Clarks: Made to Last

by Mark Palmer

  William S. Clark in May 1906.

  In a letter to McAfee in June 1897, William was forthright:

  The main inducement, in fact we might say the only inducement, from a business point of view … has been that we thought it would be an advantage to our general trade to be kept more closely and constantly in touch with the highest class of West End Trade.

  To this end, C. & J. Clark would commit up to £3,000 on this joint venture, receiving a quarter of net profits. In effect – apart from a shop in Bridgwater, Somerset, that closed in 1864 – this represented the company’s first tentative foray into retailing. But it was not a path upon which William was setting off with any great relish and within months the partnership ended.

  William S. Clark with his wife Helen and their children at Millfield, probably in the early 1900s. Standing, left to right: Roger, Margaret, John Bright and Alice. Sitting, left to right: Esther, Hilda, William and Helen with Fly the dog.

  The issue of C. & J. Clark and retailing would persist for decades. In later years, there were family members who thought the firm should have opened its own shops a lot earlier, others who believed the company was right to stick to doing what it did best – manufacturing shoes. Writing to John Keats in 1898 following the McAfee episode, William told of his fear of upsetting existing outlets where Clarks shoes were sold and his concern about cutting out wholesalers who supplied the retail sector:

  We are not at present prepared to cast all our present business to the winds and follow the example of Manfields and others in starting our own shops. The choice has to be between one and the other as if it got out that we were in any way going into the retail trade our present accounts would be closed. There is so much jealousy of these multiple shops.

  George Barry Sutton wrote in C. & J. Clark, 1833–1903: A History of Shoemaking that the board wanted ‘time to see which way the cat would jump’ when it came to going down the retail path. The company was not alone in this. Most UK shoemakers operated in a similar way, selling via wholesalers or specialist shops. It was from foreign competition that the main threat came, with the Americans, in particular, making shoes and then selling them in Britain through specially opened shops.

  In the same letter to Keats, William seemed to suggest that he was growing weary of the day-to-day stresses of running C. & J. Clark:

  There is also the feeling as far as I am personally concerned, that I want as soon as I can see the chance, to get out of business altogether – as I have told you before I have done my share and now I am nearly 60 I want to get free and not to launch out in fresh extension and development.

  In fact, he did not relinquish the reins of responsibility for a further 27 years, remaining chairman until 1925, by which time his arthritis had confined him to a wheelchair.

  Responding to the new demands of fashion required nerve. The company produced a poster in 1905 that originated from America, showing an attractive women looking at herself in a full-length mirror. Dressed to impress, she was seen lifting up her long skirt and admiring her shoes, replete with high heels and pointed toes. This promotion for Clarks ‘Dainty’ shoes was successful in America, but was regarded as too risqué for the British market, although it was later pressed into service in Australia and the Far East.

  Tapping into the American way of doing things took on a fresh impetus when John Walter Bostock joined the company in 1908. Bostock, who was born in 1873, came from Staffordshire. The Bostocks originally were from Heage, Derbyshire, moving to Stamford and then Northampton. Their connections with the shoe industry were even older than that of the Clarks. In 1759, Walter’s great-grandfather, William Bostock, was apprenticed to a shoemaker and it was his son, Thomas, who in 1814 set up a small business designing and making uppers, which he sent on to outworkers for them to attach the soles.

  Public procession to mark the opening of the Street waterworks, heading along the High Street and past Crispin Hall on 18 June 1904.

  Thomas Bostock had three sons, who went into partnership in 1840, naming the company Thomas Bostock & Sons, of which Lotus Ltd became a subsidiary in 1903. Lotus is today part of the Jacobson Group, whose brands include Gola, Ravel and Dunlop. In 1904, at the age of 31, John Walter Bostock, a grandson of Thomas, went to Boston, Massachusetts, to open up an agency selling, among other things, leather for uppers, and C. & J. Clark became one of his main customers.

  Bostock was a moderniser. Throughout his career, he resisted the forces of conservatism and was credited with an ‘exhaustive knowledge of the shoemaker’s craft … inventive brain, lively imagination and unswerving determination to succeed,’ according to Clarks of Street, 1825–1950.

  Frank Clark (at steering wheel) and Harry Bostock in a De Dion motor car, 1906. Harry Bostock was at this time the Clarks agent for New Zealand, and was instrumental in introducing his cousin, John Walter Bostock, to Clarks.

  Bostock made a brief trip to Street in 1907 to show the management his glacé kid and upper leathers. ‘During this visit we were so impressed by his knowledge that we arranged for him to come over again,’ wrote Frank Clark’s son Hugh. He came to Street a second time in July 1908 and within a year had accepted a permanent job as production superintendent. This put him in charge of the pattern cutting, upper cuttings, closing, making, finishing, production of new lasts and sampling. A big brief, in other words. He was the first non-family member to occupy such a senior managerial role and went on to become a director in 1928, only retiring in 1946.

