Clarks: Made to Last

by Mark Palmer

  No pressure was exerted on C. & J. Clark’s workforce to sign up or not sign up. A total of 310 men and 61 women did volunteer, of whom twelve lost their lives.

  The war saw the arrival in Street of child evacuees from London, including two boys and two girls from a family in Romford, Essex, who were taken in by Roger and Sarah Clark. One of the boys, Edgar Smith, recalls:

  My mother took us down by train. We went to Bristol Temple Meads station and Mrs Clark met us there in the family’s Lancaster … On arrival in the house, we had tea from a silver tea pot in the drawing room served by a maid in frilly cap and apron. It made quite an impression on us. We always ate with the family, even when there were guests, which usually were other Quakers. Mr Roger Clark was a remote figure to us. He always read the Bible at breakfast.

  The Street Women’s Auxiliary Fire Service during the Second World War, with Karl Hinde, a grandson of James Clark and chief engineer at Clarks from 1920 to 1952, standing at the middle of the back row.

  Edgar remembers the house being busy and that he and his siblings were encouraged to develop hobbies:

  They bought a violin for my brother Ray and gave him a beehive. I got interested in birds and this has stayed with me all my life. I visited Mrs Clark with my sister Pauline when I was about 17. Later, as I travelled on business, I called in to see her. She was very old then. I remarked how the garden wasn’t as I remembered it and she said: ‘Never look back, Edgar. Never look back.’

  Shoemaking in Street was reallocated to other buildings during the war with Germany, an inconvenience at the time, but something that proved to be an important turning point, simplifying and improving the whole process by breaking production down into smaller controlled areas. This was the precursor to a totally new way of working: individual factories presided over by individual managers, producing individual parts of a variety of different shoes. Bancroft Clark led this particular revolution and would pursue it with great energy once the war ended. He announced in 1941:

  It seems likely that future shoemaking policy will be to set up independent manufacturing units, certainly from lasting to boxing and possibly from closing to boxing, each doing 5,000–8,000 pairs per week of homogenous type of work. The man in charge of each would be more independent, have greater control of the shoes that he makes and have an easier organisation problem. Other advantages would be quicker output, and faults would be remedied more easily.

  Full-scale decentralisation was Bancroft’s goal, even though it was not until 1941 that the last outworker dropped off his hand-sewn work to the factory foreman, something William S. Clark had wanted to happen 100 years earlier.

  During the war, the first issue of the company’s trade publication, News from Clarks of Street, rolled off the presses. It was aimed at retailers, forecasting fashions and drawing attention to special sales promotions. In the November 1941 edition, Hugh Clark came up with a rallying cry:

  We have no sales problems, only supply problems. People are so anxious to get shoes that they might be tempted to become lax about quality. I think it is up to us to be careful about this. We at Clarks are very jealous of our century-old reputation for sound footwear and we are determined to do our utmost to keep that flag flying. If you find us slipping up in any degree, do not hesitate to tell us at once, in spite of the fact that you could probably sell our shoes even if quality was not up to standard.

  From 1942, the Board of Trade encouraged shoemakers to produce wooden-soled footwear to combat the shortage of leather. Bostock and his senior lieutenants rose to the challenge, inventing a hinged wooden sole for use on ladies’ walking shoes called Limbers. This proved to be far more comfortable than it sounds once the company decided to use beech wood and developed a method for drying out the timber, using a special kiln recommended by the Timber Research Association. Wooden soles gave good support to weak arches and, although the Board of Trade had initially been wary about granting C. & J. Clark a licence for them, such was their success that the technique was circulated officially throughout the British shoe industry.

  Sales director Hugh Clark (at left) with George Pursey, his assistant sales manager, in November 1943.

  Between March 1943 and June 1945, C. & J. Clark produced 146,000 pairs of wooden-sole shoes, some 12 per cent of their total output for women. But because the cost of wooden soles was almost 25 per cent greater than leather, they were phased out once the war ended and leather became more freely available.

