The Coat Route

by Meg Lukens Noonan

  “Vicuña is the most expensive fiber we weave,” Gary says. “It’s quite difficult to work with because the fibers are so short. Bryan has to buy up pretty much all the long-fiber vicuña he can to weave one or two pieces per year. And it’s not the strongest yarn. Every time the yarn breaks and the loom stops, there is the potential for a mistake to be made. Vicuña stretches our people and our systems to the limit. Everyone gets a little nervous when they realize the value.”

  Bryan takes out a length of metallic thread that he has brought with him. It is pure silver plated onto brass.

  “Do you think you can do something with that? In the weft?” he asks. Gary turns it over in his fingers, then calls another man in from an adjoining office.

  “Bryan’s got another challenge for you,” he says with a laugh.

  We put in earplugs and walk out onto the factory floor, where shuttleless looms are shooting weft yarn across warp. Bryan stops, puts on his glasses, and inspects the gray suit fabric emerging, one thread at a time, from one of the looms. The selvage identifies the cloth as Dormeuil’s Amadeus, a silky lightweight wool that is the firm’s best seller. He runs his hands across the breadth of it and regards it with something that looks very much like love.

  Bryan, Gary, and I drive out of Keighley, up into the misted treeless moors of Oxenhope, where the Dog & Gun pub sits along a turn in the road. Inside, at a table near the fire, Gary tells me that he grew up in Huddersfield, the son of a man who worked in weaving.

  “I guess it’s in the genes,” he says. “I started sweeping the floors in a mill when I was eighteen and got a degree in textile technology at night. Then I worked in a dyeing-and-finishing plant in India before I came back here.”

  Gary’s biggest challenges are passing skills on through his workforce and attracting young people into the business.

  “You’ve got to be prepared to work hard. But there are rewards,” he says. “It’s the whole thing about making things. You can’t express yourself putting tins on supermarket shelves. We are making something. For all the ups and downs of the business, we’re doing things here nobody else is doing. I tell the lads here that. They are making things here that no one else in the world can make.”

  Back in Huddersfield, we make a quick stop at Paragon Textiles, on a dingy block of low stone buildings. Paragon is the world’s only commission pattern weaver that’s still operating on traditional looms—some of which are more than a hundred years old. Bryan wants to see how a sample turned out—he’s experimenting with yak. He finds the cloth, being slowly banged out by an old loom with giant exposed cogs. Bryan leans over and inspects a length of dark blue emerging from one loom. A cardboard box on the floor near it has yak 10 per cent written in black felt-tip marker.

  “It’s like one of my children,” Bryan says, above the noise of the looms. He looks pleased.

  Most of Paragon’s employees are close to retirement age, and the company desperately needs young workers to learn how to operate the machines. But a several-months-long search for two young workers willing to become apprentices had yielded no candidates. None—in a town where the unemployment rate among sixteen- to twenty-four-year-olds is nearly 21 percent.

  We have one more stop to make. W. T. Johnson & Sons is a textile finisher run by fourth-generation brothers. Walter Johnson started the operation in Bankfield Mills in 1910 to make use of the soft Pennine water, the crucial ingredient in the process of turning woven cloth into something you would want to put on your body. I get out of the car and smell wet wool. Inside, there is a humid chaos of cogs and moving belts and hissing steam, like a train station in a noir film.

  Nearly every premium cloth woven in the U.K. is put through Johnson’s Rube Goldberg process of being soaked, scoured, pummeled, stretched, and dried. Without it, even the most expensive worsted cloth feels stiff as wallpaper. To move through the maze of machines, you have to step over narrow channels of moving water and pass open wells. This is the famed local water, filtered by layers of grit stone and shale, which is essential to Yorkshire wool-finishing. In the late 1930s, Johnson astutely decided that he needed his own supply: it took two years of drilling and a fifteen-hundred-foot bore hole to hit water.

