You can watch a preview clip of the documentary below.

Also in tonight's documentary, Mark Lewis Jones meets Pat Brandwood, the curator of the Robert Owen Museum in Newtown. Pat has written a blog article for BBC Wales History about the work of museum and her passion for Owen.

Alun Burge has written two articles about co-operatives in Wales. Read Alun's article on the co-operative economy and on the history of the co-operative movement in Wales.

Phil Carradice has written a blog on the life of Robert Owen.

Baker Boys: Behind the Co-operative Movement is broadcast tonight, 10.35pm on BBC One Wales. Visit the programme page to find out more about the documentary and view some exclusive footage.

Pat Brandwood, curator, Robert Owen Museum

Pat Brandwood writes:

I am new to blogging, so let me introduce myself. My name is Pat Brandwood and I am curator of the Robert Owen Museum.

I have admired Owen since my early 20s when I first came across his ideas about learning through enjoyment and discovery. This approach brings out the best in students and remains as inspirational now as it was then.

After a career in teaching and lecturing, my husband and I retired to Newtown and, as a fan of Owen, I called into the museum to offer my services. After a short spell as education officer, I was offered the curator's job at the end of 2009, and all thoughts of a leisurely retirement disappeared.

I soon realised that Newtown was central to Owen's vision.

It was here he went to school, explored the countryside, learned to dance and run faster than any of his contemporaries.

When he set up his school in New Lanark as a model for "universal education" he used his happy Newtown years as the basis for the curriculum: there was dancing, sport and nature study.

Despite setbacks, Owen remained an optimist about the future of society.

He spent his lifetime and his fortune campaigning for factory reform, co-operative communities, trades unions, and education for life.

His vision was broad, democratic and surprisingly modern. As he wrote in 1841, his aim was "to promote the well-being, and happiness, of every man, woman, and child, without regard to their class, sect, party, country or colour".

He returned to Newtown in 1858 to, as he put it, "lay my bones whence I derived them".

He still loved the place and Newtown honoured him with a grand funeral. His friend and lifelong co-operator, GH Holyoake, was one of his chief mourners.

When Holyoake returned to Newtown over 40 years later, he found the grave neglected and he used his influence in the Co-operative Union to improve the grave and make it a fitting memorial to his friend and "social father".

At the opening in 1902 he gave an impassioned tribute to the great man. You can read it on the Co-op archive.

The museum was opened in 1929 on the site of his birthplace. The collection was donated to the town by local gentry, business people, co-operators and American members of the Owen family.

Portrait of Robert Owen © New Lanark Trust

The Co-operative Society continued to support Newtown in honour of their "founding father" and made a large donation to a lending library at the Cross in Newtown which has housed the Robert Owen Memorial Museum since 1983.

The museum is very small but visitors like the intimate, almost domestic feel. And though the real importance of the collection lies in letters, campaigning pamphlets and books by Owen, the museum is full of images of Owen, as well as some furniture and paintings which he would have known from his homes in Newtown and New Lanark.

My favourite exhibit is a very modest one: an empty glasses case. But with it comes a letter from the optician's daughter explaining that Owen came to their shop for a new case and when Owen asked the price, her father said he would be honoured for Mr Owen to have it free of charge, if he could keep the old one in memory of their meeting. She had kept it for 80 years and sent it to Newtown from America!

Throughout the museum's history fans from all over the world have found their way to this small market town. We regularly get visitors from Japan, Australia, USA and Europe.

For me and the other unpaid volunteers, the best reward is when someone discovers the range and impact of Owen for the first time. Our visitor's book is full of comments from people who have just learned of the continuing impact of his ideas.

Almost as important as the museum itself is our website, which we believe is the best source of information about Owen and his writings on the web. It's a pleasure to receive emails from Owenites and co-operators all over the world.

My aim is to make people in Newtown, Wales and beyond aware and proud of a man who made his mark on history as one of the most prominent social reformers of the period, a pioneer of the co-operative and trade union movements and a source of inspiration for political theories from David Cameron's Big Society to green issues, fair trade and socialism.

You can meet Pat and the other volunteers at the Museum of Robert Owen, The Cross, Broad Street, Newtown, Powys. The phone and fax number is +44 (0)1686-626345, and opening times are on the visitor page of the museum website.