  Sales of children’s sandals held up remarkably well during the war. They were deemed as suitable shoes for children sent off to the countryside away from congested urban areas at risk from German bombings. And women were encouraged to buy sturdy Clarks shoes, spurred on by a 1941 showcard that played on the government’s ‘Walk when you can’ poster. ‘Ease the burden which war puts on transport – but do it comfortably in Clarks shoes.’

  The new Peter Lord shop in Bristol, photographed in 1946.

  Utility shoes and wartime restrictions did not mean that Clarks gave up on the pursuit of new designs, or new designers. Far from it. In 1936, Hugh Clark had commissioned André Perugia, the French shoe designer who had opened his own shop in Paris at the age of sixteen, to come up with six creations at 100 francs apiece. And Bancroft made contact with Mabel Winkel, whom he described as the ‘ablest shoe stylist in America’. Somervell had hired Winkel in the mid-1930s and she also worked with Lotus. She seemed poised to sign a contract, but wanted $7,500 a year for her services, which scared Bancroft off. He was, however, committed to post-war creativity, noting how style was no longer:

  … merely a matter of upper colour and decoration … style is an expression of the desires and wishes of the buying public … style will move faster both in the sense of change … and in spreading rapidly throughout the country.

  Street escaped the bomb damage that devastated some parts of the West Country, but in Bristol, the Peter Lord shop in Queen’s Road was virtually demolished during a heavy raid on 24 November 1940. The following morning, Hugh Clark drove to Bristol and negotiated a lease for new premises almost opposite the old ones and it was business pretty much as usual. Similarly, the London office was hit and had to be moved temporarily to Watford before eventually returning to Mitre House.

  Bancroft Clark succeeded his father as chairman on 1 January 1942, although Roger remained on the board until 1947. Retirement clearly did not sit comfortably with Roger.

  I don’t pretend to like it, but it is obviously the only thing to do at my age … I have said I wished to receive notices and agendas and to attend meetings as hitherto and of course they agreed to this. I may continue to make the minutes a while longer.

  Indeed, Roger continued to write the minutes of directors’ meetings at the Avalon Leather Board Company until 1959, long after his retirement as a board member of C. & J. Clark. His official retirement brought the directors together in Bancroft’s office at 2 pm on 1 July 1947. He wrote in his diary:

  I have thought some time of retiring – my deafness so much now that I don’t really understand – and as Hugh [Clark], just 70, is retiring from the Board (I think he should have been asked to stay to 75) Bancroft suggested I should give up too. Bancroft said much of what Hugh has done for the business in many ways and the others spoke warmly – his energy and judgement as to styles – selling – and everyone spoke of his human kindness and friendship. I suddenly broke down in what I tried to say and was speechless for a moment – and tears …

  7

  Measuring feet, maximising profit

  IN THE YEARS that followed the Second World War, Britain was to change beyond recognition – but not immediately. As the country celebrated the end of warfare and the beginnings of wide-reaching reform under a victorious Labour government, the cultural and economic landscape in 1945 was far from fertile. Making do was the edict of the day.

  As David Kynaston described in Austerity Britain, 1945–51, there were:

  … no supermarkets, no motorways, no teaba
gs, no sliced bread, no frozen food, no flavoured crisps, no lager, no microwaves, no dishwashers, no Formica … Central heating rare, coke boilers, water geysers, the coal fire, the hearth, the home, chilblains common … White faces everywhere. Back-to-backs, narrow cobbled streets, Victorian terraces, no high-rises. Arterial roads, suburban semis, the march of the pylon. Austin Sevens, Ford Eights, no seat belts, Triumph motorcycles with sidecars. A Bakelite wireless in the home, Housewives Choice or Workers Playtime or ITMA on the air, televisions almost unknown … Milk of Magnesia, Vick Vapour Rub, Friars Balsam, Fynnon Salts, Eno’s, Germolene. Suits and hats, dresses and hats, cloth caps and mufflers, no leisurewear, no teenagers. Heavy coins, heavy shoes, heavy suitcases, heavy tweed coats, heavy leather footballs, no unbearable lightness of being. Meat rationed, tea rationed, cheese rationed, jam rationed, eggs rationed, sweets rationed, soap rationed, clothes rationed.