  Everywhere I look, cloth is rolling in and out of machines, folding onto itself like ribbon candy. Some of the machines are more than a hundred years old, like the one that scours and tenderizes stiff cloth by pulling it wet across wooden rollers. Others are boxy computer-driven units with blinking lights and monitor screens. Some churn out miles of cloth, others just one piece at a time. One passes the cloth across rows of teasels, prickly thistlelike pods that have been used since Roman times to lift nap. Another shears away nap. One singes the cloth to give it sheen. That one tumbles cloth that contains fragments of precious gems. This machine beats on it until it looks old.

  “Ralph Lauren loves that one,” Bryan says.

  Everywhere, there are tall stacks of folded cloth, on rolling dollies and on pallets, or draped over stands like layers of horse blankets. Bryan points out the selvage on one pile of black cloth, light enough for a suit coat. The words “100 percent pure vicuña” have been woven into the border. Most of what is stored here is in the business-suit color spectrum, but near the loading dock are stacked bolts of neon lime, intense red, and vivid purple.

  “That’s probably for Prada,” Bryan tells me.

  No one can be sure if the vicuña for Keith Lambert’s coat was finished here. Nigel Birch, Johnson’s product-development manager, tells me that it would have been a long process—probably ten to twelve weeks—from the time it arrived as raw fiber to the spinners until it was a finished fabric.

  “It probably would have been scoured and milled, dried, raised, and drawn—probably on teasel gigs—dried, set by pot-boiling, dyed if it wasn’t woven from dyed yarn, dried, redrawn, cut, brushed, and finally pressed—maybe cuttled and cramped,” he explains.

  Regular woven cloth, which comes off the loom feeling stiff, requires about two weeks to go through the twelve-step process of being cleaned, softened, pressed, and dried.

  “The object, always, is to have the cloth feel like what it costs,” Bryan says.

  Each cloth demands a different treatment, and fabric developers are always experimenting with finishing recipes that will give them the end product they’ve dreamed about. One cloth will be washed on wood for thirty minutes, pressed for five, steamed for seven, go through two crops, re-steamed, and then put under heat. If it isn’t quite what they wanted, they tweak the process. There are people here who spend all day feeling cloth—scrunching, rubbing, caressing—waiting for their hands to tell them they have it right.

  Chinese finishers, on the other hand, don’t have the time, or the expertise, yet, to experiment with cloth. What they do must be uniform, because they’re doing so much of it at one time.

  “Finishing is one of the few things that China can’t do,” Bryan says, letting his hand linger on a folded length of dark suiting cloth, before we head toward the door. “You have to be handson. It’s like wine tasting. You can’t invent a machine to do it.”

  With the coat progressing nicely, it was time to consider the buttons. They, of course, were not to be taken lightly. The correct buttons spoke volumes, albeit sotto voce. They said, to those who understood such things, “This is a proper garment made with proper attention to details.” Buttons mattered immensely.

  There was never a question in John’s mind about what kind of buttons to use for the vicuña coat. They simply must be crafted of water-buffalo horn. That was the only choice for a garment of this quality. Now it was a matter of selecting the color, size, and style.

  John got out display cards that he had from Richard James Weldon, a London firm that had been supplying bespoke tailors since 1826. It was where one went for one’s trimming needs—from kilt pins to collar meltons. He looked over the horn buttons. John preferred a matte finish, rather than shiny. More elegant, he thought. He pondered the color choices: n
avy or black. Navy would be the more subtle selection, blending, as it would, with the cloth. Keith, he felt certain, would prefer navy.

  He chose eight of the size 23 for the cuffs, four for each side. The buttonholes on the sleeve would be real open holes. Some tailors made a fake hole for the top button, to allow for lengthening later on if the sleeves prove to be too short. John wasn’t worried. He was certain the sleeves were the right length. He wanted size 40 for the three main front buttons. The button at the neck and the button in the center vent would be size 30, to avoid bulkiness.

  John jotted down the style numbers. Richard James Weldon would no doubt source the buttons from James Grove & Sons, a manufacturer in England’s West Midlands, which was considered the best horn-button maker in the world. No other buttons would do.

