Clarks: Made to Last

by Mark Palmer

  In a letter to a friend dated 30 April 1863, James admitted the situation was far worse than he had realised: ‘I seem now clearly to see that we were only rescued when just on the brink of a precipice from which we could not have rescued ourselves’.

  William S. Clark was only too aware of what was required. The promise of change had to be delivered.

  The financial question being thus put on a more solid basis the inspectors [Simpson and Thompson] had to consider in whose hands the future management of the business should be placed … They made very careful inquiries of those in responsible positions in the factory and searching examinations of the partners and their sons as to the part they had taken and their views as to the conduct of the business; a good deal of this naturally transpired in T. Simpson’s full investigation of the state of affairs before he undertook to try to put things straight.

  Modesty may have prevented him from adding that the ‘careful inquiries’ and ‘searching examinations’ led to only one overwhelming conclusion. William S. Clark, aged only 24, was to be handed full responsibility for C. & J. Clark on 31 May 1863, a position he would hold with unrivalled success for the next 40 years.

  4

  Make – or break

  CHANGE CAME FAST. In fact, the turnaround was of such magnitude that even William S. Clark may have been surprised by the outcome. When he wrote about it many years later, he attributed much of the transformation of C. & J. Clark to his benefiting from seeing first-hand the inefficiencies of the previous era while working with his father and uncle. And now that James and, in particular, Cyrus (who was 62 in 1863 and in poor health) were no longer in charge of day-to-day affairs, William could set about making the necessary improvements unimpeded by intervention from the founders. Referring to himself in the third person, William wrote:

  Everything in the business had to be conducted with the most rigid economy … W. S. Clark, having known only too well where some of the worst leaks had been under former conditions, though vainly striving to get them stopped, was very soon able to alter much that had gone.

  The accounts told their own story. During the four and a half years from 31 December 1858 to the day William took control at the end of May 1863, there had been a net loss, whereas in the four and a half years starting 31 May 1863 and ending 31 December 1867, the business made a profit of £14,400. William, given to understatement, said these figures ‘put a very different aspect on the state of affairs’.

  Thomas Simpson continued in his role as an adviser, something William described as:

  … invaluable, though occasionally his lack of acquaintance with the technical difficulties of the very complicated shoe business, so totally different to the comparatively simple process of cotton spinning [Simpson’s business before his retirement], made it difficult for W.S.C. to carry out his [Simpson’s] wishes.

  High on both William’s and Simpson’s list of priorities was the repayment of the loans awarded to the company through a specially drafted Deed of Covenant. At the same time, it was evident that additional money had to be found in the latter part of 1863 and 1864 and yet again it was Thomas Clark – always known to the family as ‘Cousin Thomas’ – who stepped into the financial breach once more, sending William £2,300 to meet ongoing expenses. In addition, Stuckey’s Banking Company, encouraged by the new management set-up, advanced £1,000 on the condition that the company’s overdraft be reduced to £2,500 over the next two years.

  In 1863, the total debt owed to fellow Friends amounted to £19,050. By 1868, it had come down slightly to around £18,000, but the subsequent four years saw it diminish considerably. Accounts in 1872 showed Friends’ loans had been reduced to just under £3,750, while bank loans were £5,064 and the overdraft stood at a comparatively respectable £1,783.

  That William threw himself into his new responsibilities with boundless energy and enthusiasm there can be no doubt. Factory hours in 1863 were 6 am to 6 pm, but the new chairman was putting in eighteen-hour days himself and took a mere fortnight’s holiday in the first two years of his chairmanship. He recorded later that he had only two full-time foremen to help him in the factory – ‘but poor ones at that’ – during a period when he sought to end the practice of out-working and to stop the ‘horror of the treatment of small boys in the home workshops’.

  His weapon to achieve this was new machinery and his main lieutenant in this endeavour was John Keats. One particular process that exercised William and Keats was finding a means of closing the uppers with waxed thread. No machine was capable of this because the wax in the thread habitually clogged the eye of the needle. Keats – whom William described as a ‘very erratic genius in the machine room’ – came up with the idea of using a hook in place of a needle. And it worked. This was especially crucial for the sales of heavy waterproof boots.

  ‘Made strong and stout in the soles and uppers to keep the feet dry and warm, in spite of dews and wet grass’ boasted an 1864 Clarks showcard. A patent for this invention – known as the Crispin machine, in honour of St Crispin, the patron saint of shoemaking – was taken out in 1864 in the joint names of William S. Clark and John Keats, and Greenwood & Batley, a company in Leeds, was commissioned to make and sell them under licence.

  Adapting these machines to sew on the soles of boots was the next challenge. It was hoped that a variation of an invention by Lyman Blake would do the job. Blake, who was from Massachusetts in the USA, worked in the shoemaking business all his life, at one point joining Isaac Singer’s company, Singer Corporation. By 1856, at the age of 22, he had become a partner in a shoemaking firm and two years later received a patent from the United States government for inventing a means of attaching the soles of shoes to their uppers. William and Keats had in fact seen the machine in action at the London Exhibition of 1862 – but had not been overly impressed.

