PURVEY AND CONTRACT DEPARTMENT.
Meantime the work of the purvey department was growing. For the two years 1902 and 1903 the department secured contracts from Glasgow Corporation for the supply of bags of eatables on Children’s Day. In the aggregate the bags supplied numbered 190,000, of a total value of about £1,800, and requiring somewhere about twenty-five tons of flour for their manufacture. When the “Wheatsheaf” tearooms were reopened after the fire an “at home” was held to which the customers were invited. The purvey department was also an offerer on most occasions when purveys on a large scale had to be carried through, often with success. The department was successful in securing the purveying contract for the tearooms in the East-End Exhibition. It was also a successful offerer in 1904 for the supply of bread to Gailes Territorial Camp, and in the following year Jamestown Camp was supplied from Clydebank.
The tearooms continued to give cause for a considerable amount of anxiety on the part of the committee. Sometimes a small profit was made on the working and sometimes a loss resulted, but there never was that increase in trade for which the board thought they had a right to look. With the erection of St Mungo Hall and the transference of the catering headquarters to South York Street the need for Main Street as a depot for the catering department disappeared, but for some time it was carried on as a workmen’s tearoom, always without any signs of assured success, however. Finally, in 1904, it was given up altogether. Nor were the London Street halls or the Union rooms much more successful. Several experiments were made at London Street, with the object of making the place more popular. The whole of the three upper flats were taken by the Society, and several trade union and friendly society branches made the rooms their headquarters, but the place was never really popular. An attempt which was made to run the second flat as workmen’s dining and tea rooms did not meet with much success, and it seemed as if anything the board could do was not of much use in popularising the place. Nor were the Union rooms much more successful. They just managed to keep going, but they did not become, as had been hoped, a rendezvous for the men and women of the Co-operative movement. Nevertheless the committee did not despair. They always kept on hoping that the tide would turn and renewed the lease time after time, still looking for the Co-operative patronage which never came in sufficient quantity to make the place a success.