The Friends’ Meeting House in Street, built in 1850.
QUAKERS TOOK A DIM VIEW of debt. It represented the irresponsibility they stood so implacably against. Consequently, the Society of Friends’ monthly meetings stressed the words of Epistle 1754 – guidance emanating from headquarters in London of that year – about how they should be ‘properly watchful’ over fellow Quakers and ‘early to caution all against running beyond their depth and entangling themselves in a greater multiplicity of trade and business than they can extricate themselves from with honour and reputation’. Being ‘properly watchful’ over others was a persistent theme within Quaker circles in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Specific guidelines of this kind were relayed to clerks and read out at regional and local meetings. They were updated at irregular intervals in response to developments in the financial and industrial world. Applying the teachings of Christ to the workplace were essential, and in the event of money troubles, you were expected to seek advice from more experienced Friends – and to be candid about your predicament. For example, in the words of Epistle 1692:
All friends that are entering into trade, or that are in trade, and have not stocks sufficient of their own to answer the trade they aim at, be very cautious of running themselves into debt, without advising with some of their ancient and experienced Friends among whom they live.
The Friends’ Meeting House in Street, built in 1850.
Those who did incur debts were encouraged to wipe the slate clean as soon as possible. Failure to pay a debt was seen in Epistle 1735 as ‘the great scandal and reproach of our holy profession’ and Friends were warned to give ‘timely caution to any such as either break their promises or delay payment of such debts, or otherwise render themselves suspected’. And woe betide those who were in debt but continued to enjoy the trappings of a comfortable life, ‘it being exceedingly dishonourable for any to live in ostentation and greatness at the expense of others’.
Cyrus and James Clark grew up well-versed in these fundamental Quaker principles. And they would have learned at length about the character and behaviour of the Quakers’ uncompromising founder, George Fox – who had happened to be apprenticed to a Nottingham shoemaker prior to his spiritual awakening in 1643.
Quakers were stoical in their response to provocation and persecution. In 1661, following the suppression of a violent Fifth Monarchist uprising (one of several non-conformist movements) led by Thomas Venner, Fox had issued the Peace Testimony, which officially committed the Society of Friends to pacifism and non-violence under all circumstances. ‘The spirit of Christ will never move us to fight a war against any man with carnal weapons,’ he wrote.
A turning point for Quakers came within months of the accession of William and Mary in the form of the Toleration Act of 1689, which was designed to be ‘an effectual means to unite Their Majesties’ Protestant subjects in interest and affection’, according to Charles Braithwaite’s respected Quaker history, The Second Period of Quakerism.
Fox died in 1691 – two years after this breakthrough – but had lived long enough to see positive results from his battles with Church and state, and a system was in place whereby Quakers knew what was expected of them, professionally and personally. Men and women should worship God directly and not through any intermediary, whether it be a priest or religious organisation. Personal religious experience was what counted. How you lived your life was more important than any prescribed system of belief and you were wholly responsible for your own actions. Redemption must be found on earth. The Kingdom of Heaven resided within the soul of all men and women, and was not merely a safe haven to which you were invited in the afterlife.
The closest Quakers came to a constitution or written code was the so-called ‘Advices and Queries’, which were circulated at the London Yearly Meeting. The overriding principle of these edicts was that Quakers should embrace the simple life. An allegiance of trust should always be maintained between Friends. They should work hard, support each other and be beyond reproach in their business affairs. Honesty was paramount. They must share any success with others, striving at all times for the common good.
By 1697, Quakers were enjoying considerable financial success. ‘They have Grip’d Mammon as hard as any of their Neighbours; and now call Riches a Gift and A Blessing from God’, scoffed one of their detractors, Charles Leslie, in The Snake in the Grass; or Satan Transformed into an Angel of Light, published in London in 1697.
Some 150 years later, at least 74 banks had been founded by Quakers, their influence way out of proportion to their numbers, which never exceeded more than 30,000 in Britain except in the latter part of the seventeenth century. There is an argument that Quakers did well because they hailed mainly from middle-class families (and certainly Fox could be described as a man with access to independent means), but nothing can detract from their resourcefulness, innovation, graft and public-spiritedness.
