Clarks: Made to Last

by Mark Palmer

  In 1974, Miss World came to call – not to see the museum but for a special fitting of a pair of Barbarys, part of the relaunched Country Club casual range. ‘Gee, they’re wonderful and a perfect fit’ said Marjorie Wallace, who hailed from Indianapolis, USA, as the Redgate factory manager, David Heeley, slipped the tan and white shoes on to her silky feet.

  Miss World was visiting Britain’s sixth-biggest private company and now the largest shoemaking concern in Europe. Clarks employed almost half the 8,000-head population of Street and, despite speculation from time to time in the press, there were no plans to float the company, and no intentions to change its family-based management structure. Some sections of the media found this perplexing. An article in the Observer towards the end of 1974 spoke of a:

  discernible attitude of caution towards this curious family, which, over the years, had made such a spectacular amount of money in such an unspectacular way.

  Grappling with the culture of Clarks became something of a preoccupation for newspapers. The Sunday Times was intrigued by the lack of company cars and the way the Bear pub, opposite the head office, was still dry. An article by Allan Hall in that paper’s Atticus column on 17 March 1974 carried the headline ‘How not to spend a fortune’, and was based around a rare interview with Tony Clark who was quoted as saying:

  If you said we were millionaires, I should think we’d all sue you for libel … I suppose the next generation may be different but I doubt it … I suppose I’m a bit different from our earlier generations. I have a drink. But I don’t smoke in the office until 5 o’clock. We have a rule in here that there’s no smoking and it’s worth it because we get a reduction on the insurance premiums.

  Hall noted that Tony’s office was sparsely furnished and had lino tiles on the floor. There was no art on the walls and his desk was ‘of the school room sort’. The company car issue was raised during the interview.

  ‘As a matter of fact, nobody has a company car,’ said Tony. He went on:

  You see, in a family business where five of the nine directors are all Clarks you have to work and get on together. You avoid situations that create jealousies and frictions. We have always said you should pay people for what they do rather than set up these standards of what kind of office they have and what kind of car they drive, according to which chair they are sitting in. What do I want with a luxurious office?

  Shortly after that interview, and within twelve months of Peter Clothier’s departure, Tony Clark himself retired as chairman of C. & J. Clark Ltd at the end of August 1974, giving way to his 41-year-old cousin, Daniel, who decided that, like his father (Bancroft), he would combine the role of chairman and managing director. Daniel had studied engineering at Cambridge University and had joined the company in 1954, taking up his first main job as superintendent of Shepton Mallet four years later. He was interested in matters of the mind, but at the same time was practical, with a passion for how things were made. He was warm, cultured and unfailingly courteous. He was hard-working, well-liked, experienced and greatly respected. But his father was a hard act to follow.

  9

  Trainers, négligées and selling the brand

  ALCOHOL WAS MOST DEFINITELY SERVED at the 150th anniversary celebrations of C. & J. Clark Ltd in June 1975 – and lots of it. There were parties galore to mark this particular landmark, both in Street and in London, where the festivities handily coincided with London Shoe Week. There were three lunches and a dinner in Street alone during the week starting 16 June 1975, all held in a huge marquee erected on lawns in front of the Grange, overlooking the main headquarters building.

  The new chairman, Daniel Clark, made four separate speeches, each tailored to his particular audience. The ‘Inaugural Lunch’, as it was called, held on Wednesday 18 June 1975, was attended by the great and the good from the southwest, including the Conservative Member of Parliament for Wells, the chairman of Somerset County Council, the Mayor of Glastonbury and the chairman of the Street Parish Council. The chairman of Mendip District Council was there, too – Ralph Clark, who was chairman of the Clarks subsidiary, Avalon Industries. Civic leaders were joined by leading lights from the British Footwear Manufacturers Federation, the National Union of Footwear, Leather and Allied Trades and other associated organisations. Clarks’ main competitors were included as well. In fact, a senior executive of Startrite, a rival manufacturer of children’s shoes, made a speech on behalf of guests, and even Harry Levison from the British Shoe Corporation was asked along.

  Daniel Clark became chairman of Clarks in 1974, shortly before the 150th anniversary celebrations the following year.

