Clarks: Made to Last

by Mark Palmer

  A Dennis lorry used for transporting goods around the factory site and for regular runs as a charabanc to Glastonbury railway station, seen outside the main entrance to the Street factory around 1920.

  William was regarded as a good communicator. Doubtless he would have approved of the formation, in 1919, of a Factory Committee or Factory Council or Works Council, as it variously was called. This in-house council comprised a combination of workers and management and its aim was to deal with grievances and consider any suggestions from the factory floor. In particular, it would come into its own during the depression years of the 1920s and 1930s, when work-sharing was introduced to avoid widespread unemployment. Further support for employees came in the form of clubs, such as the Street Shoemakers’ Benefit Society, Street Women’s Benefit Society and Street Women’s Club. These organisations joined forces in 1913 to become the Street Shoemakers’ Provident Benefit Society, which led to the founding in 1918 of a C. J. C. Savings Bank, which used its surplus (profit) to make payments to members who were sick or retired.

  Interior of the library, designed by Samuel Thompson Clothier and paid for by the Clark family, built in Street in 1924 and seen here in 1949.

  Several years later in 1924, C. & J. Clark began circulating its Monthly News Sheet as a means of communicating directly with the workforce. The first issue, in August, made a point of stressing that the publication had come about at ‘the request of the new factory committee’ and that it would include ‘items of news likely to be of general interest to those working in the factory’.

  That same year, a new library in Street, funded entirely by C. & J. Clark and designed by William S. Clark’s son-in-law, Samuel Thompson Clothier (known as Tom), who designed many civic buildings in Street, was officially opened by Charles Trevelyan MP, who had recently been appointed President of the Board of Education by Ramsay Macdonald, the prime minister who led the Independent Labour Party to victory in the 1924 General Election.

  Alice Clark as a young woman in 1895.

  One of the loudest voices in favour of better worker welfare was that of William’s daughter, Alice Clark. In 1914, she played a key role in setting up the Day Continuation School in Street, to which the company contributed half the costs. The school was intended expressly for boys and girls who had abandoned their education at the age of fourteen to work in the factory. Pupils would attend one morning and one afternoon a week. Alice, a resolute feminist, was thrilled at the prospect of young girls attending continuation school. She had been present, aged seventeen, at the formation of the Street Women’s Liberal Association and served as its secretary for eleven years. She sat on the executive of the Union of Suffrage Societies, which meant she spent a lot of time in London meeting and cajoling MPs, for which she had the full support of her family and fellow board members in Street. Alice also served as chairman of the committee responsible for Quaker relief work in Austria at the end of the First World War.

  At a meeting of the directors of C. & J. Clark in 1914, it was agreed that ‘the possibility of arranging to let out children from 14 to 16 or 17 during Factory hours to attend classes was … discussed and felt to be desirable’. This was conducted on an ad hoc basis, particularly during the First World War, when:

  … it had sometimes been necessary to keep one or two away from the afternoon school, labour shortages prompting the suggestion that Mr Alexander the School Master might, weed out … some of the older ones, especially any who do not care about school, or who are troublesome in discipline.

  But sanctioning boys and girls to miss school was not something the board wished to encourage. It ‘should not be a precedent to be resorted to easily again,’ it concluded.

  After the war, weekly attendance was increased to eight hours, or two half days per week for each pupil. This was in sharp contrast to what was happening nationally, despite the Education Act of 1918, which raised the school leaving age from twelve to fourteen and offered some form of continuation classes. In reality, many authorities, short of cash, were cutting back on education, leaving continuation schools solely in the hands of private companies. In 1921, a full-time qualified headmistress named Annie Bent was appointed to the Strode Day Continuation School, as the school had then become, and she was joined four years later in 1925 by a headmaster called William Boyd Henderson, known as Boyd Henderson.

  Marvelling over the circumstances contributing to his employment, Boyd Henderson referred to there being:

  … no advertising; no scanning of testimonials; no interview with the Governors. The fact that I was Millicent Falk’s [a mutual friend of Henderson and Alice Clark] cousin seemed to be all the testimonial that was needed, and on that recommendation I was appointed.

  In fact, Alice had been instrumental in the choosing of Boyd Henderson, believing that he shared many of her ideas and that he would embrace the school’s liberal ethos.

  His arrival was accompanied in 1926 by the adoption of the half-time system of twenty hours per week, which meant that if two children shared a job, one would be working in the factory while the other went to school. Pupils included workers from Clark, Son & Morland after 1926, in addition to those employed by C. & J. Clark.

  As Roger Clark wrote in the foreword of William Boyd Henderson’s Strode School, a short history of the school:

  It was always the aim of W. S. Clark, of Alice Clark and of those following them that the school should never be a mere technical adjunct of the Factory, but rather that the children who left school at fourteen to enter the Factory should acquire a richer mental background, a wider culture, such as would serve through life to stimulate the intellectual powers and an interest in things worthwhile.