Their progress became something of a business phenomenon. A Quaker, Edward Pease, was inspired to build the Stockton and Darlington Railway in 1814, which was to become known as the ‘Quaker Line’. Railway ticket and stamping machines were invented by a Quaker, Thomas Edmonson, as was the timetable known as Bradshaw’s Railway Times, created by George Bradshaw. The Reckitts, a Quaker family, went into the household goods business, while the Crossfields were soap and chemical manufacturers whose firm led eventually to the formation of Lever Brothers.
Bryant & May made matches; Huntley, Bourne & Stevens produced tins; Allen and Hanbury developed pharmaceuticals; and the Cadburys, Frys and Rowntrees all made their mark in the production of chocolate.
Several prominent biscuit companies also began plying their trade during the nineteenth century, most of them with Quaker origins: Carr’s of Carlisle; Peek Frean; Jacobs & Co; and Huntley & Palmer, who were also affiliated to Huntley, Bourne & Stevens.
Those who brought the Quaker name into disrepute could be ‘disowned’ by the Society and there were occasions when the practice of Friends refraining from suing one another was suspended if ‘Evil Persons’ had proved ‘base and unworthy’. Monthly meetings had the authority to ‘speedily set righteous Judgment upon the head of the Transgressor’.
The guidelines were regularly updated and insertions added. In the 1783 Book of Extracts, for example, Friends were alerted to a ‘most pernicious practice’ that fell short of ‘that uprightness that ought to appear in every member of our religious society’, a practice that was ‘absolutely inconsistent with the truth’. This ‘highly unbecoming’ new menace was the availability of credit.
The interior of the Friends’ Meeting House in Street, as it was in October 1955.
In 1833, both the 1738 Advices and 1783 Extracts were revised and became known as the Rules of Discipline, which themselves were tweaked in 1861 and divided into three main chapters: Christian Doctrine; Christian Practice; and Church Government. These helped Quakers keep their ambitions in check during the Industrial Revolution when wealth billowed from the chimneys of factories, mills and warehouses.
‘We do not condemn industry, which we believe to be not only praiseworthy but indispensable,’ stated the Rules of Discipline, which went on to reiterate that ‘the love of money is said in Scripture to be “the root of all Evil”’. The Rules urged: ‘Dear Friends who are favoured with outward prosperity, when riches increase not to set your hearts upon them.’
Cyrus and James Clark attended their local meeting house every Sunday, sitting in silence or listening to a Friend giving testimony. Their business was in its infancy and they would have been aware of their responsibilities, particularly the consequences of over-extending themselves. They only had to look at the plight of Elizabeth Fry, the famous Quaker prison reformer who had married Joseph Fry in 1800, with whom she had eleven children. Greatly influenced by William Savery, an American evangelical Quaker, Elizabeth had established a school in 1816 for the children of women serving sentences in Newgate Prison, Norfolk. She also arranged for instruction to be given to their mothers, especially in sewing and knitting; she organised Bible-reading and insisted that prisoners be divided into small, manageable groups, each under the watchful eye of a matron, who pressed upon her charges the importance of cleanliness in mind, matter and spirit.
Elizabeth became such a powerful voice that she was called to give evidence before parliament on penal reform, but for all her notoriety, her altruism, her contacts in high places and her towering international reputation (she had once entertained the King of Prussia at lunch), she suffered the humiliation in 1828 of seeing her husband’s business fall into bankruptcy, which led to his immediate estrangement from the Society of Friends. Cyrus and James Clark were fortunate to escape a similar fate.
Rugs accounted for some 60 per cent of C. & J. Clark’s sales in 1835, followed by footwear and mops, each approaching 20 per cent, and chamois leather making up the balance. Those figures would change dramatically over the next fifteen years. By 1851, footwear represented some three quarters of total revenue, with rugs down to a fifth and mops and chamois leather accounting for a tiny fraction of sales.
Chamois leather, which is soft and absorbent and leaves no streaks when used as a polisher, takes its name from the chamois, a goat-like mammal native to regions in central Europe, particularly the Carpathian mountains of Romania and the Tatra mountains in Bulgaria. From the nineteenth century onwards, however, most chamois leathers were chamois only in name. They were, in fact, made from the hides of deer, goats and sheep – and it is likely that those produced by C. & J. Clark were sheepskin. They were reasonably simple to make, requiring little in the way of machinery or equipment.