  William decided against its use – a decision he explained in his memoirs as being:

  … partly [because of a] strong objection to a chain stitch and partly because anyway the work was not satisfactory. The reason for this was at that time the horn was stationary and it was only by the introduction of the rotating horn not long after that that the machine became a success.

  But the Blake Sole Sewer, as it was called, had proved hugely effective during the American Civil War and at the very least had convinced William that if:

  … C. & J. Clark was to hold its own in face of constantly increasing competition it could only be by the adoption of these new American methods … [and] as the Trade Union then had no foothold in Street they hoped the change might be made here without undue friction.

  He was proved right – and wrong. Improvements to Blake’s machine gathered pace, principally due to modifying its stitching unit. This involved the addition of a ‘whirl’ device which fed a loop of thread into the hook, copied from the original Crispin machine, but in a rare oversight, the ‘whirl’ had been omitted from that invention’s patent. Blake’s machine was too big to operate in the home of an outworker and required an overhead power source to operate the belt. This was fortunate from William’s point of view because it quickened the process of gathering workers up into the factory.

  William and Keats pushed on with their plans. They had success with a machine that burnished the edges of soles, a significant follow-up to James Miles’s mechanised sole-cutter that trimmed soles exactly to size. They also invented a press for the building and attaching of heels, the first such machine to be used in Britain. On this occasion, rather than taking out a patent they simply operated it in secret without any fanfare – after reminding themselves that they were after all in the business of making shoes, not selling shoemaking equipment.

  William nearly committed the company to screwing on soles as an alternative to both riveting and sewing after being introduced to an inventor who claimed to have developed a machine capable of fastening soles in that way. A special room in the factory was set aside for this innovative piece of equipment, but the delivery date cam
e and went and when, a year later, the inventor – who was from Stalybridge in the foothills of the Pennines – said that he was ready to make the delivery, William wrote a thank-you-but-no-thank-you letter.

  We fully indorse [sic] your opinion that boots and shoes must all be made by machinery before long but are not so sure that the public will not prefer having them sewed to screwed.

  There were other frustrations in those early years of William’s leadership. For all his long-term commitment to machine-made shoes, there was the short-term, uncomfortable truth that labour costs on boots made by machine were often one-third per pair more than had been predicted. In 1866, William wrote to Greenwood & Batley complaining of:

  … a constant drain of expense upon us from which we have as yet reaped no advantage of any kind whatsoever, and none of the goods made hitherto have realised what they have cost us in wages and materials.

  A few months later, he was more optimistic: ‘We hope in time to make a paying affair of it, as we are still convinced there is something valuable at the root of the system’. By 1872, the ‘something valuable’ element became clearer with the adoption of a bent needle that allowed soles to be sewn while still on the last. This prompted William to declare:

  We are perfectly satisfied with the work … we believe most of our customers sell it as hand work … in fact, to give you our honest opinion, we are satisfied that no system at present before the public can in the long-run compete with it, and we are indifferent as to anyone else taking it up.

  Cyrus Clark died on 14 December 1866 at the age of 65, only a few weeks after the death of his wife. There were no obituaries, but in Clarks of Street, 1825–1950, Cyrus is spoken of as ‘warm-hearted’ with an ‘indomitable perseverance in carrying out any object on which he had set his mind … no obstacle, or, as he would say, no “lion in the path” was allowed to stand in the way’.

  His death led to an unseemly and unfortunate three years of wrangling between his brother, James, and Cyrus’s surviving family, particularly his youngest son, T. Beaven Clark. James described it as ‘passing through some of the deepest trials’ of his life, which he only managed to negotiate with the ‘loving support and sympathy of my precious wife’.

  Two years before Cyrus died, he and James had renewed their partnership agreement whereby they or their heirs had equal shares in the profits of the company for seven years. Therefore, upon his death, half the profits of the business continued to be paid into Cyrus’s estate and it was left to the two executors of his will to see that this happened. The executors were Jacob H. Cotterell and William I. Palmer, the Quaker cousin who worked in his family’s biscuit business in Reading.

  Some months after Cyrus’s death, Cotterell also died, leaving Palmer as sole executor. Palmer was, according to William:

  … anxious to wind up the trust affairs as far as possible and suggested that an agreed sum should be paid into the estate to cover the share of profits for the remaining years of the partnership and all claims there might be on the business for goodwill etc

  It was agreed that negotiations should begin, with Palmer representing Cyrus’s family and Thomas Simpson negotiating on behalf of James.

  An agreement was reached for a payment by James of £1,500 as a goodwill gesture. In his account of this episode, William quoted Palmer as saying:

  If James Clark agreed to the terms he [Palmer] proposed as his brother’s executor it would place him [James] in a position in which no one could find fault with him.

  James signed his name to the settlement, but Palmer then informed him of Cyrus’s wishes that accompanied his will, making it clear that he wanted his son, Beaven, to succeed to his share in the business. As William recorded:

  For reasons that seemed to him conclusive James Clark replied that after long and careful thought he had come to the conclusion that this was quite out of the question and there the matter rested.

