The corn-millers of Leeds attempted to undersell the Leeds
Industrial Society. They soon failed, and the price of flour was
permanently reduced. The Leeds mill does business amounting to more than
a hundred thousand pounds yearly; its capital amounts to twenty-two
thousand pounds; and it paid more than eight thousand pounds of profits
and bonuses to its three thousand six hundred members in 1866, besides
supplying them with flour of the best quality. The Rochdale District
Co-operative Corn-mill Society has also been eminently successful. It
supplies flour to consumers residing within a radius of about fifteen
miles round Rochdale[1]. It also supplies flour to sixty-two
co-operative societies, numbering over twelve thousand members. Its
business in 1866 amounted to two hundred and twenty-four thousand
pounds, and its profits to over eighteen thousand pounds.
[Footnote 1: Its history is given in the Reports above referred to, p.
269.]
The Rochdale Corn-mill grew out of the Rochdale Equitable Pioneers
Society, which formed an epoch in the history of industrial co-operative
institutions. The Equitable Pioneers Society was established in the year
1844, at a time when trade was in a very bad condition, and working
people generally were heartless and hopeless as to their future state.
Some twenty-eight or thirty men, mostly flannel weavers, met and formed
themselves into a society for the purpose of economizing their hard-won
earnings.
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