It’s Thursday the 2nd of May 2005 and as Jack and I walked through Rainhall Road car park in the rain this morning I reflected on the fact that later today it would be full of the stallholder’s vans who will be running the French Market in Town Square this weekend. Being a historian and also aware of current affairs I considered the contrast between the French Market as a symbol of co-operation in Europe and the proposed Constitutional Treaty as a blunt instrument forged by Brussels to tell us what was good for us and the reaction it is provoking. It’s my opinion that any closer union founded on trade and enterprise is more likely to be successful than one forced on us by legislation.
Of course these are not new ideas, nor do they apply only to European enterprises. By a happy coincidence, the French Market will take place on Town Square which was originally the site of the headquarters of the Barnoldswick Industrial Co-operative Society. If we go for a bit of a wander through the roots of the co-operative principle we might find that there are some common threads between what was happening in the late 18th and early 19th centuries in Europe, the effects this had on thought in Britain and how, in the end, it translated to Barnoldswick and became an important factor in the town’s history.
I immediately run into a problem because when I look for the earliest stirrings of self-help and independent thought I think of the Black Death, the Peasant’s Revolt and the collapse of Feudalism. I have to remind myself that I am writing for the local paper and not starting on a synthesis of the history of thought in Europe. However, as I have been heard to say before, given the choice, I will always assume that my readers have enough curiosity and intelligence to be able to recognise the value of understanding what the forces were that shaped our town, they were not always local, single-cause or modern.
The major factor which controlled the social structure of England until the mid 14th century was deference to the local lord. This carried with it responsibilities of service and in return the lord lent his vassals just enough land to enable them to survive by peasant farming and pay whatever taxes and rents were demanded of them. The system was based on there always being a surplus of labour encouraged enough to breed but kept in check by regular episodes of famine. The Black Death reduced the working population by half, destroyed the surplus and put power and the possibility of independence into the hands of the workers because without them society couldn’t function.
The transformation didn’t happen overnight but eventually it spawned wage labour, the small entrepreneurs who started the Domestic Textile industry, individual land ownership and eventually, with the advent of technology led by the increasing demands of the evolution of industry and the factory system, produced more egalitarian ways of managing society, including modern political systems.
We need to look at a Welshman called Robert Owen, born in 1771 in Newtown (Powys), by 1790 he had worked his way up to become manager of Robert Dale’s cotton factory in Manchester where he was the first man to use American Sea-Island cotton as opposed to Indian fibre. He was regarded as one of the most competent and enterprising men in the industry. He was also a brilliant thinker, had seen the revolution in France, read the latest political philosophy and realised that if the new factory system was to develop its full potential there had to be a massive shift in the social status and physical well-being of the workers. They could not be regarded simply as factory-fodder, they had to be given a stake in the future.
In 1794 he moved to New Lanark in Ayrshire and with partners took over a large mill formerly owned by David Dale, whose daughter he married. He ran the enterprise on principles of democracy, fair wages and the best living conditions that could be supplied. By 1825 the New Lanark system had failed because Owen was a man seen to be moving too fast by the Establishment who recognised the genesis of a political movement when they saw one. For the last 25 years of his life until he died in 1858, Owen lectured and wrote on his belief that that individual character is moulded by environment and can be improved in a society based upon cooperation and that what was needed was transformation and not reform of the lot of the working class. By then his ideas had taken root in all sorts of strange places.
In 1844 28 working men gathered together to set up the Rochdale Equitable Pioneers Society and opened a co-op shop on Toad Lane in Rochdale. They sold basic items such as flour, butter, tea and candles, but it was how they ran the business that made them different. Their concern was firstly to make sure that as far as possible they sold only unadulterated food of the highest quality and secondly to act as a true democracy in which every customer was a member of the society and shared in the profits. The enterprise prospered beyond their wildest dreams and was copied all over Britain.
In 1854 the principles of the Co-operative movement had reached Barnoldswick. Atkinson, in his history ‘Old Barlick’ says that about 24 members started the Barnoldswick Society in a rented cottage in Newtown, now Yvonne’s Lingerie shop. They graduated through three other shops and in 1870 built their own store at the bottom of Manchester Road in what is now the Strategy Bar. It was an idea whose time had come and became a strong social influence in the town. Next week we’ll look at how it prospered into the 20th century and how the principle evolved beyond retailing into banking, savings and even into the weaving sheds.
SCG/02 June 2005
969 words.
The 1870 Cooperative shop in Manchester Road. The wheel on the end of the beam in the gable end was the hoist for lifting supplies to the first floor.
