by Mark Palmer
… those who have been trained for the execution of their management duties and who give full-time devotion to them … we seek to bring in outsiders, as well as able members of the shareholding families who are interested and will accept appointment on these conditions.
Bancroft made a special effort to check up on the fifth generation as they approached the start of their working lives. In the autumn of 1959, he went to see Tony Clark’s son, Lance, who was reading geography at Oxford university and considering a career in the colonial service. Lance was an exceptional rugby player, who went on to play for Bath.
‘Bancroft said I should try six weeks working in Street – and I’ve been there nearly 60 years,’ says Lance, who, when interviewed in 2011, was still working as a consultant at Clarks, reporting directly to the chief executive.
Lance developed a particular interest in how shoes were made. After building a relationship with Peter Sapper, a German with a small moccasin business called Sioux, Lance, while working at Padmore & Barnes in Ireland (part of Clarks Ireland Ltd), was responsible for ‘Project M’, which came to fruition in 1967 with the launch of the Wallabee. This iconic shoe – a lace-up with crêpe sole, inspired by classic men’s moccasins – was at first regarded as too radical for the British market but enjoyed almost immediate success in North America. To advertise the Wallabees, the largest billboard ever seen up to that time on the North American continent (it measured 185ft by 45ft) was erected in Toronto, Canada, next to a highway used by more than 250,000 motorists every day. By 1973, the two Padmore & Barnes factories – in Kilkenny and Clonwell – made little else other than Wallabees, producing some 18,000 pairs a week.
Other members of the fifth generation who played prominent roles during the 1960s and 1970s were Jan and Richard Clark, the second and third surviving sons of Bancroft and Cato Clark.
This billboard advertising Clarks Wallabees in Toronto in 1967 was at that time the largest ever seen in North America.
‘Most members of the family went down the same route on leaving university’ says Richard Clark, who graduated from Cambridge university in 1961. He continues:
We were a manufacturing company based in Street and our education in the business tended to follow similar lines. I spent about six weeks in various independent shoe retailers and then some time at Peter Lord. I also went to a tannery and a factory in France. Then Bill Graves gave me a job as a factory assistant and had me working on projects related to children’s shoes. Eventually, I went to Ireland and ran the New Forest factory at Dundalk, which was making women’s runabouts called Serenity.
Bancroft persistently worried about finding jobs for family members – or, at least, the right jobs. Shortly before his retirement in 1967, he wrote a document called ‘Management Changes’, in which he cited the example of Anthony Clothier, eldest son of Peter Clothier (grandson of William S. Clark), who had gained promotion to ‘something within Clarks Ltd, before he had mastered and made a success of his present job’. According to the minutes of a board meeting held in 1967, this was a view shared by Tony Clark, but Stephen Clark said in a note to Bancroft that:
… the apparent nepotism that you are feeling puritanical about is an advantage to the business. Without it we would not have had the guts to put people as young as Anthony [Clothier] and Jan [Clark] into their present job. We should have filled them by seniority, with someone of 40 and had we done that we should not have been acting in the best interests of the shareholders.
Anthony in fact rose within Clarks to become a main board director from 1977 until 1986. He was later president of the British Footwear Manufacturers Federation on two occasions, and president of the European Shoe Federation from 1979 to 1983.
The Clarks commitment to Street in the 1960s remained consistent with its Quaker heritage. In 1959, the Clark Foundation was set up to fund educational and recreational opportunities for all ages. In 1963, for example, the Strode Theatre opened, funded entirely by the foundation and drawing in audiences from around the West Country for plays, films, pantomimes and revues. One notable landmark was its staging of the premiere of William Douglas Home’s The Secretary Bird, which went on to enjoy stellar success in London’s West End.
