Robert Owen(1771–1858)

Robert Owen was born at Newtown in Montgomeryshire on the fourteenth of May 1771, the sixth child of a saddler and ironmonger of the small Welsh market town. He left school at nine, was bound apprentice in his tenth year to a draper at Stamford, and by eighteen was managing a cotton-spinning mill at Manchester employing five hundred hands. By twenty-eight he was a partner in the Chorlton Twist Company, one of the largest cotton firms in the country, and travelling regularly to Glasgow on the firm's business.

In 1799 he bought, with two Manchester partners, the New Lanark cotton mills on the upper Clyde from David Dale. The mills employed about two thousand people, including five hundred pauper apprentice children housed in the mill barracks; the conditions, by the standard of the trade, were not exceptional. Owen, taking over as managing partner in January 1800, set out to prove a thesis the trade thought commercially impossible: that the productivity and the welfare of a workforce were the same problem.

Through the next twenty-five years he made New Lanark the most-visited industrial site in Europe. He raised the minimum working age to ten and then to twelve, cut the working day from fourteen hours to ten, built the first infant school in the world at the mill gates in 1816, opened the Institute for the Formation of Character with its evening classes and its library and its concert hall, set up a company store at cost price (the direct ancestor of the cooperative store), and ran the village without corporal punishment, without piece-work fines and without the lock-out as a disciplinary tool. The mill was profitable throughout. Visitors came from across Europe, the Tsar of Russia among them, the future Tsar Nicholas the First among them, to see the place work.

He spent the second half of his life carrying the New Lanark argument outward. The Factory Act of 1819, the first British legislation against child labour, was largely his draft. His Report to the County of Lanark in 1820 set out the doctrine of the self-governing industrial village that became the seed of the British cooperative movement; the Rochdale Pioneers, founders in 1844 of the modern co-op, took his principles as their constitution. He founded the experimental community of New Harmony in Indiana in 1825, and at its dissolution returned to England in 1828 to lead the trades-union and cooperative congresses of the 1830s. The Grand National Consolidated Trades Union of 1834, the first attempt at a national federated labour movement in Britain, was his project.

He died at Newtown on the seventeenth of November 1858, in his eighty-eighth year, back in the small Welsh market town where he had been born. The New Lanark mills operated until 1968, were saved by a conservation trust in the 1970s, and were inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2001. The cooperative principles he set out in the Lanark Report, member ownership, equal voting, surplus shared with the members, are today the constitution of a movement of over a billion members worldwide. The Owen name in modern social and economic thought carries the weight of the twenty-eight-year-old partner who took the mills at New Lanark in 1799 and made the trade's settled assumptions wrong.