  Henderson himself was passionate about the school’s mission:

  They [the pupils] are engaged in industry but yet they are continuing their education. But there is more than that. Entry in industrial life at whatever age it takes place is a revolutionary change in the lives of boys and girls. Previously they have been at a whole-time school mixing with companions of their own age. Now they are in a factory mixing with men and women. Previously they have been dependent on their parents for pocket money. Now they are wage earners whose pay packet makes a considerable difference to the weekly family budget.

  Alice Clark’s interest in what her brother Roger called ‘things worthwhile’ included writing a book, published in 1919, entitled Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century, which is still highly regarded today and was the subject of a discussion on BBC Radio 4 Woman’s Hour in 1998. It was based on the premise that British women, especially those from the middle and upper classes, were more independent and therefore more liberated in the seventeenth century than they were in the nineteenth.

  It was while working on her book that Alice was awarded the Mrs Bernard Shaw Scholarship to study at the London School of Economics. When she returned from London to Street in January 1922, she threw herself into her job, making the personnel management department a model for everything she felt important about factory life. She organised a system of records for each employee to ensure they were in the right job and adequately fulfilled in what they were doing. She checked the earnings of each worker and played a key role in setting up a company pension plan, with a trust to protect it. The pension scheme was launched in 1926 with £15,000 assigned for this purpose, with a further £10,000 added shortly afterwards. Over the next twenty years the capital would exceed £100,000.

  Alice was absent from C. & J. Clark for long periods due to illness, a legacy of her childhood tuberculosis, and she became an increasingly ardent supporter of the Christian Science movement. ‘The problem of evil, which the War had made more terrible than ever, was lying on her mind; and there was also her personal trouble of being several times disabled by illness’ wrote her sister, Margaret Clark Gillett, in a special obituary pamphlet published by Oxford University Press shortly after Alice died.

  On both these lines she came to find an explanation which satisfied her i
n the doctrine of the Christian Science Church. The doctrine helped her; she felt herself liberated; she gained the experience of rising over what was threatening to conquer her. Thus she was enabled to bring light and courage to many others.

  The article also sought to sum up Alice’s thinking about the dispersal of company profits:

  She came to feel more and more strongly that a business should be run and profits apportioned for the benefit of all concerned in it. She saw that this would involve a limit being set to the rate of interest paid to shareholders on their capital, and she realised that there would be great difficulty in rendering such a limitation effective, but she believed that a solution of this difficulty is essential if we are to find our way to juster [sic] social order.

  Greenbank Pool, built at the wish of Alice Clark and paid for from her estate, primarily for the benefit of female bathers, seen here from the roof of the new post office on Whit Sunday, 1963.

  Towards the end of her life, Alice resigned her Quaker membership, but she was often heard to declare how she ‘could not swallow Mary Baker Eddy [founder of the Christian Scientists] whole’. Family members were sorry to learn of her religious defection, but Roger remained in awe of his sister’s personality. In a letter to his mother-in-law, Emma Bancroft, in January 1927, he spoke of Alice’s ‘sweetness and calm’, adding:

  I don’t know just what Christian Science can do for the body, but if it deserves any of the credit for Alice’s spiritual poise and character it must have something in it …

  When Alice died at the age of 60, on 11 May 1934, she left a legacy to her youngest sister, Hilda, and also expressed a wish that a swimming pool be built in Street, primarily to be used by women and young girls, who were loathe to join their male counterparts bathing in the river, often naked. She set aside a gift of £5,000 for this purpose. Hilda fulfilled her sister’s wish and the pool opened for business on 1 May 1937, attracting more than 36,000 people in its first summer. The annual subscription was 2s. for those over nineteen and 1s. for those under nineteen, with an entrance fee ranging from 2d. to 6d. a visit. It became known as Greenbank Pool, after the Clark family home of the same name, and remains a popular outdoor pool and public space today.

  The Roaring Twenties heralded a new dawn for luxury and fashion goods, but among the majority of consumers there was no great appetite for spending hard-earned money on everyday shoes, even when the quality was high. The management of C. & J. Clark was only too aware of the problem, but not entirely sure how to remedy it.

  John Bright Clark was open with the workers about what he saw as some of the pressing issues facing the new generation of management. Writing in the first issue of the Monthly News Sheet in August 1924, he said C. & J. Clark was proud of its high-quality Tor brands, but:

  … unfortunately there is a limit to the demand for goods of the Tor brand standard in this country, and it must take a long time for it to increase enough to cover our capacity for output. The management are considering the possibility of introducing a cheaper grade of ladies’ shoe to meet the public demand.

  He went on to highlight the downside of this strategy and then did his best to end on an optimistic note:

  A postcard showing factory workers arriving at the Street factory main entrance in 1925.

  Competition for these lower grades is very keen and it may prove impossible to meet it in a factory burdened with the costs necessary for the present high grade of production. The management are exploring every possibility of reducing costs by mass-production and other ways, so as to secure some large business on these lines, but they cannot as yet say whether their efforts will be successful. It is not proposed to make any lines that will not do us credit or give reasonable satisfaction, but care will have to be taken to keep them distinct from existing lines, so that business done on them may be extra and not in the place of what we might otherwise be doing. For this reason, these lines will not carry the Tor brand trade mark and we shall endeavour to keep the design distinct and use different grades of upper material.

