Clarks: Made to Last

by Mark Palmer

It was left to James’s son, William S. Clark, to start turning things around. A towering figure who lived to the age of 86, William knew instinctively what people wanted to wear on their feet. But he also knew where his father and uncle had gone so disastrously wrong: by taking too much money out of the company rather than reinvesting it for future expansion.

  William was one of the earliest shoemakers in Britain to introduce machinery into the production process, and he went on to establish C. & J. Clark both as a pioneer of new technology and as a champion of footwear innovation. He remained at the heart of C. & J. Clark and at the centre of life in Street for more than 50 years, and was followed by his brother Francis (better known as Frank), and then by his son Roger, his grandson Bancroft, another grandson, Tony, and finally by his great-grandson Daniel, all of whom served as chairmen of C. & J. Clark. Two more of William’s children, Alice Clark and John Bright Clark, and many of his descendants and the wider family have played important roles in the company.

  Shoemaking was in their blood, but they were also imbued with a strong sense of what is now called corporate social responsibility. In Street, a school was founded so that young men and women could combine working in the factory with continuing their education. A theatre was opened, a library was built, along with an open-air swimming pool and town hall. Playing fields were established for the benefit of all and low-cost housing was provided by the company for its employees. C. & J. Clark was Street.

  Today, the company places a concerted emphasis on its ‘enduring values’ and has a strict code of business ethics which talks openly about ‘caring for people’ both within the company and outside of it. Through the Clark Foundation, established in 1959, it supports a number of charitable initiatives in the UK and abroad, including Soul of Africa, a not-for-profit organisation working in Africa to fight unemployment and change the lives of orphans and children affected by AIDS.

  Clarks is a modern business with a long heritage. More than 80 per cent privately owned by family members, the company goes about its business with little fanfare, largely shunning publicity and mindful – even subconsciously – of its social and religious roots.

  The headquarters of Clarks remains exactly where it has always been, in Street at the northern end of the High Street opposite the Bear Inn, a public house the company owned until a few years ago and which only was permitted to serve alcohol as late as the 1970s. The chief executive – one of only a few women in Britain in charge of such a large organisation – operates from a group of New York-style loft offices with striking views of Glastonbury Tor. The Tor was at one time the brand image of Clarks, and it is still used for Clarks sports shoes today. On the outskirts of town, the futuristic-looking distribution centre has room for 5 million pairs of shoes and dispatches footwear to all corners of the globe.

  Clarks has a clearly defined structure. It is run by professional, outside managers, with a family shareholder council serving as an intermediary, a sounding board and as a democratically elected consultative body. This was put in place following years of in-fighting that resulted in the company coming within a few votes of being sold for £184 million in 1993 to a City of London financial consortium with no experience of the footwear industry.

  At the time, almost every newspaper and media organisation urged the family to sell up. The Daily Telegraph predicted that the fate of Clarks would be the same as other Quaker companies – ‘the Lloyds and the Barclays, the Cadburys, Frys, Rowntrees’ – all of which had either gone public or been bought out. ‘If the bid is rejected, Clarks future looks grim,’ ran the paper’s editorial on the morning of the vote.

  The bid was rejected, but the future was far from grim. Left to its own devices, Clarks regrouped and discovered a new resolve. It brought in experienced business people who had their own ideas about the future and who were allowed to see those ideas through. But crucially, the company remained family-owned.

  Over the next decade or so, Clarks began the painful process of closing down all the factories it had run in the West Country, in Ireland, in the United States and elsewhere across the world. The survival of the brand now depends on production overseas, primarily in Vietnam and China. However, each line of shoe is still designed by Clarks, distributed by Clarks, marketed by Clarks and sold either in the 1,156 Clarks shops, franchise stores, factory outlets and concessions and through the Clarks website, or in independent shops and department stores serviced by Clarks as a wholesaler.

  Nearly half its sales come from outside the United Kingdom. North America is one of the strongest markets, selling only 10 million fewer pairs than in Britain, and every year there is further expansion into the Far East and India.

