Clarks: Made to Last

by Mark Palmer

  … time gradually restored friendly feelings with his brother’s family. He always had cordial feelings towards them and deep regard and affection for the memory of his brother from whom he had received such unfailing kindness in his early days.

  Palmer, who, although acting on behalf of Cyrus’s descendants, had been thrown into the role of peacemaker, told James he hoped never again ‘to have the misfortune’ to be a sole executor ‘in a business under similar difficulties’. Simpson, who had been bullish in representing James, was less magnanimous. He wrote to his client applauding his decision to make the goodwill payment rather than allow Beaven to be a partner in the business, adding:

  You have been sponged nearly dry by one thing or another on account of the family but I believe God will return it to you again in added prosperity, and your conduct throughout I consider to have been a very great honour to you whatever others may say … I consider it [the award] to be an unjust one but it has to be abided by.

  Despite the award, discordant rumblings continued. Bessie Clark, Cyrus’s daughter, was under the impression that James never actually got round to signing his statement about not wishing to cast aspersions on Cyrus’s character. James patiently wrote to her on 21 March 1870, stressing how his only desire had been to ‘clear myself from the charge of having ever intended to cast any imputation on my brother’s perfect honesty and integrity’. But Bessie was still not convinced. She thought James had not addressed directly the question of signing or not signing the document. James wrote to her again, spelling out his position even more clearly:

  I quite intended my letter of the 21st to confirm the paper I signed at the time of the Arbitration and I had no idea that it could be understood in any other sense.

  Over the next few months, James wrote twice to his nephew and eventually, almost a year after the announcement of the settlement, Beaven responded in a conciliatory tone:

  Dear Uncle, I am extremely glad to receive the two letters thou has addressed to me and gladly accept them in the full sense in which I trust they are written. I most sincerely thank thee for the expressions of regret they contain and for the frank acknowledgement of thy feelings with regard to my dear father …

  Beaven also conceded that he had been hasty in rejecting James’s offer to get involved in the rug business:

  I consider myself to blame for not speaking to thyself when I first heard of the state complained of as mutual explanations might probably have prevented the unpleasant misunderstanding which has occurred.

  As it turned out, James and William decided later that same year in 1870 that the rug business would be separated from the shoe company. It was to be called Clark, Son & Morland, with James, William and John Morland, James’s son-in-law, as partners. James and William had a quarter share each and John a half share. The headquarters was at Bowlingreen Mill, a tanning factory owned by James, which he had inherited from his father, though it was not long before the business moved to Northover, a nearby tanning yard bought especially for the purpose. Following the new status of the rug company, James wrote:

  By the kindness of my friends, and the skilful and diligent management of my son, William, I was released from the great harassment I had endured for many years, working with insufficient capital entailing some years heavy losses instead of profit.

  Cyrus’s death and the subsequent fall-out came shortly after William’s marriage at the age of 27. His wife, Helen Priestman Bright, was a year younger than him and they were to have six children, two sons and four daughters. Helen was the only child of John Bright by his first wife, Elizabeth Priestman. Bright – or to give him his full title, The Rt Hon. John Bright MP – was the much admired and hugely influential Liberal politician who, along with Richard Cobden, formed the Anti-Corn Law League.

  An MP for 46 years, Bright was regarded as one of the greatest orators of his generation. His father, Jacob, was a Quaker who ran a cotton mill business in Rochdale and John remained proud of his radical religious roots. His first public speech was at a Friends’ temperance meeting when he got his notes hopelessly muddled and began to break down in tears. The chairman told him to abandon his text altogether and just speak his mind. Which he did, gaining a rousing reception. His talent for off-the-cuff oratory never faltered from that moment on.

  Greenbank, where William S. Clark and Helen Priestman Bright lived after marrying in 1866.

