Clarks: Made to Last

by Mark Palmer

  In Bridgwater, a new building at Redgate Farm, to be known as the Redgate factory, opened in January 1947, covering 20,000 sq ft and costing £20,500. Here, within twelve months, a highly efficient mass-production capability boosted output to 4,650 pairs a week, mainly of women’s casual shoes, particularly ‘Clippers’, which were advertised as ‘Clippers in gay colours for playtime’.

  It had been a swashbuckling start to peacetime trading. Sales in 1946 were up 28 per cent on 1945, with profits rising by 23 per cent, a result that may not have come as a surprise given that Clarks was one of only a few companies which managed to maintain their output during the war. The firm produced 70 per cent more shoes in 1946 than it did in 1935 and for the first time it was making the same proportion of women’s and children’s footwear. This growth would continue at an even faster rate. Clarks made 1.25 million pairs in 1946, rising to an astonishing 2 million in 1948, and in terms of personnel, by the end of the year there were close to 2,000 men and women working across all the Clarks factories.

  Bancroft was not sitting in his chairman’s chair with any sense of complacency, however. In the 1946 annual Directors Report and Accounts – which was read only by senior members of the company – he was quick to point out that government subsidies to tanners for help with the cost of hides and skins had created an ‘artificial position’ and therefore he was revising down his forecasts for the coming year. He also took the opportunity to make some critical observations about the workforce: ‘a certain laxness in time-keeping … [and] difficulty in getting new employees to reach the speed of output required in a competitive shoe industry.’ Things had not improved greatly a year later: ‘Our only grumble with our employees is a certain slackness about time-keeping’ he told the directors. ‘Our industry works a 45-hour week, but the actual hours worked in Street are well short of that.’ Perhaps, but there was nothing slack about the figures. Turnover in 1947 reached £1,681,270, compared with £1,288,468 the previous year.

  Time-keeping was not the chairman’s only gripe. Shortly after New Year 1948, he told the Factory Council that shops were still returning too many faulty shoes and that output had to increase still further. The Americans, he said, were producing ‘about half as much again per head per week as you do here. Our machines are the same, the conditions are the same; the only difference is the tempo of the work.’

  Production did increase following the purchase of the manor house next to the Shepton Mallet factory, which came with twelve additional acres of land earmarked as the site of a new factory expressly for children’s shoes. And extra units were built in Bridgwater, which meant that by 1948 nearly a quarter of all Clarks shoes were made outside Street.

  Bancroft developed the concept at Clarks that each manager had to draw up his own budget annually. These were added together to form the main budget, which the board reviewed and modified as appropriate. The revised figures were then handed back to the managers. Monthly accounts had to be produced with all items matched against their respective budgets. These accounts were published internally for the benefit of senior managers and directors in a ‘blue’ book, a process which still continues today.

  A greater emphasis was put on time and motion studies, developing new manufacturing techniques and generally monitoring efficiency in minute detail, all of which had the unanimous support of Peter Clothier and Tony Clark, who were Bancroft’s right-hand men during the years of factory expansion. One member of the Clark family has described these three as ‘the Holy Trinity’. They were certainly close. Bancroft was the oldest – by six years from Tony and eight from Peter. Tony and Peter had spent a lot of time together as small children because Tony’s mother, Caroline Pease, died from an embolism twelve days after giving birth to her only child. Esther Clothier became something of a surrogate mother to Tony and it was through the Clothiers that Tony developed a great love for Bantham in South Devon. After the war, Peter Clothier and Tony Clark both bought houses there and in later years other members of the Clark family did likewise. There is still a strong family tradition of going to Bantham for short breaks and holidays.

  Peter had been made managing director of the Avalon Leather Board Company in 1936 and became a director of C. & J. Clark three years later. His great expertise was machinery, whereas Tony Clark had a reputation for being, in the modern parlance, a ‘people person’. Tony was a liberal Quaker. He drank alcohol and hunted to hounds (as did his father, John Bright Clark). Bancroft was seen as the intellect, Peter as the technocrat and Tony as the life-enhancer.

