Page 26 - 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.
fraud in trade. From the time of starting the first co-operative
corn mills at the end of the eighteenth century, protests against
adulteration were continually being raised, and they were still needed.
The grocers' oldest trade journal, the Grocer, which commenced
pubhcation in 18G2, in its first years frequently defended the trade
against general charges of adulteration, and affirmed that in this
respect " the present " showed " a decided improvement " over
" the past." Yet, taking the columns of this organ from 1862 for
the next few years onwards, we find direct evidence that tea, flour,
bread, sugar, rice, milk, butter, lard, arrowroot, chocolate, cocoa,
coffee, mustard, pepper, tobacco, snuff, soap, and tallow were all
specifically adulterated, at any rate by the " few black sheep " to
which the Grocer confessed. In 1863 a Hebden Bridge miller was
fined £10 for having 25cwt. of alum on his premises. A writer in the
Field in 1863 instanced a Manchester shop, " not very small," where
it was " quite one man's work to adulterate." Even raisms and
currants were said to be " rubbed with treacle " to make them
heavy. And we read of large seizures of short-weight butter, and of
" putrid tea " being burned by order of the courts. If we are to
believe the Grocer it was only the innocent co-operative societies
who, in the sixties, bought the "many tons of inferior butter" put
on the market; but it was not a co-operator who invested £1,500 in
" an invention for converting impure and rancid butter into the
finest Dorset . . . solely by the admixture of water." This
fact, which came out in the courts and was recorded in the Co-operator
for August, 1864, takes us a little ahead of our story; but it suggests
frauds which are bad enough to-day, which were more extensive
when the C.W.S. started, and by all probabilities were considered
quite respectable in 1850.
After existing for about two years the Central Co-operative
Agency came to an end. Our last glimpse of it is through a
reflected splendour. In July, 1852, a prospectus appeared in the
Operative of a Co-operative Investment Society. Its capital was to
be £100,000, " with power to increase to £1,000,000." And this
huge financial trust was greatly to be facilitated by a connection
with the Central Co-operative Agency, of 76, Charlotte Street,
Fitzroy Square ! Unluckily, by the end of 1852 the agency, and
the Operative, and presumably the Investment Society (if it ever
lived) were all dead.
Various causes contributed to the failure of the agency. An
important reason was that, unlike the early attempt in Liverpool,
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