Clarks: Made to Last

by Mark Palmer

  We are respectfully CJC

  Once the strike had ended, William moved Hodges quietly out of Street, and he left the company altogether in 1887. This was the only all-out strike that Clarks encountered then or since. Later, William attributed the unrest to ‘certain information that came to hand’ but was sparing with the detail, saying only that ‘all the difficulty at Street was caused by agents of the Trade Union who vowed that the machinery and system should be put an end to and used their utmost efforts to stop it’.

  Kenneth Hudson, in his 1968 book Towards Precision Shoemaking, said William opposed the trade unions precisely because he:

  … believed passionately in the importance of good relationships’ [between employer and employee] … He saw no virtue or value in discussion between representatives of capital and representatives of labour. Such meetings, he felt, made understanding and fair treatment less likely, not more.

  William was something of a renaissance man. He was a keen reader and took a great interest in architecture and engineering. Sporty as a child, he remained a strong swimmer and skater throughout most of his life. But he also managed to find time to involve himself in almost every facet of local affairs. He was an Alderman in the County of Somerset and a magistrate; he acted as treasurer of the Western Temperance League and was chairman of the Central Education Committee of the Society of Friends. For 24 years he was a member of the local authority, first known as the Local Board, later the Urban District Council.

  Quakers took seriously their wider commitments. They believed in the sacredness of human life and the acceptance of all people, regardless of gender or colour. As enshrined in the words of John Bellers in 1695, recorded in William C. Braithwaite’s The Second Period of Quakerism:

  It is not he that dwells nearest that is only our neighbour, but he that wants our help also claims that name and our love.

  The Quaker desire to create a convivial working environment would lead other Quaker families to build whole new towns on the foundations of their high-mindedness. In 1893, after Cadbury had opened a factory in Birmingham fourteen years earlier, it established a new community for the workers and their families that it called Bournville. This occupied a fifteen-acre site, ideally placed for rail and canal links, and everything was, as the company put it, ‘arranged for well-studied convenience’. A founding principle at Bournville was that ‘no one should live where a rose can not grow’.

  Not to be outdone, Rowntree, Cadbury’s big rival, acquired a twenty-acre site just outside York, and Reckitt, a Quaker company which produced household cleaning products, established its own model society near its factory in Hull. That is not to say that the entire workforce of these companies thought they were living a model existence. Generosity sometimes came with a price. The Rowntree family went as far as deploying supervisors to monitor behaviour to and from work and for a short period refused to employ single mothers.

  Likewise, men who married their pregnant girlfriends were not entitled to the customary three-day, fully-paid honeymoon and those missing work through venereal disease did not qualify for sick pay.

  Rules such as these were in keeping with Quaker thinking but, as James Walvin wrote in The Quakers: Money and Morals:

  … what convinced Quaker magnates of their approach, was not so much the moral strength of their position but its commercial results: managing the labour force decently was good for business.

  There was no question of depositing money in off-shore bank accounts or amassing excessive bonuses or taking the local community for granted. Rather, the onus was on building up the community and investing in its future. At C. & J. Clark, there may have been a brief period of tension between management and workers over the introduction of new machinery, but the firm went out of its way to build an integrated society outside the factory. It bought large swathes of land on which workers could build their own homes, helped by loans offered by the company. A terrace of cottages, for example, on Somerton Road, built in the 1830s, had been bought by Cyrus Clark, and additional houses were acquired in Leigh Road and on the High Street. Property owned by Clarks in 1882 was valued at £6,524.

  The company sponsored a Building Co-operative and land was let out cheaply for use as allotment gardens. George Barry Sutton quoted one employee as estimating that 30 per cent of Clarks’ workforce owned their homes by the turn of the twentieth century. That sense of a wider community was further advanced in 1885 when construction was completed on the Crispin Hall, a cultural and community centre commissioned by the company. Like Millfield House, it was designed by George Skipper, and was big enough to seat 800 people. In addition, there was a lecture room, library, reading room and a geological museum, with a gym and billiards room added later.

  Today, Crispin Hall – listed Grade II by English Heritage – is rented to community traders and charitable organisations, and the local Women’s Institute holds its weekly market in the main hall every Thursday. The building was officially opened in 1885 by John Bright MP, William’s father-in-law, who said:

  It has always been desired that the Factory and those connected with it should share the community life of Street rather than exist as a self-contained unit apart from that life.

  There were annual factory outings organised by management. One, on 27 June 1885, involved a trip to Plymouth on a special train that left from Glastonbury at 5.30 am and arrived on the south coast nearly five hours later. The special fare was 4s. 3d. and was available to all those working at C. & J. Clark, Clark, Son & Morland, and the Avalon Leather Board Company, which was set up by William S. Clark as an independent company (although he was the first chairman) for the turning of scrap leather into fibre board, which was used as part of a shoe’s construction.

  Poster advertising the opening of the Crispin Hall.

  On this particular works’ outing, the factory band accompanied everyone to Plymouth and the return train did not pull into Glastonbury until well after midnight.

  The British Trade Journal of 1887 evidently thought highly of Clarks’ general ethos, saying that it formed ‘as industrious, temperate and intelligent a community as can be met with’.

