The Co-operative Wholesale Society (CWS) were among the pioneers of industrial film, producing short films on their factories and workers from 1898, only 2 years after the first ever demonstration of moving pictures in London. This CWS Family Fare Exhibition was hosted and filmed by the Newcastle Co-operative Society (NCS) in the CWS centenary year, 1960 and, judging by the queues and crowds, seems incredibly popular. At this time, NCS had 116,000 members, operated 250 branch stores with a...

The Co-operative Wholesale Society (CWS) were among the pioneers of industrial film, producing short films on their factories and workers from 1898, only 2 years after the first ever demonstration of moving pictures in London. This CWS Family Fare Exhibition was hosted and filmed by the Newcastle Co-operative Society (NCS) in the CWS centenary year, 1960 and, judging by the queues and crowds, seems incredibly popular. At this time, NCS had 116,000 members, operated 250 branch stores with a turnover of £14 million, and purchased more CWS products per Co-operative members than any other society. 

The modern Co-operative movement continued to use film as ideological propaganda, advertising, and education, for social campaigns but also for entertainment. Programmes were screened in community halls, the Women’s Institute, mobile cinema units and CWS run cinemas into the 1970s and later. The first co-operative cinema was opened in Meadowfield, County Durham, in 1915. In an article for the society journal The Wheatsheaf, October 1922, G. Curtis wrote: 'Let us have our own cinema and show the big feature films as they are released. Here is a chance for the co-operative movement to contribute to the amusement of the tired worker. Note that, amusement. We are not asking you to join a class. We are not asking you to read a book. We are inviting you to see in your own comfortable super cinema "The Girl Who Slipped on the Soap", featuring Lilian Gish. Ay, and to draw dividend on the purchase money of your ticket.'

The Co-op film units contributed greatly to the tradition of workers’ and Left-political film. At an international Co-operative educational conference in Paris in 1954, attended by delegates from eighteen countries, "the use of films and picture strips for the instruction and enlightenment of co-operative members" was emphasised on the film working party agenda. However, the movement's productions also included stereoscopic film adverts and all-colour musical publicity films such as Co-operette in 1938 with Stanley Holloway, featuring the “Carrot and Onion Dance” routine against a backdrop of cans of food. And in 1937 the Co-op claimed to be ‘the only organisation in the country using colour cartoons on the lines of Mickey Mouse for film propaganda.’

The Co-operative Movement were not slow in tapping into the glamour attached to cinema and film stars for publicity, and from the mid-1950s, commercial television. A native of Rochdale, like the Co-op, Gracie Fields was supportive of the trading organisation, recording the novelty song, 'Shopping at the Co-op Shop' in 1929, and never failing to visit stores when playing at local theatres, such as Newcastle and Birmingham in 1930. Film actor Richard Attenborough featured regularly in promotions for 'Defiant' radios and televisions, and may have been under contract to the CWS. The Movement also capitalised on the fame of former employees such as a huge star of the stage and screen from the 1950s, Richard Burton, a former assistant at the Taibach and Port Talbot Society. And, internationally, Greta Garbo, who promoted bakery products for the Consumer's Cooperative of Stockholm in one of her first jobs before the cameras, Our Daily Bread in 1922, and had once worked at the Stockholm department store of the Kooperativa Forbundet - The Swedish Cooperative Union.

The North East of England was one of the strongholds of the co-operative movement. In 1872 Newcastle was the location chosen for the first branch of the Co-operative Wholesale Society. The CWS grew out of the Rochdale Equitable Pioneers Society, formed by a group of impoverished Lancashire weavers. They opened the first successful Co-op shop at Toad Lane in 1844 to combat profiteering by the ‘middle-men’ and the adulteration of food: sawdust was commonly added to tea and chalk to flour. Members benefited from a reading room and the quarterly ‘divi’ (dividend) share of profits. Many will still remember “Divi Day” when parents would often buy a new pair of shoes or coat for the kids. The CWS became wholesaler, manufacturer, importer, farmer, publisher, banker and insurance provider to the Co-operative Movement.

Joseph Cowen (founder of the Newcastle Chronicle, a radical politician and Newcastle MP, popularly known as the “Blaydon Brick”) pushed to open the first CWS Newcastle Branch and served as President of the first day of the 1873 Co-operative Congress. Tyne and Wear was the location for many fine Co-operative warehouses and stores including one of the first British ferro-concrete engineered designs by Louis Gustave Mouchel and François Hennebique for the CWS bonded Quayside warehouse, completed in 1900, and considered the oldest surviving large-scale reinforced concrete building in Britain. This Grade II listed early modern warehouse was refurbished in 1994 under the ownership of Tyne and Wear Development Corporation, and is currently (in 2019) the hotel Malmaison Newcastle.

