Clarks: Made to Last

by Mark Palmer

  Bancroft became sufficiently rattled by Clore that on 30 March 1962 he fired off a letter to Keith Joseph, the Minister of State at the Board of Trade, complaining of what he saw as the British Shoe Corporation’s ‘monopoly’. Joseph replied by agreeing that Bancroft should meet his parliamentary secretary, Niall Macpherson. A meeting took place on 10 April 1962, attended by Bancroft, Macpherson and three civil servants. The outcome was disappointing. In a note written the day after the meeting, Bancroft recorded:

  I described the present situation where the Clore group controls 50 per cent of the multiple business, 33 per cent of the specialist shoe shop business, and 22 per cent of shoes sold in the UK … that the effect of their controlling 50 per cent of the multiple business made them dominant in the city centre selling of shoes, and this was a difficult position … I asked whether the government’s view and policy on monopoly had changed and whether it ought to change. The answer was no, that they are not contemplating any change.

  A year later, Sears Holdings – the British Shoe Corporation’s parent company – announced record profits that were 22 per cent up on the previous year. Clore was typically punchy, telling shareholders that the directors of Sears and of the British Shoe Corporation ‘are constantly examining suitable ways of expanding the activities of the group, whether by acquisition or development of existing businesses’. Sears was already a huge and diverse group, embracing everything from shipbuilding (Furness Shipbuilding Company Ltd) and mining (Parmeko Ltd) to laundry and dry cleaning equipment (Brown & Green Ltd) and air conditioning (Mellor Bromley Ltd). It had also bought two prestigious West End jewellers, Mappin & Webb and Garrard & Co. Ltd.

  Over the next few years, Clarks and the British Shoe Corporation played a cat-and-mouse game. In March 1966, Tony Clark, managing director of C. & J. Clark, met his British Shoe Corporation counterpart, Harry Levison, at a ‘private, social occasion’, during which Levison claimed that Clore left him alone to run the business as he saw fit. The two men discussed the small matter of large mark-ups, with Levison insisting that 45 per cent was his ‘minimum standard’. Tony later wrote:

  He [Levison] says branded manufacturers, including Clarks, are always welcome and should keep in touch with his various buyers, although they will be wasting everyone’s time unless they get the 45 per cent mark-up firmly into their heads!

  Clarks’ enthusiasm for the youth market led to the national release of two cinema commercials for the Wessex line (Clarks’ umbrella brand for mass-produced lines), filmed in colour and shown in more than 1,000 cinemas. In the two-minute version, Wessex shoes appeared in conjunction with McCaul Knitwear, while the one-minute film concentrated solely on Clarks, the soundtrack featuring ‘Big Beat Boogie’ by Bert Weedon. In the February 1960 issue of Clarks Comments, Stanley F. Berry, the Clarks advertising manager, explained the rationale:

  There are two fields in which the young dominate: the Cinema, and Popular Music through the medium of gramophone records. The Rank people, after much research, claim that they can now produce a predestined top ranking disc based on well-proved formulae, and that film advertising associated with such music, without words, is likely to be more effective with young people than conventional cinema advertising.

  The commercial was shot at Elstree Studios, with a roof-top set designed by the art director Cedric Dawe, and the action – featuring dance sequences performed by members of the Cool for Cats troupe, who had been a big hit on ITV – was choreographed by Dougie Squires. Squires had made his name on Chelsea at Nine, a television series starring Billie Holiday, and on the BBC’s On The Bright Side, made famous by Stanley Baxter.

  Even more striking advertisements would follow. In the summer of 1964, two television commercials went on air with a James Bond theme. They were produced by Terence Young, who had worked on From Russia With Love, and the Bond-style music was arranged and conducted by Malcolm Mitchell. The idea of these two commercials – which were shot mainly in Palmers Green in London – was to remind viewers of Clarks’ fitting service and what became known as its ‘No Time Limit’ guarantee.

