To close the week let us look back at the very origins of the pension.
Here we have the Royal Hospital Chelsea, which was started by King Charles II as a home for veteran soldiers, who he felt had been cast out after giving their youth to the service of their country. Before his intervention those noble ex-servicemen had simply ended up begging and sleeping on the streets. His Royal Hospital was completed in February 1692, and, by the end of the following month, almost five hundred people were living there, safely, and warmly.
Another link to our story is that starting in 1692, and going right up to the 1950s, this building also served as an administration base for all Army pensions.
Now if you were in the Navy, you would not have gone here. Instead you would have gone to Greenwich Hospital, which was built in 1695. This was directly funded by the sailors themselves, in a kind of early PAYE scheme in which a sixpence every month was deducted to pay for those at the hospital, as those who followed them to sea would fund their land-based retirement.
But wait.
Neither of these were the earliest, by many centuries. For that we must beckon forth Augustus Caesar, who not only gave his veterans grants of land, or appointments on his staff or in public offices, but introduced a monetary scheme whereby when a soldier left his army they would be given a lump sum to make sure they were able to cope. And it was quite a lot, for scholars reckon it at between three and five thousand denari. thirteen to fifteen years salary. You did have to have done the time though, sixteen years as a legionnaire plus four to five in the military reserve.
Lets start our card chat with the fact that though this set is listed as Westminster Tobacco it is actually one of the sets which says "Issued by the Successors in the United Kingdom to the Westminster Tobacco Co. Ltd". Curiously the only address given is London, and that may be because the cigarettes were made in Liverpool by Ogdens and issued, in England, by British American Tobacco.
The first series was issued in 1925. RB21-200-159.1 tells us there are two formats, unnumbered with no descriptive text, and numbered with a descriptive text.
They were already pretty scarce by 1950, when the London Cigarette Card Company catalogue listed them as odds only, the unnumbered version being retailed at 1/6d. each and the numbered version at a shilling each.
And if you want to know why our original and our modern World Tobacco Issues Indexes use Roman Numerals on this one set when all the other Westminster sets are either numbers or capital letters, so would I.... for there is no explanation given!
The first series of these cards were issued in 1925. They appear in our British American Tobacco booklet, listed as RB21-200-159.1, where it says they are in two formats, one being unnumbered with no descriptive text, and the other being numbered with a descriptive text. They were already pretty scarce by 1950, when the London Cigarette Card Company catalogue listed them as odds only, the unnumbered version being retailed at 1/6d. each and the numbered version at a shilling each.
In both the World Tobacco Indexes the text says :
BRITISH ROYAL AND ANCIENT BUILDINGS. Sm. Black and White photos. Nd. (48) See RB.21/200-159-X.
However that leads you to the first series, whereas ours is the second, and it appears under RB.21/200-159-Y.
And if you want to know why our original and our modern World Tobacco Issues Indexes use Roman Numerals on this one set when all the other Westminster sets are either numbers or capital letters, so would I.... for there is no explanation given!