  Within a year of VE Day, disgruntlement was seeping into the system. The Sunday Pictorial, sister paper of the left-leaning Daily Mirror – and one of several publications in which Clarks shoes were advertised – launched a ’100 Families to Speak for Britain’ campaign, in which readers were invited to get their grievances off their chests and on to the national agenda. One woman, Eileen Lewis, from Croxley Green in Hertfordshire, told the newspaper: ‘I can’t get shoes for my kiddies. A couple of weeks ago I spent all day trying to buy two pairs of shoes. I must have called at twenty shops’.

  Mrs Lewis’s frustration would have found sympathy in Street, where a contributor to the first issue of Clarks Comments, a new in-house publication for staff, retailers and suppliers, railed against ongoing wartime restrictions. The unnamed contributor was particularly exercised by the:

  … absurd regulation which prevents a shoe manufacturer from saving materials and making open ventilated sandals. In America, they have been wiser than we in this respect, and have allowed the manufacture of ventilated shoes; indeed, half the shoes women wear today are toeless and heel-less … Women’s shoe styles in America are now blossoming out again. During the five years of relative separation, they have made considerable changes. Their lasts are broader in the tread, shorter in the forepart length and bigger in the joint measure.

  Shoemakers had often looked enviously at their counterparts across the Atlantic both in the context of styling and technical breakthroughs. In the 1940s, Americans had developed the ‘slip-lasted’ shoe method, often referred to as the California Last construction. This required no stiff insole board. With a slip-lasted shoe, the upper materials were stitched to a fabric sock. The last was then forced into the shoe, the platform cover neatly wrapped over a lightweight flexible board and the sole attached in the traditional way. This process created more flexible and therefore more comfortable shoes, though they coped less well in wet conditions.

  In Britain, people tended to walk more than they did in America, where, by 1946, the motorcar was a common feature of post-war life. But even so – and much to the chagrin of Bancroft Clark – Americans were presented with a far wider choice of what to wear on their feet and were buying twice as many shoes per head as the British.

  To find out why, Bancroft dispatched Tony Clark to America in April 1946, along with Leslie Graves, a factory manager with proven production and design skills, and two other heads of department, one in charge of last and wooden heel-making, the other responsible for pattern cutting. They visited New York, Boston, St Louis, Cincinnati and Buffalo, where they inspected the maple trees from which the Clarks last-making blocks were cut. The trip resulted in a stark observation: ‘The chief impression, which we brought back about shoemaking was the great superiority of American machinery over ours,’ wrote Tony Clark in Clarks Comments. He continued:

  Here, we are suffering badly after six years of war through having to operate worn-out and obsolete machinery which we cannot even get repaired satisfactorily, let alone replaced by new and improved types … The type of machine they are using [in America] is in many ways more efficient and up-to-date than ours. We saw in every department machines which we need badly and which, if we had them, would lead to an immediate improvement in the quality of our shoes and also to increased output.

  Bancroft had travelled to America himself immediately after the war and was convinced that despite continued rationing and other impediments to the growth of the UK economy, the shoe trade was ripe for expansion. He predicted that if employment picked up and foreign trade treaties were reformed, shoe manufacturing would be set fair. Crucially, he recognised that if buying power became stronger it would be women doing the spending:

  Women will want to feel neat, trim, smart and lovely … Their outward appearance will be an expansion of and a cause of their inner well-being … Women will want more clothes and that includes shoes. With a shorter working week they will have time to think about nice clothes and [have] more time to wear them … Shoe style is not merely upper colour and decoration. One of the most important elements in women’s style will be fit. A shoe that does not fit and does not keep its fit will slop, lengthen, gape, bag, wrinkle. Whatever eye appeal it may have in the window, it will not be style on the foot. What women will want to buy, what they will be educated to buy, will be style on the foot.

