When the war started in 1914, no one was prepared for the wholesale distress caused by the call-up of so many of the bread-winners on whom entire families depended. The poor had always been with them but the avalanche of need that now swamped the existing relief agencies revealed the existence of a new kind of poor; people whose poverty was nothing to do with whether they were deserving or otherwise, and whose numbers were on a scale far beyond anything previously experienced. Desperate families searched here, there, everywhere for even the barest means of subsistence—the demands for assistance far exceeded the available resources.

Accustomed as we now are to the bureaucratic state, the lack of the mere mechanics of assistance is hard to imagine. The only appropriate organisation already in being in Liverpool was the Soldiers' and Sailors' Families Association (SSAFA), set up during the Boer War to meet the needs of servicemen's dependants. This had dwindled to a mere thirteen members, with no subscription list.