Despite some recent research, it still largely accepted that English rural society did not have a significant peasantry in the last two hundred years. This is in contrast to most other European countries, where peasants used co-operative purchasing and marketing, often resulting in politically and socially fractured co-operative movements. The British co-operative movement is associated mainly with industrial areas and with the consumption needs of factory and pit workers. Guided by the Rochdale Pioneers’ principles of 1844, by the end of the nineteenth century ‘the Co-op’ dominated working class retailing. Where consumer co-operatives existed in the countryside, they were located in market towns and mostly formed by trade unions with branches in rural areas, particularly railwaymen, sometimes quarrymen or farm workers and occasionally small groups of middle class socialists. Yet the Co-operative Union, the national United Kingdom membership body, encompassed a significant number of small single village societies founded by Victorian aristocracy or gentry. These are the main subject of this paper, which will also explore different types of co-operative paternalism. These have largely been ignored by co-operative historians, as they do not fit into their conventional, often heroic, view of the movement and figure only marginally in the descriptive work of some regional rural historians. Whilst evidence of paternalistic rural co-operatives is difficult to locate, either from snippets in local histories or newspapers, this paper may help initiate future research in the subject.Footnote ¹

The British co-operative movement was an object lesson in Victorian self help. It was working class, independent, self governing and democratic, in sharp contrast to conservative gentry paternalism. Yet paternalistic co-operatives came from a long tradition. George Holyoake, the first historian of co-operation, found evidence of dozens of village shops set up all over southern England by squires or vicars in the 1790s, as traditional paternalism struggled with the acute bread crisis, compounded by war. Less famous than the Speenhamland reform of the Poor Law, and of short term nature, these early paternalistic co-ops may be seen as part of the conflict between moral and political economies, as Britain came to terms with its Industrial Revolution and rapid social change.Footnote ² The founding father of British co-operation, Robert Owen, a successful cotton mill owner, also acted in a paternalistic way in imposing his ideas for a New Moral World on first his workforce and then on mankind. Rejecting the emerging working class democracy of friendly societies and trade unions, the grandiose imposition of a vast secular scientific religion was to be done by Robert Owen himself. Using his personal wealth and those of rich backers, he and his family formed seven rural experimental communities in Britain and the United States. Huge sums were invested, with the Queenswood community costing £30,000 and New Harmony in America $125,000. Here property was to be held and cultivated in common, families would live communally and raise children. Trade would take place between the communities and the state would wither away. None was successful, largely because the colonists tended to be committed and often awkward urban artisans rather than farm workers, so the key question of who would own any profit never came up, and the Owen family footed the bill.Footnote ³

Several of Owen's disciples followed his lead. In the 1830s, James Hill, a banker from Wisbech, built a Hall of the People and started a co-operative farm, briefly creating a mass movement in this Cambridgeshire market town. In the nearby Fens, eccentric farmer William Hodson attracted scores of Owenites to a remote settlement on the Bedford Level where, despite having their own brickyard, windmill, dining hall, newspaper and cricket square, everything ended in tears. Hodson had to hire farm workers to do the cultivation and then used them to evict the complaining fellow colonists. In the 1840s even the Chartist movement's Land Company looked to rich paternalistic leaders like Feargus O’Connor to supplement their fundraising for buying estates. Although their settlements envisaged more individualistic spade husbandry, with just enough land to become qualified for the vote, there was still a co-operative element. Despite these continuing failures, Malcolm Chase has chronicled how much the Chartists absorbed Owen's theories and the tenacious potency of such back to the land rhetoric for a new working class with memories of green fields.Footnote ⁴

There are vestiges in the next generation of rural radicalism in the 1870s. A year before Joseph Arch's farm workers’ union swept through Southern England, Thomas Strange, a Wesleyan schoolmaster from Herefordshire, made a deal with Sir Baldwin Leighton of Loton Park, Shropshire, reforming landowner and future Conservative Member of Parliament. Leighton effectively bankrolled Strange to start a farm workers’ union and persuaded gentry friends to chair local meetings. Here, encouraged by the attendance of sympathetic squires, clergy and migration agents, farmers were shamed into giving pay rises. Although Strange's union was briefly united with Arch's union in the National Agricultural Labourers’ Union, it soon diverged over the strike issue. By the end of 1872 it had purchased, presumably with Leighton's money, 142 acres at Leintwardine in Herefordshire, where thirty labourers were settled to farm co-operatively and a co-operative store was founded for the use of other members. There is evidence that the farm continued until 1879.Footnote ⁵

