In order to look at the growth of co-operative and other mutual organisations in what is now the Royal Borough of Greenwich we need to start with a very quick look at the historical background. This part of Kentish Thameside had huge industrial sites by the 17th century when the Royal Dockyards in Deptford and Woolwich, along with the Royal Palace in Greenwich, employed many, many people in the service of the state..
In this area a skilled work force in state owned industries were well aware of the advantages of collective action. This increased in the 19th century with the military establishment in Woolwich and the vast industrial site of the Royal Arsenal - the largest and most diverse factory ever in Europe. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries private industries opened here using Arsenal trained engineers in skilled jobs – and workers with aspirations for better lives in a better world. In the mid-19th century many of these workers were involved in – for instance - the temperance movement and heard a message of how, by founding their own organisations , they could take control of their lives.
In the mid 18th century a number of mutual businesses were set up by workers hoping to improve the quality and price of food and other household items on offer locally. I wrote a detailed article about this here a few weeks ago. In Deptford a butchery business was opened by Dockyard workers and in 1758 in Woolwich, as in Chatham, a mill was set up to support a bakery business. These were owned by groups of shipwrights or ‘artificers’ in the Royal dockyards and were successful in bringing down prices. The Woolwich Mill and bakery survived for 80 years and supplied bread commercially to military establishments as well as to local people. It stood near the side road still called ‘Mill Close’ today. The Royal Dockyard closed in 1869; and a suggestion was made by a future leading co-operator that it might be saved by becoming ‘co-operative shipbuilding’.
In Woolwich several organisations were set up with a mutual structure, particularly for financial or insurance purposes. Most are not entirely relevant to a history of co-operation locally but it should be noted that the best known of these institutions was the Woolwich Equitable Building Society of 1847 and described in the Survey of London as ‘an important staging post in the history of mutualists enterprise in Woolwich, and a seed that grew to spread the name of Woolwich nationally’.
Alexander Mcleod came from a poor background in Scotland where he had served an apprenticeship in engineering and came south in the 1850s to find work in the Royal Arsenal. Today his statue still stands above the main door the shop he founded in Powis Street, Woolwich. As a member of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers he was at a meeting where the subject of Co-operation in trade was raised. A special meeting was called for November 7th 1868 at which the Royal Arsenal Supply Association was founded with just twenty members. This was the beginning of the mighty Royal Arsenal Co-operative Society.
The first cooperative ‘shops’ were stores in the homes of
leading members - McLeod was secretary to the organisation and in 1869 the
first store was in a room below his home at Parry Place on the Plumstead
borders. In 1871 they set up the Royal
Arsenal Co-operative Society Limited and adopted the ‘Rochdale model’ for a
retail co-operative with profit-sharing through dividends. Two years later, when
they took on their first employee, it
was decided to pay a profit sharing bonus on staff wages. This idea
was unique in retail co operatives and I am reminded of the contemporary local
profit sharing scheme at South Met. Gas which lasted until nationalisation in
1946. The RACS scheme lasted until the 1980s merger with CWS.
In the early 1870s they took on a proper shop at a site in Powis Street. Survey of London comments that this was ‘away from the main shopping district- typically for a co operative’. It was at the western the ‘Greenwich’ end of Powis Street and the start of what became a complex of RACS owned buildings there. At first it opened for just four evenings a week’ and McLeod became full-time manager.
Within ten years RACS had 1,597 members, many of them skilled workers looking for a respectable shop with a high standard of goods at affordable prices. Starting with groceries they soon added a draper, a boot maker and a tailor and, eventually, much, much more.
These Powis Street properties expanded and became RACS main stores. McLleod’s statue remains on a building now, sadly, a Travel Lodge . There is not the space here to describe this central Woolwich complex of shops but it is included in great detail in the Woolwich volume of Survey of London.
By the 1880s the Powis Street shop included a butcher and the beginnings of the network of milk rounds. Then a tea room was added and at the back more stables and a purpose built bakery. Central Stores were opened in 1903, when RACS had a membership of 21,788 and was the largest co-op in London. At the opening ceremony a crowd of some 5,000 heard a speech from newly elected Labour MP, Will Crooks, followed by a procession round Woolwich which included the Society’s 130 horses and 86 vehicles plus military bands.
At the same time the Society opened numerous smaller shops around the area – a network which would eventually cover most of Kent and Surrey. Initially however sites were in Plumstead. Erith, Charlton – and most notably in 1900 at The Links on Plumstead Common. There were eventually hundreds of shops and branches; all with their own histories.
RACS was not alone in South London in its popularity and
expansion. In the 1890s a Co-operative Festival was held in Crystal
Palace as part of Blackheath resident, Edward Owen Greening’s, 'One and All'
movement . 34,800 people are said to have attended and over 100
co-operative societies were there with half a mile of exhibition tables. There
were speeches from London trade unionists - Ben Tillet and Tom Mann and there was a grand concert with 6,000
singers and a new Labour song specially composed for the day – although the
Co-op movement, including RACS at this stage, was not Party political. The
Festival was an expression of what working people could aspire to and
achieve - “what do we want? ... good
music ... the love of flowers ... the
appreciation of the domestic arts . ... the practice of athletics ... the
desire for culture ... association in employment.”
