Consumer Co-Operatives in Postwar Britain

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chapter 21 Affluence and Decline: Consumer Co-operatives in Postwar Britain

Corrado Secchi

The history of the British consumer co-operative movement has been thor- oughly analyzed, by both co-operators and historians. In this chapter I am go- ing to analyze the post-1945 period, and within that time frame I will focus on international links with other European co-operative movements. In the first section I will illustrate the situation before 1945, concentrating on the main themes to be expanded upon in postwar history. The consumers’ co-operative retail movement was certainly the most important because of its size and im- portance within British society and history, but I will also take into account other co-operatives in housing, industry and agriculture. I will also consider separately the Co-operative Insurance Society and the Co-operative Bank, because, even if they were officially cws ventures, their history remained quite separate from the rest of the retail consumer movement. The British movement takes the year 1844 as its official beginning as that year marks the creation of the Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers. How- ever, the first co-operatives were created in the second half of the eighteenth century.1 From 1820, two men in particular shaped the form of co-operative societies: the socialist thinker Robert Owen with his communitarian project,2 and the activist William King who founded the Brighton Co-operative Society and helped to gather support for this new form of business.3 The Rochdale Pio- neers, however, were instrumental in setting strict parameters for co-operative societies, in particular through the set of principles in their annual almanac that are still today the basis for the ica’s statement on co-operative identity.4 Rochdale influenced the movement’s development in three ways: first, from

* This chapter draws on work for the author’s recent PhD thesis: see Secchi, The Co-operative Movement in Italy and Britain. 1 Bonner, British Co-operation, pp. 1–40. 2 Owen, A New View of Society. 3 Mercer, Co-operation’s Prophet. 4 Website of the Rochdale Pioneers Museum; available at http://www.rochdalepioneersmuse- um.coop/about-us/the-rochdale-principles; last accessed 19 August 2016. See also Chapter 3.

528 Secchi then on the British movement was dominated by consumer co-operatives; second, although socialist in its conception the movement claimed political neutrality; third, the dividend returned to members was to become a distinc- tive feature of the British movement, as well as an integral part of its ideology.5 With its strong working-class links, the movement grew steadily during the course of the nineteenth century. Like many consumer co-operative movements in Europe, it consisted of co-operatives in small towns, spreading from the industrial northwest to other areas in England and Scotland.6 Major cities turned out to be harder to conquer, but in 1868 there was already a foothold in London with the Royal Arsenal Co-operative Society, which became one of the most active societies thanks to its strong links to the labor movement and later the Labour Party.7 National organizations – the Co-operative Union (cu) and the Co-operative Wholesale Society (cws) – were founded as advisory bodies to help societies with problems and to help jumpstart their business and community activities. The Co-operative Union (founded in 1870) was originally meant as an all-encompassing organization for all kinds of co-operatives. By the late nineteenth-century it affiliated mostly consumer co-operatives and gradually lost its original function to become the center for consumer societies only. The cws on the other hand, founded in 1863, was built as a business organization for the consumer movement. It was meant to advise societies on how to make their purchases and to provide them with products that the movement would manufacture in the cws factories. It was not created as an organization meant to control all purchases within the movement, although this ambition was probably in the minds of its creators. The cws supported many affiliated activities: the biggest were the tea plan- tations in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) that allowed cws to control as much as 20 percent of the tea market in the 1950s.8 It also built factories to produce its own goods for consumer co-operatives. There were also other co-operative ventures, among them were the Co-operative Insurance Society and the Co- operative Bank, which grew steadily during the twentieth century and in 2016 provided insurance and banking for millions of consumers under the banner of the Co-operative Banking Group. The Co-operative Productive Federation was another branch of the Co-operative Union, and, being so small, worked

5 Bonner, British Co-operation, pp. 41–116; Gurney, Co-operative Culture, pp. 105–31; Bailey, The British Co-operative Movement, pp. 35–82. 6 Purvis, “The Development of Co-operative Retailing”. 7 Rhodes, An Arsenal for Labour. 8 Anderson, “Cost of a Cup of Tea”. See also Wilson et al., Building Co-operation and Chapter 22.