Other contemporary rural paternal co-operative societies have also been traced in the area of the Welsh Marches. Near Much Wenlock, his family's pocket borough until 1832, landowner Lord Wenlock affiliated the grocery store in his closed village of Bourton to the Co-operative Union as early as 1869. He appointed a series of managers and later incorporated the Post and Telegraph office. With an average of fifty-seven members until its dissolution in 1924, there can be few village households who rejected membership as part of a package of paternalistic benefits like cottages with gardens, parish charities and Sunday Schools. The Wenlocks’ interest in co-operatives extended to their other English holdings. They had a 20,000 acre estate at Escrick in East Yorkshire, where the second Baron also founded a village co-operative store in 1872. Although his paternalism extended to providing a school and allotments and the patronage of a friendly society, he refused to allow the Methodists to build a chapel there.Footnote ⁶

Another Shropshire village society at Burwarton, a few miles south of Bourton, was founded by Viscount Boyne in 1881. William Boddey, secretary of this society for the whole of its existence until 1907, is described as gardener and forester to the Viscount. There were obviously no democratic Rochdale principles here. Wenlock and Boyne wanted reliable servants to run their stores efficiently. Burwarton was a large parish in the remote Clee Hills of south-east Shropshire, and was home to some of the independent smallholders of the Clee Liberty who doubled as quarry workers. With an average membership of 112, it is likely that the society included these squatters on common land as well as Boyne's cottagers and estate workers. The early twentieth-century development of coal mines on the southern Clees gave rise to more conventional industrial co-operatives set up by unionised workers. Although benefiting from membership through bulk buying and advice, neither of these Shropshire village societies ever submitted annual reports to the Co-operative Union or sent representatives to the Co-operative Congress. One wonders what they would have made of each other if they had attended, given that Lord Wenlock was a future Conservative Member of Parliament and became Governor of Madras. Furthermore there is no record of the Co-operative Union objecting to the lack of democratic control. Both of these societies were, however, totally reliant on individual enthusiasm. The Burwarton Society did not survive after the death of the Eighth Viscount Boyne and the Bourton Society was destroyed by the succession of three Lord Wenlocks in nineteen years, which coincided with the agricultural depression following the First World War.Footnote ⁷

The farm workers’ union was strong in Shropshire. For most of the period, the county was second in importance only to the union's Norfolk heartland. But neither Bourton or Burwarton had a union branch, even though many other estate villages did. Lydbury North in the south west, for example, which was home to the long established Plowden estate as well as the Earl of Powis’ Walcot estate, had nearly a hundred members in its branch and was the scene of a successful haysel strike in June 1916, which succeeded in raising the wage rate for the county. Although Lydbury enjoyed a full range of paternalistic benefits, neither the big house nor the farm workers themselves ran a co-operative society.Footnote ⁸ The only other co-operative society in a Shropshire village was founded at Tibberton, near Newport, in 1876. The village is located within the sprawling estates of the non-resident Duke of Sutherland, but there is no evidence to suggest that he founded the Tibberton co-operative. The society continued after Sutherland sold up in the area in 1913 and survived independently until 1946, perhaps encouraged by the local branch of the farm workers’ union. Tibberton was close to Ellerdine Heath, home to John Beard, a key national figure in the unions. The area was characterised by smallholders and Methodist chapels and the co-operative society probably benefited from this self-help ethos. Beard was also active in promoting the North Shropshire Smallholders Co-operative Insurance Society, under the slogan: ‘Cottagers insure your pigs and get your feeding supplies’.Footnote ⁹

Shropshire was the location of the Co-operative movement's own ‘company paternalism’. The village of Roden, near Wellington, was almost entirely run from the 1890s as a Co-operative Wholesale Society fruit farm, with a processing plant. Strongly unionised from 1922, its co-operative ethos did not prevent a long running dispute with the management which ended with the union head office talking to the Co-operative Wholesale Society in Manchester, before terms of settlement were approved and endorsed. Here a paternalistic co-operative culture seems to have been encouraged with a convalescent home and maypole dancing.Footnote ¹⁰ Further local research may uncover other paternalistic societies, like that run by the socialist landowner William Lawson in Blennerhurst, Cumbria between 1867 and 1872 and encouraged by the co-operative guru, George Holyoake. These may also be linked with the late nineteenth-century socialist communities, dominated by rich patrons, that have been described by Jan Marsh.

