Respected in the village, he was a miner at Plean Colliery before joining up and connected with the Bannockburn Shepherds and
Rechabite societies.
Capped by the
Rechabite Coffee Tavern and Flower's grocery shop at one end, and the cul-de-sac of Taff Street at the other, it traced three hundred yards of all that was most vital about our valleys.
Then there is the well-reported case of a self-identified African Jew, "Uncle Billy" Simmons, who claimed to be a
Rechabite from Madagascar.
AN INDIAN STORY." Crystal Fount and
Rechabite Recorder: Organ of the Independent Order of
Rechabites, and devoted to the Cause of Temperance in General 5.6 (October 18, 1845) : 81-84.
Nigel Paul Williams was only identified through his DNA after his body was found on April 8 last year at his home at
Rechabite Hall, Crescent Street, Merthyr Vale.
Thomas became chairman of Department of Public Instruction Board of Advice 134, under whom school 488 fell, and was a keen
Rechabite (total abstainer).
Healthy Investment, still a friendly society, was called The
Rechabite Friendly Society when it began as a temperance organisation in 1833.
Rather than joining the middle-class
Rechabite temperance association to which his Uncle Tristram belonged, Gilman became a member of the more plebeian Washingtonians.
And the
Rechabite Friendly Society has a tax-exempt endowment savings plan allowing customers to cash in on abstinence.
The society received backing within the Methodist church, and the organisation published antismoking leaflets.(45) The League survived until 1956, and, according to the SunHerald, had issued `gloomy and frightening leaflets for twenty years'.(46) Typical of the arguments used was that of a Methodist who had worked as a
Rechabite organiser in the local option campaigns of the 1920s, and condemned tobacco as `insidious', `pernicious' and `narcotic', while another claimed that tobacco `exerts an enslaving grip' on its users.(47)
In those same years the
Rechabite and Sons of Temperance brotherhoods increased the numbers and "respectability" of supporters in the anglophone communities, forming jolly men's clubs with secret passwords, parades, and witty speeches, as well as insurance that was to be forfeited by the member if he fell off the wagon.