I am nothing more than a working man. On the 25th June 1850 we find James Taylor attending what was described as a well attended meeting of the working classes at Wotton under Edge, Gloucestershire. At that meeting the prepares of the motion to form the society the unrepentant local Chartist John White spoke of the two classes from whom he expected support - the small band of temperance men and those who ten or eleven years before had united with him in a kind of chartist league. Snigs End being only a short distance from Ledbury- and went on to declare that they the movement had no sympathy with the object of Fergus O Connor and nor did the societies in any way resemble that O Connor had brought in to existence. Looking back the origins of the modern building society movement have their roots in James Taylor.
Conventional wisdom implies that the movement was of little importance.
George Barnsby, the acclaimed historian of Midlands working class movements at least has the courtesy to mention the Freehold Land Societies, whilst discounting the importance of both the Freehold Land Societies and the Building Societies, appears to suggest that their formation was a result of Chartist agitation.