  For many people in Britain, their first pair of shoes has been and still is bought from Clarks. This reflects the company’s dominance of the children’s market, where parents are encouraged to take their sons or daughters to a shop so that their feet can be properly measured and their shoes properly fitted. Selling ‘First Shoes’ – the branded range for infants under two – and back-to-school shoes for schoolchildren remains at the heart of Clarks’ success and it is now possible to buy a version of the company’s famous foot gauge so that parents can measure a child’s foot before ordering online or visiting a store.

  Footwear has never been an easy trade. The science of making shoes is complicated. In the days when all shoes used leather, there was the challenge of working with a non-uniform raw material. Because all skins have their own unique strengths and weaknesses, machine production was almost impossible until the middle of the nineteenth century. The human foot also poses challenges. Its shape is intricate and highly individual, requiring shoemakers constantly to experiment with new techniques. And then there is the fleeting shelf-life of shoes as they fall victim to the vagaries of changing fashions.

  Clarks has never been afraid of experimenting. It was one of the first to adapt the sewing machine for shoe production; an early convert to offering a variety of width fittings; the first to design a shoe in 3D on a virtual last; and the first to use new materials such as polyurethane soling to replace leather. And although to begin with, Clarks took a dim view of advertising – along with other Quaker firms who thought it degrading – the company was soon producing imaginative ‘showcards’ using stars of stage and screen to endorse its products. Collett Dickenson Pearce, St Luke’s and Yellow Door have all held the Clarks advertising account, the last headed up by Mary Portas.

  The Desert Boot is one of Clarks’ best-known lines. It has changed little since its heyday in the 1950s. It is a casual shoe created by James Clark’s great-grandson, Nathan Clark, based on his experiences serving in Burma as an officer in the Royal Army Service Corps in 1941. Made of soft suede with a crepe sole, the Desert Boot resolutely refuses to be labelled and seems forever in fashion as a result. Everyone from Liam Gallagher to Bob Dylan to Tony Blair to the Jamaican rapper Vybz Kartel has been spotted wearing the Desert Boot.

  There was no history of shoemaking in Street at the start of the nineteenth century. But today, fortunately, there is a huge amount of historical material about Street’s shoemaking. Quakers believed in keeping accurate records of their day-to-day business activities. Ledgers, letters, copy-books, financial papers and several personal memoirs make up only a small part of Clarks’ extensive archives. There is also a shoe museum and a collection of 20,000 assorted shoes going back to the Roman Empire.

  These records paint an extraordinary picture of a British business that has changed beyond recognition since its simple, rural beginnings – and yet the survival of Clarks and its evolution as an international global brand is largely due to its unchanging values and the family’s fierce determination to remain independent.

  1

  A little extra pocket money

  STREET DOESN’T MERIT A MENTION in the Domesday Book. Nor does its ancient moniker of Lantokay, so-named in honour of a Celtic saint by the name of Kea. Rather, Street assumed the role of an appendage, an unthreatening sat
ellite of rich and famous Glastonbury barely two miles away.

  Glastonbury used to be very rich indeed. Prior to the Dissolution of the Monasteries, its abbey’s status came second only to that of Westminster Abbey in London. Although Christian legend claims it was founded by Joseph of Arimathea in the first century, there is more general agreement that the abbey was established by the Saxons following their conquest of Somerset in the seventh century.

  Their king, Ine of Wessex, was a local man who put the abbey on a sound financial footing and it is he who is thought to have erected a stone church which later formed the west end of the nave. In the tenth century, St Dunstan, the Abbot of Glastonbury, who became Archbishop of Canterbury in 960, enlarged the church, and the Normans continued its expansion, adding more and more magnificent buildings.

  Such was its reputation that King Edward I and Queen Eleanor spent Easter there in 1278 and during that visit the king proposed holding his Assizes within the grounds, only to be informed by the abbot that this would violate the site’s ancient privileges. The king backed down and held the Assizes in Street instead.

  Many years later, in 1539, the incumbent abbot, Richard Whiting, was in no mood to hand over his community’s worldly goods to a rampaging Henry VIII, for which he was rewarded by being hanged, drawn and quartered on Glastonbury’s Chalice Hill. To make sure the message got through to other would-be dissenters, his head was impaled over the entrance to the abbey and his severed remains were distributed in towns throughout the county.