  Bright was a strong supporter of the 1867 Reform Bill and is credited with inventing the expression ‘flog a dead horse’ which he used in the House of Commons, telling MPs that trying to rouse Parliament from its apathy on the issue of electoral reform would be like ‘trying to flog a dead horse to make it pull a load’. He also coined the phrase ‘England is the mother of all parliaments’ while rallying support for a wider electoral franchise.

  William and Helen began married life in Greenbank, so-named after the Rochdale home of John Bright. It was an old farmhouse on to which William had built two Victorian wings. The bay window was re-assembled from the Clarks showcase stand at the Great Exhibition of 1851. The family remained there until 1889, when William commissioned his favourite architect, George Skipper, whose main bulk of work was in Norfolk, to build a new house further away from the factory. This was called Millfield and is now part of the 1,200-pupil co-educational independent school of that name, which was founded in 1935. William and Helen were already familiar with the area around Millfield because in 1880 their youngest child, Alice, contracted tuberculosis aged six, and rather than send her abroad for the mountain air as so many tuberculosis victims were, they built a Swiss-style house called The Chalet, where Alice sat during the day and often slept at night. She survived.

  The Chalet is now used as a chapel for Millfield School and is the oldest building on campus. Millfield House remained in the Clark family until the 1950s, with the school paying rent for its use. At first, it was where Millfield’s founder, Jack Meyer, lived, before it became a boarding house for boys.

  James and William formed a new partnership in 1873 and it was another seventeen years before James finally retired aged 79. Part of the agreement between father and son amounted to a job description of which most people can only dream: ‘James Clark is not required to give more time to the business than is convenient or agreeable to himself’.

  The capital within the company at the start of this new partnership was £9,505. 4s. 2d., of which James’s share was £7,203. 3s. 9d. and William’s £2,304. 0s. 5d. Profits were to be divided equally.

  Crucially – and contrary to what had seemed possible only a few years earlier – by 1871 most of those who had loaned the company money in 1863 had been repaid in full. In triumphant mood, Thomas Simpson sent the deed governing the agreement between Clarks and its creditors to William, with a note saying: ‘I should consign [the Deed] to the flames which has been the fate of all the other promissory notes’.

  William no doubt felt greatly relieved. Honour had been upheld and the Quaker edict about living free from debt had been restored. William resolved never again to allow the company to operate without adequate reserves. He was also resolute in his commitment to reinvest profits whenever it was expedient to do so – and not take money out to build new homes or prop up struggling associated enterprises.

  Millfield House, designed in 1889 by the architect George Skipper as a family home for William S. Clark. It is now a boarding house for Millfield, a leading public school.

  There were good years and there were less good years between 1863 and 1879, during the height of what is known as the second industrial revolution or the technological revolution. The development of the railway system allowed goods to be transported at an accelerated rate, but this had the effect in some parts of the country of saturating the market with products that could not be sold. This surplus in turn forced prices to drop as businesses tried to secure capital returns by making quick sales of their assets.

  Clarks output remained strong. The company produced 78 per cent more pairs
of shoes during the sixteen years from 1863 to 1879 than in the sixteen previous years, and in some years output actually doubled. In terms of numbers, Clarks produced 180,000 pairs of shoes in 1863. By 1903, that figure had risen to 870,000. And what was especially gratifying was the way the footwear industry in general, and Clarks in particular, defied the national economic mood. When the country was in the grip of recession in 1875 and 1876, Clarks increased productivity by 18 per cent.

  The main Clarks factory in Street in the late 1890s, seen from the High Street. This view clearly shows the clock tower built for Queen Victoria’s jubilee in 1887 and in the background the water tower (built in 1897) and the ‘Big Room’.

  William had made a point of saying in 1863 that he wanted to reduce the number of lines the company produced, but by 1896 there were no fewer than 352 different models of women’s footwear alone. And whereas in 1863 Clarks produced more boots than shoes, this had evened up by the end of the century, with shoes representing some 50 per cent of total output.

