The Co-operative Party Banner

The Party’s Centenary banner created for the 2017 celebrations.

Professor Tony Taylor, volunteer at the Co-operative Heritage Trust, Co-op Archives writes:

In 2017, the centenary of the foundation of the Co-operative party was celebrated with the  creation of a new banner. First paraded at the Durham Miners’ Gala that year, it featured images of William Cooper, the Rochdale pioneer, Joyce Butler, the MP who introduced the first bill to outlaw discrimination against women, the Scottish peace activist Mary Barbour, A.V. Alexander, the first Co-op Party minister in Churchill’s wartime cabinet, and Alf Morris, Labour MP and campaigner for the rights of the elderly.

Emblematic of the richness and diversity of the co-op party tradition, the banner, nevertheless, offered a partial and selective view of the party’s past. Missing were some who played a central role in the party’s creation and history.  Notable by his absence was Henry John May, pioneer campaigner for the Co-operative Party who carved out a distinctive role for himself as an international co-operator and peace campaigner in the inter-war years and was the party’s first parliamentary candidate in 1918.   

Origins of the Co-operative party

The origins of the Co-operative party lie in the events of the Great War. Patriotism on the home front created a hostile political environment for groups seen as the outgrowth of organised labour, a feeling accentuated by the Russian Revolution of 1917. In the nineteenth-century, the co-operative movement was non-aligned politically, but taxes on the ‘divi’ (sacred to co-operators) to raise funds for the war effort, and the Lloyd George wartime government’s refusal to allow co-op officials exception from conscription, led to calls for a distinctive co-operative voice in parliament.

Cover of Pamphlet, 'Scheme for Parliamentary Representation: National Emergency Conference 1917. Pamphlet Collection, Co-operative Heritage Trust

Thereafter, there were proposals for the creation of a co-op political arm that might work in tandem with the Labour party. For many contemporaries, the starting point of the Co-operative Party was the election of Alfred Waterson, a railway worker from Derby, for the parliamentary constituency of Kettering in the general election of 1918. Others have highlighted the role of Sam Perry, father of the lawn tennis champion Fred Perry, who took up the role of first national secretary of the Co-operative Party  in 1917.

H.J. May

The individual stories contained in 25 boxes of autobiographical material in the Co-op Archive, however, provide a corrective to this conventional view of the development of the Co-operative Party. Photographs and documents in a faded folder highlight the central significance of Henry J. May, the party’s first parliamentary candidate in a crucial byelection in early 1918, to the development of the Co-op Party in parliament. 

Photograph of HJ Mays c1930s. Biographical Collection, Co-operative Heritage Trust

Usually acknowledged only in a footnote to the history of co-operation (his candidature merits only five lines in G.D.H. Cole’s A Century of Co-operation [1944], p. 319). May’s campaign was a milestone that proved central to the subsequent growth and expansion of the party at grassroots level.

Caused by the elevation to the peerage of the sitting Liberal MP for Prestwich, Sir Frederick, Cawley, the Prestwich by-election of January 1918 marked the first parliamentary seat contested by the Co-operative Party at a time when it had no permanent headquarters and barely any staff. Throughout the war a truce had operated between the political parties who had united in a wartime coalition to further national war aims. Given these emergency conditions, no candidatures by any political opponents were anticipated in this contest.

Frustration at Lloyd George’s failure to meet representatives from the co-operative movement to discuss their particular grievances was, however, a factor in May’s decision to stand. The Liberals’ choice of Oswald Cawley, an officer serving in Palestine and Frederick Cawley’s third son, also supported by local Conservatives, was seen as denying voters a choice, and, in effect, representation, given his continuing active service abroad. 

The Prestwich by-election

Prestwich seemed an unlikely constituency for this test of a ’new’ party. A growing residential area, with a deferential rural tradition, and once home to the aristocratic Egerton family, during this period it was steadily evolving into a dormitory commuter suburb for Manchester. Characterised by tennis and bowling clubs, literary societies and dancing associations, it was home to a number of celebrities, not least, W. Haslam Mills, journalist for the Manchester Guardian.