The non-footwear side of the business comprised a miscellaneous range of products such as ottoman covers, gloves and mops, and included woolstapling, fellmongering and the manufacture of rugs themselves. The mops were an effective way to use what would otherwise be wasted – consisting of a stick on to which were fastened strips cut from the leftovers of skins assigned for rug-making.
All respectable housewives had a good supply of mops. Seldom a day went by without women washing the floors inside their houses or the doorsteps and pavements outside – and if the neighbours were watching, so much the better. Mops occasionally had other uses. In the 1832 General Election, they came in handy during a brawl in Street on polling day between Whigs and Tories. The election had come shortly after the new Whig prime minister, Lord Grey, who succeeded the Duke of Wellington, had pushed the Reform Bill through parliament – an act that increased the number of MPs in growing, industrial cities at the expense of those in areas where fewer people lived, known as the ‘rotten boroughs’.
This bill, designed to enlarge the suffrage by including more property owners, was seen as a crucial step towards parliamentary democracy and one which would usher in a wider electorate. As it happened, Grey himself came from a distinguished Northumberland family and his first cabinet consisted almost entirely of aristocrats. There was an irony to the bill’s preamble. It spoke of how it was designed to ‘take effectual Measures for correcting diverse abuses that have long prevailed in the choice of members to serve’ in the palace of Westminster, and yet one of the first things Grey’s government did after the act became law was to create two new dukedoms.
Voters in Street were mostly Whigs. In Wells and Glastonbury, they tended to be Tory. The nearest polling station to both towns was in Ilchester. It was on the way back from the ballot box that a crowd from Wells stopped for refreshment at the Street Inn, where they were joined by men from Street, almost all of whom worked at C. & J. Clark. A description of this incident is included in Clarks of Street, 1825–1950, a wide-ranging history compiled mainly by Laurence Barber, a former archivist for Clarks, but with contributions from Clark family members and some senior Clarks employees:
They were greeted with scorn and jeers by [the people from] Wells, and later with more solid missiles. Wells, armed with weapons from the inn, drove [the people from] Street up the High Street to the Factory gates, where a young lad named John Hooper, afterwards for many years well known as the factory carpenter, seeing their plight, handed out mop sticks through a window, and these, broken in half across the knee, soon furnished the shoemakers with effective staves.
Battle ensued, during which a man called Joseph White suffered a blow to the head and was laid unconscious. He was taken into Cyrus Clark’s house to recover. Another man with the same surname but no relation, Josiah White, was Street’s police constable and well-known as a Whig. He was also struck on the head, but brushed off the blow and then proceeded to cause mayhem. ‘I’ll teach ’ee who is constable,’ he shouted, wielding his baton as he took matters into his own hands.
A few days later, the local magistrate, who was a die-hard Tory, acquitted the men from Wells, but handed out £200 worth of fines to the shoemakers from Street and fined Josiah White £10. The Whig candidate, who had been returned to Westminster and whose party won the general election, was so outraged at the treatment dealt out to his supporters that he paid all their fines out of his own pocket.
The number of men employed purely in the Clarks’ shoe business began to rise each year, from one in 1829 to around 38 in 1841, according to the census returns. With ready-made shoes not requiring as much skill as bespoke footwear, Cyrus and James had little difficulty recruiting workers from nearby villages, especially those who had lost their jobs following the decline of the textile industry. In fact, with the exception of two Irishmen, the 1841 census showed that no shoemakers in Street, Glastonbury or Walton were born outside Somerset. Even in 1851, only 10 per cent of male shoemakers hailed from outside the county. But it was a young man’s game: men under the age of 21 accounted for 39 per cent of Street’s shoemakers in that same year.
Clarks was producing 60 lines of footwear in 1835, including for the first time a range of shoes for children. The pace of expansion took even James by surprise. ‘We little thought that the slipper trade begun in such a small way would lead us into a large shoe business … and greatly increasing the population of our village.’
In addition to sheepskin, a variety of other materials were used for slippers, while soles were also sold separately, though in declining numbers. Boots for ladies and men were the bestsellers. One ladies’ boot was called the ‘Ne Plus Ultra’, which sold for 20 shillings (£1), a lot of money at the time, and two and a half times as much as the Clark brothers’ second-most expensive boot. In fact, no boot or shoe would command such a price in real terms as the Ne Plus Ultra until 1921.
Ready-made footwear was sold to customers for 10 to 15 per cent less than bespoke. The main saving concerned the work of the ‘clickers’, or ‘cutters’ as they became known, who were the most highly paid individuals in the shoemaking process. Clickers were so named because the room in which they worked was silent apart from the click of their blades piercing the leather. Sometimes they were referred to as the ‘gentlemen of shoemaking’. For ready-made footwear, clickers continued to cut out the upper leather, but in standard sizes rather than making new patterns for each individual order.
The clickers were based in the factory along with supervisory staff who checked the quality of shoes brought in every day by outworkers. The outworkers were divided between those known as ‘makers’ and as ‘binders’ (known also as ‘closers’). The makers were men and boys, who were responsible for attaching the sole and heel to the upper. The binders were women and girls, who sewed together the pieces of leather that formed the upper. Binding involved two processes: the welt and the sew-round. Welting was far more common than the sew-round, except in the case of more sophisticated women’s shoes. The maker would ‘last’ the shoe by tacking an insole to the bottom of his last and stretching the upper over it until its lower edges overlapped the circumference of the insole. Then he would tack the upper to the insole before a welting strip was laid along the perimeter. The welt and the overlapping portion of the upper was hand-stitched or sewn to the insole, at which time the tacks could be removed. The outsole was then stitched to the welt. A steady hand and patience were the prerequisite qualifications of the all-important makers, or at least that was what the men, anxious to remain better remunerated than the women, were quick to stress.
It was also the job of the makers to finish the shoe ready for sale, which involved paring the sole and heel edges, waxing, colouring and polishing – and then sanding, colouring and polishing the bottom of the sole and the top-piece. Such was the strict division of labour between the sexes that, if you lived in Street, it was common to ask on hearing that a baby had been born whether the child was a binder or a maker, rather than a boy or a girl.
The sweatshops of London were notorious at this time, but conditions in Street were not always much better. Shoemakers worked and lived in backshops with ladders leading through the scullery to the first floor where much of the labour took place. It was cramped and dirty. The conditions are described by Brendan Lehane in his book C. & J. Clark: 1825–1975:
Sometimes whole families worked together to make enough in a week – a pound or so – to pay for necessities; not that they needed much, for several cottages kept pigs and most grew their own vegetables. Wives learned to rock their babies’ cradles with their feet while they stitched uppers – 15 stitches to the inch – to earn, if they were nimble, 1½d. an hour. Eldest sons learned early to assist in their fathers’ trades. With his pincers, knife, hammer, awls, tacks and rivets of brass or wood, the man of the house made the complete shoes. In winter, they worked round the light of one central candle.
The system worked well, and for the first few years of the partnership, productivity kept up with demand. Sales tripled between 1832 and 1836. The Invoice Recording Book 1834–1836 shows that, even though transport options were still limited, Clarks shoes were spreading to parts of Britain and the British Isles that other companies weren’t reaching. There were no trains at this time between Bristol and London, or from Bristol to the north of England. Goods were sent by wagon, pack-horse, barge or sometimes by ship. Even so, the Clark brothers’ shoe business was trading well in Northwest England, the Midlands and other areas of the country even further from Street.
In fact, in 1835, sales of footwear in what the firm called the home area (Somerset, Cornwall, Devon, Dorset, Wiltshire, Hampshire, Gloucestershire and Bristol) accounted for only 18 per cent of sales, while in Eastern England, no sales at all were recorded that year.
Far and away the biggest single market was Ireland, which accounted for some two fifths of Clarks total output in shoes and around a sixth of its rugs. The obliging Irish – at least until the Irish famine and the general economic depression of the late 1830s – were made up mainly of the merchant classes thriving in the larger ports following the easing of trade restrictions in 1780. Clarks attracted buyers in Dublin, Cork, Limerick, Waterford, Belfast and Clonwell, the last being a strong Quaker town.