  A Clark family ‘nutting’ party under the oak tree at Kingweston in September 1870.

  But it did not rest there. Beaven, who was employed in the business as a book-keeper, insisted that his family had ‘an absolute right to a half share partnership in the profits of the business in perpetuity’ and not just for the remaining five years of the partnership. James disagreed. He said that when the last deed of partnership was drawn up between the brothers in 1864, Cyrus had tried to insert a clause ‘securing his family this half share, not in goodwill but in any further partnership’ but had eventually backed down on the proviso that a line be included simply expressing his hopes that one of his sons would come in as a partner.

  James, distressed and frustrated, was prepared to be generous to his late brother’s family but would not give way on the matter of the future partnership. And William took exception to his father being accused of ‘not doing his duty by his nephews’. The situation was weighing so heavily on William’s mind that at one point he contemplated walking away from the business altogether. Certainly, that was the inference from a letter he received from Simpson, stressing that:

  … you owe a great deal to your father … and it will hardly look well that you should fly from the post of duty when trials and annoyances have to be met and overcome.

  Arbitration ensued. Cyrus’s family asked for a fellow Friend, Richard Fry, from Bristol, to act on its behalf; James sought the services of Lewis Fry (no relation to Richard), an eminent Quaker also from Bristol, who later went into politics. George Stacey Gibson, from Saffron Walden, a leading member of the Society of Friends on a national level, was asked to be an independent voice of reason.

  Delicate deliberations took place at the home of Cyrus’s and James’s older brother, Joseph, and lasted a full day. T. Beaven Clark and his brother, Alfred, read out their statements, as did James and William. Alfred was speaking more on behalf of his brother than himself because he had been well looked after financially through his role in charge of the firm’s London office in Sambrook Court, Basinghall Street, which was set up as an independent venture in 1863. Cyrus’s eldest son, John Aubrey Clark, a qualified land surveyor who had played little part in the firm, remained silent.

  Following that meeting, Simpson wrote to James on 10 June 1869 with encouraging news:

  I duly reached home last night after a very satisfactory interview with cousin W. Palmer who said, ‘if they [Cyrus’s family] do not accept it now, I will have nothing more to do with it.’

  And he sought to assure James that he was right to make a stand:

  I have carefully read over the memorandums left by your brother [Cyrus] and although they deeply excited my sympathy and sorrow on his behalf, the perusal has only the more strongly confirmed my previous opinion on the whole question. Everything is stated in such a way as to give an incorrect estimate of the facts of the case and for the express purpose of exciting sympathy, but the false gloss cannot of course deceive me, as I know the facts too well … if the proposition is now declined it would be wrong to take it up again.

  But it was taken up again. In fact, it was a further five months before matters were brought to a close, during which time tensions between James’s and Cyrus’s respective sides of the family worsened. Simpson wrote to James on 22 June 1869 recommending it would be wise to ‘have no further conversation with either Beaven [T. Beaven Clark] or Alfred or anyone else on their behalf on any subject at all connected with the negotiations’. He added:

  Keep up your spirits for all may yet turn out better than you now expect. You have right on your side … you have a wife and children who are your first duty, and their interests have for years been sacrificed to the interests of your brother and his family.

  On 11 November 1869, James issued a signed statement that he hoped would assuage the growing resentment towards him from Cyrus’s family:

  The Arbitrators having expressed their opinion that the observations made by James Clark upon his late brother’s conduct were of a more severe character than the circumstances warranted, and that some of such obse
rvations might be understood as reflecting upon Cyrus Clark’s character, James Clark stated that he had never intended to make any reflections upon his brother’s straight-forwardness and integrity and that he entirely withdrew any observations which might bear that interpretation.

  Five days later, the arbitrators ‘unanimously’ decided that ‘either some representative of the family of the late Cyrus Clark be admitted to a share in the said business or that a compensation for goodwill be paid to the estate of Cyrus Clark.’ The amount was set at £2,250 – rather more than the originally agreed sum of £1,500.

  William I. Palmer immediately wrote to James and pleaded with him not to make a hasty decision. James wrote back on 18 November 1869 saying that although the award was higher than he had anticipated he felt ‘well satisfied’ and was pleased to bring matters to a conclusion. He would opt to make the payment:

  It has been a great relief to me to be so entirely liberated, as only such an award could have liberated me, from a Partnership that has for many years been such a burden that I could not feel at all justified in leaving it on my children’s shoulders.

  Lewis Fry, the Friend who had supported James, told him:

  We were all very strongly impressed with thy candid and very honourable conduct in at once surrendering the agreement which had been signed. Hadst thou insisted upon it, as many persons would have done, I believe we should have felt that it would have precluded our making any award.

  And Richard Fry, representing Cyrus’s family, was similarly impressed, telling William: ‘When thy father has carried out these terms no one can say but that he had done everything for his nephews that he could be expected to do’.

  The immediate response of the nephews is not documented, but Beaven gave short shrift to James’s subsequent offer that he might become a partner in the rug-making side of the business. William never expanded publicly on this for fear of ‘the risk of injustice to James Clark’s memory’, adding how: