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. These 1959 advertising spots for the cinema held in collections at North East Film Archive were made to promote shopping at Newcastle’s flagship Newgate Street store, highlighting perhaps not just the products and services but the CWS’s progressive sponsorship of...

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. These 1959 advertising spots for the cinema held in collections at North East Film Archive were made to promote shopping at Newcastle’s flagship Newgate Street store, highlighting perhaps not just the products and services but the CWS’s progressive sponsorship of architecture and film.

The modern Co-operative movement continued to use film as ideological propaganda, advertising, 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 empasised 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. Amongst 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

References:

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

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