Clarks: Made to Last

by Mark Palmer

  But the elongated golosh – which could be put on without the need to stoop and with no straps to fasten – proved unsuccessful commercially as cheaper options flooded the market. And they never quite did technically what they were billed to do. Consequently, at one point in 1855, Clarks opened a dedicated store in London’s Blackfriars Road on a three-month lease in order to shift surplus stock of goloshes by means of a closing-down sale.

  The partners accepted that goloshes had become ‘very heavy losers arising entirely from a fault in the gutta percha which after a few years became so hard and brittle that it will stand no wear,’ and by 1858 the company’s price list featured no gutta percha footwear of any kind.

  This aspirational 1851 showcard for goloshes features a suave salesman complete with foot-measuring gauge. Sadly, goloshes turned out to be an unsuccessful venture.

  It was a similar story with vulcanised rubber – named after Vulcan, the Roman god of fire – when the company bought a half share in a patent for combining leather and rubber to produce an elastic material that did away with the need for buttons or laces. Between 1851 and the spring of 1855, C. & J. Clark acquired a massive £25,000 worth of vulcanised rubber – but to little financial benefit.

  During this experimental phase, Charles Goodyear, the American whose name would later be associated with tyres, had become a friend of Cyrus and James and gave advice about the production of a new rubberised boot. Goodyear, who said there was no other ‘inert substance which so excites the mind’ as rubber, was a year older than Cyrus and had begun his own business career by opening a hardware store in Philadelphia. Cyrus and Charles would have met at the Great Exhibition when the American’s wares were on display in a huge pavilion built from floor to ceiling entirely of rubber. Goodyear never opened a factory in Britain, but a company in France agreed to manufacture vulcanised rubber – with disastrous results, ending up with Goodyear being arrested by the French police in December 1855 and spending sixteen days in a debtors’ prison.

  Five years later, Goodyear was dead, leaving debts of $200,000, but he went to his grave firm in the belief that his invention would eventually pay off. And so it did, though not for his immediate descendants. None of his family, either at that time or in subsequent years, was involved in The Goodyear Tyre & Rubber Company, which was so named in Charles’s honour. Despite his turbulent career, Goodyear, quoted in the January 1958 American edition of Reader’s Digest, was philosopical:

  Life should not be estimated exclusively by the standard of dollars and cents. I am not disposed to complain that I have planted and others have gathered the fruits. A man has cause for regret only when he sows and no one reaps.

  The Clarks also investigated doing business with the North British Rubber Company, which had been set up by Henry Lee Norris, an entrepreneur from New Jersey, and Spencer Thomas Parmalee from Connecticut, who had moved to Edinburgh in 1856. The unreliable quality of Norris’s and Parmalee’s vulcanised rubber ultimately put an end to any formal business arrangement, but the partners had showed once again their readiness to explore new shoemaking techniques.

  William S. Clark joined the company in January 1855 at the age of sixteen. He had been educated at two Quaker schools, Sidcot, in Winscombe, and Bootham, in York, and spent some months studying chemistry at the Laboratory of St Thomas’s Hospital in London under the tutelage of a Dr Thompson. His arrival in the business coincided with the first attempts at introducing machinery into the manufacturing process.

  William S. Clark on leaving Bootham School, York, in December 1854.

  William was determined to be a modern shoemaker. Which is to say that he regarded technology as the way forward – and he wanted to see an end to the outworker system. In effect, he wanted shoemaking in Britain to catch up with what was going on in America, where, because of a shortage of labour, the search for machinery to replace men had quickened. The earliest footwear machines to have been patented in the US are thought to be David Mead Randolph’s invention for making riveted boots in 1809, followed a year later by Marc Isambard Brunel’s invention for the nailing of army and navy shoes. But a far more revolutionary development was on its way, one which would bring about a surge in the ready-made market and create havoc for the bespoke trade: the sewing machine.

  Cyrus and James may have been resistant to some aspects of modern business practice – and, as William pointed out, their accounting methods were lamentable – but shunning innovation was never something of which they could be accused.

  C. & J. Clark’s machine room began to take shape in 1856 when Singer & Co., based in America, persuaded the Clarks to acquire one of their sewing machines on trial. Isaac Singer, a failed actor and farmer, had patented his creation in New York in partnership with Edward Clark (no relation to the Clarks of Street). Singer invented the first commercially successful sewing machine, and between 1851 and 1863 he took out twenty patents and sold his machines throughout the world. It was, however, the British inventor and cabinet maker, Thomas Saint, who had issued the first patent for a general machine for sewing in 1790 – though he may not actually have produced a working prototype. That patent describes an awl that punched a hole in leather and passed a needle through the hole.

  The arrival of sewing machines had caused controversy. In 1834, Walter Hunt, an American, had built such a machine, but did not patent it because he thought it would cause unemployment. Ten years later, the first American patent was issued by Elias Howe for a ‘process that used thread from two different sources’. His machine had a needle with an eye at the point. The needle was pushed through the cloth and a loop was formed on the other side. A shuttle on a track then slipped the second thread through the loop to create what was, and still is, called the lockstitch – at five times the speed of a fast hand-sewer.