  The next day, a Thursday, some 500 Clarks pensioners walked into the tent for lunch and filed out again a couple of hours later, each holding a little leather wallet containing a cash voucher. The evening do on the Friday was for all employees with 25 or more years’ service under their belts. Wives and husbands were invited only if they too had chalked up a quarter of a century at Clarks. Maurice Burt, the factory worker who had missed the 125th anniversary party because he was unattached at the time and felt uneasy going on his own, attended this one and, although now happily married, was perfectly content to leave his wife at home:

  It wouldn’t have done to have the wives there, not at all. It was quite a party, I can tell you. I think I must have got home about 4 am and there can’t have been many steady heads in the morning. Whenever you put your glass down or if it was getting near empty someone came along and filled it up again. There was no dancing or anything, but everyone found a way to let off steam.

  The menu was a 1970s classic: ‘melon boat’ to start, ‘dressed Scottish salmon’ with mint new potatoes, garden peas and a green salad to follow, rounded off with fresh strawberries and cream. Petit Chablis and Côte de Beaune-Villages flowed liberally. Bill Graves, a non-family member of the board, gave the main address, to which Cyril Gifford, one of the firm’s plumbers, whose family had been associated with Clarks for decades, replied on behalf of the whole workforce.

  An altogether more sedate lunch took place on Saturday for shareholders. This was followed by a tour of the attendees’ choice – either the historic buildings of Street or the churches of Somerset. The former included an inspection of two modern sculptures, Diamond and Steps, both by Philip King, which had been unveiled earlier in the week on either side of the Grange Road approach to the factory.

  Daniel Clark used the anniversary as an opportunity to reiterate some key values. In one of his speeches, he said:

  The Quaker upbringing and tradition of the founders of the company continue to inform the way we think about the business and its problems, and the sort of business we want to be; the conditions under which we employ people; our produce and services, and their integrity and usefulness to the community. Whether we think about the product or the way it is promoted, or the people who produce it, we want everyone to be proud to be associated with the company.

  In London, Lance Clark, managing director of Clarks Ltd, the branded footwear division, was the host and keynote speaker at two dinners held at the Europa Hotel off Oxford Street, only a couple of days after an IRA bomb had exploded outside the nearby Portman Hotel, injuring three passers-by. At least 1,000 people attended, including the television personality Judith Chalmers (a well-known fan of Clarks), the actress Adrienne Corri, who appeared alongside Peter O’Toole and Richard Attenborough that year in Otto Preminger’s film Rosebud, and the actor Patrick Mower, who many years later would become a stalwart of ITV’s soap opera Emmerdale. A special anniversary exhibition was put on at Clarks’ London offices in Berners Street, to which the press was invited, along with those attending the Europa Hotel dinners and others associated with the shoe trade. The exhibition consisted of a visual history of shoemaking set to piped music from the 1930s.

  Key figures at Clarks pose for a photograph to mark the 150th anniversary celebration in 1975. Back row, left to right: Lance Clark, Stephen Clark, Jan Clark, William Johnston and Ralph C
lark. Front row, left to right: Foster Harrison, A. W. (Bill) Graves, Eric Gross, Daniel Clark and John Frith.

  In sharp contrast, there was none of this fanfare and no mood music to mark the closure of Clarks’ Yeovil factory four months later in October 1975, when nearly 100 workers lost their jobs. This factory, along with several others, had been operating on a four-day week for a number of months as the country reeled from one economic crisis to another. Cabinet papers released in 2005 under the 30-year rule reveal that the Labour prime minister, Harold Wilson, was warned by his energy minister, Lord Balogh, that Britain’s economy faced ‘possible wholesale domestic liquidation’ if inflation and unemployment continued to rise. The then industry secretary, Tony Benn, at odds with the chancellor, Denis Healey, pressed Wilson to introduce quotas and higher tariffs on imports, along with cuts in defence spending and selective help to industry – but a cap-in-hand approach to the International Monetary Fund for a £2.3 billion bail-out was the course the beleaguered government took.

