Lady Jane Mico and her Almshouse Trust

Lady Jane Mico was the wife of Sir Samuel Mico, Alderman and Mercer, who traded in the Middle and Far East, as a member of the Levant and East India Companies, importing spices and silk. In London he lived in the parish of St. Andrew Undershaft and he owned the George Tavern on the quayside at Weymouth, Dorset. In 1666, the year of his death, he served as Master of the Mercers' Company. He bequeathed most of his estate to his widow and to his nephew, Samuel, but he left the George Tavern and a sum of £500 to the town of Weymouth for the preaching of an annual sermon in the parish church, for the binding out of three poor children apprentices and for the relief of ten poor decayed seamen of the town, aged 60 and upwards. He left a similar sum of money to the Mercers' Company to provide loans for young men to set themselves up in business.

In July 1666 the East India Company allowed Lady Mico the use of their House for one day to sell the goods left her by her late husband, the Court of the Company recalling that Sir Samuel had been a "great buyer" of their goods. Both Lady Mico and Sir Samuel's other executors continued to hold a considerable amount of East India Company stock after Sir Samuel's death.

When Lady Mico came to her own will in 1670, she showed great loyalty to her family and friends. Nobody who had the slightest claim on her was left out. Brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts, nephew, nieces and servants, all were remembered. Unfortunately this warm-heartedness towards those who were close to her meant that there was not really sufficient left over for the charities which Lady Mico wished to endow. For this reason Lady Mico's Almshouses have, until recently, been something of a poor relation among the Mercers' Company's almshouse trusts, as they have suffered from a chronic insufficiency of funds.

The sum of £1500 bequeathed by Lady Mico to establish the Almshouses was considered inadequate by her executors and placed at interest with the Mercers' Company for twenty years. By 1690 the Court of Chancery had transferred complete responsibilty for the Lady Mico's Charity to the Mercers' Company and, the capital having increased to £2900, the Company felt able to build. A site opposite Stepney Church, belonging to St. Paul's School Estate, also managed by the Mercers' Company, was chosen and the ten houses built at the cost of £700. The balance of the capital was not invested in the purchase of land as instrusted by Lady Mico and the Court of Chancery, but remained at interest with the Company producing an income of £88 a year. O f this, £80 pound was paid in annual pensions to the Almswomen. Very soon, therefore the Company had to subsidise the Charity

particularly in the matter of repairs to the Almshouses.

Inadequate endowment was unfortunate, but Lady Mico's Charity also demonstrated the Biblical adage that from the poor is taken away even what they have. It was not until 1817 that it was discovered that, in 1704, Elizabeth Fermor, niece to Samuel Barker of Fairford, Gloucestershire, Sir Samuel Mico's godson, had left part of a rent of a farm at Chaceley, Worcestershire, to the use of the poor widows in Lady Mico's Almshouses. From 1817 the income of the Charity was enhanced by this bequest but no attempt was made to recover the arrears due since 1704, even though, between 1745 and 1763, owing to the Company's own financial difficulties, payment of even the annual pensions to the poor widows was suspended.

In spite of this improvement in their fortunes, by the 1850s the Company was subsidising the Almshouses to the tune of some £300 a year. In 1854 the Company decided to rebuild and the new Almshouses were completed in 1856 at the cost of £2850. These were the houses which were occupied by the recipients of Lady Mico's charity until February of this present year (1980). In 1871 it was remembered that the site of the Almshouses belonged to St. Paul's School, though no rent had been paid to the Colet Estate for many years. After protracted negotiations with the Charity Commissioners the Company purchased the site from the Colet Estate for £1120.

Lady Mico had decreed that her Almshouses were tobe for the poor widows of London of the age of 50 and upwards and the Company interpreted this to mean widows of Freemen of the City though they did not appoint Mercer widows to the Charity. A clear picture of the typical almswoman of the early 19th century emerges from a series of petitions for admission. they were women like Catherine, the widow of Peter Olivant, oilman of Fleet Street, who having had to give up his business because of unforeseen loses in the East and West Indies, became a Clerk to the Tilers' and Bricklayers' Company, of which he was a Liveryman, and afterwards died as the result of being trodden on the foot by a man with a loose nail in his shoe. By 1902 it was becoming difficult to find sufficient candidates among the widows of Freemen and shortly afterwards the Company dropped its absolute insistence on this qualification.

From the late 19th century it became the regular practice to appoint a Matron to the Almshouses. Fascinating details of life in the Almshouses and in Stepney in the last two decades of the century can be glimpsed in the letters received by the Clerk to the Company from these women. Miss Streeter, appointed Matron in 1882, thought the curse of Stepney was drink and that if it could be cured, the place would be pleasant enough. She desribed how black shutters were put up at the residences of deceased Almswomen and she gave a succinct account of the fourteen year old son of a neighbouring innkeeper who robbed his father and escaped via the Almshouses to sanctuary with a family in Belgrave Street, whose boys were also thieves. "Can nothing be done to stop young boys going on so?" she asked.

On the night of 19 March 1941, three of the Almshouses were destroyed by a high explosive bomb and several others were damaged by blast, but no-one was hurt except the caretaker, slighty. The three houses were rebuilt in 1951 and at the same time a communal bathroom was erected in the backyard to serve all ten houses!

In 1965 the company felt that the house should be further improved but was inhibited from doing so because the Greater London Council had planned the area around Stepney Church as a public open space. It was therefore decided to rebuild the Almshouses elsewhere in Stepney and the GLC offered a site on the corner of Aylward Street and West Arbour Sreet, where they themselves were carrying out a housing development. It was also agreed that the number of Almshouses should be increased and that they should be designed and built by the GLC on behalf of the Company. On the completion of the new houses, the old houses in Whitehorse Road would be conveyed to the GLC in part exchange. For a while the scheme was put in jeopardy when the GLC decided that the old Almshouses should become part of a Conservation Area but they eventually stood by their original agreemennt to accept responsibilty for the old houses.

The new Almshouses were handed over to the Company on 21 January 1976. They comprise 18 flats, including one for the Matron and one for a resident confined to a wheelchair, together with a guestroom, launderette and a clubroom and provide, in the words of the Architect, "a sheltered enclave of dwellings for the elderly but active community, who need a quiet open space for sitting out.....for meeting....and to provide a pleasant view" For the first time, too, a scheme for the management of the Trust has been approved by the Charity Commissioners.

The other major charity founded by Lady Mico has, through a series of coincidences, also achieved a tenous link with the Mercers' Company. In her will Lady Mico left a sum of £1000 for the redemption of Christian slaves in Barbary, a problem which her husband, as a member of the Court of Levant Company, would have been very familiar. This money was invested in the purchase of a wharf and and premises at Castle Baynard, but with the exception of one payment in the 1730s, the income was never used, and by 1830 a sum of over £100,000 had accumulated. In 1835 it was diverted by those concerned with the emancipation of slaves in the British West Indies to the education of freed slaves. A prime mover in this matter was Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton, a great grandson of Charles Buxton, Master of the Mercers' Company in 1768, although not himself a Mercer. The fund was used to set up elementary schools throughout the British West Indies and to found a teachers' training college at Kingstone, Jamaica. The Schools were soon afterwards handed over to various religious societies, who also maintained schools in the islands, but Mico College, Kingstone, remained the responsibilty of the Mico Trustees and is now the second largest teachers' training college in Jamaica. The Buxton family have been represented on the Board of Trustees of the College since its inception and the present representative Mr. Henry Fowell Buxton is a Liveryman of the Mercers' Company, his father having been admitted to the freedom by virtue of his descent from the 18th century Master of the Company. September 1976