Description: Friendly Societies and bands in the Market Place. Copied from Jubilee Celebration Album presented to Sir John Turney. At the beginning of the nineteenth century there were about 7,000 friendly societies in existence - by the end of the nineteenth century there were some 30,000 registered friendly societies catering for the needs of some 4.5 million persons. A further million people were catered for by special societies applying only to their own industry, trade or profession. This demonstrates the importance of societies when the working population was only about 10 million people, so that more than half of them were actually covered by friendly society membership. (information from www.afs.org.uk)