  In the same year that Crispin Hall opened, Clarks acquired the Bear Coffee House, formerly Jimmy Godfrey’s Cider House – now the Bear Inn – directly opposite the factory. Once the transaction had been completed its licence to serve alcohol was immediately revoked. Then, in 1893, it was demolished and rebuilt under the supervision of the architect William Reynolds, a nephew of William S. Clark. It became known as the Bear Inn, but was granted a licence again only in the 1970s.

  Crispin Hall, seen here in 1900, was provided by William S. Clark as a cultural centre for the population of Street. The hall is still in use for community and charitable events today.

  Education was another priority. Cyrus’s and James’s mother, Fanny Clark, had been instrumental in founding the British School shortly after the start of the Crimean War, which then became the Board School. Later, William S. Clark built and personally financed for several years the Strode School, which was set up for boys and girls who had left full-time education at fourteen and were employed by Clarks.

  Later, in the 1920s, a Day Continuation School was established for the benefit of boys and girls up to the age of sixteen working in the Clarks factory – but not exclusively so – as a means of extending their educational opportunities. Pupils would commit to one morning and one afternoon each week, their attendance being a condition of employment.

  The advantages of working at Clarks were offset to some degree by lower wages compared with other shoemaking companies. Clarks was not a member of the Victorian Employers Federation, formed in 1885 to represent employers on issues of industrial and labour relations, and so it was exempted from negotiations with the unions over pay and conditions. A national strike in 1897, calling for a minimum wage, a 54-hour week, and, most notably, an end to child labour, had no impact on C. & J. Clark.

  Advertisement card from 1926 for the Bear I
nn (or Hotel) in Street’s High Street, opposite the Clarks factory.

  Towards the end of the century, William relented over union representation, but still regarded it as a diversion. His main focus was on monitoring output and sales – something both his father and uncle demonstrably had failed to grapple with. William’s original 1863 Summary of Stock Account had analysed in detail the value of footwear output from 1851 onwards and he did everything he could to eliminate the imbalance between output and sales. As Sutton noted, somewhat complicatedly, in C. & J. Clark, 1833–1903: A History of Shoemaking:

  He enumerated the wage and material costs incurred annually, making sub-divisions to show expenditure on different classes of employees and components. These costs, hereafter called direct costs, were deducted from footwear output and sales to give ‘gross profit on goods made’ and ‘gross profits on goods sold’. Other expenses incurred in the footwear trade, hereafter called indirect costs, were enumerated and deducted from each of the gross profit figures yielding ‘net profit on goods made’ and on goods sold. Finally, each item of costs, expenses and profit was expressed as a percentage of both goods made and goods sold. This dual set of figures provided a comparison of costs with expected results, expressed in the value put on goods made, and with actual achievement expressed in sales.

  This policy paid off. Between 1863 and 1904, there were only ten individual years when the number of pairs produced exceeded the number ordered. And while the founders never placed a great emphasis on the accuracy of their accounting, William insisted on preparing accounts half-yearly rather than just annually.

  James Clark retired in 1889 and a new partnership was formed between William S. Clark and his brother, Francis Joseph Clark. Like William before him, Francis (always known as Frank) had been sent to the Quaker Bootham School in York, and had joined the firm at the age of seventeen in 1870. He was fourteen years younger than William. Within a short time, he was managing the cutting room and purchasing materials for uppers. Apart from one year studying at University College London, his whole career was spent in the family business. In July 1881, William wrote to his brother saying how he wanted him to:

  … feel now more than ever … thy full share of the burden of the business and … that thy future position in the business must mainly depend on thy making thyself necessary to the business.

  This partnership was to last fourteen years, concluding only when the business became a private limited company in 1903. During this period, the second-generation brothers ploughed more than four-fifths of profits back into the business, a level of reinvestment unheard of while Cyrus and James were partners.

  The footwear market, meanwhile, was changing. Ready-made shoes were now the norm rather than the exception and the 1890s saw an influx of cheap shoes from America, Switzerland, France and Austria. Department stores – or, at least, buildings where a number of different shops sold their wares – were on the increase. C. & J. Clark, however, regarded its product as superior to anything found in a department store and continued to sell only to wholesalers and specialist shoe shops. Its shoes were given suitably establishment names: ‘Lady’s Morocco Oxford Lace’ (1887); ‘Boy’s Derby Balmoral’ boot (1887); ‘Lady’s calf kid Balmoral’ boot (1887); and ‘Lady’s patent calf Langtry tie shoe’ (1895).

  Frank Clark in April 1876.

  Meanwhile, Ireland proved vexing. Cyrus and James Clark had enjoyed considerable success in a country that, back in 1836, accounted for 30 per cent of footwear sales and 20 per cent of rug sales. In 1877, William looked long and hard at the Irish figures and was not pleased by what he saw. He estimated that his salesman was spending nine weeks a year in Ireland, dealing with wholesalers in Dublin, Cork, Belfast and Limerick, and that the return, once you had factored in various discounts, was lamentable. William wanted to go direct to the retailer, effectively cutting out the middle man.