  In a similar populist vein, Clarks provided Honor Blackman with her shiny thigh boots and other footwear that she wore in the role of leather-clad Cathy Gale in ITV’s The Avengers series, which regularly commanded an audience of 6 million on Saturday nights. And in 1967, Clarks hosted the BBC’s Any Questions live from its Plymouth factory, when the panel, chaired by Freddie Grisewood – who was nearly 80 at the time and had been on the programme since its inception in 1948 – included Sir Gerald Nabarro, a flamboyant, handlebar-moustached Tory MP, and a future leader of the Labour Party, Michael Foot.

  Compared with women’s shoes, little money was spent marketing the Clarks men’s range – because there wasn’t much of a range to market. But in 1962, Clarks bought the established men’s shoe manufacturing business of J. T. Butlin & Sons Ltd. This company, based in Rothwell near Kettering in Northamptonshire, specialised in mail order sales and had a sound reputation for the more formal men’s shoe market. This was a contentious acquisition because Clarks had always approached men’s shoes with a diffident air – making a mere 0.8 per cent of men’s shoes in the UK in 1959. But the decision may have been influenced by the fact that John Butlin, the managing director, was married to Honor Impey, a great-granddaughter of James Clark.

  In 1941, Clarks had made men’s boots as part of its commitment to the war effort and shortly afterwards it experimented by subcontracting work to G. B. Britton & Sons in Bristol, hoping this might lead to a more concerted commitment to men’s shoes. But it never quite happened. In the 1940s, the board had concluded that G. B. Britton & Sons did not produce the quality of work that Clarks required – or, at the very least, a standard that could command the sort of prices necessary to justify a bigger investment in the men’s market. Prior to the purchase of J. T. Butlin & Son, Bancroft had considered a bid for an alternative Northamptonshire firm, Crockett & Jones, which also made men’s shoes, but this came to nothing.

  Traditionally, it had been left to the factories in Ireland to manufacture most of Clarks’ shoes for men, particularly the successful ‘Flotilla’ range, which was first introduced in 1954 and then gained its own separate catalogue in 1958. By 1962, Flotillas supplied everything a man could need by way of footwear: ‘Brogues’; ‘Suedes’; ‘Casuals’; ‘Contemporaries’; and ‘Sandals’. Appropriately, the sales slogan for Flotillas was: ‘The City to the Sea’. Not until 1970 was the Clarks Flotilla range superseded by Craftmasters, City and Club shoes.

  A touch of design class was introduced to Clarks’ range in 1963 with the appointment of Hardy Amies as consultant designer, a man whose other clients included the Queen and the Queen Mother. Amies, a Londoner born in Maida Vale, was 49 when he began working for Clarks and seemed in no doubt about his expertise. Speaking at an event organised by the Royal Society of the Arts, Sir Hardy, as he later was to become, said:

  A dress designer is not just a frivolous person catering to the whims of rich women, but someone who, properly used, can play a part in the industrial life of this country.

  His credits included a variation on the Chelsea Boot, elastic-sided shoes and slip-ons, and it was he who coined the phrase ‘the laceless look’. Amies was invited to share his vision with readers of the Courier in October 1964, advancing the cause of raised heels. ‘There are few men who would scorn at being an inch taller,’ he said, before stressing that ‘the shininess of well-polished leather is the best possible contrast to the mattness of a wool suit, still the basis for modern men’s dressing.’ He ended up deploring young people’s ‘disregard of grooming … an attitude of mind backed up by a shortage of domestics’.

  Young people who met with Amies’ disapproval were not the natural customers of Peter Lord. They would be catered for later when Clarks bought Ravel, which targeted fashion-conscious young men and women with cash to spend on contemporary footwear. Peter Lord, regarded as the purveyors of sensible shoes, continued to gr
ow. After opening for the first time in London’s Oxford Street in 1960, with a staff of 24, the chain’s 70 outlets were selling nearly one million pairs of shoes a year. The Oxford Street branch was competing with no fewer than 30 shoe shops on that street alone, but it did so with aplomb, its huge glass windows catching the eye of passers-by, and that same original site, within a few minutes’ walk of Oxford Circus Underground station, is still occupied by Clarks today.

  A 1965 press advertisement produced during Hardy Amies’ stint as a consultant for Clarks.

