Ticket for admittance to the Pit at the Benefit performance in aid of the London Master Bakers' Pension Society and Alms-House Fund, Theatre Royal Haymarket, 10 May 1860.

This two-shilling ticket gave entry to the Pit (an area of the stalls) but to no particular seat. It bears the check-taker’s punch-hole that prevented re-use.

Card and paper tickets were introduced for Benefit nights so that those promoting events could sell them in advance, unlike the metal checks reused in-house by theatres daily. This was for an evening featuring the lavish new play by H.J. Byron, Fairy Romance, originally licensed as The Pilgrim of Love, an Oriental Fairy Tale in Rhyme, and the two preceding pieces or ‘curtain-raisers’ - Edward Falconer’s The Family Secret and Tom Taylor's The Rife and How to Use It, both starring John Baldwin Buckstone (1802-1879), the actor, author and lessee of the Haymarket from 1853 to 1877 who made the Haymarket the premiere comedy theatre of London.

The London Master Bakers’ Benevolent Institution was founded on 13 December 1832, originally to provide pensions for the widows of millers and bakers, and those who struggled to support themselves after retiring from the baking industry. After August 1857, when the foundation stone was laid, the Institution built the Bakers’ Almshouses in Lee Bridge Road, Walthamstow, an Italianate three-sided building with a courtyard designed by the architect Thomas Edward Knightley (1823-1905). Completed in 1866 and containing fifty-two residencies, it was described as ‘one of the grand alms-houses of north east London’. The building survives today where its original purpose can be seen from a carving of a young boy gathering sheaves of corn. A nearby pub, The Bakers Alms, which was closed in 2010, took its name from the alms-houses. The Benefit was clearly just one of several money-raising enterprises by the London Master Bakers’ Benevolent Institution.