Introducing researcher Rachael Vorberg-Rugh
Rachael Vorberg-Rugh is a familiar face at the Co-operative College, where she is researching both a PhD and a book on the 150-year history of the Co-operative Wholesale Society (CWS), which became the Co-operative Group in 2001. Rachael had previously worked at the Co-operative College on a Heritage Lottery Fund bid, and the history of the CWS is scheduled to be published by Oxford University Press in 2013.
Using the National Co-operative Archive
Rachael can often be found in the National Co-operative Archive “reading old newspapers over and over again”, including pamphlet collections, periodicals and archive copies of the Co-operative News (which she describes as “brilliant because they reported verbatim on quarterly meetings of the CWS, so you get not just the official policy but people’s response to that”). She also pores over the minutes of local societies which were members of the CWS; these show the contrasting views of what societies wanted from the CWS and what the CWS thought it was able to offer members. Photographic records help her visualise what life would have been like, and there will be lots of images in the finished book.
She says: “It’s exciting what great resources we have. There’s such a wealth of printed material I always joke that co-operatives were in love with the printing press!”
She continues: “It’s an interesting challenge to look at such a broad period. The co-operative movement declined in the post-war period and after the 1950s people stopped writing about the movement so much. Reporting standards changed.”
New material is being uncovered all the time as the Co-operative Group gets ready to move into its new premises, and archivists from the National Co-operative Archive are currently in the middle of a huge project cataloguing the organisation’s records. Rachael explains: “The amount of information coming out of office moves is brilliant. It’s a great time to figure out what needs to go into the archive. Almost every week we find a new stash of paper or set of minute books. One of the first things we found was a set of grocery committee minute books from the nineteenth century. Minute books are always funny – you have to go through a process of trying to fill in between the lines because of the difference between what’s said at the meetings and what’s actually recorded.”
Co-operative business history
Rachael describes the business history project as “a dream opportunity”, and she brings her interest in social history to the project. She explains: “I never imagined myself as a business historian. It sounds so dry and dull, but we’re looking at how organisations develop and interact with society and society interacts with them. As we’ve dealt with the aftermath of the economic crisis we’ve all seen that business activity doesn’t happen outside of society.”
Rachael is also working with Dr Tony Webster, Head of History at Liverpool John Moores University, and Professor John Wilson of Liverpool University, where Rachael is also employed, on the project. Both John and Tony bring their own expertise. She explains: “John is an expert on the history of business management in Britain, which give a broad sweep on what’s going on. Tony has a background in business and economic history and had done a lot on the empire in the past, which helped us look at the international spread of co-operation. This is important as the CWS developed internationally earlier on than most businesses, especially food businesses, in Britain.”
Rachael thinks it’s about time there was an accessible, up-to-date history of the CWS, and believes there is a wide audience. She explains: “There hasn’t been a new history of the CWS since the 1970s. We hope to bring the history of the business into a wider understanding both for academics and a wider audience in the co-operative movement.”
She continues: “In the twentieth century, especially after the war, co-operatives really fell out of the textbooks. We’re dependent on chance encounters for people to see co-operatives as something to explore. Most business schools don’t mention co-operatives as a viable alternative, and one with a long track history.
“It’s in the past ten years that academics have found the co-operative movement again as a subject matter. It is interesting to look at it as a business and a social movement. Academics had tended to look at those two separately.
The publication is timely: “We hope the business history can make people aware of co-operatives, both historically and what they are doing today. We have been very fortunate with the timing. Nobody would have dreamed when we started this project that there would be an International Year of Co-operatives the year before the publication of the book.”
To bring the book up to date, Rachael has been conducting oral history interviews with members and senior managers in the co-operative movement. A heritage course was also developed for elected members of the Co-operative Group and delivered at winter school.
Co-operative contradictions: PhD
In her spare hours, Rachael is writing up her PhD, which she is undertaking at Oxford University, but she says the two projects “help each other”. Her PhD focuses on business, labour and gender history in the co-operative movement from 1880-1920 and looks at co-operative contradictions, for example the fact that the movement was led by men but depended largely on women as household shoppers.
Rachael who was already interested in community builders such as Robert Owen, first became interested in co-operation when she read the 1915 book Maternity, which comprises letters from women co-operators about their experience of child bearing and rearing, and a later book by pioneering co-operator Margaret Llewelyn Davies entitled Life as We Have known It. After majoring in European history at the University of Puget Sound, Washington State, she wrote about the Women’s Co-operative Guild for her masters at Portland State University although she had only three weeks in the UK to research it, relying on interlibrary loans to access records.
She explains why she decided to focus on the 40 year window of 1880-1920 for her PhD: “I’ve always loved that period. There are similarities with a lot of things we deal with today. There was so much social and economic change. Women’s public presence was less then, but by the 1880s you can see the Women’s Guild as one of the first working class women’s movements and one of the first places women could be accepted in a public role. People were talking about questions like ‘What does it mean to be a democracy?’ and ‘what does it mean to have a voice?’.
“I became more and more interested in the broader movement. It is easy to think of the Women’s Co-operative Guild as a women’s movement and forget the co-operative part. It is a really interesting organisation. I was asking questions like ‘What about the women who weren’t in the Guild but were involved in co-operation?’.”
Rachael is discovering interest in her PhD topic from all sorts of angles. She delivered a workshop at the National ‘Missing Women’ Conference in Leeds in 2011, which is part of the 2020 Women’s Challenge to make co-operatives more representative by 2020, and will give a paper on the Women’s Guild’s attitude towards rationing at a conference on world war one.
Rachael has also spoken to current Women’s Guild members about the historical legacy of the Guild and their parents’ and grandparents’ experiences. She explains: “The Women’s Co-operative Guild has lasted a lot longer than people could have expected. There is continued relevance.”
Filed Under: About • Our Heritage • Researching Co-operatives
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