Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain. Judith Flanders

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СКАЧАТЬ early Co-operative Congress met in Manchester in 1831, to establish the North-West of England United Co-operative Co., to supply a wholesale warehouse in Liverpool for the various societies’. This did not take off, but these early cooperative ventures set an example, and in the 1850s and 1860s a new generation of workers attempted to create similar societies. The town of Rochdale, in Lancashire, was the location. Rochdale had had a thriving flannel industry for centuries, but with the coming of power looms the economic life of the town was no longer so stable. The new industries of coal mining, cotton mills and machine-making were developing, but the ‘hungry forties’ and reliance in the new factories on hiring ‘outsiders’ combined to create extreme hardship locally. In 1837, 180 animals a week had been slaughtered for sale in the local market; in 1841 the number was less than 70. So in 1844 the Rochdale Pioneers was formed, a club with thirty members, set up with the intention, in the short term, of selling food and clothing at prices workers could afford; then, when it became possible, the group hoped to move on to building workers’ housing, creating their own workshops, and setting up a temperance hotel. The main difference between the Pioneers and other clubs was that profits would no longer simply be divided among the members. Now interest would be paid to each shareholder, and what remained of the profits would be distributed to members in proportion to the amount of money they had spent at the store that year: a dividend on purchases. With capital of £28, the Pioneers began trading with a stock valued at £16 11s. 11d.: 28 pounds of butter, 56 pounds of sugar, 6 hundredweight of flour, 1 sack of oatmeal, and some candles. At the end of its first year, the club’s membership had risen to seventy-four, it had increased its working capital to £181, and had made a profit of £22. The trade depression of 1847 only brought in more members: by 1848 there were 140; two years later it was 600.

      In 1850 another group of men in Rochdale attempted to start a cooperative corn mill, in imitation of the Pioneers. When they failed to raise the necessary capital, they approached the Pioneers themselves, who invested some of their profits in the mill, creating the Corn Mill Society. By 1852 twenty-two different societies were dealing with the Corn Mill Society, a consumer-initiated, consumer-owned and consumer-controlled group. By 1851 there were perhaps as many as 130 societies working on the principles the Rochdale Pioneers had established, and many realized that cooperation between them was the way forward. In 1862 a conference in Oldham agreed to set up the North of England Co-operative Wholesale Agency and Depot Society; the following year it was formally registered as the North of England Cooperative Wholesale Industrial Provident Society (later thankfully shortened to the Co-operative Wholesale Society, known as the CWS), with forty-three societies owning shares. This was the start of the national cooperative movement: in 1862, branches of the Co-op were opened in Newcastle; in 1874 in London; in 1875 in Liverpool, in 1882 in Leeds, then over the next decade in Birmingham, Blackburn, Bristol, Huddersfield, Longton, Northampton, Nottingham and Cardiff. Furthermore, buying depots were set up across the country, and also outside England: six were opened in Ireland in eight years; then one in New York; followed by, in Europe, Rouen, Dénia, Copenhagen, Aarhus, Odense, Esbjerg, Gothenburg and Hamburg, and, further afield, Montreal and Sydney. As if this unstoppable march were not enough, the Co-op opened its own production sources where necessary: a dairy in Ireland from 1889; pig farms and bacon-curing in Denmark from 1900 and Ireland from 1901; even tea estates in Ceylon from 1913.⁶

      By the 1860s the idea of cooperative trading had travelled far from its origins, and various middle-class groups were setting up their own versions. The first was in 1864, when some Post Office clerks in London clubbed together to buy a chest of tea at a wholesale price. They moved on to bulk purchases of coffee and sugar, and in 1865 the Post Office Supply Association was formalized; within six months, it had 700 members, and it had changed its name to the Civil Service Supply Association, whose intention was to supply ‘Officers of the Civil Service and their Friends…at the lowest possible prices’.⁷ In 1866 came the Civil Service Co-operative Society, and in 1872 the Army and Navy Cooperative Society, open to ‘officers, their widows, non-commissioned officers, petty officers, secretaries of service clubs, canteen and mess reps’, and any friends that they chose to introduce.⁸ Both claimed to be offering a new combination: low prices and reduced service in exchange for cash sales, fixed prices, some goods only in large quantities, others with an extra discount for bulk. It was, perhaps new to them although, as we have seen, none of these notions was innovatory. Soon mail order was added to the list of services, together with expanded ranges: wine, tobacco, baby linen, books, boots and shoes, coal, carpets, drapery, milk and butter, meat, pianos, even surgical instruments—the Civil Service Co-operative Society and the Army and Navy were now a long way from the working-class aims of the originators of the movement, and were heading instead towards the department stores (see below, pp. 110ff.). Those groups formally connected to the CWS stayed true to their origins, selling only groceries, fresh meat, and in some places drapery, tailoring and shoes and clogs.

      Despite the financial structure that linked the co-ops to their middleclass brethren, the range of goods available in the co-op shops themselves more closely resembled that in the multiple stores (which today would be called chain stores) that were appearing at a rapid rate in urban centres at the same time. Co-ops and multiples were similar in that they both aimed at the working-class customer; they both relied on their size to achieve price reductions; they both sold a narrow range of goods, primarily food; they sold at fixed prices; they accepted only cash; they reached their customers by branding their outlets with a central name; and they provided a bare minimum of services to keep costs down. They were different, however, in an equally basic way. Co-ops were decentralized groups that shared services, fixed their own prices and shared their profits via membership dividends based on purchases. By contrast, the aim of multiples, first, last and always, was to make profits for their owners.⁹ There was no attempt to share the wealth, or form a better society.

      The main growth of multiples came in the later part of the nineteenth century, but preliminary stirrings had been there for some time. Williams of Manchester, a typical early example, was created after a Mrs Williams married a miner; she had previously owned a grocery in Didsbury, a prosperous suburb of Manchester. In 1865 she took a double-fronted shop there; in 1888 she opened another shop in Cheadle; in 1891 yet another, this time in West Didsbury; within thirty years Williams of Manchester had five branches, all in prosperous, middle-class suburbs. Eventually it expanded to thirty.¹⁰ Similar in pattern if not in scale was Thomas Lipton. He was born in Glasgow in 1850, the son of an Irish labourer and his wife, who had emigrated during the Famine. At eighteen he joined his parents in the small grocery shop they then ran; with some savings and a year’s pay he opened a second shop. By 1880 he had twelve shops in Glasgow, with a turnover of £200,000. His first shop in England was opened the following year, and by 1889 he had 30 shops and a turnover of £1.5 million.¹¹ Less than a decade later, there were 242 shops in Britain, and a smattering of overseas outlets.¹²

Lipton’s shops stocked a limited range of goods—bacon, ham, butter, eggs, cheese—and thus, in order to buy cheaply from wholesalers, he needed to have a large number of shops to supply. He relied heavily on a combination of price-cutting and price promotion. He advertised his cut-rate ‘Irish produce’—ham was priced from 5d. to 7d. per pound, while elsewhere it cost between 7d. and 10d. In 1877 he famously advertised the ‘Lipton Pound Note’, which declared, ‘I promise to give on demand at any of my establishments ham, butter and eggs as given elsewhere to the value of ONE POUND stg for fifteen shillings.’ He made this financially possible—and even profitable—by rapid turnover, low profit margins and low overheads. He aimed relentlessly at the lower-class market: his shops were either in the high streets or in smaller streets of densely populated working-class neighbourhoods. He sold a strictly limited range of stock in bulk, to vast numbers of customers, from vast shops: in Paisley, a suburb of Glasgow, his shop had a horseshoe counter so large it СКАЧАТЬ