150 years of
The Co-operative in Plymouth
 It was Christmas Day 1859, a Sunday, when John Slade and John Shovel, two local craftsmen, called in to visit
their good friend and near neighbour, forty-five year-old, Charles Goodanew, one of Britain’s 275,000 shoemakers.
All three working men were unhappy with various aspects of Victorian England and as they sat down over a seasonal
drink they started to put the world to rights. Plymouth was overcrowded, the population of around 60,000,
almost four times what it had been when Charles was born. Sanitation was poor, so too were the majority of the
population. Food was expensive, and all too often adulterated, and Charles had many mouths to feed, although,
tragically, four of his nine children had already died – three of them without reaching their third birthdays. His
eldest daughter however had already married and was six months pregnant. So begins Chris Robinson’s 150 Years of the Co-operative in Plymouth, for it was from that very Christmas Day
meeting, 150 years ago, that the Plymouth Co-operative Society was born. The story of how a small group of
men came to set up what became the biggest retailing operation in Plymouth is quite remarkable … and absolutely
enthralling. A lavishly illustrated, 256-page hardback, the book charts the rise and rise of the humble people’s enterprise that
started out in an upstairs room on the Barbican. Modelling themselves along the lines of the Rochdale Pioneers,
who had launched the first truly successful Co-operative in Toad Lane in 1844 (the year after Dickens’ Christmas
Carol had been published), the Plymouth Society grew swiftly. Their aims to sell decent quality food to working
men and women at decent prices - with the promise of a dividend to be paid from any profits made - proved
instantly popular. Each year’s growth was impressive and by the 1890s they were able to build, without borrowing
a penny, the most substantial shopping complex Plymouth had ever seen. Indeed, had it not been for the Blitz
their Central Premises would doubtless still be standing today. After the war, they were ready and able to service the new housing estates, either with travelling grocery or butchery vans or other mobile units, or with brand new shops. And then there was the impressive new Co-operative House, built in three phases in the early 1950s, giving the Society the largest retail footprint in the City Centre. The first to introduce Self-Service shopping into the City and at the forefront of the superstore, then convenience store revolutions, the Society’s recent history is every bit as compelling as the early stages and Chris’s account stands alone as an absorbing overview of retailing over the last 150 years as well as being a fascinating story of an outstanding local business, one that has had hundreds of thousands of members and many thousands of employees since 1859 and is today part of a Co-operative Movement that, globally, has around 600 million members! HARDBACK |
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