  Howe assigned the British rights to his patent to a corset, umbrella and footwear manufacturer called William Thomas of London – and then sued Singer for patent infringement in 1854 and won. Howe saw his annual income jump from $300 to more than $200,000 a year, and he amassed a fortune of nearly $2 million over the next twenty years or so. During the American Civil War, he donated a portion of his wealth to equip an infantry regiment for the Union Army and served in the regiment himself as a private.

  Singers, as they were known, were worked by treadle and were cumbersome beasts that required a dedicated person to master them. In Street, it was William S. Clark who spent three months learning every aspect of their capabilities, before passing on his knowledge to a trio of technically-minded women, all sharing the same forename – Mary Wallis, Mary Ann Haines and Mary Marsh. They quickly became experts themselves. The Clarks then bought two further Singer sewing machines for £30 each.

  Output increased dramatically. By 1858, over 50,000 pairs of uppers were stitched by machine, accounting for 23 per cent of total production. And by now there were more women in the machine room than there had been in the whole factory five years earlier.

  At the same time, riveting was becoming commonplace, and C. & J. Clark was one of the first firms to sell hand-riveted shoes on a large scale. Riveting was especially good for thick-soled boots or shoes.

  Sewing machines and riveting spawned new machinery at C. & J. Clark for many of the ancillary jobs previously carried out by hand. For example, in 1858, Samuel Boyce, a boot manufacturer in Lynn, Massachusetts – and a friend of James Clark – produced a device that cut soles to size. It was worked by a foot treadle and became one of the first machines imported from America for use in the British shoe trade.

  An enterprising man called James Miles, of Street, took it upon himself to copy or adapt these American machines, selling them on to shoemakers up and down the country. Likewise, William S. Clark and John Keats, the factory foreman (who claimed to be related to the poet of the same name), jointly invented a machine for the building up and the attaching of heels to soles, mainly of boots. This involved enlarging the heels in solid iron moulds and then punching holes in them, into whi
ch rivets were inserted before being attached to the boots. There was considerable secrecy over this piece of equipment, for fear that rival firms in Northamptonshire and Leicestershire would hear about it.

  Not everyone was happy. The introduction of technology led to strikes in some traditional shoemaking towns in the Midlands, but the Clarks persuaded their workforce that technology would lead to more, not fewer, jobs, and largely avoided disruptive labour unrest organised by what were known as ‘craft societies’ – a precursor to the trade unions.

  Encouraged by William, Cyrus and James also turned their attention to lasts, acquiring equipment in 1855 that would ‘secure good fitting boots and shoes … made from the finest wood seasoned on the premises’, as they described it on a price list sent out to customers that year. Their first last-making machine was bought from a Scottish supplier for £12. 10s., with a condition of sale that a man called David Garner would move to Street to be in charge of it. Garner was paid 33 shillings a week, but there were stipulations attached to his employment. He had to give up alcohol and attend church.

  How long Garner survived in his job is unclear, but his machine was soon replaced by one that would, according to company records, ‘turn a right or a left last from the same pattern, or a large or small last from the same pattern’. These were state-of-the-art creations because a large proportion of footwear, particularly in children’s ranges, was still made without any distinction between right and left feet.

  By 1855, the shoe business in Street was improving faster than the quality of life. The town’s poor drainage and inadequate water supply had been highlighted in official reports. One review conducted by the Board of Health in 1853 – a year after a typhoid epidemic struck the southwest of the country – noted with alarm that the only form of drainage was an open stream running through the main street, into which almost all houses discharged their waste. It was persistently stagnant and smelt dreadful.

  There were a number of deaths from typhoid, including that of Cyrus’s son, Joseph Henry, who died aged nineteen, and James’s second son, Thomas Bryant, who was only nine. James reacted bravely, describing his loss as a ‘bitter trial’, but one that ‘was sent in mercy by our Heavenly Father to bring us nearer to Himself. None but those who have experienced it can know of the bitterness of such a trial’.

  In its report, the Board of Health took a sterner, more pragmatic view:

  There is no public provision of water within the parish, the inhabitants mostly obtaining their water from wells, the water of which is generally of an extremely hard quality, and sometimes polluted by a leakage from cesspools.

  The Board’s report went on to cite the Public Health Act of 1848 and insisted on the setting up of a Local Board, comprising nine elected members, whose purpose was to monitor the sanitary conditions in the town.

  In addition to typhoid, Street suffered from other diseases such as scarlet fever and measles. As Michael McGarvie described it in Bowlingreen Mill:

  Various causes were suggested for this including that the orchards with which Street was surrounded impeded the circulation of the air and so increased the dampness, or that the out-work system under which six to nine men worked together in a small room was conducive to illness. The real culprit was defective drainage and the pollution of the stream which ran along the High Street. C. & J. Clark’s factory contributed substantially to this.

  Blame was indeed laid at C. & J. Clark’s door. The Board of Health’s report found that the:

  … refuse drainage and tan liquid of the [Clarks] factory is passed into the stream towards the lower end. The condition of the stream and of the various ditches is at times very offensive.