  Company documents show that Bostock was given considerable authority and that he exercised it without threatening those who had come into the business by virtue of bearing the Clark name. His remuneration in 1909 amounted to a fixed salary of £750, plus 10 per cent of all profits above £8,000. A further 5 per cent would be added to profits between £12,000 and £16,000, and an additional 10 per cent on profits in excess of £20,000 a year.

  Many of his responsibilities impinged on departments headed by members of the Clark family, but it was with Hugh Clark, Frank’s son, that he forged particularly strong links. Hugh had joined the company through the traditional route. After completing his education at Bootham and Leighton Park, a Quaker boarding school on the outskirts of Reading, he embarked on a four-year apprenticeship in 1904 at the age of seventeen. But finding a role for him was difficult, judging from a letter he received from his uncle, William, in June 1908 that spoke of securing:

  … a more definite opening … to give … the opportunity of being of some real service in the business after … rather wearisome years of preparation for it.

  In fact, Hugh went on to occupy a number of senior positions, while also serving as a captain in the First World War, during which he was awarded the Military Cross for evacuating a French town under enemy fire. His first main role at C. & J. Clark was overseeing the building, engineering and electricians department. Later, he succeeded John Bright Clark as head of sales and was influential in the company’s first forays into retailing.

  Another influential figure singled out for high office was Wilfrid George Hinde, who was thirteen years older than Bostock and a grandson of James Clark. Hinde joined the firm in 1910 to work under John Bright Clark in the costings department and had special responsibilities for developing the ‘factory system’. To this end, he was sent in 1912 to America, where he visited several shoe factories including J. Edwards & Company in Philadelphia, which specialised in high-grade children’s shoes. This factory was managed by a man called Parrott, who happened to come from Somerset and was only too pleased to share his carefully defined work practices with young Hinde.

  Parrott had made factory systems his hobby and was renowned for his production timetables, which Hinde then adapted for use at Street. This marked a new departure for the company. Until then, orders went through the factory in rotation, but there was no daily or weekly timetable for each department. When it came to costings, Hinde was meticulous. On one occasion he was even keen to know how much money had been spent repairing
Frank Clark’s Daimler, prompting Frank to remind him that any work on the car was entirely due to it being used to transport customers to and from Glastonbury train station.

  Hugh Clark (at left) at the Friends’ Ambulance Unit in 1915, with his father Frank Clark’s Bianchi after conversion into an ambulance.

  Hinde, whose brother Karl also worked at C. & J. Clark, was seen as a man of many talents. In addition to costings and factory systems, he was instrumental in introducing ‘standard lines’, which in the 1920s would lead to the first mass production of shoes – footwear using high-quality materials but not requiring so many man-hours. Hinde also saw the value of advertising, eventually working on C. & J. Clark’s first campaign devised by the Arundel Advertising Company.

  Like Bostock, Hinde – who had spent time in prison as a conscientious objector in 1916 – was appointed a director in 1928 and remained with the company until 1947. Non-family members found it hard to reach such exalted positions. Richard Wallis Littleboy, who hailed from Birmingham, was one exception. He joined in 1904 and was put in charge of accounts, but was soon given additional responsibilities, not least the organisation of salaried staff. It was not long before he was a signatory on company cheques and he, too, was given a percentage share of profits.

  Bostock was keen for other non-family members to secure similar promotions, but there was often resistance. In May 1911, he pushed for a man called William Wells to be made manager of the Machine Room, but the minutes of a directors’ meeting noted that while there were:

  … great advantages in giving promotion to those who have grown up in the Factory … grave doubts [existed] as to whether he [Wells] has sufficient tact and organising power to handle a department containing 300 women and girls.

  So Hugh Clark was given the job instead and Wells became his foreman.

  The company was proud of its American influences. The 1906 Tor Shoes Catalogue trumpeted:

  … the newest and best, the lasts and patterns having been perfected in the United States by the highest American skill procurable for money, care having been taken that the shapes should be exactly adapted to the requirements of our market.

  But there were dissenting voices within Clarks about the speed of change and the pursuit of style, especially when it came to breaking into the fashionable London market.

  One of the problems in London was that as a sales territory it was split between the regions – the Midlands, the South East and even the North – and served by dedicated travelling salesmen, who worked for a straight salary, plus expenses, and who were offered bonuses in good years. The travelling salesmen were held in high esteem, but there was disagreement between them and the board over commission. ‘We do not work any of our home grounds by giving commission – we do not think it a satisfactory arrangement’, said a 1908 directors’ minute.

  A year earlier, John Angell Peck, who had been so successful as an agent in Australia, was invited to Street to ‘supervise the travellers’, although the board noted that he was not enamoured of the prospect. Peck, keen for Clarks shoes to become more fashionable, insisted on setting up a dedicated showroom in London, and by January 1908 he found the premises he was looking for in Shaftesbury Avenue, on the corner of Soho’s Dean Street. It would cost £130 a year in rent.