  Tony Clark, described as one of the ‘Holy Trinity’; the other two were Bancroft Clark and Peter Clothier.

  All three were adamant that establishing new centres of production under the control of competing managers was the way forward, and so rapid was this expansion that by 1960 there were, in addition to Bridgwater, Shepton Mallet and Street (which in itself had been greatly enlarged, especially with the opening of The Grove in 1950), eleven factories in the southwest – in Midsomer Norton (1952), Radstock (1953), Glastonbury (1954), Minehead (1954), Warminster (1956), Plymouth (1957), Weston-super-Mare (1958), Ilminster (1959), Yeovil (1960), Castle Cary (1960) and Bath (1961). Yet more would be opened during the 1960s in Exmouth, Barnstaple, Rothwell and New Tredegar (in south Wales). The Rothwell factory near Kettering in Northamptonshire, was bought in 1966 expressly to make men’s shoes.

  The first truly devolved factory was Mayflower in Plymouth, which opened in October 1957. It was financed with help from Plymouth Corporation, which then rented it back to the company on a long lease. The Lord Mayor of Plymouth, Alderman Leslie F. Paul, cut the ceremonial ribbon, watched by Peter Clothier, who had ultimate responsibility for the factory. Plymouth concentrated on fashionable women’s shoes in the Wessex range. It was instructed to implement tight fiscal control over every aspect of its business, but had its own accounts department and work study team, which answered to local management rather than to Street. It also developed its own system of training unskilled labour and was seen as a pioneer of new technology. Every new employee received individual training and he or she was encouraged to suggest ways to speed up or simplify the work. If any of their ideas were adapted, they were rewarded. This scheme was another means of increasing production speeds, encouraging workers to resolve any issues around them and work together as one unit.

  The imperative for efficiency was greater than ever as shoe imports from Western Europe surged: some 3.3 million pairs were imported in 1956, three times as many as in 1953, with Italy posing the greatest threat at the higher end of the market. Furthermore, the price of sole leather had continued to rise and this had to be passed on to retailers, who were beginning to baulk at what they were being asked to pay for stock.

  Clarks, like other UK shoe manufacturers, was keen to use alternative resin-rubber soling material, but the government was allowing only small quantities of the ingredients needed to produce this to be imported from America and Canada. Factories such as the one in Plymouth had to find other ways not just to compete but to outperform their continental rivals. Speed of production was crucial. Peter Clothier determined that the conveyors in Plymouth were only to carry shoes being worked on at the time and not those awaiting attention. Maintenance of machinery was given a high priority on the principle that money spent on preventing breakdown was a saving on acquiring new equipment. There was also a radical rethink on the use of lasts. When the Mayflower factory opened, each last was used on average twice a week, in keeping with conventional shoemaking practice, but within months, individual lasts were being used on average 23 times a day – and a pair of shoes passed through the Mayflower factory in a mere three days.

  Plymouth also developed a method whereby shoes were softened to make them easier to shape and work with in the final stages of assembly. This was called ‘rapid-mulling’ and involved the use of steam, as prescribed by scientists working at the Clarks laboratory in Street. According to Clarks of Street, 1825–1950:

  Th
ey were exciting times for all concerned. Managers had to create, in their area, all aspects of factory activity, from the production of finished shoes to the organisation of workers councils. On their efficiency would depend the success of the firm in beating its rivals. In the early days, on the sturdy principle that they had to pay their own way, there had to be a good deal of improving, and anyone at any level who saw a real way to saving money or time was rewarded according to the amount saved.

  Before the war, Clarks had developed the process of making what was called ‘Pussyfoot’ sheets from scrap crepe that proved suitable – and hardwearing – for shoe soling, but this was suspended except for certain government requirements. Then, immediately after the war, Clarks pioneered a new soling material called Solite, which wore significantly longer than leather and was regarded as more comfortable than Pussyfoot. Showcards for Clarks shoes made with Solite claimed they provided three times the wear and mothers were reminded that ‘active feet can run through a mint of shoe leather’.

