Today
In 1907, the Chulkhurst Charity was amalgamated with other local charities with similar purposes, to form the Biddenden Consolidated Charity, still functioning as a registered charity. The Bread and Cheese Lands were sold for housing, expanding the charity significantly to provide Biddenden pensioners and widows with bread, cheese, and tea at Easter, a cash payment at Christmas, and distribute Biddenden cakes. (During the food rationing of the 1940s and early 1950s, the cheese was replaced by cocoa. Distribution of cheese resumed in 1951.) A wrought iron village sign showing the Biddenden Maids was erected on Biddenden village green in the 1920s.
The tradition of the dole continues to the present, and every Easter Monday tea, cheese and bread are given to local widows and pensioners through the windows of Biddenden's former workhouse. All those eligible for the annual dole are given a Biddenden cake, and they are sold as souvenirs to visitors. The cakes are baked so hard as to be inedible, to allow better preservation as souvenirs; they are baked in large batches every few years and kept until the stock runs out. Historically, the loaves used were of the archaic quartern loaf size, but this particular part of the tradition ended when Biddenden's last bakery closed in the 1990s.
Read more about this topic: Biddenden Maids
Famous quotes containing the word today:
“These native villages are as unchanging as the woman in one of their stories. When she was called before a local justice he asked her age. “I have 45 years.” “But,” said the justice, “you were forty-five when you appeared before me two years ago.” “Señor Judge,” she replied proudly, drawing herself to her full height, “I am not of those who are one thing today and another tomorrow!””
—State of New Mexico, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“The East is the hearthside of America. Like any home, therefore, it has the defects of its virtues. Because it is a long-lived-in house, it bursts its seams, is inconvenient, needs constant refurbishing. And some of the family resources have been spent. To attain the privacy that grown-up people find so desirable, Easterners live a harder life than people elsewhere. Today it is we and not the frontiersman who must be rugged to survive.”
—Phyllis McGinley (1905–1978)
“Dearest Lord, may I see you today and every day in the person of your sick, and, whilst nursing them, minister unto you. Though you hide yourself behind the unattractive disguise of the irritable, the exacting, the unreasonable, may I still recognize you, and say: “Jesus, my patient, how sweet it is to serve you.””
—Mother Teresa (b. 1910)