  Some of the more popular lines from early in William’s career included: the ‘Gentleman’s Osborne’ boot (1858); the ‘Gentleman’s Prince of Wales’ shoe (1863); the ‘Lady’s side-spring’ boot (1864); the ‘Lady’s Lorne Lace’ boot (1871); the ‘Lady’s cream brocade side-laced’ boot (made originally for the 1862 International Exhibition) and the Child’s ‘Dress Anklet’ in black enamel seal, which had been designed by William himself in 1856.

  Quality was sacrosanct. In 1867, William, clearly irked by what he felt were inferior shoes coming into the market at comparable prices to Clarks, wrote to a dealer saying:

  … the quality of our goods is so entirely different from those of Crick & Sons [a Northampton firm of shoemakers] that … we doubt if we could get up goods low enough in quality to sell where [theirs] have sold.

  A little later, he explained to another dealer that ‘ours is mainly a better class trade’.

  For all his determination to end the out-work system, William had to accept that even as late as 1898 some 4,800 pairs of shoes were hand-sewn by more than 150 men operating from home in villages such as Long Sutton, Martock and South Petherton, and small towns like Wells and Shepton Mallet. Most outworkers still had at least one apprentice, who lived in and received his keep in return for work. Many of those apprentices came from Muller’s Orphanage in Bristol.

  Gradually, the so-called ‘team system’ that was proving so effective in America came to the fore in Street, culminating in the establishment in 1896 of ‘the Big Room’, a building measuring 240 ft by 120 ft that was divided into a number of ‘rooms’ but with no dividing walls. These open-plan departments comprised a Pattern Room for grading and design, a Cutting Room for the preparation of uppers, a Machine Room for closing the uppers, a Making Room for lasting and sole attachment, and a Treeing and Trimming Room for finishing.

  Expenditure on new equipment was as low as £69 in 1877 – less than £5,000 in today’s money – and it was only after 1878 that larger financial investments were made. Until then, William had concentrated on making sure the existing machinery was working to full capacity, but, surprisingly, in 1876, some twenty years after the first Singer sewing machine had been introduced, only 80 per cent of the footwear produced by C. & J. Clark had machine-sewn uppers.

  The ‘Big Room’, seen here probably around the beginning of the 20th century. All the major shoemaking processes took place within one large open-plan workshop.

  Frustrations in perfecting machine-made shoe production were compounded by Street’s insufficient labour force. It was not unusual for price lists to include an apology for production delays and promises that such hold-ups were being addressed. Furthermore, workers’ unrest was festering. In 1867, the men operating the Crispin machine in the boots department downed tools and demanded higher wages. This defiance led to further apologies for production delays, with William telling his customers that he had been persuaded to shorten the hours of the cutters and Crispin machine hands – as well as increasing their pay. A double headache.

  Trade unions had been decriminalised in 1867 and the Amalgamated Cordwainers Association became in effect the first shoemakers’ union. But it made little headway and in 1874 a new union was formed: the National Union of Boot and Shoe Rivetters and Finishers, otherwise known as the Sons of St Crispin. This grouping soon established a network that helped workers throughout the country and provided such support as a funeral fund and sick pay. By 1887, it had 10,000 members. The Sons of St Crispin would change its name to the National Union of Boot and Shoe Operatives in 1898.

  The union was suspicious when William brought in John Keats’s father, William Keats, to help finesse the Crispin machine, and there were soon rumours of random strikes being planned. At one point in 1877, William felt it necessary to write to Greenwood & Batley insisting:

  It is a mistake to say that our factory was closed several times owing to disturbances. To the best of my knowledge this only occurred once – at the time of a strike which lasted two or three days just before W. Keats left us … although a great many other matters caused ill-feeling towards W. and J. Keats, and it was heightened by a good deal of indiscretion on their part, and as a matter of fact in the strike referred to, and which was directed solely against them, the question of the sewing machine was never alluded to by the men. I quite believe that J. Keats may be right in thinking that a feeling against the machine was really at the root of the matter. I write this fully that you may understand that, as the men never raised any direct opposition to the machine, I do not honestly see that I could put the case any stronger.