Clarks spent £9,000 on an extension to the Street library, after which more than a third of the town signed up to become registered readers. The foundation also paid a contribution of £35,500 towards a sports hall for Strode College, formerly known as Strode Technical College, and £80,000 towards changing Strode School into a comprehensive, Crispin School. It also paid £47,000 for a new pavilion and to renovate the field of Victoria Athletic Field and Club for use by members of the public and not just Clarks employees. More controversially, Clarks helped facilitate the provision of a relief road around Street to encourage lorries and other heavy vehicles not to clog up the narrow town centre. Some shops and small businesses expressed their reservations, arguing that they would lose business from the by-pass, but the work went ahead anyway and the road remains in place today.
James Lidbetter, the Street librarian, stands in the new library extension built in 1959.
The sense of community, a world within a world, was reinforced in 1957 when the company launched Clarks Courier, a newspaper which for some years was published in addition to Clarks Comments. Although intended to fill a perceived need for better and more widespread communication, the Clarks Courier – which over the years became referred to simply as the Courier – was read not merely by Clarks employees. You could pick up a copy for 2d. on Street’s High Street. The paper was printed fortnightly on presses belonging to the Bristol Evening World, and its policy and editorial content were determined by the Clarks public relations department, which in turn liaised with Vernon Smart, the personnel director, particularly over sensitive matters of labour relations.
To dismiss the Courier as a management propaganda sheet would do a disservice to those who submitted copy from the far reaches of the Clarks empire, often with judicious wit and an enviable attention to detail. Correspondents were appointed in each factory and there were regular columns, such as the ‘Shepton Notebook’ and ‘Irish Diary’.
A full listing of cinema showings throughout the region was run in every issue, along with classified and display ads and an entertainment guide called ‘The Best in the West’. There was a regular full-page feature called ‘Taken for Granted – Courier looks at jobs that rarely make the limelight’, and the ‘Pet Portrait Competition’ was well-received by readers.
‘The editorial policy of Courier is one of neutrality,’ wrote David Boyce, one of the paper’s senior editors in 1960:
The paper is neither pro-management nor pro-employee. It sits on the fence and holds a purely watching brief. It is a mouthpiece for both management and employees alike; within its pages can appear advance news of developments within the industry, details of new techniques, department changes and personality profiles. All reported without fear or favour.
Certainly, at the start of the 1960s, there were plenty of changes to report on as Clarks embarked upon another structural reorganisation aimed at addressing the burgeoning and complex businesses both in Britain and abroad.
In 1960, C. & J. Clark became a holding company with four main subsidiaries, of which the biggest was the UK shoemaking and wholesaling operation, known as Clarks Ltd. Bancroft assumed the role of chairman of both C. & J. Clark and Clarks Ltd. The second subsidiary, Clarks Overseas Shoes Ltd, remained as it was, with Arthur Halliday as managing director and Jack Rose-Smith as his number two; C. & J. Clark Retailing Ltd, which at that stage consisted of the Peter Lord shops, was the domain of Reginald Hart, and Avalon Industries Ltd was a new holding company for various subsidiaries relating to Clarks shoe components and engineering interests. Avalon Industries was under the control of Stephen Clark.
Street Estates Ltd, a property and estates management company, was also part of Clarks, although it was not at this stage included in the annual accounts. It had been formed in 19
30 to oversee the non-industrial properties in Street, which the company had either built or bought as housing for its workers. By the early 1940s, there were around 100 such Street Estates properties. In 1961, more than 60 per cent of its portfolio was made up of industrial buildings; 20 per cent residential and 20 per cent of unspecified land in and around the town.
The reorganisation at Avalon Industries meant there were related companies dotted about the West Country, trading variously in materials, chemicals, components and machinery used by shoe manufacturers. In 1961 Avalon Industries was made up of: The Avalon Leather Board Company, based in Street, which had been started by William S. Clark in 1877; C. I. C. Engineering Ltd, in Bath, which would merge with Ralphs Unified in 1966; Avalon Shoe Supplies Ltd, the sales company of the Avalon group; The Larkhill Rubber Company Ltd, which made all types of rubber and PVC soles; Strode Components Ltd, with three factories – in Street, Warminster and Castle Cary – making plastic heels, wedges, cut-crepe soles, insoles, lasts and steel shanks; and Avalon Chemicals, which produced adhesives, resins and polyurethane compounds (often known in the trade as PU) from a factory in Shepton Mallet regarded as the most advanced pre-polymer plant in the world.
