The Campion Fund is used to provide occasional modest grants to support research consistent with the Society’s objective and history. Typically, these grants support projects that are too small in scale, or too novel to interest the main funding agencies. In one case the support of the Campion Fund helped demonstrate the importance of a project, which subsequently went on to win lottery funding.

The Manchester Statistical Society was one of the main beneficiaries of the estate of Sir Harry Campion who was the first Director of the Central Statistical Office during and after the second world war, a distinguished statistician and a Vice-President of the Society. (See “Obituary: Sir Harry Campion, 1905-96”, by W. Rudoe Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series A (Statistics in Society), 1997, vol. 160, issue 1, pp. 148-151). The bequest was placed into a trust fund by Manchester Statistical Society to provide grants.

There are regular calls for applications on this web-site. Those who think they have a research project which requires modest funds and is consistent with the aims of the Society are invited to contact the Society when the next round of grants is advertised.

Recent grants have reflected the local and historic roots of the Society. Yet the Society is not parochial. One grant was given to support research on technology policy in South Korea. Policy towards new technology has been a recurrent theme of papers given before the Society. Recent beneficiaries have included a local school, an academic and a research student.

Campion Fund grants are given with minimal bureaucracy. The Society is fortunate in having a wide range of skills amongst its members. Applications are evaluated very quickly by calling on experts. Once a grant is given, the project is allocated a “minder” from among the Society’s members who support and advise the project and report back upon its success. For example, a recent Society funded project to conserve school archives was able to call upon a member with great experience as a Librarian.

The trustees have received some excellent applications which are regrettably not consistent with the aims of the Society, notably in areas such as pure medical research. The following project outlines are included to show the types of projects that have been funded and the outcomes of the research.

The Irish in Nineteenth Century Manchester
Conserving the Archives of Manchester High School for Girls

Patterns of Irishness in Nineteenth Century Manchester

This research project was partly funded by the Manchester Statistical Society with a grant to Mervyn Busteed from its Campion Bequest Fund. The resulting paper was delivered to the Society on 12th June 2001 and subsequently published by MSS and is available for purchase. The research was carried out in the School of Geography at the University of Manchester.

The £1,000 grant awarded by the Society enabled the applicant to employ a research assistant during the summer of 1999. They were able to carry out a spatial analysis of the distribution of Irish households in Manchester during the 19th century. The Irish were attracted to Manchester by the economic opportunities it offered. He showed there was a large and thriving Irish population in Britain, and indeed Manchester, even before the famine influx. Families could find employment in a wide range of activities in the Manchester cotton mills and warehouses, in domestic service, dressmaking, millenary and construction.

The research uses census sources to demonstrate residential clustering of Irish families who were marked out by their origins, accents, religion, politics and often their use of the Gaelic language. The Manchester Irish experience encapsulates the dual loyalties of all migrant people.

The research resulted in a fascinating and original insight. The grant was highly cost effective. The findings have a strong local content but provide a universal perspective on migrant communities which is of contemporary relevance. The insights generated by a patient survey of historical sources echo the early surveys carried out by the Manchester Statistical Society itself.

See http://www.art.man.ac.uk/Geog/staff/mab.htm (this will alter soon)

Conservation of the Archives of Manchester High School for Girls

The records of Manchester High School for Girls, founded in 1874, are evidently of local interest and the school receives many enquiries concerning past pupils. But the school records also illustrate the important role women played in founding and managing a girl’s school in which national figures were governors, headmistresses and pupils. The school recognised the importance of its own archives by appointing an archivist to work alongside the school librarian.

The Campion Fund gave a grant approaching £3,800 to support preservation of around 3,000 photographs and proper storage for several thousand record cards of pupils who attended the school between 1926 and 1990.

See http://www.manchesterhigh.co.uk/libraries/libindex.htm