The Newcastle headquarters moved to the grand, purpose-built building at West Blandford Street in 1899, once described as a “striking symbol of commercial success” and now home to the Discovery Museum. The later magnificent central Co-operative department store on Newgate Street opened on 10 September 1932, and was finally completed in 1934. Designed by LG Ekins, chief architect of the Co-operative Wholesale Society in London until 1941, this building was an Art Deco temple to shopping in response to the retail boom of the 1920s and early 1930s. Among the design details, the cast figures of running men supporting the brass bannister of the grand stairwell are a delight, and it's hard not to think of them as a celebration of the industrious Co-op workers. The store, with its imposing north and south towers, still stands but finally closed its doors on New Years Eve, 2011

As the visitors walk through the entrance gateway to the CWS Family Fare Exhibition it is interesting to look at their attire. Many men and women still wore hats, with just below the knee, raincoat coat or trench coats, still in fashion today.  Two British luxury clothing manufacturers, Burberry and Aquascutum, are identified with the invention of this with Thomas Burberry inventing the waterproof gabardine fabric in 1879. We can also see here the swing coat, the box coat, the crop jacket and cardigan.  Increased economic power in the 1960s fueled a new sense of identity and the need to express it in fashion. The fashion industry responded by creating designs for young people that no longer simply copied 'grown up' styles and if you look carefully you can see two young men in less formal wear with short sleeved shirts and bomber jackets. They were in the minority with most people dressing quite formally in suits.  Again, as in the 1955 trade fair we do see a  fashion show where a succession of different models parade 1960s Co-op fashion on a catwalk including tightly fitted purple pencil skirt two-piece suits with short jackets and high pill box hats. Not a mini skirt insight yet! Co-op fashion has never been truly in the vanguard.

There are also various shots of the different displays intercut with browsing audiences, and interestingly include a presentation of closed circuit television (CCTV) equipment. The use of CCTV for both educational TV and video advertising in retail stores originated in the 1950s, with testing in department stores taking place in the 1940s. A German electrical engineer and pioneer of German television, Walter Bruch was ordered in 1942 during wartime to create a television system that could monitor the development of the V-2 rocket, and so invented the first ever CCTV system. The more pervasive and controversial use of CCTV are as security and surveillance cameras. In 2013 The Telegraph quoted the disturbing statistics disclosed by a security industry report that  Britain had a CCTV security camera for every 11 people, a staggering 5.9 million closed-circuit television cameras in the country at that time. The English novelist, short story writer, and essayist J.G. Ballard characteristically once said: “I’ve decided to recast myself as Utopian. I like this landscape of the M25 and Heathrow. I like airfreight offices and rent-a-car bureaus. I like dual carriageways. When I see a CCTV camera, I know I’m safe.”The 'surveillance state' is, of course, far more of a concern today since the explosion of social media and the mobile phone. Sad to think of the fiction we have missed since the death of J. G. Ballard as he would certainly have embraced today's brave old/new world of technology in its algorithm -controlled complexity - so far removed from the seeming naivety of a Co-op CCTV display.

In the era of the Formica tabletop, a woman is also giving a CWS cookery demonstration in a 1960s kitchen, with fridge, (freezers were unheard of.) and a cooker with an eyeline integral toaster in view. A mock Co-op supermarket has customers browsing shelves too. The Co-op was in the vanguard of the self-service and supermarket trend in Britain (actually the brainchild of Clarence Saunders, founder of the American Piggly Wiggly grocery chain). The Newcastle Society lagged behind London branches: Romford got one in 1942 as a response to wartime staff shortages. But it was one of the first traders in Newcastle to convert stores into self-service. The re-fit of a grand 1930s West Road shop in Denton Burn, Newcastle, was announced at a members meeting in 1955. Once rationing ended in 1954 self-service supermarkets slowly caught on, but for a while ‘the hostess’ guided customers around these bewildering new environments and cajoled them into using wire baskets.

References:

The British Consumer Co-operative Movement and Film, 1890s-1960s, Alan Burton ( Manchester University Press, 2005)

The People's Cinema: Film and the Co-operastive Movement, Alan Burton (National Film Theatre, 1994)

http://www.engineering-timelines.com/scripts/engineeringItem.asp?id=1127

https://www.archive.coop/collections/coop-film-archives

http://manchesterhistory.net/architecture/1930/newcastlecoop.html

http://radicaltyneside.org/events/newcastle-co-operative-society-department-store

https://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/news/history/inside-117-newgate-street-secrets-9004984 

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/bizarre-story-piggly-wiggly-first-self-service-grocery-store-180964708/

Encyclopedia of Television, Edited by Horace Newcomb, (Routledge, 1997)