The RACS Board of Management was known
as the ‘General Committee’ with nine, initially unpaid, members. They managed
the day-to-day business of the Society, but major decisions of policy needed to
be agreed at a general meeting of members.
From the start RACS promoted ‘culture’ and ‘association’. The earliest facilities at the Powis Street
store included a reading room and a library
- this was the earliest library in Woolwich, and others were set up in or
near stores in the coming years. In 1901 the Powis Street library moved into a
converted Baptist
Chapel in Parsons Hill which became the Co-operative Institute and Education
Centre. The building was demolished when
John Wilson Street was rebuilt as part
of the South Circular Road and the Education Centre moved to Park Vista in
Greenwich. I remember the Co-op library there myself in
the 1970s and thought it was somewhere I was perfectly prepared to settle into
and study.
Edward Greening’s ‘One and All’ movement, mentioned above, was all about healthy living, self sufficiency, allotments, growing your own food. As RACS expanded they bought up a number of farms and areas where members could grow their own vegetables or where their shops could sell fresh local grown produce. One result of this, still with us today, is, now community run, Woodlands Farm on Shooters Hill originally purchased by RACS in 1920. Although, I’m afraid one service they provided was for customers to pick the piglet which would be slaughtered for them at Christmas! By 1937 there was an abbatoir at the north end of the farm, which was said in the 1970s to have the fastest beef gang in Europe – and – well, we perhaps we should draw a veil over the shocking events of July 1987. The Woodlands Farm Trust does a good job and hopefully will continue to do so (and thank you, Maggie, for recent presents of their excellent local honey and apple juice).
Some of the farm land purchased by RACS was used for housing development - most notably on the Abbey Wood ‘Co-op’ Estate, aimed at respectable and well paid Arsenal workers. Here street names reflected Co-operative values and the movement’s heroes – McLeod, Federation, Greening and several more. One unique feature was the excavation of extensive underground mine workings for chalk to provide building materials. The miners’ canteen survived to become the reception area for what is now the Abbey Wood camp and caravan site.
Later, in 1925, RACS took over and managed the architecturally exceptional Eltham Well Hall Estate built by the Government in the Great War to house munitions workers. RACS added community facilities, in particular Progress Hall and retained the estate until it was sold to Hyde Housing in 1985.
As RACS grew and expanded they began to take over smaller local co-ops. The earliest was probably in 1905 when they took over East Greenwich Co-operative Society which operated a single shop in Woolwich Road, later used by the Co-op funeral service. Once taken over by RACS they soon announced greatly increased turnover in the shop. In the 1960s this process of takeovers was accelerated and many Co-operative Societies were taken over by RACS from as far from Woolwich as Woking, Sheerness and Slough. I well remember when they took over Gravesend Co-op in 1968 with its 20 shops However, there is no mention in the RACS account of Gravesend Co-op Hall where I saw George Melly, or indeed of Gravesend Education Department where I met Harold Wilson.
The Great War led to the introduction of sugar rationing – ironic
since the Co-op Jam factory was opened in Abbey Wood in 1916. It survived to be
bombed in the Second World War and provided valuable employment for local women. On
7th November 1918 – just four days before the
end of the war - RACS had celebrated its 50th anniversary with a Jubilee Concert. Sales for 1919 were well over £2.5 million and
membership was 68,500. They looked forward to a prosperous peace.
A memorial to those
employees who had died in the Great War was installed in the Powis Street Head
Office. In 1918 as part of the
peacetime future RACS purchased Shornells – a huge house in woodland off
Bostall Hill in Abbey Wood. They
intended it to be used it as an education centre and a hostel for students. The first
weekend school there featured lectures by playwright, George Bernard Shaw, and economist,
G.D.H.Cole. – plus 30 year old Joe
Reeves, future Greenwich MP, who had just been appointed as RACS Educational
Secretary. By 1985 and the merger
with CWS Shornells was in a bad state, subject to vandalism and fires. It was sold for £1 to a local project for a
Greenwich hospice and remains in this use today.
In 1921 RACS established
their Political Purposes Committee which involved direct affiliation to the Labour Party,
locally, regionally and nationally. The
early co-ops had been set up at a time when political allegiances were
changing, with new ideas and new politics - the gradual rise of Labour and
decline of the Liberals. Most co-ops did not identify too closely and recruited
activists from many different political perspectives. The foundation of RACS
Political Purposes Committee is a complicated story, as is it history up into
the 1980s. I would very much recommend Rita Rhodes book ‘An Arsenal for Labour’ which follows the whole process through with
more clarity than I ever could achieve.
Outside
London the Co-op Party was active and dealt with politics and elections. In the RACS area nominees represented co-op
interests on local Labour Party management committees and nationally RACS’s
nominee had a place on Labour’s National Executive Committee. Since the demise
of RACS in the 1980s a Co-op Party branch was set up in Greenwich and Woolwich
and quickly built up a strong membership.