  Britain was the so-called ‘sick man of Europe’, limping towards what would become the ‘winter of discontent’ in December 1978. There was talk of ‘lame duck’ industries and how the country had been brought to its knees by the ‘British disease’. Skinheads in ‘bovver boots’ threw sharpened pennies at opposition fans at football matches; new ‘brutalist’ post-war tower blocks became ghettos of antisocial behaviour; and the prospect of public spending being cut by some £3 billion was obscuring any light at the end of the economic tunnel. Many high earners had decamped overseas to avoid being taxed at the top rate of 83 per cent.

  While politicians argued and the trade unions stockpiled their options amid escalating labour unrest, housewives took direct action. A Clarks survey in 1976 showed that hard-up mothers weren’t bothering to buy back-to-school shoes for their children – and this resulted in a 15 per cent drop in sales for the company. Suddenly, feeling the pinch was a common affliction among UK shoe companies. Workers at K Shoes in Kendal, in the Lake District, were on shortened weeks, as they were at Norvic in Norwich, and at the Down shoe factory in Belfast.

  Making matters worse were the imports of cheap shoes flooding into the country at an increasing rate – although this of course was welcomed by independent retailers anxious to keep their buying costs down. Annual shoe imports averaged 80 million pairs between 1971 and 1975, rising to 97.5 million in 1976. This meant that by the end of 1976, 40 per cent of all shoes sold in the UK were made abroad.

  There may have been a reluctance to source or manufacture shoes offshore – and certainly it was never given the ‘high priority’ advised by the management consultants – but there were flurries of activity in this direction. In 1978, a company called Atlas Shoes, in Nicosia, Cyprus, was looking for an investor and Clarks took a 51 per cent share. The plan was for Atlas to produce 150,000 pairs of children’s shoes a year, but by 1979 this target had been re-adjusted, with Atlas making around 90,000 pairs of men’s sandals instead. John Willets, who was in charge of Atlas, wrote a note to Bernard Harvey, a long-term factory manager back in Street, saying that any other lines at Atlas were merely ‘small bits and pieces with heavy development costs, quality problems etc – a formula for disaster’. Atlas closed in 1983.

  Closer to home, towards the end of 1975 the company made its first big move into the European Economic Community – which Britain had joined two years earlier during the premiership of Edward Heath – by buying an 80 per cent stake in the French retail chain France Arno, which had 48 shops in major cities, including Paris. It sold mainly women’s shoes, but none were from the Clarks range.

  Jan Clark, now managing director of C. & J. Clark Retailing, told the Financial Times that the acquisition offered scope for further investment and expansion ‘and opportunities for the export of footwear from Britain’. Those opportunities never materialised.

  A far more significant decision was taken two years later in 1977 when Clarks paid £14 million for the publicly listed Hanover Shoe Company and its subsidiary, Sheppard & Myers, in the USA. The directors felt expansion into America was essential, not least because, according to the minutes of a board meeting in 1976, it was an opportunity to operate without being impeded by ‘left-wing policies’ in the UK, where Labour had been returned to government in 1974. Clarks had enjoyed some success in America and it was felt that a medium-sized acquisition would consolidate the company’s position on that side of the Atlantic, especially one that came with an established retail arm.

  Such was the scale of this venture that there was speculation in the media about it being a precursor to a public flotation by Clarks, although, in fact, it led to the removal of Hanover’s share quotation on the US Stock Exchange.

  The Hanover Shoe Company had been founded in 1899, specialising in high-grade, middle-priced shoes known in North America as ‘dress shoes’, with proper, welted leather soles. It had shops in some of the best malls in the country and it complemented Clarks, which was known primarily for its casual rubber-soled footwear. The board was impressed by the conservative and honest nature of its way of doing business. Based in Hanover, Pennsylvania, it had three leased factories in West Virginia and ran 240 of its own Hanover-brand shops across the USA.

  Clarks had been looking for an opportunity to invest in the USA for some time, and with extra urgency after Florsheim, a retailing giant also specialising in formal shoes, gave Clarks an ultimatum over its prices towards the end of 1974, threatening to renege on its £1 million annual order. Florsheim also rang alarm bells in Street when it began sourcing cheaper versions of Wallabees from Czechoslovakia.