  Solite was developed out of a material initially discovered in the United States under the trade name Meolite. Its formulation was a closely guarded secret and was not easy to obtain in the UK. However, Clarks acquired samples and an in-house chemist, James Hill, analysed the material and found it was a styrene/butadiene co-polymer. By adding more styrene the end product was hardened whereas more butadiene softened the material. It could therefore be adapted to suit different types of footwear.

  Clarks developed its own formula, and production began in the Rubber Department in Street in 1949. It was then manufactured in bulk at the Larkhill Rubber Company in Yeovil from around 1966 and sold to the external trade in addition to its own domestic use. The Plymouth factory used Solite extensively well into the 1970s, producing some 50,000 pairs of Women’s Court shoes a week.

  The actress Moira Lister being fitted with Clarks Skyborne bootees at the Quality Footwear Exhibition, Seymour Hall, London, in November 1947. Hugh Clark is at her left.

  One of the other major technological breakthroughs during this period was the introduction of the Construction Electric Mediano Automatico (CEMA) machine, which resulted from C. & J. Clark collaborating with the Grimoldi company in Spain, whose founder, Gonzalo Mediano de Capdevilla, was a circus performer and trick cyclist from Barcelona. CEMA allowed for the moulding of rubber soles directly on to the lasted leather upper, a revolutionary breakthrough because it did away entirely with labour-intensive methods of both machine-sewing and welting. It greatly improved the bond of sole to upper and was particularly suitable for children’s shoes and heavyweight men’s footwear, especially boots. CEMA produced shoes with far greater traction and soles that were waterproof. They also retained their shape and were regarded as supremely comfortable.

  Mediano de Capdevilla’s first contact with C. & J. Clark had been in 1949 when Nathan Clark, one of Roger Clark’s sons and the inventor of the Desert Boot – who was then working with Arthur Halliday in Ireland – asked Bancroft permission to send Jack Clarke, the company engineer, to Barcelona to investigate this new discovery. Clarke was accompanied by Bob Cottier, Nathan’s assistant, who spoke good Spanish. Within weeks, an agreement was reached and by Christmas a CEMA machine was set up in Street, and Mediano de Capdevilla sent over two men, one a rubber technician, the other a mould maker, to demonstrate its powers. The two Spaniards stayed three months, during which time various modifications were made to their machine. If C. & J. Clark was to benefit fully from CEMA, it needed to be used on lines with long production runs (to keep mould costs low) and the curing time of the rubber needed to be as short as possible. The original Spanish machines had cure times of fifteen minutes, but the company’s own engineers managed to reduce this to as little as 3.5 minutes, depending on the style of shoe. In July 1950, C. & J. Clark placed an order for seven such machines from a firm of engineers in Chard and the company gave an undertaking to Mediano de Capdevilla that it would produce 2,500 pairs per week of children’s shoes in the Shepton Mallet factory – and that he would receive a royalty of one per cent on every CEMA-moulded shoe sold.

  CEMA-moulded footwear was popular with the public and by December 1957 the two millionth pair of shoes made using this method had rolled off the assembly line. CEMA was a bright light in shoe production, and was only eclipsed in 1962 when Clarks began experimenting with injection moulded polyvinyl-chloride or PVC that required no curing time at all – although CEMA was still used on boots. Later, polyurethane (PU) proved even lighter and more hard-wearing than PVC.

  Bancroft was jubilant about CEMA:

  We believe we are the first in this country to make shoes this way and we think we are the only people making them with the precision necessary for our type and grade of product. We have faith that the project will be successful and hope that time will prove us right.

  Bancroft recognised that the post-war ‘baby boom’ was good for business, possibly very good indeed. But winning the trust of the next generation of mothers was imperative if that business was to come Clarks’ way. Housewives needed to be convinced that their children would be wearing not just properly fitting shoes but shoes that would care for their feet. In the 1930s, many shops deployed the Pedescope to measure a child’s foot. This bulky contraption required the customer to stand on a step and look down at his or her feet through a pane of glass. It would remain a common feature in shoe shops until the early 1960s – but it came with a health warning: ‘Repeated exposure to X-rays may be harmful. It is unwise for customers to have more than twelve shoe-fitting exposures a year.’ On the other hand, you could have as many shoe-fitting exposures as was humanly possible if it involved the Clarks Footgauge.