  Bancroft was convinced of the urgent need to widen Clarks’ production capabilities, something that had been tried and tested several years earlier in 1938 when the company entered into a formal and successful arrangement with John Halliday & Son to make shoes in Ireland. Halliday was a former Leeds manufacturing firm founded in 1868, specialising in heavy agricultural boots. In 1928, it closed down in the north of England and opened up in Ireland after buying an old cholera hospital in Dundalk, County Louth. But, hindered by the decline of Irish farming and the new-found popularity of the Wellington boot, it struggled. Arthur Halliday, the company’s managing director, needed to diversify and was approached by four different companies: Padmore & Barnes, Lotus, Somervell, which made K Shoes, and C. & J. Clark. Halliday was educated at the Quaker Bootham School in York and it must have been clear almost immediately that he would slip seamlessly into the Clarks culture – and so it proved. Once the deal had been signed, Bancroft wrote that Arthur Halliday was ‘our strongest card … [who] likes to have our support against the Wild Irish who are his workers, staff and directors’.

  A five-year contract was drawn up between C. & J. Clark and John Halliday & Son, and a new subsidiary, Clarks Ireland Ltd, was formed. Initially, the Irish operation made only women’s shoes, but within a year it had moved into children’s footwear. The contract was extended in 1943 and by 1948 Halliday’s was producing 500,000 pairs of Clarks shoes a year.

  Such was the importance of the Irish market that Arthur Halliday joined the board of C. & J. Clark Ltd on 1 January 1947, shortly after John Walter Bostock retired and a few months before Wilfrid Hinde stood down, both big characters who had enjoyed starring roles in the company in the first half of the twentieth century. Meanwhile, H. Brooking Clark, son of Hugh Clark, joined the company after leaving Oxford university and serving as an officer in the Scots Guards in North Africa. Brooking would be invited on to the board in 1952 and later became company secretary before leaving C. & J. Clark in 1965.

  Bancroft Clark, chairman from 1942 to 1967.

  During the war, owing to a lack of space in Street, Clarks had opened a closing room in St John Street, Bridgwater, to machine-finish the uppers of shoes for the armed forces and then, after the war, to make demobilisation footwear. This led to the launch of a full-scale factory in Bridgwater in June 1945 when Clarks exchanged contracts on a former dairy, where the emphasis was on developing the slip-lasting process that had proved so successful in America. In time, the factory was enlarged with the construction of a new building in the dairy yard that had become a recreational area for employees. The women workers lost their netball pitch but Clarks gained a valuable making room, where local unskilled labour was trained by teams sent from Street to Bridgwater each morning.


  A second factory was opened in Shepton Mallet, built on the site of Summerleaze park, where American forces had been based during the war. On taking possession of it in June 1946, Clarks acquired eight double Romney huts, which had been used as aircraft hangars and then warehouses. A mere seven days after being granted a licence by the Ministry of Works, the huts were converted and production of ‘Infants Playe-ups Sandals’ (known shortly afterwards as ‘Play-ups’) began.

  Bancroft Clark had long been a believer in decentralisation and pursued it like a man on a mission. Several years earlier, following a visit to Bally in Switzerland, he had reported seeing:

  … factories scattered about in different villages so that they do not get either too many people living close together, or too large a proportion of their workpeople coming long distances.

  In 1945, he outlined his overall strategy, talking about how the new additional factories would ‘take the lid off people’ with ‘each main unit … separately managed by a manager of potential directorial status’.

  The Shepton Mallet factory was managed by A. William (Bill) Graves, the younger brother of the production expert Leslie Graves, who had been responsible for the factory in Bridgwater. Shepton Mallet employed ten women and eight men and in its first week produced 200 infants’ Play-ups – all of which turned out to be sub-standard. There was no disguising this from Bancroft when he visited at the end of that week. The chairman expressed his displeasure, after which Graves made sure that any deficiencies in the system were ironed out, and by the end of 1946 the factory was making 1,000 pairs a week. A year later, Number Two Factory, as it was called, opened on the Shepton Mallet site, followed closely by Number Three Factory. In 1953, the UK Shoe Research Association declared the Shepton Mallet factories the most efficient in the country, and Graves went on to open a further eight factories in the West Country.