  Trepidation was in the air. And, as if to compound the anxiety, William S. Clark had a massive heart attack in August 1925, from which he would never recover. Unable to walk more than one or two steps without help, he spent the last months of his life in bed or in an armchair. On the morning of 20 November 1925, he appeared more engaged than he had been for several days, asking his son, Roger, for details of the new Club and Institute Committee, of which William had been re-elected president the day before. He was also keen to know of any developments at the latest meeting of the Western Temperance League Executive.

  William died later that morning in what was the centenary year of the founding of C. & J. Clark. He was 86. A flag was run up a pole on top of the clock tower at the factory and flown at half mast. The announcement about his funeral, scheduled for three days later, included two verses from Spenser’s Faerie Queene, beginning with William’s favourite opening line: ‘And is there care in Heaven?’ His widow, Helen, who followed the cortège in a wheelchair, wanted a band to lead the procession, but not just any band. She chose the local Street Prize Band, which played Chopin’s ‘Funeral March’.

  The turn-out in honour of the man described by the Central Somerset Gazette as ‘the father of the town’ was like nothing seen before in Street – or since. One published account said:

  The usually busy village was full of silent waiting crowds, no throb of engines from the factory, shops shut, blinds drawn, men, women and children waited in the slant November sunshine as if for a royal procession.

  Roger Clark wrote how it was:

  … a grey soft afternoon with gleams of sun and the music quite extraordinarily beautiful and moving and it had a wonderful uniting effect on all that long procession – of which one could not at any time see the end.

  The service was held at the Society of Friends’ meeting house at 3 pm and he was laid to rest in the burial ground beneath the boughs of a huge cedar tree, his grave framed by white chrysanthemums and roses. As his oak coffin – with several wreaths on top of it, including one from the Factory Council – was lowered into the ground, the hymn ‘Abide With Me’ was sung.

  From there, the band struck up once more, playing Beethoven’s Funeral March, and the crowd made its way to Crispin Hall, where a thousand people managed to squeeze into the main hall, with many others waiting outside. Dr Henry Gillett, a cousin from Oxford, explained that the service would follow Quaker traditions: ‘At a time like this when a Friend is missed from among us we recognise that there is strength in silence, communion of sympathy, deeper than words.’

  But there were words. Speaker after speaker testified to William’s great strengths, the manner in which he had saved C. & J Clark and how he had built an entire town around the family business. Before the singing of ‘O God, Our Help in Ages Past’, John Morland, who was 88, rose to his feet. He was William’s brother-in-law and a lifelong friend from their school days. The room fell silent as he prepared his words.

  A life such as we have known is one of the best witnesses for resurrection to immortal life that we can have. It is impossible for those who loved him and saw what he did to believe that such a life can pass away into nothingness.

  6

  We were now in retailing good and proper

  HEMLINES WERE RISING, but production was falling. At one point, in December 1926, shortly after William’s death, the machine room in Street was so quiet that the company accepted an order from Fox Brothers of Wellington for 5,000 pairs of gaiters, a move described by Kenneth Hudson in Towards Precision Shoemaking as ‘rather in the spirit of a manufacturer of aeroplanes agreeing to make scooters’.

  This must have concentrated minds, because a year later the new chairman, Frank (William’s brother), and the board announced a significant change of policy. Whereas John Bright Clark only three years earlier had said that the way forward in the mass market was to drop the Tor name, now he maintained that the Tor branding should be reinstated
:

  … otherwise we should rapidly come to the position where the majority of our shoes went out without our name on them. We should thus lose the goodwill attached to the name of Clarks that we have spent so many years in building up.

  He was, however, quick to stress that:

  … we still attempt to make them with the care and attention to individual differences which we give to our high-priced shoes … it is more and more necessary to get out striking and novel designs at fairly frequent intervals throughout the year, if we are to pick up every scrap of trade that may come our way.

  Whatever business you were in, picking up trade was a shared national burden. The 1926 General Strike, called by the Trade Union Congress (TUC) in support of miners who were fighting to protect their jobs, wages and working hours, cast a shadow across the whole country. Fortunately, members of the National Union of Boot and Shoe Operatives (NUBSO) were not asked to join the strike and even if they had been there was no certainty they would have fallen into line. The official NUBSO history refers repeatedly to cooperation between management and workers rather than conflict. As Spencer Crookenden recorded in K Shoes: The First 150 Years, 1842–1992:

  The leading figures of the employers’ side were not remote from the productive process; they were in active control of their own businesses and closely in touch, through their conciliation and arbitration activities on local boards, with the routine technical details of their industry.

  The economic downturn that followed the general strike, culminating in the Great Depression sparked off by the Wall Street Crash in 1929, would prove long and deep. Economists today are still divided over who was responsible for what and whether the US government could have done more to avoid the catastrophe. One view, to which many Quakers would have subscribed, was that it represented a systemic failure of free market capitalism.