines, the proportion of subscribers who survived was always likely to be relatively high. However, for longer-term building tontines, the prospect of oneself or one's family becoming the owner of a property or the sole beneficiary of lucrative rents or tolls was an enticing one. Typically, the final surviving subscriber or group of subscribers, the size of which was predetermined at the start of the tontine, stood to gain the freehold of the properties in their own name, or the equivalent value at auction, as well as an ever increasing amount of tolls or rent during their lifetime. In Glasgow, for example, Cecilia Douglas (1772–1862), West India planter, slave owner and art collector, was the last survivor of the Glasgow Tontine and in 1860 she inherited the Tontine Rooms, one of the grandest civic buildings in the city.Footnote ³⁴ The last survivor of the first Richmond Bridge Tontine died in 1859 and at the time of her death aged 85 was receiving £800 a year from an initial investment of £100.Footnote ³⁵ Promoters of the Regents Canal Tontine in London in 1817 claimed, perhaps somewhat optimistically, that the last survivor would stand to gain up to £15,000 a year for a £100 share.Footnote ³⁶ Although this scale of return would have been exceptional, nevertheless, as the examples illustrate, it was indicative of the potential gains over and above any annual return that could be made just by surviving longest.

National and local geographies

The concept of a tontine was not new, stretching back to seventeenth-century France, but during the eighteenth century became popular as a way for governments to address shortfalls in the national finances.Footnote ³⁷ However, in Britain these state-sponsored tontines proved less successful than in other countries and although there were seven national tontine schemes during the eighteenth century, only three (1773, 1775 and 1777 – all by the Irish government) were ever fully subscribed.Footnote ³⁸ Subscribers to these national tontines found that the initial return was generally below that which could be achieved through a life annuity or other investment in government bonds, although for those who could wait this was offset by the fact that the rate rose as the number of subscribers declined. At the start of 1789, for example, the Great English Tontine yielded a rate of return for the first class of subscribers (nominees below 20 years) of 4.15 per cent but by 1829, by which time the number of shareholders had fallen, it had risen to 6.3 per cent.Footnote ³⁹ Even so, this return was far from spectacular and compared relatively badly to other private schemes set up at the same time.

The relative unpopularity of national tontines, noted above, was in stark contrast to local schemes set up by groups of individuals or municipal corporations to provide mutual assurance or to finance various forms of urban improvements and building works. In the late 1780s and early 1790s, just as the national tontines were coming to an end, so other private ‘universal’ assurance tontines attracting large numbers of subscribers running into many thousands were being established in towns and cities across the country. The overall importance of these private and municipal tontines was reflected in their geographical spread shown in Figure 1. There were very few English counties which did not have at least one tontine in this period. Over 30 schemes were located in London, including several set up by local vestries for civic improvement as well as some very large assurance schemes and bridge building projects. Together with London, Bristol and Bath were the other main centres, particularly in relation to assurance schemes. Building and civic improvement tontines were more numerous and widespread, with many schemes located in expanding provincial towns and cities such as Birmingham, Boston and Northampton, along with Hull and Newcastle. In Scotland, the rivalry between Edinburgh and Glasgow, with five and six schemes respectively, encouraged new projects. Other places with ambitions to attract a wealthy clientele also used tontines to fund building projects. ‘Flagelantus’, writing in the Cheltenham Chronicle in 1819, called on civic leaders there to build a royal residence like that of the ‘inconsiderable village(s)’ of Lyndhurst and Weymouth, suggesting that ‘this would at once reflect the highest credit upon the public spirit of the Town and be eventually a source of considerable profit to themselves’.Footnote ⁴⁰ For whatever reason, tontines could be found across the country from Truro in Cornwall, in the extreme south-west of England, to Peebles and Ardrossan in Scotland.Footnote ⁴¹ Many towns had at least one or two schemes and even relatively small places, such as Tewkesbury and Rhyl, each had a local scheme in operation. Noting the popularity of these kinds of tontines, a report in the Derby Mercury stated that

Figure 1:

Location of tontines 1770–1829

Source: See Appendix 1.

Places without tontines, such as Sheffield, appeared to be the exception and it was noted there in 1790, ‘it has been a matter of wonder’ that no such scheme existed.Footnote ⁴³

Tontines: assurance, construction and improvement

Tontine schemes can be classified in three main ways depending on purpose and methods of repayment: those whose purpose was entirely to provide mutual assurance and which invested mainly in government bonds; those which sought to raise funds for specific building projects, repaying subscribers from rents or tolls; and those established by local vestries, town corporations or commissions to provide money for civic improvements with repayments coming from rate income or other municipal sources.Footnote ⁴⁴ Building tontines reflected the emerging associational culture of eighteenth-century provincial towns and often involved the construction of new kinds of leisure spaces in which the middle class could meet, including assembly rooms, ballrooms, chapels, hotels, inns, libraries and theatres. Similarly, civic schemes focused on improving infrastructure and public buildings, such as market places, workhouses and prisons. In both cases, however, they operated in a different way to those that provided mutual assurance. The number of subscribers was usually limited depending on the total to be raised, and the duration of the scheme depended on the longevity of investors or their nominees rather than on a set period of time, usually between five and seven years, more typical of assurance schemes.

The broad chronology of these different kinds of tontines is shown in Figure 2, which indicates a rapid increase in the 1790s, followed by a gradual decline to the 1820s, along with a shift away from assurance schemes towards those concerned with building and civic improvement. It is worth noting that the numbers of tontines identified in each decade was not dependent on the number of newspapers, which rose throughout the period. Of the 197 schemes identified, 115 referred to private building projects with assurance accounting for a further 70 and local government another 11.Footnote ⁴⁵ However, this figure is likely to be an underestimate, particularly in relation to local improvement acts, discussed below, which number in their thousands during this period, many of which related to building and other types of civic improvement.