  Following the Hanover Shoe Company acquisition, Clarks paid some £3.5 million for the Bostonian Shoe Company a year later in 1979 at a cost of some £3.5 million. Bostonian, a shoe manufacturer and retailer based in Whitman, Massachusetts, was part of the Kayser-Roth Corporation, a subsidiary of Gulf & Western. Jan Clark, who had moved in 1978 from heading up retail in the UK to taking charge of Clarks in North America, was keen to gain more outlets in which to sell Hanover shoes, and the Bostonian deal gave him nearly 100 of them. It was a bold strategy, but one that brought with it a new set of problems because Hanover and Bostonian sold the same kinds of formal footwear at a time when the commercial wind was blowing in the opposite direction, towards more casual shoes. Clarks profits in the USA declined by 10 per cent in 1978 and the position worsened over the next two to three years. But it did mean the company had a presence in America, a commercial base from which it could manoeuvre over the next few decades. Today, the American market is crucial to Clarks, accounting for approximately 40 per cent of its business, and many of the current Clarks stores in the US at one time had either Hanover or Bostonian above the door.

  There were, however, some senior directors who worried that Clarks had moved from being a competitive branded shoe manufacturer to an investor in other companies’ inferior shoe manufacturing and retailing.

  Judging the market in the 1970s was a formidably hard task. Social mores loosened, fiscal budgets tightened. Roy Jenkins, a liberal-minded home secretary in Harold Wilson’s last government, had set out to build what he called a ‘civilised society’ by abolishing the death penalty, decriminalising homosexuality, legalising abortion, relaxing the divorce laws, and reforming theatre censorship. Choices abounded. In the world of shoes, platform soles, as worn by Abba and Gary Glitter, were all the rage, with the likes of David Bowie, Marc Bolan and Elton John doing their bit in the cause of ‘glam rock’. But it wasn’t all glossy, as Noddy Holder’s Slade and the Bay City Rollers clunked around at the top of the music charts in working men’s boots and shoes, and on nights out, young men and women were often wearing the same kinds of footwear.

  Sporting platform shoes didn’t mean you had to look like members of Kiss (the American band that was the inspiration for the satirical film Spinal Tap) to get noticed. Barbara Hulanicki, the Polish-born fashion designer, produced her Biba-trademark range to great critical acclaim, recapturin
g some of the elegance of Salvatore Ferragamo’s platforms of the 1930s. Clarks’ foray into this particular market produced the 1976 Andy Imprint Rangnoddye, with three-inch stacked heels and crepe rubber soles, retailing at £11.99. These were more Barbara Hulanicki than Noddy Holder – but at a fraction of the cost.

  Then, just as it was safe to dispense forever with kipper ties and loon pants, along came the punk scene, which did its best to reflect the national gloom. Angry music by the likes of the Sex Pistols and the Clash brought with it ripped clothes held together by giant safety pins, spiky red hair and snarling attitudes utterly at odds with the repressed, genteel culture of Upstairs Downstairs, the phenomenally successful London Weekend Television series about an upper-class Edwardian family and their servants, which ran to 68 episodes in the 1970s.

  The footwear of choice for punks was Doc Martens, especially the Eight-Eyelet 1460 model, which took its name from the day, month and year of its creation by R. Griggs Group Ltd, a respectable Northamptonshire shoe manufacturer which had bought the patent rights from Klaus Martens and his friend Herbert Funck.

  Clarks gave punk culture a wide berth. But a far more perplexing challenge – and greatly more damaging in the long term – was the rise of the sports shoe, or trainer.

  In 1895, Joseph Foster, from Holcombe Brook, a small village north of Bolton in Lancashire, founded a shoe company called J. W. Foster & Sons, which eventually ended up as Reebok International Ltd, now a subsidiary of Adidas, the German sportswear company. His big idea was to create a spiked running shoe, which British athletes would wear at the 1924 Olympic Games in Paris, famously captured on the big screen in the 1981 film Chariots of Fire. It wasn’t until 1960 that two of Foster’s grandsons rebranded the company Reebok, so named after a type of African gazelle. Then, in 1979, Paul Fireman, an American partner of an outdoor sporting goods distributor, spotted Reebok at a trade show and secured the North American distribution rights. Within months, Reeboks were selling for $60 a pair, making them the world’s most expensive running shoes.