  James Clark was quoted in the Report admitting that:

  … the drainage liquor consists of the boilings of dye-wood, alum and muriatic acid … liquor in which green skins have been soaked, and whether from the presence of animal matter in a state of decomposition, or of vegetable matter in a similar state, has a very offensive smell.

  Feelings were running high. Cyrus chaired a meeting in 1852 at the Temperance Hall to explain to ratepayers the implications of the Board of Health’s report, opening proceedings with a diplomatic aside that ‘good temper always gained the advantage in argument’. Some pointed an accusing finger at the Clarks, prompting James, seated near his brother, to remind people of ‘the deaths and illness in our own families’. The meeting ended more harmoniously than it had started.

  James became a more active and devoted Quaker following the death of his son. At the family’s morning meetings – which he insisted on, with no exceptions – he began praying out loud in front of his surviving children and would, as he put it, ‘express a few words in the evening meeting’ as well. This, James said, ‘proved very formidable’, but he was rewarded with a sense of:

  … peace, which I believe always follows an act of obedience to our Heavenly Father. From this time I had frequently some brief communications to offer in our meetings for worship.

  In 1856, four years after this personal tragedy, James was appointed a minister in the Society of Friends, something which ‘led me more deeply to feel my responsibility and strengthening me by this proof that I had the confidence of my friends’. In the spring of 1860 – the year his eldest daughter, Mary, became engaged to John Morland, who later would take over the rug side of the business – he felt enormous pride when his wife was appointed an elder of the Street Friends’ meeting house:

  A very precious, wise and useful Elder she proved to be … no one can know how much I have been indebted to her for her wise, loving and faithful counsel.

  Towards the end of 1853, Britain established formal ties with Turkey, which was at war with Russia. Lord Aberdeen, the prime minister in charge of a coalition government, described the ‘state of tension’ in the Crimea as ‘undoubtedly great’ but said: ‘I persist in thinking that it can not end in actual war’. The Times went further, thundering that ‘War would not only be an act of insanity, but would be utterly disgraceful to all of us concerned.’

  But there was no sign of Russia backing down. Instead, its navy sank the Turkish fleet at Sinope, provoking a declaration of war by Britain and France on 28 March 1854. The resulting campaign in the Crimea was to be a war like none before it. For the first time, photography brought home the graphic horrors of battle and there were stories in the press as much about inefficiency and incompetence as tales of heroism and bravery. The work of Florence Nightingale ensured that the war pulled at the conscience of those not immediately caught up in the conflict, especially when it became evident that more soldiers were dying from disease than from fighting the enemy.

  In Street, the Crimean War tugged at the conscience in a different way. Quakers were pacifists. They were duty bound not to interfere in the war effort – but they also felt called to alleviate the suffering of war’s innocent victims. As William S. Clark wrote:

  The Government urgently wanted a supply of sheepskin wool coats to save troops in the Crimea from perishing with cold. As C. & J. Clark had a supply of skins that were suitable for this and that could not be got elsewhere in sufficient quantity they felt bound to make these coats but decided not to keep any profit for their own use.

  That profit came to some £300 – a large sum at the time – all of which was used to build the British School in Street. Education was important to Quakers. George Fox himself had established two schools, one at Waltham Abbey, Essex, another at Shacklewell, in what is now part of the London Borough of Hackney. Fox said these institutions were to ‘instruct young lasses and maidens in whatsoever things were civil and useful in the creation’.

  The Western Gazette, a local newspaper covering Somerset and the West Country, picked up on the story of Clarks making coats for soldiers fighting the Russians but failed to inform readers of the not-for-profit motive:

  Our enterprising manufacturer, Messrs Clarke [sic] of this place, are preparing at the rate of 40 sheepskin coats a day for the army in th
e Crimea. The sheepskins are prepared with all the wool on and are intended to be worn by our men in just the opposite way that they are worn in general – the wool will be worn inside and the skin outside.

  Elmhurst, the house that Cyrus Clark built for himself in 1856, photographed in 1860 by his eldest son John Aubrey Clark. In the foreground can be seen (left to right) Cyrus’s daughter Bessie (Sarah Elizabeth), his wife Sarah Bull Clark, Cyrus, and (at far right) his youngest son Thomas Beaven Clark.

  As the Crimean War reached the bloodiest of conclusions, C. & J. Clark was fighting its own battles. Heavy losses were incurred between 1859 and 1862, for which a number of reasons were cited, not least the manner in which Cyrus and James continued to take money out of the business for their own benefit. In 1856, Cyrus had built an entirely new house, Elmhurst, which a few years later he would use as security for further loans to the business. James, meanwhile, made such alterations and additions to Netherleigh that it almost doubled in size. This may have been a practical necessity because he and Eleanor had such a large family – but it did not help balance the books. At the same time, Cyrus agreed to build a house for the second of his three sons, Alfred, to mark his marriage in 1857 to Sarah Gregory, the daughter of Bishop Gregory.

  William S. Clark wrote later in his memoirs that he regarded the brothers’ withdrawals as ‘altogether excessive’ and said:

  William S. Clark in 1861.