Figure 2:

Foundation of tontines 1770–1829

Note: Three tontines could not be allocated to a particular decade but all were founded prior to 1805.Sources: See text.

The popularity of tontines during the 1790s was based on the relatively high rates of return that they promised to investors. Promoters were able to achieve this by accumulating compound interest on investments and by playing the market. Assurance tontines tended to invest in government funds, but they were able to promise higher returns to subscribers because of the principle of survivorship and the hope of making a profit by buying Consols when the price was low but selling in a rising market at the end of the tontine's term. There were also other options that could potentially add to profits. The second Exeter Tontine, which sought to recruit ‘respectable’ subscribers from throughout south-west England, invested both in the funds but also purchased state lottery tickets, paying out directly if winnings exceeded £100, or if below this amount adding it to the overall capital to be shared at the end of the seven-year term.Footnote ⁴⁶ Other tontine schemes also followed this course of action. The interest accruing to subscribers to the Andover Lottery Tontine, for example, was also used to purchase lottery tickets, in this case with all the proceeds being added to the capital.Footnote ⁴⁷

In a rising market, the prospect of buying cheap and selling dear was attractive for tontines with a limited duration. But it also carried risks. Figure 3 plots the foundation of tontines against the price of Consols, showing how the peak years of foundation in 1789 and 1790 took place during a rapidly rising market, with investors anticipating continued price rises. Since most assurance tontines operated for a limited duration, short-term expectations of making a profit in a rising market drew investors into these kinds of schemes. The instigators of the New British Tontine, based in Bristol and advertised very widely across the country in 1792 and 1793, drew attention to this opportunity: ‘Both the moral utility and the pecuniary advantages of Tontines are too obvious to need comment; and never was a more beneficial time for them than the present, when the funds are SO VERY LOW.’Footnote ⁴⁸ With the price of Consols low, but with the expectation of a rise, tontines that invested in the funds were an attractive proposition. Trustees of the second City of London, Westminster and Southwark Tontine, for example, dived into the market in April 1793 when the price of Consols fell. The Stamford Mercury noted that this would ‘give an immediate high interest, with the probability of being sold out to a very great profit. This accounts for the rapidness with this Tontine fills, it being some years since there was a prospect of so large a profit from the accumulation of money put in the Bank of England.’Footnote ⁴⁹ Not to be outdone, the organizers of the New British Tontine decided to keep open their books on account of the low price of Consols, claiming that this provided subscribers with an opportunity to make up to 20 per cent profit.Footnote ⁵⁰ Continued low prices encouraged further schemes. A third City of London, Westminster and Southwark Tontine was started and grew rapidly from its inception in July 1795 with agents in London, Chester, Stockport, Liverpool, Manchester and Swansea. The organizers of the scheme plunged into the bond market frequently, taking advantage of the continued fall in the price of Consols. Although the initial aim was to raise £33,000, within two years the capital had grown to over £65,000 invested in the funds, with regular newspaper advertisements notifying subscribers of the amounts purchased each month and emphasizing its likely future profitability.Footnote ⁵¹ So confident were the organizers of being able to make a profit by buying Consols cheaply that they started another tontine in November 1798, despite making a loss on an earlier scheme.Footnote ⁵²

Figure 3:

Tontines and Consol prices 1770–1829

Source: Tontines: see text; Consol prices (1770–89): T.S. Ashton, An Economic History of England: The Eighteenth Century (London, 1955); (1790–1829) N.J. Silberling, ‘British financial experience 1790–1830’, Review of Economics and Statistics, 1 (1919), 289.

While investing in the funds could provide a regular return and a high premium, it carried risks if at the end of the term the price of Consols had fallen below the initial cost of purchase. As the ‘rage’ for tontines mounted, and as lower-middle-class and even working-class subscribers were drawn into these kinds of schemes, so writers began to express concerns about their profitability.Footnote ⁵³ ‘When the passion (for tontines) descends to the laborious part of mankind, and this phrensy [sic] seizes on those who cannot afford to sport with their losses’, an anonymous writer warned in relation to the Yorkshire Tontine, ‘the public should then catch alarm, and endeavour to stop the progress of the infatuation’.Footnote ⁵⁴ Other writers urged caution. In 1792, Richard Price warned against investing in tontines, particularly for those whose incomes were uncertain and who were likely to fall behind in their payments, pointing out that even if they continued to invest, the potential for making a profit was limited both because the mortality of fellow subscribers had been over-estimated and the price of Consols was likely to fall.Footnote ⁵⁵ Price's concern was well founded and the steep reduction in Consol prices from 1793, following the declaration of war with France, marked an end to the rising market, undermining profitability for tontines that had invested heavily in the funds and eliciting further warnings as insolvency loomed.Footnote ⁵⁶

