Page 470 - 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.
the stir and interest of associated domestic industry. It has taken
what is now at its best a busy pleasant hum of movement and hfe
into the four walls of private workshops, and left the homekeeper
to the dubious enlivenment of street cries and canvassers at the
door. Public visits even to co-operative factories are necessarily
restricted, but something is done to restore the interest when, with
a sense of right, co-operative men and women in great parties are
conducted through some C.W.S. works, and almost bj^ the thousand
sit down in the Balloon Street dining-room. And the guests have
not been limited to British co-operators. By ones and twos or
in whole battalions observers and inquirers have reached Balloon
Street or Leman Street or West Blandford Street from the ends
of the earth—Germans, Scandinavians, French, Belgians, Dutch,
Austrians, Russians, Hindoos; East meeting West in Americans
and Japanese, creed beside creed in socially-minded priests and
priest-rejecting freethinkers, nobles or high governmental officials
on one day, anarchists in search of direct lessons in free association
on the next. Perhaps the largest party from the Continent—and
beyond the Continent—was that of August, 1911, organised from
amongst its readers by the well-known French daily, UHumanite,
whose appearance in a body, headed by a red flag, created a mild
sensation at any rate on the prosaic streets of Manchester.

The fiftieth birthday of the Co-operative Wholesale Society,
if we are to reckon from the " special conference " that finally
resolved upon the immediate establishment of a " North of England
Co-operative Wholesale Agency and Depot Society Limited," was
April 3rd, 1913—in Manchester a rare day of serene sky, lucent
air, and interpenetrating sunshine, a day suffused with the infinite
rejoicing and hopefulness of the spring. . . . But if we are
to date from the certificate of legal incorporation, then the date
is thrown back to August 11th; or fifty years from the opening
for business would carry us to March 14th, 1914. Between these
two extremes the convenient month of September, itself a time of
harvest and of hohday before a new season of dark nights and
indoor work, has been marked out by the precedent of the " Coming-
of-Age " as the month of Jubilee. Of the celebrations themselves
it is not our business to write here; they will be better recorded
in the Co-operative News, the Wheatsheaf, and elsewhere. Ours it
has been to show the innumerable workings of many hands that
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