Co-op delegates still attend Labour Party management meetings, and most
Greenwich councillors are ‘Labour and Co-op”.
In 1926 RACS was involved in setting up the youth movement known as ‘the
Woodcraft Folk’. This had originated outside the co-op
as ‘Kibbo Kift’ , which was set up to provide an alternative to the militarism
of the Scouts and with an Advisory Council which included H. G. Wells, and Julian Huxley.
Joe Reeves the RACS Education
Department Secretary, was interested in the youth movement and RACS Society developed its own version called ‘The
Woodcraft Folk’. It was to become a national organisation with 6000 members by
1938 –and by the 1980s over 15,000. It still appears to be going strong – see their
web site – there is a group near you! The
nearest to me is just up the road in Mycenae House.
Also In 1926 RACS bought freehold land, once part of the
Woolwich Royal Dockyard from the
Admiralty. They named it Commonwealth Buildings and by 1937 nearly 1,900 staff
were employed there. They mainly handled
grocery and provisions warehousing - bacon
smoking, tea blending etc. There was also a pharmaceuticals laboratory, shoe repairs,
clothing manufacture, general engineering, and motor maintenance, along with a
garage and depot for transport. In 1929
a Co-operative Exhibition was held there attended by the Prince of Wales and
over 200,000 members of the public. It
was said that queues to get in were a mile long. It included “a model bungalow. the theatre of
fashion, home cookery demonstrations, concerts, arts and crafts, cornet and
hosiery making, working exhibits of
machinery, sweet boiling, cigarette making, etc. Famous bands will provide music
and Admission
is Free.” The site was closed in 1985 and developed in the 1990s for housing . It
is now King Henry’s Wharf.
When the Commonwealth building site was
demolished the original gateway and entrance buildings to what had been the
Royal Dockyard remained with the address of ‘2 Commonwealth Buildings’.
This was the Royal Dockyard’ Apprentice
School and it still houses one last co
operative business - the funeral services, now run by CWS. Another relic of
Commonwealth Buildings is the prominent chimney on Woolwich Church Street. Although
it was built as part of the Royal Dockyard it was used by the Co-op for their boiler
systems. It also appears to be doing well, despite being disused
In the years between the two World Wars the numbers
of employees at RACS rose from 1,000 to 10,000, with 70 new shops opening in the
1930s – some of these shops were Post Offices.
There was the start of a travel business with two charabancs for hire,
and eventually purchase of hotels.
World War II came with much bomb damage. After the
war, and most significantly, a group went to America to investigate a new way
of shopping called ‘self service’. Soon
a shop using this system was opened in Woolwich
and many others followed. I would be
interested to know if other shoppers were
like my mother who just refused to use the wire baskets provided at Gravesend Coop’s
Echo Square branch .
Self Service was the future in the modern world – there
were also rental schemes for TV sets,
and fridges. Then at head office a computer to work out the dividends was
installed, as well as an automatic telephone
exchange .
RACS made it to their 100 year anniversary but by then felt out of date and old
fashioned. The co-op as a body serving
local working class interests has become too remote for the public to understand
or relate to. I have heard various reasons given as to why RACS failed – did they
over reach themselves with the super-store at Margate? Did replacing the ‘divi’
with stamps just make them seem identical to the commercial supermarkets opening
around them. Although today round here Co-op
online deliveries are more efficient that the big name stores and the grocery
stores appear to be doing well.
In 1985 RACS gave up and became part of CWS.
If anyone is interested I still have two RACS membership
packs –one with unclaimed divi on it. A
couple of times I have rung up CWS to ask what I should do with them – but no
one in Manchester had ever heard of RACS, after all it was in London where
co-ops, like heavy industry, apparently never existed!
I have tried to cover here a few features of
co-operatives in the borough of Royal Greenwich. Much of it about RACS - but there is so much I have missed out. One
very important feature, for example, was their support for women in public life
- and so much much more.
There are several histories of RACS and what I have
written here is very dependent on material collected by Ron Roffey. Ron was RACS last company secretary –and he collected
a vast and interesting set of memorabilia which was housed on a whole floor of
the Powis Street Department store. When he had to leave there, the Council
housed the collection in various depots but eventually most of it had to go. I
was also told that Rochdale museum wouldn’t take much of the vast archive of
written records - if that isn’t true,
please correct me.
But Co-operation in Greenwich is not dead, despite the demise of RACS. We still have co-op shops and Royal Greenwich is a ‘co-operative council
(51 Labour-Co-op out of 60 majority members and 4 opposition). In the 1980s as Thatcher’s policies decimated
Greenwich industry and jobs so the Councils looked to new ways of creating
jobs. In 1982 they set up Greenwich Employment Resource Unit which evolved into today’s’
Greenwich Co-operative Development Agency. Inevitably this organisation
has had its ups and downs but it is very
much still with us and currently achieving success after success – continuing
to make the co-operative message count in Greenwich – and something we should
all be proud of.
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