  Glastonbury Abbey was subsequently looted by the king’s cronies and the surrounding land passed to Sir Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset, eldest brother of Henry VIII’s third wife Jane Seymour. The duke, who later became Lord Protector when the young Edward VI succeeded to the throne, moved effortlessly into the abbey and then, to bemusement and a degree of muted admiration, he embarked on an ambitious plan to develop the textile trade in Somerset.

  Around 1551, Sir Edward settled weavers and wool workers from the Low Countries into the abbey’s domestic buildings and provided them with a pastor to look after their spiritual well-being. Many of the neighbouring villages – Street included – benefited from the duke’s business strategy. A certain Robert Hiet was given the task of setting up a cloth factory in Street and trade prospered there right up until the late eighteenth century.

  Centuries earlier, the Romans had come and gone, leaving behind bits and pieces from their villas, some interesting pottery and sections of a road, all of which can be seen today in the Somerset County Museum in Taunton. On view in the Natural History Museum in London is a collection of fossils found in Blue Lias limestone that were excavated from quarries near Street in the nineteenth and early twentieth century.

  One of these is an ichthyosaur, a dolphin-like creature from the Jurassic period, which caused so much excitement that when the Street Urban Council was formed in 1894 it decided to make the ichthyosaur its emblem. Blue Lias itself was used for making doorsteps, window sills, kerbing and paving and was big business in the region until concrete proved to be an easier and cheaper alternative.

  Street – in years past spelled variously as Streate, Streatt, Streat, Strete and Stret – is derived from the Latin strata, meaning paved road, and was so named because of the causeway, once part of the Exeter-to-Lincoln Roman Fosse Way, that was repaired in 1184 to transport stone from Street to Glastonbury Abbey after a fire had destroyed some of the monastic buildings.

  By the turn of the nineteenth century, most men in the village and surrounding areas had to eke out a living from the land. In 1801, Street’s population was little more than 500, roughly similar to other agricultural villages in the county. Labourers worked as shepherds, peat cutters, cider makers or general farmhands on fields along the Polden Hills and across the slushy flats of Queen’s Sedgemoor and on towards the Vale of Avalon. Farming became a lucrative endeavour during the Napoleonic Wars, as Britain’s blockade of the continent and strict protectionist rules ensured that there was no competition from outside the country at a time when grain was needed to sustain the war effort. Wheat and barley prices were ring-fenced and remained high.

  The defeat of the French changed all that. Immediately, the price of grain plummeted and, although the Corn Laws went some way in protecting farmers, the good life was not quite so good any more. In Street, there was something of a polarisation: many working men drowned their sorrows in cider, while others immersed themselves in work.

  Alcohol has some history in Street. The museum in Taunton has on display a tankard dating from the Iron Age that was found near Shapwick. It is constructed of wooden staves covered with sheet bronze, with an elaborate bronze handle. It looks well used. In the 1820s, the Street Inn – still in business today in Somerton Road, where the stocks were once positioned – was where you went to drink, and just up the lane at the Society of Friends’ meeting house was where a small group of mainly teetotallers went to worship.

  The Society of Friends, or Quakers, as they were known, were a sizeable force in Somerset, many having fled persecution in the mid-seventeenth century and settled into the countryside from towns such as Bristol and Gloucester. Street’s meeting house was an attractive detached cottage built in 1717 and one of its earliest members was a man called John Clark III, who had moved to the village in 1723 on marrying Ann Coaxley, who was also a Quaker. Like his father and grandfather, John Clark III was a working farmer, but, unlike his forebears, he managed to avoid imprisonment for his religious beliefs.