Advert for CWS Tea, Co-operative Heritage Trust

It was also home to a community of the manual working class in bleaching and dyeing works, had a legacy of handloom weaving in the silk industry, and nurtured a strong co-operative tradition. Prestwich Co-operative Society was established in 1861, barely seventeen years after the foundation of the Toad Lane co-operative premises in Rochdale. In 1918, Prestwich was home to 13 co-operative retail outlets,  which serviced an expanding lower middle class who were not always instinctively Conservative in their voting habits.

May had no connections with the area. Nevertheless, he was deeply imbued with the co-operative tradition. Born in 1867 in Woolwich, from the age of 13 he had worked for the Royal Arsenal Co-operative Society, one of the largest consumer co-operatives in the UK in the early twentieth century.  Strongly inspired by the co-op’s internationalist tradition, he was chair of the International Co-operative Alliance between 1913 and 1938, and ensured the continuing production and distribution of translated co-operative material on the continent in French and even in German at the height of the war. His emphasis on peace and conflict resolution placed him on the anti-war side of the labour alliance during these years. In 1918 he was the secretary of the recently established Central Co-operative Parliamentary Representation Committee.

Cover of Pamphlet written about HJ Mays after his death, c1940. Pamphlet Collection, Co-operative Heritage Trust

Never officially supported by the Labour party, May’s candidature was, however, the first parliamentary campaign in which socialists, co-operators, trades unionists and members of Labour clubs and associations campaigned together under the same banner. Attracting 400 campaign workers into the constituency, it received vocal support from W.C. Anderson, former chair of the Independent Labour party. Anderson proved instrumental in the creation of a number of informal alliances between radical organisations during this period in the build up to the general election of 1918 and before his own death from influenza in 1919. 

May’s platform focussed on food prices and the unrepresentative nature of Cawley’s candidature. Which he placed in a long history of political illegitimacy by absentee candidates propagated by the Tories and the Liberals under an unreformed electoral system. Despite the party truce, May took 2,832 votes, well short of Cawley’s 8,520, but a respectable tally given the constraints of winter campaigning weather and wartime conditions. 

Sadly, Captain Cawley was killed in action near Merville in northern France on 22 August. He was the third of Cawley’s four sons to be killed in the war; his death bore out May’s warnings about the dangers of electing soldiers on active service to parliament. It necessitated another by-election in October 1918, days before the end of the war and shortly before the general election of 1918. This time a unionist and coalition candidate, Austin Hopkinson, was elected unopposed out of respect for the family.     

The legacy of the campaign

Although unsuccessful, May’s candidature demonstrated the merits of campaigns that brought together the diffuse interests of a broader Labour constituency. It anticipated the 1927 Cheltenham agreement that created an electoral pact between the Co-operative Party and the Labour Party. Further, it demonstrated the appeal of a platform that advocated a cost of living and price of food agenda.

Co-op Party leaflet, c1930s. Co-op Party Pamphlets, Co-operative Heritage Trust

In 1922 the four Co-op Party candidates elected in the general election campaigned on issues of government intervention to regulate food prices and in opposition to profiteering. It was this emphasis on the household budget and the cost of basic foodstuffs that came to distinguish the platform of the Co-operative Party in future elections, cementing its appeal to women voters and members on consumer and household budget agendas.

Co-op Party leaflet, c1930s. Co-op Party Pamphlets, Co-operative Heritage Trust

In the 1918 general election, May stood again for parliament for the constituency of Clackmannan and Eastern Stirlingshire, but in a ‘khaki’ election on the back of a patriotic agenda marking the end of the war, was unable to make an electoral breakthrough. In his final years, he campaigned for the rights of proscribed and imprisoned co-operators in Fascist regimes in Germany, Italy and Austria, as well as for peace and international co-existence at the World Disarmament Conference at Geneva between 1932 and 1934. 

Less usually credited with an organisational role in the formation of the Co-operative party, he was, nevertheless, instrumental in putting in place a campaigning agenda that served the party well and contributed to its growth in the post-1945 period.

The Co-op Archives at Holyoake House in Manchester includes the Co-op Party Papers. We are currently reviewing the collection. To request material from the collection and book a visit to the archives, please look at our website for further details.

 Banner image-International Co-operative Alliance logo used 2001-2013