STREET DOESN’T MERIT A MENTION in the Domesday Book. Nor does its ancient moniker of Lantokay, so-named in honour of a Celtic saint by the name of Kea. Rather, Street assumed the role of an appendage, an unthreatening satellite of rich and famous Glastonbury barely two miles away.
Glastonbury used to be very rich indeed. Prior to the Dissolution of the Monasteries, its abbey’s status came second only to that of Westminster Abbey in London. Although Christian legend claims it was founded by Joseph of Arimathea in the first century, there is more general agreement that the abbey was established by the Saxons following their conquest of Somerset in the seventh century.
Their king, Ine of Wessex, was a local man who put the abbey on a sound financial footing and it is he who is thought to have erected a stone church which later formed the west end of the nave. In the tenth century, St Dunstan, the Abbot of Glastonbury, who became Archbishop of Canterbury in 960, enlarged the church, and the Normans continued its expansion, adding more and more magnificent buildings.
Such was its reputation that King Edward I and Queen Eleanor spent Easter there in 1278 and during that visit the king proposed holding his Assizes within the grounds, only to be informed by the abbot that this would violate the site’s ancient privileges. The king backed down and held the Assizes in Street instead.
Many years later, in 1539, the incumbent abbot, Richard Whiting, was in no mood to hand over his community’s worldly goods to a rampaging Henry VIII, for which he was rewarded by being hanged, drawn and quartered on Glastonbury’s Chalice Hill. To make sure the message got through to other would-be dissenters, his head was impaled over the entrance to the abbey and his severed remains were distributed in towns throughout the county.
Glastonbury Abbey was subsequently looted by the king’s cronies and the surrounding land passed to Sir Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset, eldest brother of Henry VIII’s third wife Jane Seymour. The duke, who later became Lord Protector when the young Edward VI succeeded to the throne, moved effortlessly into the abbey and then, to bemusement and a degree of muted admiration, he embarked on an ambitious plan to develop the textile trade in Somerset.
Around 1551, Sir Edward settled weavers and wool workers from the Low Countries into the abbey’s domestic buildings and provided them with a pastor to look after their spiritual well-being. Many of the neighbouring villages – Street included – benefited from the duke’s business strategy. A certain Robert Hiet was given the task of setting up a cloth factory in Street and trade prospered there right up until the late eighteenth century.
Centuries earlier, the Romans had come and gone, leaving behind bits and pieces from their villas, some interesting pottery and sections of a road, all of which can be seen today in the Somerset County Museum in Taunton. On view in the Natural History Museum in London is a collection of fossils found in Blue Lias limestone that were excavated from quarries near Street in the nineteenth and early twentieth century.
One of these is an ichthyosaur, a dolphin-like creature from the Jurassic period, which caused so much excitement that when the Street Urban Council was formed in 1894 it decided to make the ichthyosaur its emblem. Blue Lias itself was used for making doorsteps, window sills, kerbing and paving and was big business in the region until concrete proved to be an easier and cheaper alternative.
Street – in years past spelled variously as Streate, Streatt, Streat, Strete and Stret – is derived from the Latin strata, meaning paved road, and was so named because of the causeway, once part of the Exeter-to-Lincoln Roman Fosse Way, that was repaired in 1184 to transport stone from Street to Glastonbury Abbey after a fire had destroyed some of the monastic buildings.
By the turn of the nineteenth century, most men in the village and surrounding areas had to eke out a living from the land. In 1801, Street’s population was little more than 500, roughly similar to other agricultural villages in the county. Labourers worked as shepherds, peat cutters, cider makers or general farmhands on fields along the Polden Hills and across the slushy flats of Queen’s Sedgemoor and on towards the Vale of Avalon. Farming became a lucrative endeavour during the Napoleonic Wars, as Britain’s blockade of the continent and strict protectionist rules ensured that there was no competition from outside the country at a time when grain was needed to sustain the war effort. Wheat and barley prices were ring-fenced and remained high.
The defeat of the French changed all that. Immediately, the price of grain plummeted and, although the Corn Laws went some way in protecting farmers, the good life was not quite so good any more. In Street, there was something of a polarisation: many working men drowned their sorrows in cider, while others immersed themselves in work.