  This simple method of measuring feet accurately and quickly had been developed principally by John Walter Bostock during the late 1930s and early 1940s. American shoe manufacturers were well practised in offering their customers a variety of shoe sizes, though Clarks was not far behind them, especially with its anatomical range of Hygienic shoes that came in three separate widths and the women’s Wessex lines, which were offered in five width fittings and twelve sizes. After the Second World War, soldiers complained that their feet had suffered as a result of poorly fitting boots, prompting calls from the Boot and Shoe Industry Working Party Report for multi-fitting footwear in a variety of widths at affordable prices. It wanted ‘some enterprising medium price manufacturer (and/or distributor) to extend the multiple fitting trade downwards to the mass volume middle ranges of trade’.

  Clarks and Somervell were at the forefront of this particular revolution, joined by the likes of Abbotts, Church’s, Feature Shoes, Lilley & Skinner, Lotus, Novic, Sexton and Timpson. In a 1947 document laboriously entitled ‘Retail Margins on Multiple Fitting Shoes’, a representative from Somervell told the board of the Trade and Federated Associations of Boot and Shoe Manufacturers that:

  … there is no difficulty about measuring a foot with reasonable accuracy, and there is no difficulty in carrying a stock that will fit the bulk of feet, but measuring feet takes time and fitting feet slows down stock turn … You are only likely to get a reasonable standard of shoe fitting where people are prepared to pay for that standard of shoe-fitting and where the retailer finds it profitable to provide it.

  Clarks begged to differ – and had done its homework. During the war, Bostock had arranged for every child in Street and every woman in the factory to have their feet properly measured. Then, in 1946, special fitting courses were held at the factory for Peter Lord salespeople and for those who worked in independent shoe shops that sold Clarks. These courses, which were normally held in rooms at The Bear Hotel opposite the factory, were expensive and time-consuming, but made sure Clarks was known as the company that looked after children’s feet (although the ‘Finder Board’ used by K Shoes and Howlett & White’s plastic gauge were widely available and would have claimed to do the job just as well).

  Those who came to Street for one of these courses went away with a full set of instru
ctions on a flyer entitled How To Use Clarks Footgauge, although something of a technical mind-set was required to decipher the full capabilities of this device. The manual started off simply enough: ‘Use on sloping table of fitting stool.’ But after that the going got heavier:

  The gauge is marked with a scored line exactly nine inches from the inside of [the] heel pillar. Now place the size-scale plate so that when the toe-gauge slide is on this nine-inch line the pointer is exactly level with the 60 size mark. Having done this all other sizes will be accurately measured. See that the foot to be measured is at right angles to the leg … keep the toes flat with your thumb while adjusting the toe-gauge slide.

  Measuring the customer’s foot accurately and quickly is crucial. This Clarks fitting stool with integrated footgauge of May 1957 did the job perfectly.

  And on it went:

  To measure the girth (or joint measure) move the tape carrier so that the tape comes immediately central with the great toe joint. The tape carrier should be pushed back at the outer side of the foot to the full extent of its swivel movement. This will cause the tape to run diagonally across the foot and will give a correct average position for measuring.

  Eventually, the big moment arrives:

  Take the reading on the tape and find the corresponding number from the printed scale in line with the size pointer. The column in which this number (or the number nearest to it) is found shows the correct fitting.

  ‘In between’ measures were a different matter and needed their own paragraphs of instructions.

  Clarks took shoe-fitting so seriously that it continued to conduct its own research on the subject throughout the 1950s. At one point, the company embarked on a survey – an early exercise in market research – of 1,250 schoolchildren in Somerset and managed to persuade the county council and two prominent orthopaedic surgeons to back it. The survey revealed that in some towns, such as Taunton and Yeovil, as many as 44 per cent of children weren’t present when having shoes bought for them. This was horrifying. To Clarks, the very idea of buying a pair of children’s shoes that did not fit properly was deplorable. And the younger the customer the better. Children would be parents one day.