Clarks: Made to Last

by Mark Palmer

  Bryant & May made matches; Huntley, Bourne & Stevens produced tins; Allen and Hanbury developed pharmaceuticals; and the Cadburys, Frys and Rowntrees all made their mark in the production of chocolate.

  Several prominent biscuit companies also began plying their trade during the nineteenth century, most of them with Quaker origins: Carr’s of Carlisle; Peek Frean; Jacobs & Co; and Huntley & Palmer, who were also affiliated to Huntley, Bourne & Stevens.

  Those who brought the Quaker name into disrepute could be ‘disowned’ by the Society and there were occasions when the practice of Friends refraining from suing one another was suspended if ‘Evil Persons’ had proved ‘base and unworthy’. Monthly meetings had the authority to ‘speedily set righteous Judgment upon the head of the Transgressor’.

  The guidelines were regularly updated and insertions added. In the 1783 Book of Extracts, for example, Friends were alerted to a ‘most pernicious practice’ that fell short of ‘that uprightness that ought to appear in every member of our religious society’, a practice that was ‘absolutely inconsistent with the truth’. This ‘highly unbecoming’ new menace was the availability of credit.

  The interior of the Friends’ Meeting House in Street, as it was in October 1955.

  In 1833, both the 1738 Advices and 1783 Extracts were revised and became known as the Rules of Discipline, which themselves were tweaked in 1861 and divided into three main chapters: Christian Doctrine; Christian Practice; and Church Government. These helped Quakers keep their ambitions in check during the Industrial Revolution when wealth billowed from the chimneys of factories, mills and warehouses.

  ‘We do not condemn industry, which we believe to be not only praiseworthy but indispensable,’ stated the Rules of Discipline, which went on to reiterate that ‘the love of money is said in Scripture to be “the root of all Evil”’. The Rules urged: ‘Dear Friends who are favoured with outward prosperity, when riches increase not to set your hearts upon them.’

  Cyrus and James Clark attended their local meeting house every Sunday, sitting in silence or listening to a Friend giving testimony. Their business was in its infancy and they would have been aware of their responsibilities, particularly the consequences of over-extending themselves. They only had to look at the plight of Elizabeth Fry, the famous Quaker prison reformer who had married Joseph Fry in 1800, with whom she had eleven children. Greatly influenced by William Savery, an American evangelical Quaker, Elizabeth had established a school in 1816 for the children of women serving sentences in Newgate Prison, Norfolk. She also arranged for instruction to be given to their mothers, especially in sewing and knitting; she organised Bible-reading and insisted that prisoners be divided into small, manageable groups, each under the watchful eye of a matron, who pressed upon her charges the importance of cleanliness in mind, matter and spirit.

  Elizabeth became such a powerful voice that she was called to give evidence before parliament on penal reform, but for all her notoriety, her altruism, her contacts in high places and her towering international reputation (she had once entertained the King of Prussia at lunch), she suffered the humiliation in 1828 of seeing her husband’s business fall into bankruptcy, which led to his immediate estrangement from the Society of Friends. Cyrus and James Clark were fortunate to escape a similar fate.

  Rugs accounted for some 60 per cent of C. & J. Clark’s sales in 1835, followed by footwear and mops, each approaching 20 per cent, and chamois leather making up the balance. Those figures would change dramatically over the next fifteen years. By 1851, footwear represented some three quarters of total revenue, with rugs down to a fifth and mops and chamois leather accounting for a tiny fraction of sales.

  Chamois leather, which is soft and absorbent and leaves no streaks when used as a polisher, takes its name from the chamois, a goat-like mammal native to regions in central Europe, particularly the Carpathian mountains of Romania and the Tatra mountains in Bulgaria. From the nineteenth century onwards, however, most chamois leathers were chamois only in name. They were, in fact, made from the hides of deer, goats and sheep – and it is likely that those produced by C. & J. Clark were sheepskin. They were reasonably simple to make, requiring little in the way of machinery or equipment.