Alcohol has some history in Street. The museum in Taunton has on display a tankard dating from the Iron Age that was found near Shapwick. It is constructed of wooden staves covered with sheet bronze, with an elaborate bronze handle. It looks well used. In the 1820s, the Street Inn – still in business today in Somerton Road, where the stocks were once positioned – was where you went to drink, and just up the lane at the Society of Friends’ meeting house was where a small group of mainly teetotallers went to worship.
The Society of Friends, or Quakers, as they were known, were a sizeable force in Somerset, many having fled persecution in the mid-seventeenth century and settled into the countryside from towns such as Bristol and Gloucester. Street’s meeting house was an attractive detached cottage built in 1717 and one of its earliest members was a man called John Clark III, who had moved to the village in 1723 on marrying Ann Coaxley, who was also a Quaker. Like his father and grandfather, John Clark III was a working farmer, but, unlike his forebears, he managed to avoid imprisonment for his religious beliefs.
The persecution of Quakers in the seventeenth century was relentless. In the early 1660s, the legislative programme known as the Clarendon Code, after Charles II’s Lord Chancellor Edward Hyde, the Earl of Clarendon, sought to re-establish the supremacy of the Anglican Church. The Quaker Act was passed in 1662, making it illegal not to swear allegiance to the king – something that Quakers would not countenance out of religious conviction. That same year, John Clark III’s grandfather, John Clark I, fell foul of the act and was sent to Ilchester Gaol. Two years later, the Conventicle Act came into force outlawing non-conformist gatherings of more than five people. The act was repealed in 1689, but that did not stop John Clark II also spending time in Ilchester Gaol.
John Clark I had farmed on the Poldens and lived in the village of Catcott. He later moved to Greinton in the south of the county, where he died in 1697. According to the Society of Friends’ records, he was an ‘honest old man serviceable to the Truth in his day’. He must have been an heroically early recruit to the Quaker cause and, although there is no explicit evidence to confirm that he ever met George Fox, the Quaker founder, the likelihood is that he did, given that Fox spent a great deal of time in the West Country, one of the Society’s foremost strongholds.
His grandson, John Clark III, was born in 1680. His marriage to Ann brought together two important farming families. The Coaxleys were the bigger landowners of the two, owning three farms, including one at Overleigh, where John and Ann set up home together. One year into their marriage they had a son, John Clark IV, who caused considerable anxiety when in 1750 he asked Jane Bryant to marry him – and she accepted.
Jane’s grandfather, Thomas, had been involved in the Monmouth Rebellion against King James II and was hanged in Glastonbury after sentencing by the notorious Judge Jeffreys. That was not the problem, however. The concern for the Clarks was that Jane belonged to the Church of England, a disagreeable fact about which her fiancé was left in little doubt. ‘If you marry this giddy girl of Greinton,’ he was told by a Quaker elder, ‘thee will bring thy father’s grey hairs down in sorrow to the grave’.
John Clark IV’s cousin, James Clothier, was also exercised by the romance. According to a family memoir, Somerset Anthology, written many years later by John’s great-great-grandson, Roger Clark, Clothier put pen to paper, telling his cousin:
I heard very lately by a certain friend the party was afraid that thou would go to the priest for a wife … Thou mayst prevent it if thee will, and therefore I would have thee desert from proceeding any further with the giddy girl of Grenton [sic] at present, and waite, have patience, who knows that in time she may come to join the Friends.
John went ahead with the marriage and it proved to be a happy one, even though at first he was racked by guilt for saying his vows before an Anglican priest. At a monthly Friends’ meeting in July 1755, John’s contrite testimony was read out. ‘That what I did was even then much contrary to my mind and what I do now (so far as being married by a priest) sincerely Condeme.’
This difficulty came to a positive conclusion when within a few years Jane began attending the Quaker women’s monthly meetings – and in 1787 both she and John were appointed elders.