These problems were particularly acute for those seven-year schemes set up between 1789 and 1791, which matured between 1796 and 1798, by which time the price of Consols had fallen by between 18 and 40 per cent. Indeed, the sharp fall in the price in November 1798 was itself blamed on the liquidation of investments held by several large tontine societies that had come to maturity. The Bristol Tontine, for example, was said to have sold £500,000 of stocks in a single transaction, thereby affecting the market.Footnote ⁵⁷ Such falls eroded the final profitability of tontines, leading to problems of solvency. The Bath Universal Tontine, set up in 1790 for a duration of five years, found itself in this situation, as did other tontines scheduled to finish after 1795.Footnote ⁵⁸ It was due to pay out its final dividend in 1795 but because of the fall in the price of Consols the surviving subscribers found that their initial investment of 60 guineas yielded only £46 17s 6d.Footnote ⁵⁹ Reports drawing attention to the loss appeared in newspapers from Bath, Chester, Ipswich, Reading and Leeds, suggesting both a wide geographical spread of investors as well as a potential warning to others who might have invested their money in similar schemes.Footnote ⁶⁰ As prices fell, losses began to mount and in the same year the treasurers of the Chelmsford Universal Tontine reported that they had lost at least £5,000.Footnote ⁶¹ In 1796, a similar fate befell the Bristol Universal Tontine, set up in 1789, and organizers were forced to delay the payment of dividends and recommend that if subscribers wished to avoid incurring a significant loss, they should leave their investments intact beyond the agreed winding up date until the Consol price had recovered.Footnote ⁶² In January 1799, Manchester subscribers to the Old British Tontine, which had been established in Bristol in 1791 and which by 1794 had amassed capital of over £148,992, complained that the organizers had failed to pay out at the end of the term and called for other subscribers across the country to complain.Footnote ⁶³ And the New British Tontine, one of the largest mutual assurance schemes with funds of between £300,000 and £400,000, set up in 1792, found itself unable to repay its subscribers and in 1800 was forced into Chancery.Footnote ⁶⁴ By the time the case was settled in 1807, no more than £90,000 remained.Footnote ⁶⁵ For individuals, therefore, over and above the question of survivorship, investing in a tontine could be risky.

This change in profitability, whilst bringing to an end the popularity of assurance tontines in the early 1790s, also heralded a shift of investment towards building schemes since these promised to deliver a respectable and secure rate of return based on rents or tolls, with the prospect of future capital growth as trade increased and towns expanded. The promoters of the Cambray Street Tontine in Cheltenham, set up to build 12 ‘handsome’ houses in what was described as a ‘pleasant and fashionable street’ in a desirable part of town, spelled out the benefits this kind of arrangement provided:

These claims chimed well with the widespread demand for urban improvement in provincial towns arising from economic and demographic growth, rising expectations and strong civic consciousness.Footnote ⁶⁷ In the five years prior to the fall in Consol prices (1788–92), there were 43 assurance and 11 building tontines floated but in the next five years (1793–97), only seven assurance schemes were started compared to 12 concerned with buildings or civic improvement. This shift became even more marked in the early 1800s with 33 building or municipal tontines floated between 1800 and 1809 compared to just five related to assurance. Apart from a brief spike in 1803 following the declaration of peace with France, Consol prices remained low and did not reach a similar level to their peak until the very end of our period, by which time other kinds of opportunities had emerged to attract investors.

Compared to assurance tontines, those linked to building projects were usually, though not always, profitable and for the final survivor, the eventual returns could be considerable. The Richmond Bridge Tontine of 1776 paid out at 4 per cent per annum and the Middlesex House of Correction Tontine, discussed below, paid out at 4.5 per cent, the former coming from bridge tolls and the latter from the county rates, and for survivors there was always the promise of higher returns as the nominees of fellow subscribers died.Footnote ⁶⁸ Even more could be made from other schemes: the Kew Bridge Tontine of 1785 paid out a rate of 6 per cent for subscribers (or nominees) aged below 20, at 6.5 per cent for those aged between 20 and 40 and at 7.5 per cent for those aged above 40.Footnote ⁶⁹ Between 1795 and 1830, investors in Sheffield's theatre and assembly rooms received annual dividends of 6 per cent or more in 29 of the 36 years.Footnote ⁷⁰ These annual rates of return were tempting. Traditionally, no interest was paid on bank deposits, and government Consols from 1751 generally paid out 3.5 to 4 per cent. Nor was private lending more profitable since interest on loans was capped at 5 per cent by the usury laws.Footnote ⁷¹ Therefore, a healthy annual return together with the promise of compound interest and a growing share of the profits for survivors were sufficient in most cases to entice investors to part with their money.

Tontines and civic improvement

The most common type of tontine, particularly after the fall in the price of Consols from 1793, was to raise money for building projects and this took two forms: one was associated with schemes to erect buildings, such as bridges, theatres, assembly rooms, hotels and inns, and the other was linked to improvement acts that allowed vestries, town corporations and improvement commissions to raise money for projects such as market places, workhouses and prisons, or for paving, lighting and cleansing, financed by the sale of bonds and paid for from the rates.

The earliest known building tontine outside London was the Bristol assembly rooms built in 1754–55 and this was followed by a host of other similar schemes across the country.Footnote ⁷² In the West Riding of Yorkshire between 1761 and 1840, Grady has identified at least 34 projects financed in this way or through subscriptions, including some of the costliest public buildings in the region.Footnote ⁷³ The Glasgow Tontine of 1781 raised over £5,000 in £50 shares to build a hotel and coffee rooms, with the annuities paid through annual subscriptions from 107 members, and in 1796 another set of assembly rooms was also erected at a similar cost.Footnote ⁷⁴ In Bath, tontine schemes were fuelled by the rivalry between the upper and lower assembly rooms that encouraged expansion on a grand scale. The Hampshire Chronicle commented in December 1774 that Mr Gyde's plan to extend his ballroom, financed by a tontine involving 100 persons at £50 each, headed by the duke and duchess of Northumberland, also involved building a new card room 160 feet long and 26 feet wide, divided by screens of Corinthian columns. ‘[T]he elegance will exceed any of the rooms yet built’, and it was thought that when completed, the suite of rooms would be the most complete in Europe.Footnote ⁷⁵ Five years later, a rival scheme to embellish the lower town with a new theatre, hotel and assembly rooms was proposed in direct competition and at an even grander scale, based on a tontine to raise 30,000 guineas.Footnote ⁷⁶

