Page 256 - 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. — :
Neale died in Bisham Abbey, the pleasant Thames-side home,
near Mariow, which he had inherited in 1884. He had set his hand
to the plough at the institution of the Central Agency in 1851, and
he had kept his hold for forty years. In 1875, at a time when his
sacrifices and achievements warranted an honourable retirement, he
put aside the pleasant life of a country gentleman to place himself,
as general secretary of the Co-operative Union, at the beck and
call of a working-class movement. A hundred tributes to his memorj'
appeared in the Co-operative News immediately after the intelligence
of his death got abroad ; but it is preferable to quote from outside
the co-operative circles. Rather over twenty years ago, IMr. John
Trevor was about to initiate the " Labour Church." He was at that
time minister of the Upper Brook Street Free Church in Manchester,
and writing of the Labour Church movement not long afterwards
in My Quest for God, he said:
One of the principal opponents, as of the kindest, was the warden of
the church— perhaps the greatest man I have ever loiown—Edward Vansittart
Neale. In the gentlest, yet warmest, manner the veteran co-operator—so
near his end—told me I was wholly wrong. I feel the pathos of it now more
than I did then. All of us put together did not seem worth the little finger
of that man, who only sought to serve, and whoso soul was the soul of a child.
Describing how, ultimately, he came to resign, IVIr. Trevor added
It is only just to the memory of a great man to say that Mr. Neale had no
part in tliis. Indeed, though warden of the church and a regular attendant
when in Manchester, which was nearly every Sunday, his home was near
London, and he was seldom able to take part in the business affairs of the
church. It was his work in the cause of co-operation that led him to spend
part of the week in Manchester—in lodgings as hmnble as those of many a
]\Ianchester clerk. Nor must it be supposed that Mr. Neale was a Unitarian. It
was the undogmatic and cultured preaching of my predecessor that led him to
find a home on Sundays at Upper Brook Street. Mr. Neale was really a
Trinitarian and a Tory, but with a Trinitarianism and a Toi'j'ism exclusively
his own. And I often think of his remaining at the church after my pre-
decessor had left, listening Sunday after Sunday to sermons which must often
have made him sad, though he never said a word, as one of the innumerable
examples he gave of a simplicity and grace of character quite marvellous in a
man whose opinions were so thoroughly thought out and so tenaciously held,
and to which he sacrificed all his time and all his wealth. Indeed, I cannot
imagine a character in which strength of purpose and childlikeness of heart
could be more liighly developed and more perfectly combined.
A sheer contrast with Neale m bhth and mind, in voice and
person, was John Thomas Whitehead Mitchell, and colleagues though
they were on the Central Board of the Co-operative Union, and im-
bued with a deep mutual respect, it was theii' fate to be opposing
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