Stories rarely remain unchanged, the context in which they’re told matters just as much as the context referred to by the story. I wrote this sequence of 21 stories about 15 months ago. You may have read some or all of them in their earlier form. Reading it now, we perhaps see something different, especially as we consider the role of mutuality during the lockdown.
As I republish these stories, I revise and polish them. Some need little change, for others the changes are extensive. At the end of each story, I add reflections based on where my thinking has moved onto, especially in the context of the Lockdown.
How will it be possible for local businesses to remain viable following the lockdown? As a public speaker, I told this story to address this question pre-lockdown. It’s just as relevant, maybe more so today. It is fiction based on information gleaned from the local studies library and online sources. I’ve embroidered the facts to cover aspects lost in the mists of time.
Story 5: The Secret of Victoria Road, Kilnhurst
William Shaw is a steel man and during the 1860s, he headed a team who made crucible steel at the Jessop’s Steel works in Brightside, Sheffield. He is in his thirties, physically powerful, the one who pours the steel from the crucibles into the ingot moulds, using a giant pair of callipers.
He’s also a Methodist class leader and every Tuesday evening his class gathers around the stove at the Methodist Church Hall on Brightside Lane. They drink strong sweet tea from a kettle on the stove and smoke tobacco in clay pipes. They’re not just a religious class but a mutual support society, where they discuss matters that concern them. This week they discuss a topic close to their hearts: food. Food is either expensive or adulterated. For example, flour is bulked out by chalk and perhaps a little arsenic to make it white. They give their topic an airing but leave with no settled way forward.
Kilnhurst
William is married to a foreigner. She comes from Kilnhurst, near Rotherham and every so often they set out with their three boys, pushing a handcart, to visit her family. The journey takes the best part of day out and again going back.
This time they stayed a couple of nights and William soon became tired of children racing around him and so he set off for a walk. His feet took him to Victoria Road in the centre of Kilnhurst and there, something stopped him in his tracks. He looked, blinked and his life changed forever.
He was a clock, the type at right angles to the wall so that you pass underneath it. At first William admired it. He knew his team made the steel that likely made the springs that drive the clock. But then he noticed the clock bore an inscription: Kilnhurst Co-operative Society.
He went inside and spoke to the manager. He found Kilnhurst was one of the earliest co-operatives, set up 7 or 8 years after the first retail co-op on Toad Lane, Rochdale. (The photo at the head of this post is of the Toad Lane co-operative, now a museum. Photo attribution: Transport Pixels.) The manager said he would be delighted to visit and explain co-operation to the class.
A few weeks later, the manager visited Brightside and explained how retail co-ops work. He showed how customers were members. How they kept prices low and returned a dividend on the purchases members made. This could prove decisive for thousands of families in north Sheffield. Finally, they learned co-ops were dead set against of food adulteration. The class voted to set up their own co-op. Soon a delegation visited the Kilnhurst Co-op who taught them the Rochdale principles and helped them draw up their Industrial and Provident constitution.
Mutuality in Action
On a Tuesday evening in 1868, 12 men stood around the anvil at Jessop’s steel works and one by one walked up to the anvil and signed the constitution of the Brightside and Carbrook Co-operative Society (B & C).
They opened a small shop in Carbrook with initial expenses of 8/6d. That first year they made £40 profit and paid a dividend of 1/- in the pound. By 1921 B&C had 38 000 members, £567 000 capital and a turnover of £2 040 000. They had many branches all over north Sheffield.
In 1929 they opened their flagship art deco department story on Walmgate, at the site of the old Sheffield castle. Archaeologists investigated the site and their finds were displayed in the store. The store also stored B&C’s archives. In 1940, the Germans dropped a bomb on it. After the war, B&C built a new department store across the road and the building still exists, a grade 2 listed building.
William Shaw was one of thousands of men and women who dedicated their lives to the retail co-operative movement across the whole of the United Kingdom. They invented the world’s first wholesale network, The Co-operative Wholesale Society. They invented the world’s first department store, next to the first co-op on Toad Lane. The principles of co-operation informed numerous small friendly societies and the formation of insurance companies, building societies and working class banking services. They also helped establish educational institutions such as the Workers Educational Association and Scientific Institutes. Apart from the initial I&P legislation, this was done with little support from government.
Small local groups, combined to deliver a nationwide network that survived for well over 100 years. What are the barriers to a similar movement today?
LOCKDOWN POSTSCRIPT
The powerful image around the anvil, is real! It actually happened and so did the encounter in Kilnhurst. I’ve no idea how William Shaw found himself in Kilnhurst and so I made that up. I believe William Shaw was some type of blacksmith, working steel and not making it. The Methodist Class is real.
This is a powerful story when I tell it. It shows, through conjuring one man from the past, what ordinary people can do with limited means. It’s no mistake, those times in the nineteenth century were hard. By that period industrial poverty was well-established. There was no welfare state, no NHS, no workplace safety, no laws protecting consumers.
What is remarkable is so much was done not by aristocrats, captains of industry, professionals or politicians but by ordinary working people in a culture where poverty was entrenched. One thing helped with these developments that created our modern society and that was low inflation. The value of money was stable.
Financial Meltdown?
I suspect we face a period of financial instability, reduction of the middle classes and a new period of urban and rural poverty. If it’s possible to recreate something as potent as the retail co-operative movement, it will be different but based on mutuality.
Many business people will be sceptical. They’ve been brought up to see business as about personal profit and the devil take the hindmost. But this is poor self-judgement and its weakness is not so much that it impoverishes the unsuccessful but that it misunderstands how business works.
Economists often invoke Darwin’s survival of the fittest to justify the cut and thrust of the marketplace. They point to nature red in tooth and claw and so illustrate that they understand neither evolution nor biology in general. When Darwin wrote about fitness, he did not mean physical strength. He meant fitness in the sense of best fit.
Who Are the Fittest?
Animals and plants thrive where they fit in, where they collaborate for mutual benefit. The same applies to business. In nature, single species can grow out of control and it leads to collapse of whole eco-systems. The same applies to business.
A business owner who insists on going it alone, will fail. That’s always been true. As the lockdown eases and businesses open up again, they simply cannot do so without collaboration for mutual benefit. For example, a café needs supplies. It cannot function if its suppliers fail. Similarly suppliers cannot function unless cafés open and find customers. Every café that closes undermines their suppliers and ultimately, everyone along the chain back to the farmers.
These relationships and many others are the lifeblood of the economy. We need to find new ways of supporting them and, let’s face it, rebuilding them. Cafés that compete damage their supply chains. The question we must consider is how to rebuild and support supply chains. Our livelihoods depend on how we approach this question.
This is story 5/21. Last Story: Community: Incense to the Gods Next Story: Power and Finance