ABSTRACT
Howard suggests that the cooperative principle might develop in some undertakings. In fact cooperatives had developed hugely since their beginnings in Rochdale in 1844: local coops existed in almost every town of any size in England, and in London the Royal Arsenal Cooperative Society, founded in Woolwich in 1868, was among the country’s largest. But as Beatrice Webb showed, as the movement grew it changed character: originally envisaged as a way of facilitating both producer and consumer cooperatives, in practice it developed only the latter (Webb, 1938, pp. 431-432; Hall and Ward, 1998, p. 80). Despite that, Howard and his supporters hoped that the cooperative movement would be the main builders of Garden City: at Cooperative Congresses between 1900 and 1909, they argued that the movement’s stores, factories and homes should be concentrated at Letchworth. But local distributive societies were too concerned to protect their independence (Fishman, 1977, p. 65; Hall and Ward, 1998, p. 80). That was symptomatic: reaching an apogee between the two World Wars, the movement then declined and virtually died, a victim of sluggish management and political inertia. But Howard, it seems, got the formula right here: he appears to anticipate a quite different development, whereby a capitalist proprietor would give shares to his workpeople-a principle followed in 1914 by John Spedan Lewis, son of the founder of a highly successful London drapery business, who took over his father’s Peter Jones store in Sloane Square in London and began to apply the co-partnership system there, finally extending the scheme to the whole business in 1929. The John Lewis partnership, including the Waitrose grocery chain, has become one of the most outstanding examples of cooperation in the world. But it is of course a producer, not a consumer cooperative. Howard had grasped the correct formula, but he did not consistently stay with it.
