A trust formed in 1964 by bringing several older parish doles under one careful roof.

The parish of Arnold has always had relief funds of one kind or another. There are entries in the vestry minutes of St Mary the Virgin going back to the 1730s recording bread doles at Easter and small payments to widows whose husbands had died in the framework-knitting trade. Through the nineteenth century these small funds proliferated — a coal fund here, a clothing fund there, a parish almsbox at the church door — each one well-meaning, each one a little too small to do much on its own, and each one administered by people who did not always know the others existed.

By the middle of the twentieth century the case for putting them under one roof had become obvious. The Charities Act 1960 had opened a tidier route to the amalgamation of small parish trusts, and over the early 1960s the trustees of several of these funds — supported by the parochial church council of St Mary's and the local councillors of what was then Arnold Urban District — agreed to apply jointly to the Charity Commission for registration as a single body. That registration was granted, with a standard governing instrument, on 11 March 1964. The constituent funds remain on the Commission's register as linked subsidiary charities of the parent trust.

Six decades on, the working method has not changed. The trustees meet four times a year at Arnot Hill House — once in each season — to review applications, look at the books, and decide on a small handful of larger grants. Between meetings, the chair and two co-trustees hold a standing authority to make small discretionary grants in response to urgent need. Almost every grant we make is suggested by someone who knows the household: a parish welfare worker, a school welfare lead, a district nurse, a churchwarden, a neighbour with a sharp eye. We rarely advertise. We have never run a national campaign. We have never employed a member of staff. We do not intend to.

We are bound, by our governing document, to the ancient parish of Arnold — the historic ecclesiastical parish, not the modern town. The boundary takes in the streets around St Mary's, the older terraces of Daybrook and Redhill, the post-war estates of Killisick and Woodthorpe, and the village of Bestwood at the parish edge. If we cannot help a household — because they live outside the boundary, because the case is too big for us, because we have given them a grant from the same fund within the last twelve months — we say so plainly, and we try to point them to someone who can.