"It's all at the (South Suburban) Co-op NOW!"

Along with vague memories of its old advertising jingles, the Co-op store is still a familiar sight on the High Street and there's a reasonably sized supermarket version on the corner of Rose Hill roundabout on the Sutton/Morden borders. What is possibly of more interest though (unless you're on the lookout for a sandwich, as I was last week) is this elegant and very large pebble dashed plaque on the side of a nearby 'Landlords Furniture' shop on Rosehill Avenue (and to be honest I never thought I'd ever use the words 'elegant' and 'pebble-dashed' in the same sentence). Although the area is generally of 1930's vintage, and the sign is probably not of any great age, it is quite intriguing when you notice it. There might well be people reading this who worked for the company and certainly would have have been customers. It was all new to me though so I had a bit of a dig around to find out a bit more about it.
Wikipedia is always worth a punt and indeed it gives a potted history of the Society. Basically it was an amalgam of several smaller local co-operative societies operating in Surrey and Kent. In the early days these sort of societies provided a whole range of services and goods for their members, from milk to coal, books to funerals, food to furniture and any profits at the end of the year were paid back to their members in the form of a cash dividend or 'divi'.

However, reading around the subject solved another minor query. I had a photo of a stately building in Tooting, now a function hall, that had an RACS Ltd pediment. At the time I didn't know what it stood for but I now know that this was a building belonging to the South Suburban Co-Operative's big local rival, the Royal Arsenal Co-Operative Society!
I found some information about the Royal Arsenal Co-operative Society (including some reminiscences that claimed that RACS stood for 'Robbing All Customers Slowly', which seems a bit harsh) that shows that its acquisitions included the local Wimbledon Co-operative society, so it looks as though Morden might have been the border 'badlands' between these two local powerhouses. By all accounts there seems to have been some rivalry between them but ultimately it did them no good as they were both absorbed into the national Co-Op in 1985 leaving little more than a few plaques and name plates to tease the curious!
One last thing I never knew about the Co-Op, but found out reading around them, was that it has its own political party. In fact it has up to 29 MP's, including Ed Balls but you're not likely to know that as the Co-Operative Party has allied itself with the Labour Party so closely it no longer campaigns as an individual entity, even though it still aparently exists and functions independently. Its MPs are listed as being members of the Labour & Co-Operative Party, rather than just the Labour Party, but the fact that its official party colour is grey probably suggest that they don't spend as much on image consultancy as their Labour colleagues