Tontine schemes were also used to purchase land and build houses, with the rental income used to pay regular dividends and the final payout arising from the sale of the properties. In the 1790s, this system was used to construct housing or build entire streets in several places – Hanover Street in Manchester, Parliament Street in Hull, and George Street, Brunswick Street and Hutchesons Street in Glasgow.Footnote ⁷⁷ In Salford in 1797, for example, a seven-year tontine called the New Windsor was set up to erect buildings based on subscriptions that amounted to about one guinea a year calculated at a rate of 6d per week. The promoters of the scheme made a point of noting that ‘The plan of securing small savings of money on the tontine scheme, begins now to be generally understood and approved of; as by it the industrious and careful man may make the little he has to spare perfectly safe and at the same time increase in the greatest manner possible.’Footnote ⁷⁸ The money was to be used to construct houses and the rent was to be added to the general fund. At the end of the seven years, the buildings were to be auctioned and the proceeds divided equally between the surviving members. An added advantage was that subscribers could sell their shares though they could not change their nominees, giving them an option to raise cash without the need to wait until the tontine had come to an end.

Growing trade and volume of traffic also generated the demand to widen streets and build new bridges, and in several cases these were financed through tontines. One of the largest street building schemes to use a tontine was the plan by the Southwark Bridge Company in London to drive a new route from the Mansion House to Southwark Bridge in order to improve the flow of traffic and in doing so to increase tolls. The company sought to raise £600,000 by way of a tontine, arguing that the increase in tolls and the sale of property along the street would repay subscribers over an 80 year period.Footnote ⁷⁹ Commercial expansion encouraged the construction of bridges and canals, and these too were often funded wholly or partly by tontines. Bridges were a popular choice for tontines, promising a steady source of income from tolls against which to offset annual payments. The first and second Richmond Bridge Tontines of 1773 and 1776, which sought to raise £20,000 and £5,000 respectively, needed to pay out £1,000 per annum based on toll income of around £1,200 to £1,300, and neither scheme had any problems in raising the amount required.Footnote ⁸⁰ The growth of London helped ensure the profitability of these kinds of improvements, and further tontines were either used or proposed to build other bridges across the Thames at Kew (1785) and Southwark (1820). Plans to build a bridge at Rotherhithe, which failed to attract sufficient numbers of investors, and an iron bridge at Hammersmith also rested on tontines, as did a scheme to build one across the river Wear near Sunderland which, when it opened in 1796, was the second largest metal bridge in Britain.Footnote ⁸¹ Canals, too, were built with funding from tontines and here the scale could be considerable. The Regents Canal in London, for example, sought to raise a tontine of up to £300,000 using a mixture of tolls and investments in Consols to create a sinking fund from which to repay subscribers.Footnote ⁸²

Private tontines were not the only ones that underpinned civic improvement. The quickening pace of urban and economic growth from the mid-eighteenth century was also accomplished by an expansion of local government involvement in the built environment. The extent of this involvement can be gauged by the number of local acts passed and improvement commissions that were created in the second half of the century: between 1760 and 1799, over 400 improvement commissions were set up and, after a lull during the Napoleonic Wars, the number of local improvement acts increased substantially, reaching a peak in the 1820s.Footnote ⁸³ Such a flurry of improvement acts reflected not just the pace of urban restructuring but, more significantly, widespread ratepayer complaints about lack of representation and corruption in existing corporations. In the context of this opposition, new and more representative bodies charged with effecting urban improvements and provided with new powers to borrow and tax were less likely to generate opposition than if the old, unreformed corporations had taken on these responsibilities.Footnote ⁸⁴ Hemmed in by debt and faced with significant ratepayer suspicion of municipal extravagance and maladministration, these new bodies often turned to tontines or bonds as a way of raising finance for urban improvements.

Typically, local improvement acts included standard wording that permitted the authorities to raise money in these ways, stipulating the amount that could be raised, offset against the rates or other revenue source, and the purposes for which it could be used. Such schemes usually paid annuities of between 4 and 10 per cent per annum on the initial investment, often depending on the age of the subscriber. The construction of a new workhouse in St Mary Abbots, Kensington, for example, was funded in this way under local acts that allowed the parish to borrow £4,000 payable by issuing annuities for the sum of £100, with a falling rate of interest depending on the age of the subscriber.Footnote ⁸⁵ Those aged 60 or above were to be repaid at a generous 10 per cent per annum, those between 48 and 60 at 9 per cent and those between 40 and 48 at 8 per cent. To limit future liabilities, no one under the age of 40 was allowed to purchase bonds. Some schemes allowed for the creation of a sinking fund used from time to time to repay the initial capital investment to subscribers and thereby reduce the overall financial liability. In St Marylebone, for example, each year bondholders’ names were put into a tombola and a specified number were drawn out to be repaid, depending on the relative health of the parish finances.Footnote ⁸⁶

These kinds of arrangements were often used to pay for paving and lighting or to construct workhouses, prisons and churches – all of which required large amounts of capital. In Durham, the right to raise up to £10,000 by means of a tontine for improving streets and highways was included in the improvement act of 1790 and in Cambridge an act of 1794 allowed the corporation a similar right to raise £6,000 through the sale of tontine annuities repayable at a maximum interest of 10 per cent.Footnote ⁸⁷ Other examples, many of which came from London, include the building of workhouses in St Martin in the Fields (1772), St John Hampstead (1800), Coventry (1801), and Forehoe (1814); churches and burial grounds in St Anne Soho (1802), St Marylebone (1811), Strood (1812), St George the Martyr, Holborn (1816), St Pancras (1816 and 1821) and Poplar (1817); paving, lighting and cleansing in King's Lynn (1802) and St George Hanover Square (1813). The geographical spread of these kinds of arrangements, and the fact that local acts contained a standard set of wording, suggests that tontines and annuities were common means of raising finance for a wide range of building projects that helped refashion Georgian towns and places throughout Britain.