  The persecution of Quakers in the seventeenth century was relentless. In the early 1660s, the legislative programme known as the Clarendon Code, after Charles II’s Lord Chancellor Edward Hyde, the Earl of Clarendon, sought to re-establish the supremacy of the Anglican Church. The Quaker Act was passed in 1662, making it illegal not to swear allegiance to the king – something that Quakers would not countenance out of religious conviction. That same year, John Clark III’s grandfather, John Clark I, fell foul of the act and was sent to Ilchester Gaol. Two years later, the Conventicle Act came into force outlawing non-conformist gatherings of more than five people. The act was repealed in 1689, but that did not stop John Clark II also spending time in Ilchester Gaol.

  John Clark I had farmed on the Poldens and lived in the village of Catcott. He later moved to Greinton in the south of the county, where he died in 1697. According to the Society of Friends’ records, he was an ‘honest old man serviceable to the Truth in his day’. He must have been an heroically early recruit to the Quaker cause and, although there is no explicit evidence to confirm that he ever met George Fox, the Quaker founder, the likelihood is that he did, given that Fox spent a great deal of time in the West Country, one of the Society’s foremost strongholds.

  His grandson, John Clark III, was born in 1680. His marriage to Ann brought together two important farming families. The Coaxleys were the bigger landowners of the two, owning three farms, including one at Overleigh, where John and Ann set up home together. One year into their marriage they had a son, John Clark IV, who caused considerable anxiety when in 1750 he asked Jane Bryant to marry him – and she accepted.

  Jane’s grandfather, Thomas, had been involved in the Monmouth Rebellion against King James II and was hanged in Glastonbury after sentencing by the notorious Judge Jeffreys. That was not the problem, however. The concern for the Clarks was that Jane belonged to the Church of England, a disagreeable fact about which her fiancé was left in little doubt. ‘If you marry this giddy girl of Greinton,’ he was told by a Quaker elder, ‘thee will bring thy father’s grey hairs down in sorrow to the grave’.

  John Clark IV’s cousin, James Clothier, was also exercised by the romance. According to a family memoir, Somerset Anthology, written many years later by John’s great-great-grandson, Roger Clark, Clothier put pen to paper, telling his cousin:

  I heard very lately by a certain friend the party was afraid that thou would go to the priest for a wife … Thou mayst prevent it if thee will, and therefor
e I would have thee desert from proceeding any further with the giddy girl of Grenton [sic] at present, and waite, have patience, who knows that in time she may come to join the Friends.

  John went ahead with the marriage and it proved to be a happy one, even though at first he was racked by guilt for saying his vows before an Anglican priest. At a monthly Friends’ meeting in July 1755, John’s contrite testimony was read out. ‘That what I did was even then much contrary to my mind and what I do now (so far as being married by a priest) sincerely Condeme.’

  This difficulty came to a positive conclusion when within a few years Jane began attending the Quaker women’s monthly meetings – and in 1787 both she and John were appointed elders.

  They had two sons and two daughters. Their eldest boy, Thomas Clark senior, lived and farmed at Overleigh until retiring to Bridgwater on the death of his wife, Mary Metford. Thomas was, according to Roger Clark’s memoir, ‘apt to have odd or eccentric notions’ and had been known locally as ‘Tommy Weight-Bottle’ because he was reported to have paid his workers in part in cider, weighing the drink rather than measuring it in pint or quart bottles.

  Joseph Clark I was John and Jane’s second son. He was born in 1762 and lived all his life in or around Street, firstly at Friends Charity Farm Street, then at Lower Leigh and finally at Hindhayes, a house he built in 1807. He married Frances (Fanny) Sturge, from Olveston, Gloucestershire, in 1794 and they had three sons, Joseph Clark II, Cyrus and James. Joseph took on the family farm, while Cyrus and James were to become the founding fathers of what would turn out to be one of the world’s most famous shoe companies: Clarks.

  Hindhayes, the house that Cyrus Clark’s father, Joseph Clark I, had built in 1807. This photograph was taken in the back garden in the 1880s by Cyrus’s eldest son John Aubrey Clark and shows three of Cyrus’s other children: Alfred (at centre in hat); Bessie (Sarah Elizabeth), seated; and (at right, seated in front of window) Thomas Beaven Clark. The standing woman is Bessie’s companion, Mrs Walker; Bessie had been left an invalid by the typhus epidemic of 1852.