  The non-footwear side of the business comprised a miscellaneous range of products such as ottoman covers, gloves and mops, and included woolstapling, fellmongering and the manufacture of rugs themselves. The mops were an effective way to use what would otherwise be wasted – consisting of a stick on to which were fastened strips cut from the leftovers of skins assigned for rug-making.

  All respectable housewives had a good supply of mops. Seldom a day went by without women washing the floors inside their houses or the doorsteps and pavements outside – and if the neighbours were watching, so much the better. Mops occasionally had other uses. In the 1832 General Election, they came in handy during a brawl in Street on polling day between Whigs and Tories. The election had come shortly after the new Whig prime minister, Lord Grey, who succeeded the Duke of Wellington, had pushed the Reform Bill through parliament – an act that increased the number of MPs in growing, industrial cities at the expense of those in areas where fewer people lived, known as the ‘rotten boroughs’.

  This bill, designed to enlarge the suffrage by including more property owners, was seen as a crucial step towards parliamentary democracy and one which would usher in a wider electorate. As it happened, Grey himself came from a distinguished Northumberland family and his first cabinet consisted almost entirely of aristocrats. There was an irony to the bill’s preamble. It spoke of how it was designed to ‘take effectual Measures for correcting diverse abuses that have long prevailed in the choice of members to serve’ in the palace of Westminster, and yet one of the first things Grey’s government did after the act became law was to create two new dukedoms.

  Voters in Street were mostly Whigs. In Wells and Glastonbury, they tended to be Tory. The nearest polling station to both towns was in Ilchester. It was on the way back from the ballot box that a crowd from Wells stopped for refreshment at the Street Inn, where they were joined by men from Street, almost all of whom worked at C. & J. Clark. A description of this incident is included in Clarks of Street, 1825–1950, a wide-ranging history compiled mainly by Laurence Barber, a former archivist for Clarks, but with contributions from Clark family members and some senior Clarks employees:

  They were greeted with scorn and jeers by [the people from] Wells, and later with more solid missiles. Wells, armed with weapons from the inn, drove [the people from] Street up the High Street to the Factory gates, where a young lad named John Hooper, afterwards for many years well known as the factory carpenter, seeing their plight, handed out mop sticks through a window, and these, broken in half across the knee, soon furnished the shoemakers with effective staves.

  Battle ensued, during which a man called Joseph White suffered a blow to the head and was laid unconscious. He was taken into Cyrus Clark’s house to recover. Another man with the same surname but no relation, Josiah White, was Street’s police constable and well-known as a Whig. He was also struck on the head, but brushed off the blow and then proceeded to cause mayhem. ‘I’ll teach ’ee who is constable,’ he shouted, wielding his baton as he took matters into his own hands.

  A few days later, the local magistrate, who was a die-hard Tory, acquitted the men from Wells, but handed out £200 worth of fines to the shoemakers from Street and fined Josiah White £10. The Whig candidate, who had been returned to Westminster and whose party won the general election, was so outraged at the treatment dealt out to his supporters that he paid all their fines out of his own pocket.

  The number of men employed purely in the Clarks’ shoe business began to rise each year, from one in 1829 to around 38 in 1841, according to the census returns. With ready-made shoes not requiring as much skill as bespoke footwear, Cyrus and James had little difficulty recruiting workers from nearby villages, especially those who had lost their jobs following the decline
of the textile industry. In fact, with the exception of two Irishmen, the 1841 census showed that no shoemakers in Street, Glastonbury or Walton were born outside Somerset. Even in 1851, only 10 per cent of male shoemakers hailed from outside the county. But it was a young man’s game: men under the age of 21 accounted for 39 per cent of Street’s shoemakers in that same year.

  Clarks was producing 60 lines of footwear in 1835, including for the first time a range of shoes for children. The pace of expansion took even James by surprise. ‘We little thought that the slipper trade begun in such a small way would lead us into a large shoe business … and greatly increasing the population of our village.’

