Abstract
Consumer co-operation, for many years a ‘poor relation’ within the family of business and social history (Purvis I987: 4), is now receiving greater acknowledgement and recent research has done much to enhance understanding of the evolution of Britain’s most successful sphere of mutual enterprise. Yet co-operative societies were ‘deeply rooted within their local environments, and social profile, ideology and cultural life could differ significantly between societies’ (Gurney I996: 24). Beneath a veneer of common purpose, the British co-operative movement has encompassed a diversity of experience and it is unwise to pre-judge the general picture before all the jigsaw pieces have been viewed. This article examines one society based in the Oxfordshire market town of Chipping Norton, and seeks to demonstrate that accurate portrayal of the movement as a whole must acknowledge the differences as well as the similarities that exist across its constituent parts.
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