  In 1962, the British Shoe Corporation controlled around 2,000 of the UK’s estimated 14,000 shoe shops. British Bata, the biggest independent, had, by comparison, fewer than 300 outlets. But size was not everything. Clore’s British Shoe Corporation had its critics, not least because Clore himself had his critics – in growing numbers. Felicity Green, women’s editor of the Daily Mirror, wrote scathingly in the spring of 1963 about his cavalier style in what amounted to an open letter:

  When you moved into the shoe business you obviously organised things in your usual efficient manner. No doubt your trusty accountants moved in first and, when they had things on a sound financial basis you proceeded to sell shoes scientifically as you might sell fish or saucepans.

  The Sunday Times Contango column ran a piece headlined ‘The village shoemakers match up to Mr Clore’, which referred disparagingly to the ‘Clore colossus’ that had ‘squeezed out the smaller multiple chains’. It continued:

  The Clarks – like the Frys and the Rowntrees and the Cadburys – are Quakers. And they believe in living in the heart of the place that their enterprise has created. Bancroft Clark’s house is in the middle of the village, where the buses stop, and the teenagers’ motor-cycles change gear. Nobody notices particularly when he drops into the social club or strolls down to the Post Office.

  This idealistic account of life in Street ended with a quote from Bancroft:

  The women’s magazines know nothing about style. It’s the little girls in short skirts showing their knees who change style. And we can’t let Mr Clore always see the changes first.

  The Financial Times had warned a year earlier that it was in ‘manufacturing rather than in retailing that the biggest opportunities are to be found … retailers appear to have exhausted their opportunities for the time being’. Certainly, 1962 was a difficult year for all UK shoe retailers, but, despite the Financial Times’s foreboding, 1963 saw Peter Lord making a welcome recovery, with sales of £3 million. And the Financial Times would also be proved wrong about manufacturing as more and more footwear companies began to source shoes from overseas rather than making them in Britain.

  Sourcing shoes from outside the UK – also referred to as resourcing – would haunt Clarks for many years to come. It’s easy to conclude that the company should have moved towards sourcing with greater speed, but buying-in footwear was utterly at odds with Clarks raison d’être as a shoemaker. The company’s whole culture and history were based on making shoes. Manufacturing shoes was not so much what Clarks did best, but what it did.

  Even so, in 1960, Hugh Woods, who worked for Clarks Overseas Shoes Ltd, went to Italy and began sourcing ready-made shoes that retailed in Canada and North America under the Clarks name. Woods was acting with Bancroft’s full approval, but it did not go down well in some of Clarks West Country factories. In an interview in 2005 with Dr Tim Crumplin, Clarks archivist, Woods said that the

  factory managers were incensed because nobody had ever bought foreign shoes and branded them Clarks. I was known as the Clarks Wop.

  One of those who took up a post as sales assistant in Peter Lord’s Oxford Street branch in late 1966 was Roger Pedder, who, 30 years later, would become chairman of C. & J. Clark Ltd. Pedder read economics at the University of Liverpool, where one of his tutors was Dr Roland Smith, a future chairman of House of Fraser and a man who had close links with the then powerful Boot & Shoe Association. Smith knew people in high places at Clarks and helped Pedder get an interview in 1963 for a place on the graduate trainee scheme. Pedder was successful.

  Clarks took on five graduate trainees each year, all of whom would spend their first week learning to make a pair of shoes from scratch. Bancroft was in the habit of picking one of these trainees as his personal assistant. Towards the end of 1963, he chose Pedder.

  ‘I used to pay the cook, the cleaners, the gardeners, arrange the family holidays, you name it,’ says Pedder. He adds:

  Bancroft had an absolute dedication to the company in all its aspects. He was very much of his time, the master, but he was also inclusive and commanded a great deal of respect. He saw the business in the context of the international economy and he had a high ethical sense for what was right. He was straight talking but careful in his dealings with people, especially members of the family. But there was never any doubt who was boss.

  One of Pedder’s early tasks was to drive down to Portsmouth in a van to pick up a trunk belonging to Sibella Clark, Bancroft’s daughter, who had returned to England after graduating in history and fine art from Swathmore College, just outside Philadelphia, USA. This errand involved opening the trunk for customs officers and rifling through Sibella’s personal belongings. Roger and Sibella had never met. Mission accomplished, Pedder returned to Street, where a few days later he did meet Sibella – and they fell in love. They were married in 1968 in a private ceremony in Bromley Registry Office.