  In addition to sheepskin, a variety of other materials were used for slippers, while soles were also sold separately, though in declining numbers. Boots for ladies and men were the bestsellers. One ladies’ boot was called the ‘Ne Plus Ultra’, which sold for 20 shillings (£1), a lot of money at the time, and two and a half times as much as the Clark brothers’ second-most expensive boot. In fact, no boot or shoe would command such a price in real terms as the Ne Plus Ultra until 1921.

  Ready-made footwear was sold to customers for 10 to 15 per cent less than bespoke. The main saving concerned the work of the ‘clickers’, or ‘cutters’ as they became known, who were the most highly paid individuals in the shoemaking process. Clickers were so named because the room in which they worked was silent apart from the click of their blades piercing the leather. Sometimes they were referred to as the ‘gentlemen of shoemaking’. For ready-made footwear, clickers continued to cut out the upper leather, but in standard sizes rather than making new patterns for each individual order.

  The clickers were based in the factory along with supervisory staff who checked the quality of shoes brought in every day by outworkers. The outworkers were divided between those known as ‘makers’ and as ‘binders’ (known also as ‘closers’). The makers were men and boys, who were responsible for attaching the sole and heel to the upper. The binders were women and girls, who sewed together the pieces of leather that formed the upper. Binding involved two processes: the welt and the sew-round. Welting was far more common than the sew-round, except in the case of more sophisticated women’s shoes. The maker would ‘last’ the shoe by tacking an insole to the bottom of his last and stretching the upper over it until its lower edges overlapped the circumference of the insole. Then he would tack the upper to the insole before a welting strip was laid along the perimeter. The welt and the overlapping portion of the upper was hand-stitched or sewn to the insole, at which time the tacks could be removed. The outsole was then stitched to the welt. A steady hand and patience were the prerequisite qualifications of the all-important makers, or at least that was what the men, anxious to remain better remunerated than the women, were quick to stress.

  It was also the job of the makers to finish the shoe ready for sale, which involved paring the sole and heel edges, waxing, colouring and polishing – and then sanding, colouring and polishing the bottom of the sole and the top-piece. Such was the strict division of labour between the sexes that, if you lived in Street, it was common to ask on hearing that a baby had been born whether the child was a binder or a maker, rather than a boy or a girl.

  The sweatshops of London were notorious at this time, but conditions in Street were not always much better. Shoemakers worked and lived in backshops with ladders leading through the scullery to the first floor where much of the labour took place. It was cramped and dirty. The conditions are described by Brendan Lehane in his book C. & J. Clark: 1825–1975:

  Sometimes whole families worked together to make enough in a week – a pound or so – to pay for necessities; not that they needed much, for several cottages kept pigs and most grew their own vegetables. Wives learned to rock their babies’ cradles with their feet while they stitched uppers – 15 stitches to the inch – to earn, if they were nimble, 1½d. an hour. Eldest sons learned early to assist in their fathers’ trades. With his pincers, knife, hammer, awls, tacks and rivets of brass or wood, the man of the house made the complete shoes. In winter, they worked round the light of one central candle.

  The system worked well, and for the first few years of the partnership, productivity kept up with demand. Sales tripled between 1832 and 1836. The Invoice Recording Book 1834–1836 shows that, even though transport options were still limited, Clarks shoes were spreading to parts of Britain and the British Isles that other companies weren’t reaching. There were no trains at this time between Bristol and London, or from Bristol to the north of England. Goods were sent by wagon, pack-horse, barge or sometimes by ship. Even so, the Clark brothers’ shoe business was trading well in Northwest England, the Midlands and other areas of the country even further from Street.

  In fact, in 1835, sales of footwear in what the firm called the home area (Somerset, Cornwall, Devon, Dorset, Wiltshire, Hampshire, Gloucestershire and Bristol) accounted for only 18 per cent of sales, while in Eastern England, no sales at all were recorded that year.

  Far and away the biggest single market was Ireland, which accounted for some two fifths of Clarks total output in shoes and around a sixth of its rugs. The obliging Irish – at least until the Irish famine and the general economic depression of the late 1830s – were made up mainly of the merchant classes thriving in the larger ports following the easing of trade restrictions in 1780. Clarks attracted buyers in Dublin, Cork, Limerick, Waterford, Belfast and Clonwell, the last being a strong Quaker town.

