All Ludlow's activities after 1870, described in the previous chapter, were subordinate to his work as secretary to the North-cote Commission on friendly societies.

Up till then he appears to have had little contact with these institutions, though since co-operators and trade unions registered in the friendly society office, he was familiar with certain aspects of friendly society law. There were in the eighteen-seventies friendly societies of varying ages and in all stages of development, from the primitive village club to the complex organisation of the great orders like the Oddfellows or Foresters, with their lodges and delegate meetings, their professionalised staff which brought the latest knowledge of a new actuarial science to the distant locality. These orders had been built up during the nineteenth century by men of immense moral authority who had evolved specialised skills of their own, requiring heroic labours. Thus Henry Ratcliffe, the corresponding secretary of the Manchester Unity, worked, it was said, sixteen or seventeen hours a day to produce reliable tables of sickness and mortality in various trades so that it was possible to deduce what subscriptions had to be paid to make the societies financially solvent. The pioneer investigations of such men in the friendly society movement were used by the creators of the Welfare State.