James Clark married in 1835, after which Cyrus built him a house, called Netherleigh, next to the factory. This meant that the partners lived at either end of the workshop. James’s wife was Eleanor Stephens, whose father was a linen draper and gifted china painter. Her mother was Amy Metford, daughter of William Metford, a Glastonbury Quaker who ran a knitting business specialising in stockings. James and Eleanor had fourteen children, twelve of whom survived to adulthood. Their third child was William S. Clark, who would later succeed the partners as chairman and who went on to become the firm’s early saviour.
James and Eleanor had got to know each other three years before they married when Amy brought her daughter to stay with James’s mother. James wrote how ‘this visit brought me into intimate acquaintance with your dear mother and I felt very much attracted to her’. The following year, Amy made another visit to Street, during which James
… did not let it pass without declaring my desire that my fondest hope might be realised in obtaining her [Eleanor] as my partner for life and I can truly say that all my hopes and expectations have been far more than realised in the rich wealth of blessing that has been the result of that union.
The winter before their wedding was a difficult one for Eleanor. She endured a severe attack of inflammation of the lungs and her doctors advised against marriage in case it weakened her further. James would not hear of it.
I thought then if we could only have 10 years of union I should have cause for deepest thankfulness, and for how much more have I been indebted to a loving Father who spared her to me.
A year after the marriage, Eleanor gave birth to their first daughter, Amy Jane, who lived only a matter of weeks. Eleanor then became unwell and James took her north of the border to convalesce, reaching both Edinburgh and Glasgow, where he managed to do some business at the same time. ‘I opened a trade that has since become a large one; it was our first visit to Scotland’, he wrote. Within months, total sales in Scotland accounted for 7.6 per cent of the Clark brothers’ footwear business.
Meanwhile, thanks to contacts James had made in Liverpool during his earlier sales trips to that part of the country, some shoes and rugs were sold to America and Canada, where, almost from the start, Cyrus had been keen to open up a sales front. In 1833, he wrote to his brother urging him to explore ‘by what means we could send some shoes and soles to America’.
James and Eleanor Clark with twelve of their children at Netherleigh in 1858: (left to right) Eleanor Clark holding Mabel, James Clark, Amy, William, Fanny, Mary, Annie, Eleanor, Florence, Sophia, James Edmund, Edith and Frank. The Clarks were ardent supporters of the anti-slavery movement, and their clothing was made from cotton grown by free labour. The Free Produce Movement promoted a range of ‘slave-free’ goods such as sugar and cotton; this allowed consumers such as the Clarks to take direct action against slavery.
At first, Cyrus and James travelled widely, but then limited their trips to two or three a year. As early as 1830, agents were appointed on a commission basis and these men were later known as ‘travelling salesmen’. The Clarks’ London man was John Jackson, who was on commission of 8.5 per cent of the sales he made, a higher rate than that paid to salesmen working in the provinces.
Competition was intensifying. Mass production of ready-made shoes was growing apace in America, while in France, after the Napoleonic Wars, shoe manufacturing was a burgeoning business. Northampton, the heart and soul of the British shoe industry, was particularly hit by imports from Europe. As early as 1829, the House of Commons heard about Northampton’s ‘want of regular employment and the low prices of wages’.
But these were difficult times across most sectors. When Queen Victoria succeeded to the throne in 1837, she found herself presiding over a decade known as the ‘hungry forties’, replete with famine in Ireland, widespread rural and urban poverty, and economic depression of a magnitude not experienced before in Britain. She was only eighteen when she became queen and her first prime minister, Lord Melbourne, whom she trusted and revered, was anxious not to alarm the young monarch by the country’s precarious predicament. When Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist was serialised for the first time, Victoria asked her prime minister whether or not he would recommend the novel. As recorded by A. N. Wilson in The Victorians, Melbourne was scathing:
It’s all among workhouses and Coffin Makers and Pickpockets … I don’t like these things. I wish to avoid them; I don’t like them in reality, and therefore I don’t wish to see them represented.
At C. & J. Clark, production was increasing month by month, but this was stretching the business’s resources. As George Barry Sutton described it in C. & J. Clark, 1833–1903: A History of Shoemaking:
The 1834 Stock Account is notable for its lack of any reference to cash assets. The size of the net profit suggests that business had been extremely brisk and it is therefore not surprising that cash assets had been fully utilised in helping to create the large current assets shown in the account. The money due from debtors was a large sum which would all be required for the heavy outlays in the footwear trade during the following months. It soon became clear that at the business’s present rate of expansion, and taking into account other heavy spring expenditures, alternative sources of cash assets must be looked to.