The question arises, however, as to why parish vestries and other public bodies sought to use tontines and annuities as opposed to raising the rates or borrowing the capital. Growing populations and rising expectations increased financial demands on vestries and corporations, often outpacing their ability to raise revenue for capital projects, but not all places resorted to a tontine. They were relatively expensive and committed corporations to lengthy periods of repayment. Part of the answer lies in the level of indebtedness that local corporations found themselves in. In Boston, for example, between 1801 and 1837 improvements cost over £48,000 compared to an annual rental income for the corporation of around £2,000, and tontines there were used to fund major projects.Footnote ⁸⁸ Local government debt began to increase significantly in the later eighteenth century, exacerbated by inflationary pressures during the Napoleonic Wars, and vestries and corporations looked to other means to make ends meet.Footnote ⁸⁹ In terms of geography, where corporations and vestries were able to raise additional funding, they did not have to rely on selling annuities to finance improvements. Some municipal corporations were relatively wealthy, including the City of London, with considerable access to property or tolls and duties that allowed them either to raise money or use it as security to fund projects. Whereas the City of London financed the construction of Newgate Gaol in the 1780s from coal duties, in the 1790s justices of the peace in Middlesex were forced to resort to a tontine to build their house of correction. Port towns, in particular, were able to generate income through harbour tolls, whereas inland places had fewer options for increasing revenue.Footnote ⁹⁰ Liverpool Corporation had an income of £45,000 in the 1820s from tolls and rents, and was able to use this to improve the port.Footnote ⁹¹ Other towns were able to raise large capital sums through the sale of freedoms or borrowing against market tolls and other duties.Footnote ⁹² However, where these kinds of revenues were not available or were inadequate – which was true of the majority of places – or where the ratepayer base was too poor, or where local opposition to higher rates was strong, it was easier to resort to borrowing through the sale of annuities and tontines than to impose rate increases. The pattern of local government borrowing, therefore, was the outcome of a balance between economic capacity and political expediency dependent on national and local circumstances.Footnote ⁹³

Tontines and annuities were relatively expensive ways of raising money, committing the parish to potentially lengthy periods of repayment at comparatively high interest rates. However, over and above their political expediency they were attractive because, unlike loans, no capital ever needed to be repaid. The decision whether to use annuities or a tontine arrangement depended on local circumstances, and each offered different repayment terms. Payments to annuitants ended with the death of the bond holder, thereby reducing the council's commitments, whereas the overall repayments on a tontine continued until the death of the final subscriber or nominee. To balance out these different kinds of borrowing, interest rates differed, tending to be higher for annuities, usually between 7 and 14 per cent, compared to tontines which normally varied from between 5 to 10 per cent.Footnote ⁹⁴ In the short term, at least, tontines might have appeared relatively attractive, though in the long term they tended to be extremely costly because of the longevity of nominees. In Boston, for example, the last survivor of the 1814 tontine died in 1904, by which time the corporation had paid out £62,300 on an initial sum of £10,000.Footnote ⁹⁵ Decisions to use one or other type of scheme, or indeed both, varied depending on the needs of the corporation. However, both annuities and tontines had the virtue of allowing local councils to avoid expensive loans or imposing steep rate increases. They also had the virtue of drawing on wealthy subscribers from the locality, who benefited from the high rates of interest earned from their investments, and this in turn helped to reduce ratepayer hostility against what was perceived as extravagant expenditure by unreformed and corrupt corporations and vestries.Footnote ⁹⁶

Investing in growth

Investing in annuities and tontines was one of several ways in which the middling sort could both encourage growth in the local economy and also provide long-term security for families and children. Unless the family possessed property that could generate a rentier income, upon the death of the main wage earner remaining relatives could face serious financial hardship.Footnote ⁹⁷ There were enough examples of hard-up relatives in Jane Austen's writing, for example, not least her own experience of straightened circumstances arising from the sudden death of her father, to suggest that this was a common concern for middle-class families. For these professional and commercial groups, tontine subscriptions and annuities were a crucial way of saving for the future. At a time when the banking system was poorly developed, where other opportunities for life insurance and annuities were relatively limited, and where personal credit networks were insufficient, subscribing to local schemes that invested either in profitable projects or in the safety of the public funds promised to provide financial security and accordingly were popular, as the many schemes outlined above indicate.

As part of the wider life insurance market, tontines were popular amongst those who Clark notes comprised ‘the stratum of the population which possessed affluence but lacked real wealth’ – the class of professionals and commercial men, lower gentry and owners of modest amounts of property.Footnote ⁹⁸ For spinsters, too, investing in an annuity or a tontine was also an important source of income in the absence of the ability to earn an adequate living through work. In the later nineteenth century, as the ownership of shares became more widespread, other more lucrative options opened up but in the eighteenth century these opportunities were far more limited and also far more local.

