Ian Gasse

This article seeks to provide a narrative of the development of the Dumfries and Maxwelltown Co-operative Provision Society (DMCPS) during the 1870s through a detailed reading of the first of the extant minute books of the society held at Dumfries and Galloway Archives, and covering the period from June 1870 to December 1879. Co-operative societies developed in Scotland from the late eighteenth century onwards as attempts by groups of working people to provide good-quality food supplies for themselves at affordable prices. The article shows that, during the 1870s, DMCPS experienced sustained growth in its trading activities, consolidated its membership and moved to enlarged premises. First established in 1847, more than twenty years before the Scottish Co-operative Wholesale Society, DMCPS survived and prospered in the 1870s at a time when Dumfries itself was enjoying a period of increased prosperity. The article considers this growth in some detail and attempts to place the experience of DMCPS within the wider contexts of Victorian social and economic development, and the contemporary growth of both Dumfries and the wider co-operative movement in Scotland and Britain as a whole.