Not all of these were run by members of the family, but in 1961 Bancroft’s son Daniel, aged 30, was put in charge of Strode Components and Ralph Clark, 35, was made manager of the Larkhill Rubber Company, which moved that year from its cramped premises in Street to a newly built £250,000 factory just outside Yeovil. The rubber factory was particularly important because, in addition to Clarks, it also supplied all three of the other big shoe manufacturers in the UK: K Shoes, Lotus and Norvic.
Ralph Clark was the son of Alfred Clark, a science academic and Fellow of the Royal Society who taught at Edinburgh University. On leaving school in Edinburgh, Ralph was offered a scholarship to King’s College, Cambridge, where he read history. On graduating from Cambridge university, Ralph had hoped to join the Royal Navy, but was prevented from doing so because he was colour blind. Instead, he was offered a job in personnel at the Colonial Development Corporation. In 1952, he attended a family wedding in Street and fell into conversation with his cousin, Bancroft, who asked him to join the firm.
I had never thought of going into the business, and to begin with I wasn’t sure what my job was. I had more or less a free hand and was expected to attach myself to something or other, generally make myself useful. I hung around the rubber factory and saw that it was grossly mismanaged. Eventually, Bancroft asked me if I would take it over and I had to build up the new factory from scratch. I was a complete amateur and I’m not sure I covered myself in glory.
After a disagreement on sales strategy with Stephen Clark, chairman of Avalon Industries, in which Bancroft took Stephen’s side, there were, according to Ralph, ‘two years of guerrilla warfare’ during which:
… Stephen got a bee in his bonnet about setting up a sales company to handle all Avalon’s products. I objected strongly to this because it wasn’t as if we were selling a finished project. Clearly, Stephen thought my view was useless and then I found myself in an embarrassing corner when Bancroft sided with Stephen and said I had to go along with what was proposed. I said I would, but not willingly, and that made me even more unpopular. Then we started making serious money and I stayed 20 years at the rubber factory.
Not long after, in 1965, Ralph took over as chairman of Avalon Industries when Stephen became Company Secretary of C. & J. Clark, a post he held until his retirement in 1975.
The Larkhill Rubber Company Ltd, like other parts of the business, benefited from Clarks moving into the computer age. The company had acquired two rented IBM 305s early in 1960, which became a source of much interest among other companies. But it had taken Clarks’ computer specialist, Roy Wilmot, more than 24 months to persuade the board of the data-processing merits of computers. This was one innovation that Clarks was slow to embrace. In Towards Precision Shoemaking, Kenneth Hudson wrote:
The use of all this data had not always been immediately apparent to the senior members of the management staff for whom it was intended and, in a wise and successful attempt to improve understanding, a Trojan-horse approach was adopted, whereby a young man who loved and respected computers was somehow attached to each relevant and influential department head, to act as a combination of interpreter and computer’s friend. Less reverent observers have described these indispensable aides as plumbers’ mates.
Meanwhile, on the high streets of Britain, the growing power and influence of Charles Clore’s British Shoe Corporation continued to pose a threat to Clarks, but it also presented the company with an opportunity. The threat was evident enough. Clore’s shops could opt to stop selling Clarks altogether as the British Shoe Corporation looked to source cheaper shoes from overseas. And although Clarks had its own Peter Lord outlets, these were under no obligation to buy from Clarks for fear of antagonising the independents specialising in or selling Clarks shoes in high numbers. It was a state of affairs that gave rise to tension between the production and retailing arms of the company, a rift that continued for several decades. It was, in fact, a growing sore that only went away many years later, once Clarks finally stopped making shoes altogether.