Compared to many assurance tontines, those involved in financing construction projects often relied on relatively large denomination subscriptions usually between £25 to £100, either paid in a few instalments or in one go, and therefore attracted relatively wealthy subscribers similar to the occupational and social groups that invested in life insurance.Footnote ⁹⁹ In some of the eighteenth-century life insurance societies, ‘Gentlemen and esquires’ were often the largest group of policy holders – 31 per cent of Amicable Society holders, 53 per cent of London Assurance holders and 54 per cent of the Mercers Company.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ The evidence from tontines show a similar pattern, though with some important variations depending on the kinds of enterprise and its locality. Figure 4 shows subscribers to four different tontine schemes: the Freemason's Hall in London built in 1775; the Middlesex House of Correction Tontines of 1790, 1792 and 1795; Birmingham Library, established in 1799 and the Glasgow Tontine Society of 1816. Subscribers to the Freemason's Hall included a handful of the aristocracy together with members of the lower gentry (gentleman/esquire) and those involved in trade or the professions (Mr), reflecting the likely pattern of masonic membership. Over half of those who invested in the Middlesex House of Correction were primarily from the lower gentry – gentlemen and esquires – who would traditionally have been the group from which magistrates had been drawn, together with some high-status individuals, such as Sir William Chambers, the architect of Somerset House, Sir Richard Pepper Arden, who was a Whig MP and master of the rolls and at least two admirals. The main subscribers to the Birmingham Library were drawn largely from the commercial and manufacturing elite, with only a relatively small number of professional men, gentlemen and esquires, whilst in Glasgow, the mercantile and professional groups dominated.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Elsewhere, investors in building tontines were drawn from similar social groups: the largest set of investors in schemes launched in Leeds between 1819 and 1825, for example, were merchants and manufacturers followed by professional men such as doctors, lawyers and solicitors.Footnote ¹⁰²

Figure 4:

Social status of subscribers: Birmingham Library, Glasgow Tontine, Freemason's Hall, Middlesex House of Correction

Commercial: Apothecary, Auctioneer, Banker, Bookseller, Chemist, Coal merchant, Druggist, Factor, Flour merchant, Grocer, Gun merchant, Inn holder, Mercer, Merchant, Seedsman, Tea dealer, Timber merchant, Victualler, Wine merchant. Gentleman: Esq., Gentleman. Manufacturing: Brass founder, Brewer, Brush maker, Buckle maker, Builder, Button maker, Cabinet maker, Clock maker, Coachmaker, Cockfounder, Coffin furniture maker, Cooper, Cutler, Engraver, Fancy miniature maker, Fender maker, File maker, Glover, Goldsmith, Gun maker, Gunsmith, Iron Founder, Ironmonger, Japanner, Machine maker, Manufacturer, Nail founder, Patent brass cock maker, Picture frame maker, Plater, Printer, Refiner of metals, Roller of metals, Skinner, Spoon maker, Stone mason, Sugar refiner, Sword cutler, Toy maker, Type founder, Upholsterer, Wire drawer. Other: Farmer, Spinster, Widow. Professional: Accountant, Advocate, Banker, Chamberlain, Clerk, Doctor in Physic, Doctor of laws, Minister, Judge, Painter/drawing master, Physician, Professor, Sherriff, Surgeon, Writer (Scotland). Source: London Metropolitan Archives, Middlesex House of Correction Tontine (1790–95); Freemason's Hall Tontine (1775); Birmingham Library Tontine (1798); The Regulations of the Glasgow Tontine Society, Established in 1816: With Lists of the Proprietors and Nominees (1817).

As well as shared social status, geography also tied subscribers together. Investors in building tontines, in particular, often came from the immediate region, partly because of the local nature of much civic improvement and partly because of the way in which tontines operated. Geography was important in several ways. First, knowledge of the scheme was often passed by word of mouth or advertisement in local newspapers, particularly for some of the smaller building projects. Secondly, dividends were usually paid in person, partly to confirm the continued survival of subscribers or their nominees. Thirdly, trustees were usually elected at a meeting of subscribers and this helped to ensure that personal knowledge remained important in verifying claims for dividends. In turn, sharing locality with fellow subscribers, trustees and promoters helped to develop the bonds of trust that underpinned these kinds of schemes.Footnote ¹⁰³ We can see the importance of proximity for different kinds of schemes by identifying the locations of subscribers. In the West Riding of Yorkshire, the concentration of local investors varied depending on the kind of building: all the subscribers to the new public baths in Leeds, for example, were from the town whereas only around 30 per cent of shareholders in the West Riding Proprietary School in Wakefield came from the immediate locality.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ In the Richmond Bridge Tontines of 1777 and 1778, over 84 per cent of subscribers came from London, Middlesex or Surrey. Shares in the tontine could be purchased in Richmond as well in London (both the City of London and the West End), and for that reason attracted subscribers largely from these two areas (see Figure 5). London subscribers also accounted for over 84 per cent of those who invested in the Middlesex House of Correction Tontines of 1790, 1792 and 1795 (see Figure 6).

Figure 5:

Subscribers to the Richmond Bridge Tontines (1777 and 1778)

Source: London Borough of Richmond Archives, Richmond Bridge Tontine 1776 and 1778, List of Subscribers and their Nominees to the Richmond Bridge Tontine.

Figure 6:

Subscribers to the Middlesex House of Correction Tontines 1790, 1792 and 1795

Source: London Metropolitan Archives, Middlesex House of Correction, tontine registers 1790, 1792 and 1795 (MF/T/01/001; MF/T/01/002; MF/T/01/003).