Phil Carradice has written a blog on the remarkable life of Robert Owen. Read it on the BBC Wales History blog.

Portrait of Robert Owen © New Lanark Trust

Owen was born in the mid Wales town of Newtown on 14 May 1771. He was the sixth of seven children, his father being an ironmonger and saddler, and his mother coming from a long line of well-to-do farmers.

A bright and capable child, Robert was schooled at Newtown and then, at the age of 10, was articled to a draper in the town. In due course he moved to London to continue his trade and establish himself in the world.

This he managed to do with some alacrity. A move to the sprawling, manufacturing metropolis of Manchester saw Robert Owen installed as manager of Drinkwater's cotton factory in the town.

There were greater things to come and on a visit to Scotland he met and fell in love with Caroline Dew, the daughter of David Dale, owner of the New Lanark cotton mill on the Falls of Clyde.

Painting of New Lanark © New Lanark Trust

Owen married Caroline in 1799 and with four partners managed to raise enough capital to buy the New Lanark mills off Dale. He was not interested in simply making money, however: Owen wanted to run an enlightened regime at New Lanark.

He had over 2,000 people working for him - not just working, many of them lived in the tenement blocks set around the mill. And 500 of these were young children, most of them small enough to crawl under the looms and spinning jennies to clean the machinery and gather in stray cotton or wool.

Although his father-in-law David Dale had run a reasonably humane ship, drunkenness, absenteeism and theft, amongst other social problems, were rife.

Most of the work force came from the poorer elements of society, from the squalid slums of Glasgow or Edinburgh, and managers expected little else from them. Owen believed he could change this. He wanted to help people but he also knew that better living conditions could only help to make better profits.

Soon his aims had become reality. Improved housing conditions - prizes were awarded for things like the best kept room on the block - and a unique system of quality control that let all employees know exactly how they were doing, led to a highly motivated work force. And that was only the start of what he had in mind.

Owen soon became a pioneer of nursery or early years education, setting up a schoolroom on the site where children would be educated before they began work in the mill - this, 70 years before formal and compulsory education for all was introduced in Britain.

Such a system also provided an early form of child care while the mothers and fathers were working the looms. Visitors to New Lanark today can visit this schoolroom and see for themselves the alphabet of animals that Robert Owen had painted on the walls of the building.

Most mills and mines had, for years, employed the truck system where workers were not paid in cash but in tokens that could only be redeemed at the company shop. Consequently, prices were exorbitant and many workers lived below the breadline. Not in Robert Owen's New Lanark.

Owen's shop sold goods at little more than their wholesale cost, thus ensuring that families had more than enough to live on. The goods on sale were top quality, unlike the poor pickings offered in many truck shops.

By buying in bulk what Owen was able to do was pass on the savings to the customers, his work force. In effect, this was the basis and the beginning of the co-operative movement, something that still works and functions today.

Robert Owen wrote extensively about his ideas. He believed, for example, that an ideal community should consist of just over 1,000 people, living in apartments grouped around an open square and with central kitchen and dining facilities. Children, he felt, were best brought up with their families until the age of three and then became the responsibility of the whole community.

This was an idea he tried to put into practice at his "ideal" community, New Harmony, in Indiana in the USA. For two years Owen lived in America, trying desperately to make his dream reality. It didn't work, being a concept that was very much before its time. Eventually Owen was forced to return to Britain where other difficulties faced him.

After many disputes with his partners, who were always more interested in profits than in Owen's version of ideal living, he resigned from New Lanark in 1828. He moved to London but the glory days were gone and he was no longer the wealthy capitalist - albeit an enlightened one - that he had been when his work at the mills first began.

On a visit to his place of birth and childhood, he was suddenly taken ill and died on 17 November 1858. His dreams of a socialist nirvana never really came to anything; he was clearly before his time. But his legacy, his true legacy, lies in his system of child care and education. And, of course, the concept of a co-operative society where everyone would benefit, not just the men at the top of the tree.

Alun Burge has written two articles on the co-operative movement in Wales to coincide with a new BBC Cymru Wales three-part drama called Baker Boys, which begins at 9.30pm, Sunday 23 January on BBC One.

Read about the co-operative movement in Wales and the co-operative economy on the Wales History website.