They had two sons and two daughters. Their eldest boy, Thomas Clark senior, lived and farmed at Overleigh until retiring to Bridgwater on the death of his wife, Mary Metford. Thomas was, according to Roger Clark’s memoir, ‘apt to have odd or eccentric notions’ and had been known locally as ‘Tommy Weight-Bottle’ because he was reported to have paid his workers in part in cider, weighing the drink rather than measuring it in pint or quart bottles.
Joseph Clark I was John and Jane’s second son. He was born in 1762 and lived all his life in or around Street, firstly at Friends Charity Farm Street, then at Lower Leigh and finally at Hindhayes, a house he built in 1807. He married Frances (Fanny) Sturge, from Olveston, Gloucestershire, in 1794 and they had three sons, Joseph Clark II, Cyrus and James. Joseph took on the family farm, while Cyrus and James were to become the founding fathers of what would turn out to be one of the world’s most famous shoe companies: Clarks.
Hindhayes, the house that Cyrus Clark’s father, Joseph Clark I, had built in 1807. This photograph was taken in the back garden in the 1880s by Cyrus’s eldest son John Aubrey Clark and shows three of Cyrus’s other children: Alfred (at centre in hat); Bessie (Sarah Elizabeth), seated; and (at right, seated in front of window) Thomas Beaven Clark. The standing woman is Bessie’s companion, Mrs Walker; Bessie had been left an invalid by the typhus epidemic of 1852.
The three boys’ father lived until he was almost 70, and by the time of his death in 1831 he had become a pillar of the Quaker establishment. In his later years, Joseph Clark I was not a well man. He had suffered a stroke and walked with an uncertain gait, but he continued to preach, seemingly oblivious to his deteriorating health. According to Roger Clark, his audience at Friends’ meetings found him ‘quite unintelligible’ and:
… in a family meeting such as Street was at that time, no one could be found to deal plainly enough with the dear old man, and it was finally left to a Q.M. [Quaker Meeting] Committee with Bristol Friends on it, set up for the purpose, to explain to him that his Ministry was no longer effective… [but] we remember him as a kind old man who, when we were taken to see him, would shuffle across the room to get us sugar plums, and to set the cuckoo clock a-cuckooing for our amusement.
During his long, devout life, Joseph Clark I developed strong bonds with several wealthy Quaker families such as the Gilletts, Players, Metfords, Sturges and Palmers. For Cyrus and James, his two younger sons, these were to prove important contacts over the next few decades
By the 1820s, Street’s population had risen to 800, but it remained largely isolated from the main centres of business and only 60 or so people were still employed in the once busy textiles industry. London was a sixteen-hour carriage journey away, while Bristol required eight hours of riding, and it wasn’t until the opening of the Glastonbury-to-Highbridge canal in 1833 that new businesses in Street began to get established.
Cyrus Clark was a ‘most imaginative and lively personality with a penchant for trading and manufacture’ says George Barry Sutton in his book C. & J. Clark, 1833–1903: A History of Shoemaking. Certainly, he was an industrious young man. In 1821, he had gained enough experience in fellmongering (the removal of sheep’s wool from hides in preparation for tanning), tanning and woolstapling (the buying of wool from a producer, followed by grading and then selling on to a manufacturer) to form a partnership with his cousin, Arthur Clothier, whose family had been in woolstapling since the seventeenth century.
Cyrus was only 21 when he entered into this partnership with Clothier – and it turned out to be a short-lived collaboration. In 1825, they went their separate ways, with Arthur retaining the more profitable tanning side of the business and Cyrus concentrating on the fellmongering and woolstapling. Generally speaking, 1825 is therefore regarded as the year in which the company that eventually became Clarks was founded, even though the formal partnership between Cyrus and James did not happen for a further eight years. It was also in 1825 that Cyrus married Sarah Bull, daughter of John Bull, a local glove manufacturer. They were to have four sons and a daughter.
One of the reasons Cyrus had no qualms about breaking up with Clothier was that he had developed his own sideline that was to prove highly successful. His idea had been to make sheepskin rugs from some of the skins instead of pulling the wool off. This was a process that swiftly lent itself to a variety of other consumer goods. For example, offcuts were made into strips that were ideal for mops, while softer skins were adapted to make chamois-leathers and housemaids’ gloves.