Local patriotism and civic pride might have motivated many to participate, but so too did economic opportunity. There were relatively few options to purchase annuities in provincial towns, especially further away from London, and these kinds of investments allowed the middle class both to promote and to take advantage of urban growth in their area – to turn bricks and mortar into a safe income for them and their families and, for a few, to make a small fortune by living longest. Even in London, with a wider range of potential sources of investments from which to choose, investing in parochial bonds and in private tontine schemes proved attractive as ways of providing incomes for middle-class households. For those living elsewhere, rapidly growing places areas, such as London, could themselves provide opportunities for investment. In this way, although the majority (15) of the 23 subscribers that put up around £7,000 to help build St Martin in the Fields workhouse in 1770 came from London, other investors had addresses in Cheshire, Hampshire, Kent, Sussex, Jersey and Scotland.Footnote ¹⁰⁵

Tontines in the nineteenth century

Tontines were important in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries both for the dividends paid out to subscribers, and for the pooling of capital which allowed the large-scale improvement of many towns and cities in Georgian Britain. During the early decades of the nineteenth century, however, other opportunities became more widely available for corporations and vestries to borrow money at favourable interest rates and for the middle classes to invest in annuities and insure their lives. As a result the attraction of tontines waned for borrowers and lenders alike.

For the middle class, new opportunities to invest in government securities, including the possibility of swopping Consols for a government life annuity under the 1808 Life Annuity Act, and the rapid growth of life insurance offices, provided alternative ways of generating income or providing for dependants.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ The growth of the life insurance market was particularly important in this respect. Life insurance policies, which paid out at death, provided a certainty of return and as such could be used both to provide for the future but also as collateral against borrowing, and in that respect they had an advantage over tontine shares, the returns of which were anything but certain.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ The rising value of insurance policies was an important attraction, particularly as companies shared bonuses arising from surplus profits with their policy holders, a practice that had first been introduced by the Equitable but which soon spread to other institutions.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ As Alborn notes, as a result of bonuses, an insurance policy taken out with the Equitable in 1770 for £1,000 had increased in value to £3,900 by 1807 – a handsome rate of return compared to many tontines. Alborn also notes that by 1840, at least 50 of the 64 proprietary life offices were returning around a third of their surpluses to policy holders and by 1860 this proportion has risen to four-fifths.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Such increases had two effects: first, it led to a substantial growth in the number of policy holders, drawing custom away from tontines in the process, and, secondly, it encouraged the formation of new life insurance offices, including several outside London.Footnote ¹¹⁰ From the early 1800s, life insurance companies grew at an extremely rapid rate, drawing their subscriber base from the same pool of middle- and lower-middle-class individuals as had tontines, particularly in the provinces where farmers, retailers and professional groups often formed the bulk of policy holders.Footnote ¹¹¹ The number of life offices grew from 6 in 1800 to around 150 by 1850, with the total sum insured also rising from about £10 million in 1800 to £150 million by 1852, and although London still garnered the lion's share of the market, nevertheless there were some important provincial offices, such as the Norwich Union or the Manchester Fire and Life Assurance Company, with a strong regional presence.Footnote ¹¹² In this highly competitive market for middle-class investors, tontines found themselves squeezed out and although they did not disappear, they declined in importance.

Tontines also had their own problems. They were inherently difficult, and therefore costly, to administer. Although many schemes drew on local subscribers who were known to each other, it was not always easy to prove the continued survivorship of the life on which the share was held and forgery was a constant concern.Footnote ¹¹³ Trustees sought to guard against this by requiring the subscriber to appear in person to collect their dividend or to produce a certificate to vouch for the survival of the nominated life signed by a churchwarden or minister, or a justice of the peace. Even so, it was by no means easy to keep track of subscribers, particularly where shares had been sold on or subscribers had moved. Dividends were payable on a regular basis but where subscribers failed to appear, trustees were forced to advertise for their whereabouts. The rules of the Forehoe Workhouse Tontine, for example, stipulated that if a dividend remained unclaimed for two years, a notice had to be sent to the last known abode of the nominee, and if they had moved abroad, as was the case with Elizabeth Gooch who had married and moved to Jamaica, or John Day and William Bowen, who had disappeared presumed perished in a shipwreck, a notice had to be inserted in the newspapers. After a further year, if the dividend still remained unclaimed, it was then assumed that the nominee had died and the shareholder was no longer entitled to receive further payments.Footnote ¹¹⁴ In 1878, the Swansea Theatre Tontine Society still had 128 shareholders but the whereabouts of 99 were not known and advertisements had to be placed in national and local newspapers informing subscribers of a dividend payment at a cost of £350.Footnote ¹¹⁵ This process was both cumbersome and costly but the many notifications in the press relating to tontine payments bear witness that these were not isolated cases and as personal mobility increased, so the scale of the problem grew.

Tontines also fell out of favour on grounds of prudence and morality. Compared to life insurance, the rewards for owning tontine shares were uncertain and carried less moral authority, depending entirely on the ability to survive rather than on prudent investment. Benefiting fully meant outliving fellow subscribers, whose premature death would benefit the remaining investors, many of whom would have been neighbours and kin. Compared to other kinds of mutual insurance schemes, in which each and every member reaped the rewards of their investment, the main beneficiaries of tontines were those with extreme longevity. According to one critic, they were based on ‘no higher motive than a speculative avarice, looking for gain by the premature death of a neighbour, or the chance of possessing the whole annuity by becoming the survivor of the class’.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Such moral concerns, however, did not stop the Sion College fund for clergymen's widows from being restructured in 1795 as a tontine.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Critics also claimed that tontines transferred money from the weak and infirm to the rich and healthy, that the benefits arrived too late in life to be enjoyed and that elderly subscribers would be preyed upon by greedy family members. They were, according to Compton, comparable to a lottery in which there were many small prizes but only one very large one that fell, eventually, to the final longest living survivor or their nominee.

