ABSTRACT
On 14 May 1950, Reynolds’s News and Sunday Citizen proudly declared that on the following Tuesday (16 May) it would be holding a ‘Century Party’ at London’s Albert Hall. This gala, for which memorabilia still exist, was to be a celebration of the centenary of the newspaper and its progression to a ‘Second Century’ (though in the event the paper only survived for less than 20 years). The glitziness of the event was reflected in the fact that high-profile guests included leading Labour politicians such as Herbert Morrison, Hugh Dalton, Manny Shinwell and Hugh Gaitskell (all architects of the post-war welfare state) and a smattering of film stars and theatre celebrities including Richard Attenborough and Joan Greenwood. But the bulk of the guests were drawn from staff of Britain’s 800 shareholding Cooperative societies. The reason for this was that the gala had a dual purpose. It was a public celebration of two closely related radical institutions whose foundational historical ‘moment’ was the 1840s: the mass-circulation popular radical press, represented by its sole intact survivor, Reynolds’s News, and the Cooperative movement, which commenced with the creation of the Rochdale Pioneers in 1844.1
These two traditions fused formally when the Cooperative movement purchased Reynolds’s News in 1929, the year of the Wall Street Crash and the onset of the interwar crisis of capitalism. By 1950, the year of its centenary, Reynolds’s News had a new, expanded name (the republican-sounding moniker ‘Sunday Citizen’ matched boldness with nostalgia), a circulation of almost 700,000 (though some commentators thought it should be larger) and the backing of a thriving radical organization whose identity looked both backwards and forwards.2 The Cooperative
movement’s self-fashioned ‘vision of the press’ (to borrow a resonant phrase from the title of Mark Hampton’s recent book, a study I will return to in a moment) was to represent Reynolds’s News metonymically as an emblem of cooperation’s twin virtues: looking backwards, a steadfastness rooted in core socialist values and working-class consciousness; looking forwards, a vigorous and dynamic modernity. This mutually reinforcing composite of synchronic and diachronic signifiers can be seen in the mottos which blazoned Cooperative propaganda for the paper: ‘World’s Oldest Cooperative Newspaper’ and ‘Press Power for the People’, an echo of Reynolds’s News socialist subtitle, ‘Government of the People by the People for the People’ (Figure 16.1). Though the paper had existed for 79 years before its purchase by the Cooperative, the effect of this recoding was to assimilate the paper into the history of cooperation and to imply that the teleology of Reynolds’s News was inscribed in its original support for cooperative principles.
