At 21, he was the manager of the biggest cotton mill in Manchester. His model industrial village, with advanced ideas on housing, employment, education and public health was acclaimed by world leaders. He became father of British Socialism and the Co-operative movement and for some years led the trade unions.
He is a towering figure in British social and industrial history. His name? Robert Owen. Yet surprisingly few outside the Co-operative movement know the story of this man to whom so many owe so much.
Robert Owen was born in mid-Wales in 1771, the sixth child of an ironmonger. By the age of seven he had learned all that the local school could teach him. At ten he set off for London, where he spent eight years in the retail clothing trade. He then launched into management in Manchester and became manager of the foremost cotton mill in the country with 500 workers.
The Industrial Revolution was exploding across Britain. Watt had just patented his rotary steam engine. Adam Smith had published the Wealth of Nations. The power-loom had arrived. Goods were being improved and canals excavated.
Owen revolted against the human degradation of the new factory system. (‘Worse off than the slaves in the West Indies’). When he and his partner bought the New Lanark Spinning Mills near Glasgow in 1800, Owen created a garden village some distance from the mills, where he built houses, schools, shops, clinics and recreation halls. The 2,000 inhabitants came from the slums of Glasgow and Edinburgh. It was a great success, both financially and socially. ‘I can make manufacturing pay,’ he said, ‘without reducing those whom I employ to misery and moral degradation’.
New Lanark, with its I0½ hour day, its free medical care and street cleaning, and where children under ten were in infant and junior schools and not in the mill, became a place of pilgrimage for many world leaders and social reformers. Robert Owen became an international celebrity.
Education was fundamental for Owen. A person’s educational environment was the vital factor in the formation of character and in fitting men and women for the new society. His educational ideas, based on a direct appeal to the interests and aptitudes of the child, were remarkably modern.
Sadly, after thirteen years of successful pioneering, no one else followed. And as veterans returning from the Napoleonic wars created a surge in both radical protest and unemployment, Owen came to realise that factory reform and education on their own, were too slow. He published his ‘Report to the County of Lanark', in which he called for a wholesale reorganisation of society. This involved creating self-supporting agricultural ‘villages of co-operation'. He also proposed that the Government should provide employment in public works for the destitute.
He was rebuffed by a Britain which feared the spread of continental revolutionary ideas, and by Church leaders whom he had criticised for their smug acceptance of social conditions. In numerous pamphlets and speeches, Owen insisted that since unrestricted market forces meant unrestricted greed, the new industrial development should be under social control – machinery must be subordinated to man. He also developed his concept of labour as the true measure of the value of commodities. Against the heady idea of competition he proposed co-operation as the basis of a new world order. It was Owen who first used the word Socialist in 1827, to describe those who believed in collective action for the control of the means of production. The productive capacity per head had increased twelve times in 25 years, he argued, so that for the first time in history poverty was no longer necessary. The only problem was to distribute all the increased wealth that machinery had made possible.
When the Reform Act of 1832 again denied the vote to the workers, Owen moved tirelessly setting up Labour Exchanges, unions and co-operative societies. At one point he circulated 40,000 pamphlets in three days to key people around the country. The Grand National Guild of Builders was his creation, as was the million-strong Grand National Consolidated Trades Union, with members from all trades. The Tolpuddle Martyrs were members of its agricultural branch. Between 1832 and 1834, Owen was the recognised leader of the trade unions in the first great revolt of the British industrial masses. It was he who lead a protest march of 30,000 through London, after the Tolpuddle conviction.
In reply, the Government and the employers, who were now represented in Parliament, launched a devastating series of attacks on Owen’s unions. Workers were forced to sign a ‘Document’ renouncing union membership.
Owen was out-manoeuvred but undaunted. He decided that there was one ultimate solution – the often neglected maintenance of the foundations of society. If his resolution was to come through moral persuasion, people would require systemic ethical training. This he pursued till be died in his native Wales at the age of 87.
We may well wonder why this life of enormous influence is so little known. Has there been some deliberate black-out? Robert Owen was certainly a man of outstanding business ability, disarmingly gentle and with a great warmth of affection for people, extending to the whole human family. His business colleagues called him 'a failure' – because he lost his money. Many said he was autocratic and gave less care to his family than he should. Macauley described him as a ‘bore’. Marx, who owed much to Owen’s thinking, dismissed him as a ‘mere Utopian'. But for millions of ordinary folk Robert Owen was undoubtedly a saint.
It stirred their hopes that there was at least one employer who understood what it feels like to have neither education, nor vote, nor possessions and who poured out his life on their behalf.
It has become popular to sneer at the eccentricities of Owen in his middle-eighties. But we would be well advised rather to emulate his previous 60 years of unselfish and unremitting struggle. We can, l think, gratefully honour this 'Young Businessman of the Year’ of 1800, who could have easily founded a mighty industrial and financial dynasty but who, choosing to lead the masses of Britain in the first concerted blow for economic freedom, became the ‘patron saint’ of the Socialist and Co-operative movements at a vital moment in our history, and steered British working-class thinking on to a democratic track.
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