From the promoter's point of view, tontines could also be problematic. They created an uncertain and potentially lengthy future liability that remained intact until the last survivor died. Actuarial tables consistently underestimated the longevity of subscribers, meaning that profits arising from survivorship were less than promised and the financial liability more prolonged.Footnote ¹¹⁸ It was not until 1789, for example, that the last nominee in the King William's tontine of 1693 died, and of the 3,518 nominees in the Great English tontine of 1789, over two-thirds were still alive in 1826.Footnote ¹¹⁹ By overstating death rates, prospectuses tended to exaggerate the likely benefits for survivors and over time this became increasingly clear, reducing the attractiveness of investing.Footnote ¹²⁰

For local government, alternative sources of lending emerged, notably the Public Works Loan Board (PWLB) from 1817 that could provide loans for public works at prevailing market rates of 5 per cent, comparable to the nominal rates that many tontines paid out to their subscribers. Between 1817 and 1834, the PWLB lent £4.8 million, over a third of which was for civic improvements, representing a 5 per cent increase in civil government expenditure.Footnote ¹²¹ In subsequent decades, however, the PWLB increased the scale of its lending and lowered its interest rate to 4 per cent, a figure that tontines and other lenders could not match.Footnote ¹²² At the same time, the extension of more democratic franchises for local government in the 1820s and early 1830s led to improved representation, resulting in the spread of what Prest has termed ‘ratepayer democracies’, and this in turn removed some of the opposition to borrowing against the rates that had existed when the franchise was more restricted and corporations more corrupt. An important outcome of these changes occurred in 1833 with the new Lighting and Watching Act for England and Wales which allowed parishes to levy a rate with the consent of ratepayers, avoiding the need for costly local acts and having to resort to the issuing of bonds or the setting up of a tontine to fund civic improvements.Footnote ¹²³

Nevertheless, although their popularity waned it did not disappear and tontines continued to be established in the second half of the nineteenth century both for mutual assurance and also for financing a variety of other projects, including new buildings. In Ireland, the tontine set up in 1834 to develop six buildings in Pery Square, Limerick, included 89 subscribers, the last six of which would take ownership of one of the six houses.Footnote ¹²⁴ In Folkstone in 1849 the Tontine Building Company raised £50,000 from 500 members to build a street and in Margate in 1860 the Royal Crescent Tontine was set up to build 18 first class houses complete with private grounds and baths.Footnote ¹²⁵ Building tontines were also used to help finance some significant projects in London, including Alexandra Palace and the new Tontine Chambers in Westminster, a building that contained over 500 offices for lawyers and parliamentary agents and which was erected in 1863 at a cost of around £200,000.Footnote ¹²⁶ Mutual assurance schemes similarly continued to be established. Witnesses at the Royal Commission on Friendly Societies ruefully remarked that working-class areas of Liverpool in the 1870s were ‘terribly infested with tontine or dividing societies, which are one of the greatest evils in connexion with friendly societies’.Footnote ¹²⁷ And in Dublin, there could have been as many as 200 of these societies functioning as late as 1911.Footnote ¹²⁸

Appendix 1: Tontines 1770–1829

Note on sources and methodology

The list of tontines was compiled using a keyword search (=tontine) for the British Library Newspaper Archive, digitized and available from www.findmypast.co.uk. The archive itself covers a large number of national and provincial newspapers and is continually expanding its coverage. The work undertaken for this research took place between January and June 2018. Other sources were also used including the Gale Eighteenth Century Collection online; Gale Newsvault (www.gale.com/uk/primary-sources/historical-newspapers) which includes the Burney Collection of Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Newspapers and The Times from 1785; British History Online (www.british-history.ac.uk/); Journal of the House of Commons; and various British Parliamentary Papers. The number of newspapers included in this research is shown by decade in the following table:

Most English counties had at least one newspaper in the database although gaps in coverage existed. Figure 7 shows the geographical spread of newspapers included in the database. The home counties within a day's ride from the capital were served by metropolitan newspapers and therefore tended not to have their own. Newspapers were also absent from much of Wales, with Bristol papers serving that region. Where tontines were smaller, however, the existence of a local paper was important for determining their existence and therefore it is likely that the number of these kinds of schemes is an underestimate. However, because some of the larger regional and national assurance tontines depended on generating a large subscriber base, they were often advertised widely in newspapers that were published at a distance from their actual location and therefore we are not necessarily dependent on the publication of a local newspaper to identify their existence. Adverts for the Doncaster Universal Tontine, for example, established in 1788, appeared in newspapers published in Derby, Leeds, Manchester, Newcastle, Norwich and Whitehaven while larger tontines, such as the London, Westminster and Southwark Tontine of 1799, appeared in papers published in places as far apart as Aberdeen and London. The practice for newspapers to fill column space by copying news from elsewhere also helped to advertise the existence of tontines well beyond their actual place of operation.

Figure 7:

Newspaper place of publication, 1770–1829

Source: www.findmypast.co.uk/.

The full list of tontines is provided below.

Place = Place of foundation of tontine or location of secretary

Name = Name of tontine

Year = Likely year of foundation

Type = Mutual assurance, building or local government

Details = Details of the tontine's main purpose if not assurance, where known

Value (£) = Actual or proposed amount to be raised as specified in tontine publicity; where the sum is known to have varied over time, a range is given