A large amount of cash was needed each autumn to acquire sheepskin, but money was also needed for the shoe business in late spring and early summer in order to produce enough footwear for the busy autumn period of sales. In January 1835, Cyrus, who had banked for ten years with Reeves, Porch & Co. in Wells, arranged an overdraft facility as a temporary measure while working on securing long-term loans. The businessman in him might have had few qualms with this strategy, but the Quaker beating in his breast was uncomfortable. In a letter to James, who was travelling in Ireland, he said:
We are much heavier at the bank than I calculated upon and I do not see an end to our shortness unless we transfer (probably, replace) the bank debts by adding sufficient capital to fully meet these difficulties. I have been considering this matter and I have thought there is much difficulty occasioned by our having separate trades. I should therefore be willing, say for fourteen years, to unite the wool trade [which Cyrus had retained] with our business. We may then do little or much as circumstances may occur, that is when required we can shove our capital into our mat trade … we ought to average £100 in sales a week and this I think we may do by pushing the last five months of the year. I see we must drive close and we must not spend a shilling that can be avoided until we have paid off some of these debts … give this thy calm consideration.
Such a predicament might have made some people take refuge in liquor. But in Cyrus’s and James’s case, it coincided with their involvement in the Temperance Society, which was founded in 1832 by Joseph Livesey, a cheese-maker from Preston. James Clark believed he was ‘the first to sign any Temperance Pledge anywhere south of Bristol’ and Cyrus had taken great pleasure in smashing bottles of wine and liqueur that were then mixed in with mortar to build James’s marital home.
The Quaker take on drink was unequivocal. A flyer endorsed by Livesey was entitled ‘Drinking Is All Lost’ and it aimed to shock. Consume alcohol, it said, if you are happy with the:
… loss of hard earned money; loss of food and clothing; loss of happiness; loss of home comforts; loss of mind; loss of health; loss of life. You seek for pleasure in drink, and find ruin. You seek to drown your troubles, and you drown yourself.
It went on to explain how there is:
… no such thing as wholesome beer, or good cider, or pure wines and spirits. All these drinks deceive and mock you; rob and starve you. Don’t take the first glass!
Early temperance societies were inspired by a Belfast professor of theology named John Edgar, who in 1829 poured his stock of whisky out of his window, claiming it would destroy any lingering bad spirits. Livesey, the Temperance Society founder, opened the first temperance hotel in 1833 and the next year founded the temperance magazine, The Preston Temperance Advocate (1834–7). In 1835, the British Association for the Promotion of Temperance was formed to save the working classes from drink and it went on to become one of the biggest mass movements in British history. By the late nineteenth century, one in ten people had pledged to avoid alcohol.
James was an early convert, as he writes:
When about 19 years of age I became a member of a Temperance Society – which led to the formation at Street of a Society on the Moderation principle and brought me into association with other Philanthropic work … This proved a source of blessing and profit to myself, for which I have had cause to be very thankful, as it has brought me into association with many good and earnest Christian men.
Cyrus and James’s stance against alcohol may have been admirable, but it was also practical. Its enforcement was one means by which the production of shoes could continue unimpeded by cider-induced, drunken brawling, which was a regular event in Street. The brothers were particularly concerned about the young apprentices, whose lives were made that much harder when their masters were on the bottle. The problem is described in Clarks of Street, 1825–1950:
Each shoemaker would employ apprentices who made threads, sewed on the soles and did other minor parts of the work while learning their trade. The system did not work badly when, as in the majority of cases, the masters were sober, steady men and kind and considerate to the apprentices, but when, as sometimes happened, the masters were given to drinking and irregular hours of work, the apprentices suffered great hardship. Such a shoemaker would ‘shop’ his work on Friday or Saturday, would be drinking on Sunday and again on Monday (known as ‘Saint Monday’), would be quite unfit for work on Tuesday, and would only start in earnest on Wednesday or even Thursday in some cases. To get his week’s work into two or three days, he would then work half of one night and the whole of the next. This meant of course that the poor boys, of twelve, thirteen and fourteen years of age, and even younger, were brought up to waste and idle the early part of the week and then made to work day and night the latter part, and sometimes kept at their toil by doses of what was known as stirrup oil.