  In May 1878, he appointed a new, roving Irish agent, instructing him to offer a discount to retailers of 2.5 per cent on payment of a bill settled within three months, or 5 per cent if the bill was paid in cash. These arrangements were a great deal more favourable to Clarks than when dealing with Irish wholesalers, who often received discounts of as much as 10 per cent. But within weeks, William told his new recruit that he would not be renewing his contract once it expired at the end of three months. Sales had been poor and to make matters worse there was now no going back to the wholesalers whom he had sought to circumvent.

  Three years later, in 1881, Frank Clark travelled to Ireland and hit upon the idea of working with J. & S. Allen, which employed a team of salesmen selling a wide range of general goods. On the understanding that J. & S. Allen would carry no other firm’s footwear, Frank offered Allen 5 per cent commission on sales. This didn’t work either and by early 1884, J. & S. Allen wanted to end the agreement. Initially, William was keen to persist with it, suggesting that Allen should have direct access to stock in Ireland, but then he came to the same sorry conclusion. In February 1884, he wrote to Allen confirming how things had:

  … turned out just as we feared … and in consequence of giving you the agency we have entirely lost the custom of … 4 houses … who were, we believe, taking between them more of our goods than the total of your sales has since amounted to.

  Later that year, it was agreed that yet another new salesman would cover Ireland, but that he would travel in the north of England as well and, crucially, he would sell rugs and fibre boards too. The result was not much better. Then, in 1890, Clarks came to an agreement with other footwear manufacturers – including A. Lovell and Co., in Bristol; Ward Bros, in Kettering; and Hanger and Chattaway, in Leicester – whereby a traveller would carry a full range of shoes from various manufacturers and the shoe companies would share the traveller’s customers.

  Not long afterwards, William wrote to A. Lovell & Co. complaining that ‘we did not find the customers with whose names you furnished us generally such as we cared to open accounts with’. And in December 1891 he was telling Hanger and Chattaway that its goods were of inadequate quality to be shown alongside Clarks – and pulled out of that agreement too.

  Elsewhere in the export market, caution was the policy, not least in Australia where Cyrus and James had enjoyed mixed fortunes in the past. Soon after he took control of the company, William wrote to Dalgety & Co., a firm of wholesalers in Melbourne, saying that he was considering sending new shipments to the country, but:

  … the average results [in Australia] of the last few years have been so disastrous to us that on a principle that a burnt child dreads a fire, we are really afraid to take it up again.

  Certainly, speculative shipments, which Cyrus and James had gone in for with disastrous consequences, were to be avoided, especially after the Australian legislature, keen to stimulate the home economy, voted in 1861 to impose tariffs on goods from outside the country. But in the 1870s and early 1880s Clarks made a push to secure big enough orders from Australian wholesalers to make it worth their while shouldering the burdens of shipping costs and customs duties. This slowly began to pay off, especially in Melbourne upon the appointment of an agent, Gavin Gibson. Even Sydney, which traditionally had not been a strong market for the Clarks, showed signs of life after a company called Enoch Taylor began acting on their behalf. In 1891, sales to Australia had reached £30,000, but these were followed by a worrying dip. Tension between agents – especially when the Clarks placed a greater emphasis on Victoria, South Australia and West Australia – combined with a limited range of footwear being offered to Australians saw sales plummet in the period 1893 to 1899. In fact, the years 1896, 1897 and 1898 showed no sales at all.

  At one point, William’s worst fears were realised when he heard from an Australian retailer complaining how he was never shown any samples of ‘better class goods’. Clearly furious, William wrote to Enoch Taylor: ‘He [the retailer] says the same as others, that you people practically only offer the ankle straps and a few other lines in the Melbourne market’
.

  There were, however, encouraging results in South Africa. William sent a salesman called Walter Seymour to the country in 1885. His brief was to visit all major cities, offering customers a discount of 5 per cent. Seymour was also carrying goods made by Cave & Son, of Rushden, from which Clarks received a commission of 3.5 per cent. After a slow start, Seymour enjoyed some success and by 1889 was making two trips to South Africa per year.

  A year later, in 1890, William’s eldest son, John Bright Clark, was diagnosed with tuberculosis. It was agreed that as part of his convalescence he would travel to South Africa. He arrived in Cape Town in September and it was not long before he had identified and hired a sole agent, E. C. Marklew, to represent Clarks in the whole of South Africa. Results were extraordinary. In 1891, Marklew achieved sales of just £43; a year later, that figure was £11,804 and in 1893 it had reached £16,099. By 1902, Marklew was shifting £46,551 worth of shoes, which was more than 30 per cent of C. & J. Clark’s total sales. This meant that in 1902 South Africa was C. & J. Clark’s strongest overseas market by some distance, followed by Australia and then New Zealand.

  Sole agencies were now regarded as the way forward. In 1895, Max Vanstraaten was appointed the Clarks agent in France, Switzerland, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Holland, Belgium and Denmark. His company would receive 5 per cent commission on sales to retail outlets and 2.5 per cent on sales to wholesalers. Two years later, Oskar Wiener was hired on similar terms to look after South America.