Page 183 - The_story_of_the_C._W._S._The_jubilee_history_of_the_cooperative_wholesale_society,_limited._1863-1913_(IA_storyofcwsjubill00redf) (1)_Neat

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Tactics for Success.
The Bugle Horn and Spring Vale experiments, said Mr. T. Redfearn,
into which the C.W.S. was dragged "against their wish," should
not now be quoted as objections. Tlu'ee collieries would be needed,
and the surface of the land should be owned as well as the coal
beneath. At Manchester the debate was closed simply because
there was no opposition to coal mining. So the Committee got
to work. Within a month or so they received offers of collieries
to a total of over one hundred, and coal-bearing estates to the
number of sixteen. There were mines to be had in every mining
county at prices ranging from " under £500 " to £850,000, at which
maximum several were offered. Members of the Committee
inspected one or two possibilities in the Midlands, and a large estate
in Staffordshire also received close attention, but eventually it was
decided that the inquiry should be confined to the South Yorkshue
district. Here the Committee got to close quarters with collieries
near Barnsley and near Chesterfield, the expert whom they had
retained furnishing reports upon both, But it was a large estate
near Doncaster which they came nearest to purchasing—it offered
prospects so alluring that prudence seemed inglorious. Yet, under
the existing conditions of the Society's coal trade, it was too
speculative a venture. The transfer of the land would have been
only the beginning of the enterprise, the value of sinking to the
coal remaining to be proved. Meanwhile, new bargains in collieries
continued to become available at every meeting. " They had had
almost innumerable properties of an unprofitable character offered
to them," said Mr. Shillito at Manchester in 1904. Limits of time
and space permit only one description of the mass of correspondence
and reports collected m this investigation. It weighed sixteen
pounds avoirdupois. . . . The net result was declared in June,
1904, when the Committee proposed to abandon fm-ther inquiries
" for the present." This decision was received with natural regret,
but, on the whole, with a sense of inevitability.
Against a poor chess-player it may be safe to make an
unsupported sally with the queen. In this manner the co-operators
of the seventies used their capital without a backmg of organised
and settled trade. But their opponents laiew the game—whatever
was to be said against the supply of necessities being such a sport
and the simple tactics proved disastrous. The C.W.S. Committee,
therefore, now proposed to build up an advance by developing a
greatly-increased coal trade. The business was separated from the
shipping activities and given that first condition of vigorous life.
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