  It is wonderful, is it not? that on that small pivot turns the fortune of such multitudes of men, women, and children, in so many parts of the world; that such industry, and so many fine faculties, should be brought out and exercised by so small a thing as the Button.

  CHARLES DICKENS

  “It is a bit peculiar,” Peter Grove says as he steers his compact car through a roundabout on the way out of Birmingham on a sunny, cold November morning. The soft-spoken, bald sixty-three-year-old, wearing khakis and a raspberry crewneck sweater, seems puzzled by my visit, even after my many emails explaining my wish to see where the horn buttons John Cutler used to trim Keith Lambert’s coat were made. I have the feeling, as we drive toward his factory in the suburban town of Halesowen, that he can’t quite believe I actually turned up in the hotel lobby where we had arranged to meet this morning.

  Halesowen—or “Hells-own,” in the local dialect—is on no one’s list of must-see snug English villages. It sprawls on the southwest edge of the Black Country, a coal-mining region in the low hills of the West Midlands. Settled in Saxon times, the town no doubt spent its first several hundred years picturesquely enough: fields golden with barley and wheat, pastures dotted with flocculent sheep and sturdy cattle, and woodlands full of fallow deer and meaty parasol mushrooms. There were half-timbered houses on the narrow lanes and, under a canopy of bent trees, the little River Stour burbled along cool and undisturbed, except for the occasional rise of a fish. The weekly market, held in the town center every Monday, was a carnival of hawkers pushing bread and eggs and freshly butchered pigs. By the late eighteenth century, though, Halesowen had become a very different place. Industry had arrived and brought with it the smoke and soot that, along with the veins of black coal in the ground, gave the region its name.

  “The men, women, children, country and houses are all black … the grass is quite blasted and black,” thirteen-year-old Princess Victoria wrote in her diary after passing through the area in 1832, five years before she took the throne. “The country is very desolate … engines flaming, coals, in abundance everywhere, smoking and burning coal heaps, intermingled with wretched huts and carts and little ragged children.”

  In The Old Curiosity Shop, published in 1841, Charles Dickens painted a similarly grim scene of a fictionalized Black Country town. “On every side, and far as the eye could see into the heavy distance, tall chimneys, crowding on each other, and presenting that endless repetition of the same dull, ugly form, which is the horror of oppressive dreams, poured out their plague of smoke, obscured the light, and made foul the melancholy air.”

  In those early days of manufacturing, the Black Country’s men, women, and children labored into the night over back-yard anvils or in dismal foundries, shaping the bits that held the increasingly complex world together. They made bolts and rivets and springs and chains and anchors—including the three fifteen-ton ones for the Titanic, which, one local observer noted, were the only things on the ill-fated ship that actually worked.

  Halesowen’s biggest and, by all accounts, grimmest industry was nail making. Entire families worked in heat and filth, pounding nails out of hot iron rods. Every evening they trudged up Bundle Hill, where middlemen known as foggers were waiting to weigh and inspect the day’s output. More often than not, the scales were rigged and the nailers’ meager wages were paid in “truck”; that is, credit rather than cash, which was good only in overpriced pubs or shops that were owned by the foggers themselves.

  When machines started to make the handmade nail obsolete, some of the people of Halesowen, including James Grove, Peter Grove’s great-great-grandfather, went to work making buttons. James had an apprenticeship with Thomas Harris, who specialized in compression-molded buttons of animal horn and hoof. When Harris got into financial trouble, James left to open his own button factory in a rented timber-framed house in the center of Halesowen. He faced stiff competition. There were more than a hundred button makers in the Midlands, but James was a talented diesinker and a good businessman, and his operation flourished. Seven years later, he built a larger factory, at a site called Bloomfield, on Stourbridge Road.

  Peter turns in to a driveway. Behind a heavy metal gate, I can see a new-looking building, blocky and featureless as a public storage facility. To the left of the entranceway, surrounded by a rusting wire fence interwoven with dead vines, are the last skeletal brick walls of Bloomfield Works, the old button factory built by James Grove. Most of it was recently demolished to make way for a modern plant that would meet safety codes.