  There had been a further unsettling development in 1874 when a Clarks travelling salesman, E. C. Sadler, decided to exploit the shortage of jobs for hand-sewers by setting up a rival shoe manufacturing business in Street. He made this audacious move with the support of Edwin Bostock, a shoemaker in Staffordshire, and by 1877 E. C. Sadler & Co. was employing 300 people. Sadler paid his workers better than Clarks while at the same time copying many of the Clarks’ lines, sometimes passing them off as made by C. & J. Clark. The competitive threat from Sadler’s abated in the early 1880s when, citing union interference, it moved production to Worcester and in 1897 the business was closed.

  The year 1880 was a pivotal one for C. & J. Clark. For the previous 24 months, the company had been spending large sums on new technology and the ‘team system’ was being slowly implemented. To help with the latter, a man called Horatio Hodges, the son of a former Street shoemaker, was recruited to drive through the changes. Hodges had experience of working in America and was, as William put it, ‘thoroughly acquainted with the newest American machinery and systems’. But he may not have been so well acquainted with tactful man management and the need to find a common consensus. In C. & J. Clark, 1833–1903: A History of Shoemaking, George Barry Sutton wrote:

  Horatio Hodges was an unfortunate choice as the ambassador of progress … He was a gifted machinery inventor and, as a local Salvation Army leader, made recruits. What he lacked, however, was the gift of understanding others of divergent views or of impressing them with his tolerance.

  One of the many grievances against him was the way he tested the productivity of machines and then exaggerated their achievements. He was also unpopular for hiring boys because they were cheaper than men. The workers wanted Hodges out – and were prepared to go on strike until he was dismissed.

  William flatly refused to sack Hodges and countered that only one boy had been hired in direct competition with a man. ‘Pressure was brought to bear in many ways to give [the machines] up as failure’ noted William in his private diaries.

  Publicly, William made clear that if the men backed down, he would happily ensure they were secure in their jobs. But they weren’t interested. A stand-off ensued, followed by an all-out strike in May 1880 that lasted not a couple of days, like the one in 1867, but the best part of two weeks. William took a hard line during the walk-out. He said no member of a trade union wo
uld be allowed back to work and then warned that if the strike were to continue, he would be compelled to move the whole business to Bristol.

  On 22 May 1880, the Western Gazette ran a story headlined ‘Strike at Messrs. Clarks Factory’:

  An unfortunate dispute is now going on here. It seems from what we can gather that a foreman has introduced machinery which the men say has reduced their earnings…. The strike has since assumed a most determined character on the part of the rounders, riveters, finishers and the workpeople of both sexes in other branches of the trade …. There is now some talk of asking the firm to submit the points in dispute of arbitration and there is no doubt that great relief would be felt by all concerned on the strike if the matter could be satisfactorily adjusted.

  Six days later, on 28 May 1880, the paper printed a breathless, long-winded response from C. & J. Clark:

  Sir, We notice in your last week’s newspaper an account of the difficulties with our workpeople … they requested a meeting with us on Monday evening when we asked to have all their grievances submitted to us in writing that they might be fully discussed. We endeavoured to ensure that they had been mistaken in attributing their shortness of work during the past winter and other hindrances to the machinery and new system introduced in the factory and that other changes of which they complained were solely caused by a determination to improve the quality of the work turned out and that they had largely benefited from the increase in orders that had resulted from these improvements. We also pointed out that supposing all their grievances to have been well founded the straightforward course would have been to have brought them before our notice at the time they occurred and not to bottle them up and wait till the season of the year when they knew that a disturbance would cause us the greatest inconvenience and then suddenly threaten to strike unless we discharged our foreman adding that if we had been so cowardly as to yield to such a threat and thus commit an act of injustice it could not have been to increase their respect for us. The next day they decided to withdraw their demands and return quietly to work. We wish to take this opportunity to state that we think that great credit is due to them for the great order maintained during a fortnight of such excitement of feeling.