All Our Own Work

The textile workers who ran their own co-operative mill

Merlin Press, 2015 (in print)

Driven by a desire to create their own employment under their own control, the textile weavers, cutters and machinists in the small Pennine town of Hebden Bridge developed a successful co-operative business which employed over 300 women and men at its peak and ran for almost fifty years - each and every year making a profit.

Creating, almost for the first time, a new way of working wasn’t always easy. There were debates on how to share the rewards of the business, and on how much power those who provided the capital should be given. There was discussion on appropriate management and governance structures. There were dilemmas to face: should the mill produce quality products or poorer goods that sold better?

Hebden Bridge’s fustian co-operative contributed leaders to the national co-operative movement and to the emerging movement for workers’ education. Its central figure Joseph Greenwood was involved in the creation of the International Co-operative Alliance. Women associated with the co-operative set up in Hebden Bridge the first branch of the Women’s Co-operative Guild in the country.

This engrossing account of a worker-run business is the first significant study of early producer co-operatives in Britain for over a century. The lessons learned in Hebden Bridge are still relevant today for all who seek to find new ways of working and alternative forms of business.

"As co-operatives and mutuals return to the top of the economic, political and social agenda world-wide, the Hebden Bridge Pioneers need remembering alongside  their Rochdale contemporaries. This is a wonderful, timely celebration of their achievements, and  their contribution to modern debates within the wider co-operative movement. Bibby's book is essential reading." - Prof Stephen Yeo

"This is not just a readable and fascinating history but also a well-timed account of dilemmas that new co-operatives still have to face, especially those in the worker co-op sector and in the various hybrid co-operatives that have emerged in recent years"  - Spokesman

"A history so worth the telling... Bibby is to be congratulated on providing a carefully researched, organised and contextualised history"  - NW Labour History Journal

"This is a wide-ranging work of scholarship, based on extensive research in both archives and printed sources which are fully listed at the back in a comprehensive bibliography. There are also 22 black and white illustrations and a detailed index." - Family and Community History

"In this important book by one of our most knowledgeable writers on co-operative affairs, Andrew Bibby tells the story of an ambitious producer co-operative's rise and subsequent absorption by the CWS with great élan (and with 605 meticulous footnotes)... The book is also an invaluable corrective to the almost exclusive attention that consumer-based distributive co-operation has received in the literature and as such deserves to be widely read within, and beyond, the movement." - Journal of Co-operative Studies

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