Page 194 - The_story_of_the_C._W._S._The_jubilee_history_of_the_cooperative_wholesale_society,_limited._1863-1913_(IA_storyofcwsjubill00redf) (1)_Neat

The Story of the C.W.S.
of £60,000 for 4,300 square yards, the Wholesale Societ}" became
for the first time something more than a leaseholder upon the
costly ground of Cardiff. Before very long a new and greater
depot will occupy the acquired site. While the mineral wealth
of South Wales remains the district as a whole is likely to grow
still more populous. The Welsh co-operators, once aroused to the
larger meanings of the movement, have taken high rank amongst
the most loyal, and with the present goodv,ill on both sides there
is no doubt a busy future for co-operation, local and federal, in
Monmouthshire, Glamorganshire, and Carmarthenshire, and (aided by
the agricultural co-operative movement) still further West and North.
We left the Bristol Depot located in Christmas Street. The
conference of 1899, following increases of business that were not
ended by the Cardiff developments, had an effect here also. Obser-
vant eyes already had been fixed upon an area of slums by the
waterside in the heart of the city. Altogether, twelve years of
patient waiting passed before it became possible to announce the
possession of the entire site. This came with an agreement to lease
from the Bristol Corporation the fourteen hundred square yards on
Broad Quay necessary to round off an area previously acquired.
Two hundred and forty people were living on the site, in tenements
which, as the Bristol Mirror said, had nothing but their picturesque-
ness to recommend them, and five public-houses stood within the
area. While the site was cheap, its character, near the waterside,
made it necessary to prevent any possible settling by building on
cemented piers, going down 50 feet to a solid basis. The new depot
was officially opened on May 16th, 1906—twenty-one years after
the coming of the C.W.S. to the Western capital. Over five hundred
guests from the Western and Soutli Wales societies were entertained
by the Wholesale, represented in the chair by Mr. Henry Pumphrey.
The business of the depot had grown in the twenty-one years from
£60,000 to £800,000, and the employees from six to eighty. Even
though a slum is demolished, it is not pleasant to dispossess 240
people, but there is compensation perhaps in the fact that at the
end of 1912 the number of employees had grown from eighty to
270. More people work upon the site now than previously lived
upon it. Meanwhile, the statistics of the depot's trade have proved
what originally was greatly doubted—the necessity of a building
upon the present scale.
If the C.W.S. in the West has grown out of, and prospered with,
the successes of the local societies, it has also created local success,
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