Working hours in the factory were from 6 am to 7 pm, with an hour’s break for lunch and half an hour each for breakfast and tea. On Saturdays, the day ended at 5 pm. One man, James Marsh, used to walk eight miles to work from Wells in the morning and eight miles back home again at night – and was reported never to have been late.
A year after Cyrus had written bleakly to James about the company’s finances, a number of advances were secured. Stuckey’s Banking Company came up with £500 secured on land owned by the two brothers and then two years later, in 1839, the bank made a second loan of a further £500.
At that time, Joseph and Cyrus were planning to expand their corn business and tried to persuade James to join them. The two older brothers were buying corn mainly from their cousins, Joseph and Charles Sturge, who were trading in Birmingham. According to the History of the Business of C&J Clark Limited, written by William S. Clark in 1914, James Clark
… thought the business far too speculative for their [Joseph and Cyrus] limited means … he also considered that the growing business of C. & J. Clark needed all the undivided energy of the two partners [Cyrus and James] and that it suffered through the greater part of Cyrus Clark’s time and so much of his interest being absorbed in the corn trade, and he rather strongly pressed his brother to draw out of it.
Joseph and Cyrus would have done well to heed James’s advice. In the winter of 1841–2, the net assets of both the corn business and the shoe company were not enough to meet the firm’s liabilities. In addition, James had been borrowing money from the company for his own private purposes, a clear departure from Quaker ethics and in many ways inconsistent with his own high standards. This was something he conceded when writing to his children many years later in 1881: ‘We were unfortunately tempted, whilst still working with a large amount of borrowed capital, to spend too much on our dwellings, and this eventually brought us into great straits.’
There is no evidence to suggest that the brothers fell out or even came close to falling out during the early years of austerity. It may have helped that Cyrus and James were markedly different characters. William S. Clark described his father James as ‘of a more hopeful turn of mind’ compared with Cyrus, but to those working with James
… it may have sometimes seemed as if he did not fully realise that such Divine help usually worked through human instrumentability [sic] and that such help should be sought to prevent getting into difficulties as well as to find a way out of them.
Cyrus was a worrier. At times, he was perfectly capable of seeing the problem and would speak mournfully about it – but he did not always implement a remedy. In June, 1841, he wrote to James, full of gloom:
I am sorry to say it will turn out worse than I anticipated and worse with me than thyself. My own expenses have been so very heavy … We must still retrench and I see plainly we must get quit of one of our two cutters … we must lessen our stock at least £2,000, say from £6,000 to £4,000 – an abundant stock even then … I don’t wish to discourage thee but I thought it was better to write … when thou hast read this letter burn it.
The losses in 1841 amounted to £1,400 and a year later the situation was little better. Stocktaking in April 1842 made clear that, after paying the interest on loans, there was precious little left out of the profits for future investment. The mood of encroaching despair was such that Isaac Stephens, a relative of James’s by marriage, suggested to Cyrus and James that they should consider emigrating to Australia:
Much better it would be to leave while you have something to take out with you … the times are so awfully bad … and I would strongly advise thee – at all hazards – to get out of thy present business.
Cyrus began to entertain the idea and it was left to his wife, Sarah, to enlist the help of James to persuade him otherwise. At one point, she wrote to her brother-in-law, saying that Cyrus was looking to ‘escape from the storm, wind and tempest’.
The national situation was just as grim. Poor harvests brought virtual starvation to some parts of the country, followed by riots in town and rick burnings in the countryside. In Street, a cry for help went out from C. & J. Clark towards the end of 1842 – and the Quakers rallied round. The chief benefactor was Edmund Sturge, a cousin and one of James’s closest friends. He was instrumental in soliciting the generosity of others, including Joseph Eaton and Robert Charlton from Bristol and Jacob Player Sturge, another Clark cousin. George Thomas, a family friend from Bristol, came up with £750 and Thomas Clark, a first cousin of Cyrus and James who had made money from a wholesale provisions business in Bridgwater, contributed £400 and became a key figure in keeping Clarks solvent over the next twenty years. In total, loans of £2,950 were promised, but before accepting the money, the partners had to gain the approval of Stuckey’s Banking Company, easily the Clarks’ largest creditor.