James, meanwhile, received a sound Quaker education that included some years at Sidcot School, in Winscombe, North Somerset, a co-educational establishment founded in 1699 for the children of Friends. But he was an unhappy schoolboy. In fact, his whole education made him miserable. Before attending Sidcot, he had been sent away, aged seven, to a mainly girls’ Quaker school in Bridgwater, where there was only one other boy boarder. As James described it in an unpublished autobiography written for the benefit of his children:
Although I was not unkindly treated … I cried myself to sleep every night and crying again when I woke in the morning till the vacation came. Sidcot was little better. I never met with more depraved characters, so utterly lost to all that was good, as some few of the older boys, who tyrannised and exercised the worst possible influence over their younger companions.
He left aged sixteen, and his father resolved to apprentice him to a chemist in Bath. James hated the idea.
I begged so earnestly not to leave home, saying I did not care what business I was apprenticed to so that I could live at Street, that in accordance with this wish I was apprenticed to my brother Cyrus … I was greatly pleased with this arrangement, for having all my life lived in the country I could not bear the idea of the confinement of city life, or indeed of any sort of confinement.
And so, on 22 March 1828, the seventeen-year-old James went to work for his brother Cyrus. He also lived with Cyrus and Sarah in a house that had belonged to John Bull, Cyrus’s father-in-law. It was next to the outhouses where Bull made his gloves – premises that later would become the first Clarks factory.
The terms of James’s five-year apprenticeship were unequivocal. They are recorded in an informal history of the company written by James’s eldest son, William S. Clark:
I have the indenture of apprenticeship which provides that ‘Cyrus Clark in consideration of a premium of £80 paid to him and of his giving him faithful service in every way will cause James Clark to be taught and instructed in the arts of a Tanner, Sheepskin Rug Manufacturer and Fellmonger’. James was ‘bound not to contract matrimony while apprenticed’ and ‘shall not play cards, dice tables or other unlawful games … Cyrus Clark engages to find James Clark sufficient meat, drink and lodging’ and my grandfather Joseph Clark covenants to find his son, James Clark, ‘sufficient clothes, mending and washing and medical and surgical attendance’.
James seemed perfectly content with all of that. As William put it:
James Clark always remembered with gratitude the extreme kindness with which he was treated by him [Cyrus] and by his wife, my Aunt Sarah, the latter being more like a mother or an elder sister to him than a sister-in-law.
There was no mention of a stipend. But within a remarkably short period, there was no need for any such arrangement. Keen to earn some money and achieve a degree of independence from his brother, James asked Cyrus to let him have some of the short wool skins that were unsuitable for the manufacturing of rugs. He then came up with the idea of cutting those skins into wool-lined slippers. At first, he did the cutting himself and employed a man called Esau Whitnell, a skilled local shoemaker, to make the slippers for him. Whitnell, who walked with a heavy limp because one leg was shorter than the other, lived in a ramshackle thatched cottage close to the Toll Gate at the end of the village. James wrote:
Having no allowance of pocket money… my brother allowed me to get some slippers made of our short-wooled sheepskins, tanned with the wool on, and to cut out and prepare them for socks for ladies’ and gentlemen’s shoes … the slippers were made up by a village shoemaker and after a time other sorts of wool-lined slippers were added, till eight or ten men were pretty fully employed on them, my part of the working being attended to after working hours.
The story propagated by H. F. Scott-Stokes in his 1925 book, Clark, Son and Morland Ltd: Centenary Notes and Reminiscences, is that Cyrus at first showed little interest in his brother’s entrepreneurial flourish. Rather, he ‘turned to the serious business of the factory and never gave the matter another thought’. In fact, Cyrus’s private ledger shows that he was willing to give his brother long credit and some additional cash advances to expand his slipper business. Cyrus even began experimenting with different kinds of slippers and shoes himself, and in October 1831, while James was on a sales trip to Manchester, he wrote an enthusiastic letter to his brother:
We have much improved the slippers. The plan we now adopt is to take a white skin rather long in the wool, and then skim the top off it, by this means we get it perfectly white. We then use that skin for the bordering. By this means we cover stitches and we have a beautiful fringe round each, so that those thou now hast are not a fair sample – and we do the same with the brown by choosing a handsome colour prime mat and skim off the black tips.