  ‘When in London be sure to call at our Office and Showroom’ said a leaflet sent to wholesalers, with a complicated map printed on it. Peck himself did not stay in London long, returning to Australia less than two years later. He was replaced by John Downes, a former buyer from Jones & Higgins, the noted department store on Peckham High Street, which had opened in 1867. Downes was offered a salary of £250 per annum, with commission of 1 per cent on any increase in turnover. The commission floodgates had opened and it was to prove a lucrative pool for all concerned, so lucrative in fact that in 1918 the board wanted to cap earnings, noting that some travellers were making more ‘than any director of the company has ever drawn’.

  Agents overseas, however, were enjoying mixed fortunes. Results in South Africa continued to be encouraging, with trade reaching £48,000 in 1910, compared with £28,052 in 1895, but South America proved more taxing. Peck travelled to Buenos Aires to discuss trade with Clarks’ representative, Alex Zoccola, but the situation there was not helped when a partner of Zoccola’s absconded with money. At one point, in 1911, the board noted that ‘after many thefts – unreasonable claims – and difficulties in turning out the right stuff … [it was decided] a mistake was made in ever going into it’. In fact, Clarks persisted in South America, as it did elsewhere, even sending a senior agent to Russia and Siberia to explore potential new markets.

  The French were proving tricky. Or, rather, it was proving difficult to produce shoes that the French were willing to buy. Edmund Skepper became C. & J. Clark’s agent in France and he was supplied with specially designed samples to entice retailers. An advertising campaign was launched, talking up the Clark name and pushing the Tor brand, but at a managers’ meeting in 1911 there was concern about ‘future trouble with other houses if we made a big success of the [French] advertising’. Those concerns cannot have been too great because a year later Skepper received new lines worth £1,500, with a further £1,500 of stock heading his way.

  At first, sales in France picked up, but then Skepper asked if his retailers could be given 30 per cent discounts, with an extra 2 per cent on orders of more than three dozen pairs. By 13 July 1913, the board was told that Skepper ‘reluctantly came to the conclusion he could not make a success of it’.

  Elsewhere in Europe, agencies in Germany and Switzerland were increasing their turnovers and the market in Finland was growing. New agents were sought for Austria, Belgium and Holland, and, further afield, Joseph Law, who would later head Clarks’ operations in India and the Far East, was sent to Burma (now Myanmar), Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), Java, India, Siam (now Thailand) and Sumatra.

  Shortly before the First World War, The Economist published an article entitled ‘The Victory of British Boots’, in which it took British shoemakers to task:

  It was a surprising number of years before our makers woke up to the necessity of bestirring themselves … they found that the secret of Yankee success lay entirely in style and finish, and on returning they set to work to imitate their competitors in those respects … the significant fact should not be lost sight of that the great bulk of the improvement has occurred in the last five years, and when it is borne in mind that for 1912 the exports were worth very nearly 4 millions sterling, some conception can be formed of the splendid possibilities before the trade in the immediate future.

  A parade in support of women’s suffrage outside Crispin Hall, Street, in 1913. Alice Clark, one of only a small number of women to reach a managerial position in industry at the time, was an active campaigner for the women’s suffrage movement.

  The war would take its toll in Street. Unlike shoe manufacturers in Northampton and Leicester, C. & J. Clark failed to gain a share of government orders for soldiers’ boots. Overseas sales suffered badly to the extent that by the end of the war – when C. & J Clark was producing a million pairs of shoes – a mere 100,000 of these were destined for export and it took nearly three decades for exports to double, reaching 200,000 pairs only in 1947. Overall, total volume sales fell dramatically from a 1914 peak of 1,013,000 to 541,000 in 1921.

  William S. Clark remained chairman during the war years, but the two joint managing directors – his brother, Frank, and his eldest son, John Bright – took increasing charge. Meanwhile, Roger, William’s second son, became the company secretary and Alice, William’s daughter, was responsible for Personnel Management and the Closing Room.

  Semi-retirement for William was filled with onerous duties outside the factory. From 1878 to 1922, he served continuously as a member of the Local Authority, sixteen of those years on the Local Board and 28 on the Urban District Council. And most of that time, he was chairman of both bodies, only relinquishing his post at the age of 83. On standi
ng down from the council, he was praised for his enduring sense of duty. The citation read:

  William Sessions, an outworker in Street, photographed at work around 1917.

  We are grateful for all the recollections that we cherish of your public spirit, unfailing courtesy and kindness … We remember your fearless advocacy of all you believed to be true and right. You never sought a fleeting popularity by disguising your principles, you gave freely and fully of your experience, and the fruit of your sound judgment and keen business acumen to the moulding and fashioning of the life and character of the Institutions of Street.

  William had been a Justice of the Peace, president of the Glastonbury and Street branch of the British and Foreign Bible Society, treasurer of the Western Temperance League, Fellow of the Royal Meteorological Society, long-time member of the Somerset Archeological Society (now the Somerset Archaeological and Natural History Society) and a governor of various schools. He had also developed a passion for poetry. Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene, the first volume of which was published in 1590, was a particular favourite. He carried many of its verses in his head and used to recite them to his children when they were young.