These delicate negotiations were left largely to Cyrus to handle because James was travelling. In August 1844, Cyrus wrote to his brother saying that he had provided the bank with full and proper disclosure and that Stuckey’s wanted to know what the brothers were worth after paying their debts.
I think I said £1,000 or £1,200, that is jointly. I let them know that Joseph had lost all [on the corn business] and that we had to make considerable sacrifices on his behalf.
The bank then gave Cyrus ten days to provide a written statement of C. & J. Clark’s affairs and in September it agreed to the loans. Stipulations were attached. The bank insisted on being kept closely informed about the business’s finances and the Friends who had lent money made it clear that they wanted Thomas Clark and Edmund Sturge to supervise all future annual stocktakings. This became a heightened priority after it was discovered that for two years Cyrus had not even drawn up a proper set of accounts.
Many years later, after Cyrus had died, James reflected:
The years following 1840 to 1848 were very trying ones, a very increasing business and great shortness of capital. My brothers Joseph and Cyrus were engaged in the corn business, which led us into many difficulties from which we were only rescued by the intervention of my cousin Edmund Sturge and other kind Friends … our business improved after 1848, our shoe trade steadily increasing.
There were indeed improvements and trade did steadily increase – although it also needed a further loan of £450 from Thomas Clark in 1848 to help with a cash deficiency. A year later, Thomas became a sleeping partner in the business and earned the respect – and gratitude – of both Cyrus and James. Thomas was married to a sister of Cyrus’s wife and was eight years older than Cyrus, eighteen years senior to James. Born at Greinton and the son of a farmer, he served as an elder at Quaker meetings. In the 1840s, he had worked as an accounts supervisor at C. & J. Clark and so knew about the business. He was also a highly knowledgeable botanist.
During the five years Thomas remained a partner, the firm made net profits totalling £15,364. 15s. 5d., of which his share was £2,561. 3s. 2d., with the remainder split between Cyrus and James so that each received £6,401. 16s. 7d. This arrangement with Thomas continued until 1854, even though the company was in no position to repay the original £2,000 he had invested, let alone any of the additional £5,276 he had put in during times of emergency. Thomas was a benevolent contributor. At one point during 1854, he was asked to make a further urgent investment of £2,000 and although he did not have the cash, he secured a loan on land which he was in the process of selling. He even went as far as apologising to the partners for the ‘inconvenience caused by his difficulties’.
Later that year, it was agreed that Thomas would be paid interest on his loans at a rate of 7.5 per cent a year, some 2.5 per cent more than the bank rate. Fortunately, between 1849 and 1854, the value of Clarks’ total assets almost doubled from £21,700 to £42,900, sales increased from £20,000 to £31,600 and the average annual net profit was £2,800.
The earliest surviving price list is that of 1848. It comprises 334 items, with prices ranging from 13s. 6d. for Gentlemen’s Pump Boots to 3s. 9d. for Ladies’ Best French Morocco shoes to 1s. for Children’s Enamel Seal Ankle Straps. And despite those difficult early years there were some notable triumphs and some moments of reassurance for the two founding brothers. At the Great Exhibition of 1851, C. & J. Clark was visited by royalty and the company was awarded medals for its galoshes and sheepskin rugs. Cyrus was in London to receive the awards, after which he wrote to James:
My Dear Brother,
I came up here at eight o’clock, had a little difficulty in passing my parcels, but succeeded, there being new rules since the 17th.
The Queen, the King of the Belgians, walking together, arrived soon after nine o’clock, two of the Royal Children, two of the children of the King of the Belgians, and Prince Albert.
They passed rather rapidly, it seemed more a matter of ceremony, scarcely any examination of the goods. They first came in from the centre, and then came a second time and passed the other side. The guide directed the Queen’s attention to the curried leather opposite, and walked before the Queen backwards and crablike.
I had a gracious bow from her, and met her the second time, when I had a very decided bow; the gent, who went round with her, said: ‘Model of a Factory’, and the Queen said: ‘Very pretty’, but neither particularly looked at the shoes or rugs … I found I had as good, if not more, notice than some of my neighbours, but there was no time, without appearing rude, to push one’s articles into notice, so to conclude I have had a very courteous bow from the Queen and a conversation with Prince Albert.