  Two years later, Pedder left Clarks. As he describes it:

  Marrying the boss’s daughter was always going to cause complications, especially once Bancroft had retired. I had a lot of soul-searching to do – in fact deciding to leave was one of the toughest decisions of my life. I left to join British Home Stores but before doing so I had learned a lot about Clarks. I had worked my way up the retail side of the business and then became a buyer for half the women’s ranges. So I understood the business pretty well.

  Which would come in handy when Pedder returned to Clarks in 1993 in entirely different circumstances.

  The age of management consultants had arrived. In 1963, Tony Clark commissioned McKinsey & Co., which had offices in London’s St James’s Street, to produce a series of reports on the company. The first was in November of that year. It outlined in detail the responsibilities of each manager, making it clear to whom they were answerable and where their remit began and ended. It was a long, plodding document, which was followed a month later by an even longer one called ‘Adopting a Consumer and Customer Oriented Approach to Marketing Branded Footwear’. McKinsey’s covering letter to Tony Clark included a short section entitled ‘Major Conclusions’ which, when read today, appears neither major nor conclusive:

  Opportunities to increase profitable sales volume exist on a variety of fronts. However, there is ‘no rabbit that can be pulled out of a hat’ to do this. Capturing these opportunities means changing many things. In short, Clarks is going to make marketing the competitive cutting edge of its business.

  McKinsey had taken soundings from the trade and included vox pops as part of its Relations with Retail section. ‘Clarks is Clarks. They do what they want’, was one of the comments canvassed. Another was:

  I’m sure they’re good craftsmen, but they’re living in the 18th century when it comes to realising that retailers are their partners – both of us have to succeed or neither of us will!

  ‘Why don’t they stop trying to brainwash us with what they want and find out what the facts really are’, was a third.

  A main thrust of the McKinsey findings was that if Clarks was to meet its production and sales targets, it would have to consider introducing a second brand name or acquire another branded manufacturer which already had a substantial market share or owned a significant number of retail outlets. The crucial and unresolved question of Clarks expanding upon or limiting its unbranded operations fell outside the scope of McKinsey’s study. The report did, however, highlight other areas to be addressed. It was a long list that included:

&n
bsp; • Clarks’ reluctance to exploit properly the mail order business;

  • the urgent need to increase warehouse space;

  • a proposal to introduce twice-weekly deliveries by road transport to key customers;

  • separating in-stock and forward order inventory records;

  • a provision for more flexible handling of orders from large customers;

  • a revamped customer inquiries and complaints department;

  • improved communications between Street and travelling salesmen (who were in the habit of making over-optimistic delivery promises);

  • a greater onus on factory superintendents being held responsible for keeping their word on production dates.

  In other words, the consultants were advocating wide-reaching reforms.

  It was also suggested that Clarks Ltd should be divided into three separate divisions – women’s, children’s and men’s – a move which Bancroft said would ‘release new management energies and powers … taking the lids off people and letting them get on’. This and several other of the recommendations were acted upon, and within twelve months Clarks had made and dispatched 10 per cent more shoes, with profits up by 20 per cent. The Bullmead warehouse, which had been built in 1954, doubled in size in 1964 and the adjoining Houndwood site in Street was pressed into service, both of which had an immediate impact on the wholesaling and distribution side of the business. In the past, when most of Clarks shoes were made in Street, distribution was mainly by train from Glastonbury station (now defunct), but this had proved far too slow and inflexible for busy retailers. Consumers wanted their shoes immediately and held retailers to account by shopping elsewhere if they could not walk away with what they required.

  Clarks itself now had 100 Peter Lord shops, and during 1964 the company paid more than £1 million for the Wolverhampton-based family firm of Craddock Brothers, with a chain of 24 outlets in the Midlands and North West. Reginald Hart, managing director of Peter Lord since 1937, retired and was replaced by Eric Gross, a non-family member, who had joined the company shortly after the Second World War.