Paternalistic co-operatives could also be an urban phenomenon. In opposition to laissez faire Liberal mill owners, Disraelian working men in a clutch of towns on both sides of the Pennines set up their own Conservative Co-operative Societies. Often with the support of rival Tory mill owners, who also financed Salisbury Clubs with cheap beer, these eight societies were linked to the skilled Lancashire cotton spinners’ union, whose general secretary, James Mawdsley, stood as a Conservative parliamentary candidate with Winston Churchill at Oldham in 1899. Although most of these ‘Blue co-ops’ were wound up in the Edwardian period, others joined industrial societies and two survived until the 1950s and 1960s.Footnote ¹¹

The late Malcolm Bee found further evidence of paternalistic co-operatives in Berkshire and Oxfordshire. In the latter county at Long Hanborough, the Duke of Marlborough instigated a branch of the Oxford Co-operative society. He presented the shop and gave his estate workers land to build cottages if they saved enough dividend towards a mortgage. In 1882 the Earl of Jersey of Middleton Hall, who was described as ‘an excellent co-operator’, founded the hundred strong Middleton Stoney Society and subsidised it when it ran into financial difficulties, until his death in 1913. At the same time the still larger Steeple Aston Society built a well stocked shop with a loan from the vicar and this was run for twenty years by the village schoolmaster. A short lived Clifton Hampden Society also had the vicar's wife as secretary.Footnote ¹² In neighbouring Berkshire, the Long Wittenham Society was formed in 1869 by the vicar and was extended into neighbouring Aldermaston by the schoolmaster, supported by ‘a large resident landlord’. The Ardington Society was started by Lord Wantage who built a mock Tudor stores spaciously planned and equipped with outbuildings, ‘such as bakery, a slaughter-house, cart-sheds etc., round a courtyard, while attractive gardens were laid out which included a fountain and a rockery’.

The Yattendon Society was founded in 1887 by the famous architect Alfred Waterhouse, designer of the Natural History Museum and Manchester Town Hall, who lived at Yattendon Court. With his estate agent acting as secretary, the society extended to all the village families, but failed to thrive after Waterhouse's death in 1905. In Berkshire, the Co-operative District Secretary took more critical notice of paternalistic co-operatives than elsewhere in rural England, complaining that Ardington is ‘practically outside the movement . . . difficult to get any real co-operative spirit’. He was probably tipped off by a Liberal Daily News reporter who observed that:

At Long Wittenham, the Co-operative District Secretary also despaired that:

Such intervention from Co-operative activists seems to have been rare and paternalistic societies were generally allowed to go their own way. A campaign by the Womens’ Co-operative Guild between 1899 and 1904 to set up new co-operatives in poor areas, with settlement houses, penny banks, smaller packet sizes for products and ‘how to do it’ pamphlets, seems to have had little impact in rural areas.Footnote ¹⁴

Few paternalistic societies survived the deaths of their founders and the arrival of newcomers, often ‘hard faced men who had done well out of the war’, in the big house. The agricultural depression from 1920 also clearly had an impact. Working class villagers, especially in the freer cultural and political climate after the First World War, were, however, important customers of market town co-operatives. Clare Griffiths has pointed out that these targeted the rural poor with special offers and cut price bus fares. But with improved rural transport, including bicycles and ex-army lorries as well as buses, there was little need to set up village societies and few old paternalists still around who were motivated to subsidise them.Footnote ¹⁵

My previous work on rural reconstruction after the First World War outlined the growing importance of new village institutions like the British Legion, Young Farmers’ Clubs, the National Farmers’ Union, Women's Institutes and Conservative Associations, which were often neo-paternalistic in stance. Whilst these were very successful in reviving a rural cultural conservatism, some pre-war paternalistic institutions were abandoned as not fit for purpose, despite being currently reclaimed for the fashionable concept in the 2010s of ‘Red Toryism’. So the ‘tea and buns’ activities of the huge Primrose League and the friendly society club days and processions were seen to be old fashioned compared to the racy world of ‘talkies’, jazz bands, village hall hops and whist drives and quickly vanished.Footnote ¹⁶ Paternalistic village co-operatives fit easily into this category. Despite being hidden from history, rural paternalistic co-operatives had a long and varied tradition. But their demise in the harsher world after 1918 is an apt metaphor for the decline of traditional aristocratic influence.