  The gutted old building’s windows are spray-painted with graffiti and the glass in its front door is shattered, as if it had been struck by a large rock thrown with ferocity. Just below the roofline, carved in stone relief, are four water-buffalo heads. Their horn-framed faces suggest nobility and power, even as they gaze down on the BP gas station across Stourbridge Road. It is impossible to look at the factory grounds and not be struck by how succinctly it telegraphs a twenty-first-century tale: the soulless modernity, the beautiful ruin.

  “I hate it,” Peter says as we walk into the new building. “The old factory had character. But we had no choice. We had to move or we would have closed.”

  In the small lobby, a table holds a shallow ceramic bowl full of buttons—mostly mottled brown disks and paler fang-shaped toggles, with a few coins of vivid color. On the wall, a framed photograph shows an aerial view of the old factory. It was a maze of narrow interconnected buildings with two smokestacks at its center, as dark and forbidding as an asylum.

  “We had a ghost in the old place,” Peter says as I follow him up a flight of stairs. “If you walked the factory at night, it seemed like there was someone behind you, but when you looked back no one was there. I didn’t believe it till I felt it myself. It was quite eerie, really. I’ve been told the ghost will come back,” he adds, with a bright note I interpret as hope.

  On the second level of the building, there are several gray desks lined up near plate-glass windows that look down over the open hangar-like production room. I see a few men on the factory floor attending to rows of machines—some boxy, with modern-looking dials and controls, others that are hand-operated and appear old enough to be blackened with Victorian-era grease. At one end are two lines of large wooden barrels, spinning slowly like drums turning raffle tickets. And everywhere there are metal bins filled with brown disks—horn buttons in various stages of production. I ask Peter about the size of his staff.

  “We are, at present, down to twenty-five.”

  “Down from?” I say.

  “Six hundred, at our peak. When every button was made by hand.”

  No one knows exactly when or where the first buttons were made. Four- to five-thousand-year-old buttonlike objects have been unearthed in the Indus Valley, China, and ancient Rome, but they were likely used as ornaments, not as fasteners. Man found other ways to keep his clothes from flapping in the wind; heat-hardened thorns or sharpened slivers of animal leg bone, at first, then metal pins or nub-and-loop closures later. It wasn’t until early in the thirteenth century that buttons with buttonholes began to appear in European dress.

  Historians can’t say who cut that first little slit in
to fabric, tipped an anchored button through the opening, and felt it settle snug and fast against the two layers of cloth. One thing is certain, though: buttonholes changed everything.

  “Buttonholes! There is something lively in the very idea of ’em,” Laurence Sterne wrote in The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. And there was. Thanks to the buttonhole, clothing became more than just draped fabric. Functional buttons allowed garments to be crafted so that they followed the contours of the body. The human shape, once concealed, was now visible and—with the help of a talented tailor—even enhanced. (The words “tailor,” from tailler—“to cut”—and “button,” from bouter—“to thrust”—appeared at about the same time.)

  The change in clothing mirrored a societal shift as well. The collective focus was turning to the secular world, where outward appearances and the glory of the individual were to be celebrated above all. Buttons were also practical, providing a close fit that protected the wearer from cold. The historian Lynn White suggests that buttons even helped dramatically improve the infant-mortality rate during the Middle Ages—and, in general, played a part in changing parental attitudes toward children. At that time, some historians say, parents paid little attention to their very young offspring, because the emotional toll would be so great if the children died young, which they often did. White wrote that the development of functional buttonholes, along with knitting and crude heating devices, kept more little children alive—and helped foster modern attitudes toward them.

  As functional, even lifesaving, as buttons may have been, they also quickly became both status symbols for the élite and an important new medium for artisans. Working in everything from bone to enamel and precious gems, members of button guilds turned out stunning miniature works of art. The finest buttons were reserved for the aristocracy. Sumptuary laws, which placed limits on who could spend and wear what, were enacted in order to protect guild members and to keep people from dressing above their station. Officials were allowed to search people’s homes and arrest offenders who were in possession of the outlawed buttons.