In the same letter, he encouraged James to seek out new ideas and not come back empty-handed from his travels – ‘now if thou see anything which thou consider an improvement, either boots or shoes, buy it and bring with thee’.
James’s first dedicated salesman was a cousin and friend from Sidcot School, Charles Gilpin, who went on to become the Liberal MP for Northampton. Gilpin at the time was an apprentice to his father, a woollen draper in Bristol. The deal these cousins brokered was that Charles could keep any profit he made from the sale of slippers as a means of supplementing his meagre income.
Increasingly, as James went about the country selling Cyrus’s rugs, he found that there was growing interest in the slippers, which by now were known as ‘Brown Petersburgs’ or simply ‘Brown Peters’. The name remains a mystery. In Kenneth Ponting’s Sheep of the World there is no breed or type of sheep called Petersburg, although there were clear connections between the British and Russian courts in the 1830s, and trade with Russia was strong. The late John Thornton, an authority on old footwear, who in the 1980s was head of the Boot and Shoe Department at Northampton College of Technology, once suggested that the name could have been chosen simply because it was evocative of a cold climate.
Brown Peters were soon joined by other classes of slippers on James’s showcard, and he also introduced lambswool socks, some hand-welted boots and a few shoes. James may have been occupied in his workshop, but he was also busy travelling, having gone on the road at the age of eighteen. The riding was arduous, but the drinking with fellow commercial travellers was clearly far more debilitating. At one point, he heeded Cyrus’s advice and restricted himself to what he called a ‘modest’ four glasses of port after dinner, but by 1831 Cyrus and James were finding it ‘difficult indeed to bear witness at the commercial table’ and abstained from alcohol from there on.
The making of sheepskin rugs remained straightforward. Skins were tanned with the wool on them and, according to William S. Clark:
… the colour afterwards struck a dark brown with limewater … afterwards the dressing of the skins with alum and salt was introduced and the skins were dyed in various colours.
Shoe manufacturing, on the other hand, was going through a huge transformation with the introduction of ‘ready-mades’ in addition to more expensive bespoke shoes. All shoes were made on a last – a shaped piece of wood or metal around which the shoe is built – but ready-mades involved a universal last rather than one made especially for a particular individual. And it was not until the 1850s that there was a clear distinction between left- and right-footed shoes in the ready-made market.
Exactly when ready-mades were first introduced is unclear, but, as George Barry Sutton noted, a firm of shoemakers in Northampton produced 2,500 pairs of boots for Cromwell’s army in 1648 using a uniform last. Similarly, a shoemaker in London testified before a Parliamentary Committee in 1738 that he employed 162 people ‘from eight to eighty’ to produce footwear to supply the Plantations in Ireland and elsewhere overseas.
A Clarks showcard of 1890, showing the main factory site in Street at that time, as well as a small inset view of the works in 1840.
Unlike Northampton, which had a dedicated street of cordwainers (as shoemakers were known), and other towns known for their footwear, such as Norwich, Leicester and Kendal, Street had no pedigree in shoe production. Esau Whitnell was the sole shoemaker in 1829, but such was the energy of Cyrus and James that by 1841 there were 24 apprentices or junior shoemakers. Working conditions were cramped and not unlike the sweatshops of London, but it was these outworkers who changed Street from a sleepy village into a thriving town.
James Clark completed his apprenticeship in 1833, by which time he had saved £70. This was the year Cyrus and James officially worked out their business arrangement, setting themselves up almost as equal partners under the name C. & J. Clark, which would trade mainly in rugs, socks, slippers and shoes. The capital in the business amounted to £2,240, of which Cyrus’s contribution was £1,170 – the net value of his rug and skin trade – and James’s was £1,070. James raised £1,000 as the balance of his investment by mortgaging land left to him by his father, who had died two years previously in 1831.
Sales for the first six months of the partnership were £1,760. 4s. 1d. for rugs and £812. 8s. 5d. for shoes and socks. The net profit was £640.