The opportunity presented by the British Shoe Corporation was for Clarks to strengthen its position in the unbranded shoe market. Freeman, Hardy & Willis, Saxone, Manfield and many of the other shoe companies that made up the British Shoe Corporation were not manufacturers. They were strictly in the retail and marketing business, buying in unbranded shoes and selling them under their own name direct to consumers. Clarks already had some experience as manufacturers of unbranded shoes, having created a subsidiary expressly for this purpose in 1957 called Wansdyke Shoes Ltd, which operated from a factory in Bath. In the 1960 Annual General Report, Bancroft said:
A shopfront in Ellesmere Port, Cheshire, in 1963, prominently promoting Clarks shoes.
Our plans are to extend this company [Wansdyke] so as to be able to exploit the Clarks shoe-making techniques in markets where we are unable to do so on a Clarks branded basis.
Wansdyke had been making shoes for high-end customers such as Harrods and low-end ones such as Barratts (‘Walk the Barratt Way’), a company that Clore, much to his annoyance, failed to buy in 1964, despite offering in excess of £5 million for a majority shareholding. In the 1960s, the plan was for Wansdyke to concentrate on making cheaper shoes – mainly sandals – supplying principally the British Shoe Corporation and Marks & Spencer. It was hoped that Wansdyke would make 10,000 pairs a week, but in reality it seldom produced more than 3,000. The contract with Marks & Spencer stuttered and stalled for a few months before it petered out altogether in May 1962 following rows about price increases and the speed of production. At one point, Marks & Spencer complained that:
… when we started with Wansdyke we were given to understand that this venture would receive the fullest support and cooperation of Clarke’s [sic] organisation, and that the great fund of knowledge available at Clarke’s [sic] would be at the disposal of the new company.
The following year, in 1963, Wansdyke temporarily stopped supplying the British Shoe Corporation, but resumed making shoes for Marks & Spencer. It was also continuing to do business with, among others, Barratts, Debenhams, Lennards, Mothercare and Stead and Simpson. The on-off relationship with Clore’s British Shoe Corporation intensified when Clarks bought A. & F. Shoes Ltd in 1962 and London Lane Ltd in 1965, both small, London-based firms producing mainly high-fashion footwear. This was part of a drive to attract younger consumers – the so-called ‘with it’ crowd. Peter Clothier, who was in charge of women’s shoe production in the UK, felt strongly about this market. Speaking at the 1960 annual Dinner of the London and Southern Counties Shoe Retailers’ Association, Clothier said:
To sell more shoes, we must turn to the younger generation who are now so often the initiators and first acceptors of fashion trends. It is no use manufacturers and retailers setting themse
lves up as a committee of vigilantes to decide what young people will buy … young people today have minds of their own and only when they see irresistible shoes irresistibly displayed in every shoe shop will the impact be irresistible.
But Clothier appeared less sure of himself when it came to dealing with the British Shoe Corporation. In a confidential note to Bancroft, he outlined eight options facing Clarks. Option three was:
If C.J.C.’s [Clarks] intention is not substantially to expand in retailing there would be clear advantage and not too much danger in developing business with BSC [the British Shoe Corporation].
Option four presented an entirely different scenario:
If C.J.C.’s intention is to expand in retailing, there would sooner or later be a clash with BSC, where they say in effect ‘if you go ahead in retailing we throw you out’.
Clothier went on to conclude that:
… in this uncertain position, I would doubt if it is worth going far out of our way or risking serious loss of business from existing accounts to build up even a substantial trade with BSC … may it not be wiser policy in the long run to build business with, and strengthen our links in every way we can with those multiples who are independent of BSC, both because that business is likely to be on a surer footing and because they are easier prospects for us to absorb as time goes on if we so wish.
Acknowledging that the British Shoe Corporation had ‘wonderful sites’ and plenty of them, Clothier said Clarks needed to find ‘more efficient retailers than BSC’ who would offer better terms of business. But, in what could be regarded as an anachronism, the terms of business were not always favourable in relation to the Clarks-owned Peter Lord shops, never mind the British Shoe Corporation or the remaining independents. In fact, Peter Lord was at times more independent than the independents.