Page 175 - The_story_of_the_C._W._S._The_jubilee_history_of_the_cooperative_wholesale_society,_limited._1863-1913_(IA_storyofcwsjubill00redf) (1)_Neat

Voyages to Greece.
sugar buyer. Any number of further records would have been made,
had not the Customs officer intervened. This earhest arrival of all
Manchester seaborne imports was despatched to the Failsworth
Society. . . . During nearly twenty years of the canal's existence
since, the C.W.S. has regularly imported from Rouen dh-ect to
Manchester. Until July, 1905, the service v/as fortnightly, but since
that date a weekly service has been maintained. Although the
general expectation of huge exports by canal has not been realised,
the C.W.S. traffic has shown a steady if slow improvement. The
Society, however, still has to find general goods to complete the
outward cargoes of the boats at Garston and Swansea. A New
Pioneer, and a new boat, the Fraternity, now maintain the service.
That old stalwart, the original Pioneer, was sold to a Turkish
buyer in 1896. For a short time previous to this emigration she was
employed in an effort to establish a coastwise service between
Manchester, South Wales, London, and Newcastle, which failed
chiefly because one boat was insufficient to give frequent regular
sailings, and to have employed more than one boat would have
launched the Society once more into speculative trade. The service,
however, was not given up without certain advantages having
accrued from its establishment. Another and a more ambitious
attempt to realise an old ideal was made when the Equity, early in
the eighties, was taken off the Goole station, and twice sent to
Patras, in Greece, to bring home C.W.S. currants. Here we touch the
core of a myth, for there are good people who, to this day, imagme
that the Wholesale Society itself conveys its autumnal cargoes from
the East. The obstacle to the enterprise lay simply in the fact of
vessels built for the short trips of a coasting trade not being
sufficiently economical in comparison with other boats designed for
steady tramping between widely-distant ports. And ship-owning by
the 10,000 tons, let it be admitted, is, under ordinary circumstances,
still beyond the scope of economical working.
So the C.W.S. shipping, in the year of the Society's Jubilee,
consists of the two boats linking Manchester with the French
Cottonopolis, Rouen ; and, as originally, the department is under the
control of the Grocery Committee, in which the Shipping Committee
was merged in 1908. Before quitting the subject, however, a little
more remains to be told. Sending ships to sea is not only picturesque,
but nearly always romantic—at any rate to landsmen—and some-
times tragic. But from accounts of loss of life the C.W.S. records
are singularly free. During the actual navigation of the vessels no
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