  James Clark married in 1835, after which Cyrus built him a house, called Netherleigh, next to the factory. This meant that the partners lived at either end of the workshop. James’s wife was Eleanor Stephens, whose father was a linen draper and gifted china painter. Her mother was Amy Metford, daughter of William Metford, a Glastonbury Quaker who ran a knitting business specialising in stockings. James and Eleanor had fourteen children, twelve of whom survived to adulthood. Their third child was William S. Clark, who would later succeed the partners as chairman and who went on to become the firm’s early saviour.

  James and Eleanor had got to know each other three years before they married when Amy brought her daughter to stay with James’s mother. James wrote how ‘this visit brought me into intimate acquaintance with your dear mother and I felt very much attracted to her’. The following year, Amy made another visit to Street, during which James

  … did not let it pass without declaring my desire that my fondest hope might be realised in obtaining her [Eleanor] as my partner for life and I can truly say that all my hopes and expectations have been far more than realised in the rich wealth of blessing that has been the result of that union.

  The winter before their wedding was a difficult one for Eleanor. She endured a severe attack of inflammation of the lungs and her doctors advised against marriage in case it weakened her further. James would not hear of it.

  I thought then if we could only have 10 years of union I should have cause for deepest thankfulness, and for how much more have I been indebted to a loving Father who spared her to me.

  A year after the marriage, Eleanor gave birth to their first daughter, Amy Jane, who lived only a matter of weeks. Eleanor then became unwell and James took her north of the border to convalesce, reaching both Edinburgh and Glasgow, where he managed to do some business at the same time. ‘I opened a trade that has since become a large one; it was our first visit to Scotland’, he wrote. Within months, total sales in Scotland accounted for 7.6 per cent of the Clark brothers’ footwear business.

  Meanwhile, thanks to contacts James had made in Liverpool during his earlier sales trips to that part of the country, some shoes and rugs were sold to America and Canada, where, almost from the start, Cyrus had been keen to open up a sales front. In 1833, he wrote to his brother urging him to explore ‘by what means we could send some shoes and soles to America’.

  James and Eleanor Clark with twelve of their children at Netherleigh in 1858: (left to right) Eleanor Clark holding Mabel, James Clark
, Amy, William, Fanny, Mary, Annie, Eleanor, Florence, Sophia, James Edmund, Edith and Frank. The Clarks were ardent supporters of the anti-slavery movement, and their clothing was made from cotton grown by free labour. The Free Produce Movement promoted a range of ‘slave-free’ goods such as sugar and cotton; this allowed consumers such as the Clarks to take direct action against slavery.

  At first, Cyrus and James travelled widely, but then limited their trips to two or three a year. As early as 1830, agents were appointed on a commission basis and these men were later known as ‘travelling salesmen’. The Clarks’ London man was John Jackson, who was on commission of 8.5 per cent of the sales he made, a higher rate than that paid to salesmen working in the provinces.

  Competition was intensifying. Mass production of ready-made shoes was growing apace in America, while in France, after the Napoleonic Wars, shoe manufacturing was a burgeoning business. Northampton, the heart and soul of the British shoe industry, was particularly hit by imports from Europe. As early as 1829, the House of Commons heard about Northampton’s ‘want of regular employment and the low prices of wages’.

  But these were difficult times across most sectors. When Queen Victoria succeeded to the throne in 1837, she found herself presiding over a decade known as the ‘hungry forties’, replete with famine in Ireland, widespread rural and urban poverty, and economic depression of a magnitude not experienced before in Britain. She was only eighteen when she became queen and her first prime minister, Lord Melbourne, whom she trusted and revered, was anxious not to alarm the young monarch by the country’s precarious predicament. When Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist was serialised for the first time, Victoria asked her prime minister whether or not he would recommend the novel. As recorded by A. N. Wilson in The Victorians, Melbourne was scathing: