ABSTRACT
[Thomas William Allen (1864–1943), the son of a minister, was born in Abertillery, South Wales. Employed by the Blaina Co-operative Society when he left school, Allen worked his way up in the movement to become manager of the society, then from 1910 a director of the CWS. During the First World War he was chairman of the Consumers’ Council and acted as secretary to the Food Controller, for which service Allen was knighted in 1919. His career can be seen as evidence of the incorporation of co-operative leadership by the capitalist state, certainly, though he had the highest ambitions for co-operation as an alternative to capitalism. [Peter Gurney, Co-operative Culture and the Politics of Consumption in England, 1870–1930 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), 213–216] Reproduced below is the welcome address Allen gave to foreign delegates at the Newport Congress in 1908, where he was honoured with the presidency. Scores of overseas cooperators attended the annual congresses, and his speech underlines how important such displays of international solidarity were to British co-operators at this time. Allen differentiates between international conferences of “rulers” and gatherings of “the people” such as the congress, which were vital if war was to be avoided, and he goes on to blame armed conflict on elites as “most of the quarrels that have been were not the people’s quarrel’s at all”. Allen’s speech also illustrates how the ICA – which he regards as a crucial agency enabling a shift in democratic power across individual nation states – had by this time been wrested fully away from profit-sharers and anti-socialists such as E.O. Greening and Édouard de Boyve. Importantly, for Allen there is a religious dimension to co-operative internationalism: “Our day of Pentecost has come; we are of one accord in the place”.]
