OCTOBER 2018

The past informs the present
– The co-operative movement and anti-slavery
At this year’s conference of the UK Society
for Co-operative Studies, Nick Matthews,
chair of Co-operatives UK and representative
on the Co-op Group members’ council,
gave a presentation inspired by the Group’s
campaign against modern slavery. Its
efforts have seen it lobby government and
businesses to tackle the rise in forced labour,
and devise the Bright Future programme,
which offers work opportunities to survivors
of the crime. Here, Mr Matthews argues that
this anti-slavery ethos is embedded in the
co-op movement’s history ...
Last year, when the Co-op Group was awarded
the Thomson-Reuters Stop Slavery Award for the
great work of the Bright Futures programme in
supporting former slaves, I wondered what our
founders would have thought. Delighted that our
values were still intact or horrified that slavery
still existed?
p The iconic CWS wheatsheaf
I thought about the early trademark of
the Co-operative Wholesale Society, the
wheatsheaf with the motto “Labor and
Wait”. Labor stood out because it was in the
American spelling. It was suggested that this was
a demonstration by the founders of the CWS of
their commitment to the emancipation movement.
It is generally accepted that ‘labor and wait’
comes from the last line of the Longfellow poem
the Psalm of Life.
This raises a series of questions: were the
early co-operators supporters of Lincoln and the
Union forces? If the phrase was from Longfellow,
why was it important and would anyone seeing it
understand what it meant?
In short, this is what I have found. Two ideological
strands feed the early movement – Chartism and
Christian Socialism. Both had a commitment to
equality and extending the franchise at home and
against slavery.
The backdrop to the whole process of the
formation of the CWS was the US Civil War and the
blockade of the Southern ports by the Union navy.
This prevented the export of cotton to Manchester
and Liverpool. Prior to the civil war, there were over
half a million operatives in the cotton districts in
Lancashire and Yorkshire. By November 1862, over
two thirds of them had been laid off. The misery
caused has been referred to ever since as the
Lancashire Cotton Famine.
Co-ops were not immune to this economic
pressure. There were around 120 co-op societies
in the cotton districts. All lost trade and members.
Some collapsed. I believe this must have been
part of the pressure to form a Wholesale Society.
The Manchester campaign in support of the
Union came to a crescendo on New Year’s Eve in
1862 as Lincoln’s proclamation freeing the slaves
came into force on New Year’s Day. Two founders
of the CWS, John Cooper of Rochdale Co-op and
Edward Hoosen of Manchester Co-op, had called
the meeting, and some 6,000 people turned up
at the Free Trade Hall for the first meeting of what
became the Union and Emancipation Society. They
went in to be on the founding board of the CWS.
So their anti-slavery credentials are clear. How
well did they know Longfellow? Now, it is hard
to appreciate just how popular he was. Before
effective copyright law, huge quantities of his
work were sold. He was the most popular poet in
the country, with over 20 British publishers, easily
outselling the likes of Wordsworth and Tennyson.
His style of morally uplifting verse fitted the
mood of the times. It is astonishing how many of
his phrases have entered our language and there
is no doubt the founders of the CWS would have
been familiar with his work.
So, it seems that it is true that as George Jacob
Holyoake wrote, “Co-operative societies had no
small share in enabling the people of the two great
cotton spinning counties to resist the recognition
of a slave dominion.”
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