The Endowed Charities of Kensington: By Whom Bequeathed, and How Administered

Transcribed from the S. Mary Abbots Parish Magazine (reprint) by David Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org. Many thanks to the Royal Borough of Chelsea and Kensington Libraries for allowing their copy to be used for this transcription.
BY WHOM BEQUEATHED, AND HOW ADMINISTERED.
EDWARD MORTON DANIEL , Esq.
Reprinted from the “S. Mary Abbots Parish Magazine.”
Printed for Private Circulation
By EDWARD MORTON DANIEL, Esq.
A Paper read at a Meeting of the Kensington Ratepayers Association , held at S. Mark’s Parish Rooms , Notting Hill , on Tuesday , 21 st April , 1891.
As everyone has need of charity, everyone exercises charity, and most of us receive charity, the subject is of personal application and importance to us all. This is the case when charity is abstractly regarded; but when we approach the consideration of the charities of our own parish, those which we are bound to support and upon which we have individually a claim, our subject must excite the keenest interest. Too much cannot be known about them in order that their benefits may be distributed amongst the fittest subjects and most deserving persons that can be found; and in order that those of us who are blessed with means may learn how carefully and fruitfully any benefaction we may make in the future will be utilised and bestowed, if placed in the hands of those administering the charities already established in our parish.
Perhaps the point which will strike you most, when you have learned what I have to tell you this evening of the charities of Kensington, is the circumstance that, from small sums of money left for purposes of charity, great and ever growing results may spring, fulfilling purposes of good far beyond the most sanguine anticipations in which the original donors could have ever indulged.
Old Faulkner, to whose quaint and interesting history of Kensington I would refer all lovers of antiquity and curious anecdote, writing in 1820, says: “The amount of benefactions to this parish is highly creditable to the humanity of the original founders, and it is a pleasing as well as an important part of the duty of the historian to record these; perhaps in few parishes in the kingdom have they been more scrupulously observed, or more faithfully administered.” Pleasing as it was to Faulkner seventy years ago to remark upon the then condition of the parish charities, it will be yet more gratifying to us to observe at the present time how greatly they have developed, and how admirably they have been fostered, improved, and administered. Seventy years ago Kensington was really rural, containing only three or four hamlets, or assemblages of dwellings, a few large houses with grounds, some celebrated nursery and market gardens, and a few distinguished inhabitants. This is what Tickell, the poet, says about it:—