The Northamptonshire Leather Tanning, Leather Dressing and Allied Trades

P.R. Mounfield

Northamptonshire’s position at mid-century

The Industry Tables of the 1951 Census enumerated 72,603 people employed in the production of leather, leather goods and fur (Order XI) in England and Wales, 2,743 of them in Northamptonshire. In employment terms, by far the most important activities within the Order were the tanning and dressing of leather which in that year offered direct employment nationally to 35,878 folk, 2,557 of them in Northamptonshire. Figure 1 shows that at mid-century tanning and leather dressing were scattered throughout England and Wales but that there were three obvious geographical concentrations of production. First, and most important, a cluster in north-western England forming a broad swathe of activity from Merseyside to Leeds; second, a less-important concentration in the south-east Midlands, particularly Northamptonshire but also with nearby individual localities in Bedfordshire (Harrold) and Buckinghamshire (Olney); and, thirdly, London. In 1951 London contained 10,059 leather workers, 2,168 of them in tanning and leather dressing; Lancashire had 8,091 people working in these closely connected trades. (1)

Figure 1 The location of employment in tanning and leather dressing in England and Wales in 1951

The processes of leather production (2)

Leather is a material produced from animal skins and hides by tanning operations which prevent putrescence; properly tanned leather is capable of being repeatedly made wet and dry without losing this property. Skins and hides consist of three main layers; the epidermis, with the hair and hair roots; the corium, a fibrous main skin structure used to produce leather, and the flesh layer. The fibre angle and fibre structure vary between animal breeds and with beasts of different ages. In the production of leather from raw hides of cattle and the skins of other animals various processes are used according to the kind of leather required but all are based upon a similar sequence of events; dependent upon the state of the hides and skins on arrival at the tannery:

• hides and skins may have been preserved with salt to stop putrefaction, and measures to remove the effects of preservation have to take place.
• dried hides and skins are soaked in water to make the stiff hides and pelts flexible and close to a condition very similar to that when the hide was removed from the animal itself.
• fresh and wet salted hides and skins are dehaired and cleansed, initially by immersion in solutions of lime or sodium sulphide followed by scraping to remove hair and remaining fragments of flesh. The side of the hide from which the hair has been removed is known as the ‘grain’ and the underneath part as the ‘flesh’ side. Only after bating or drenching and further washing is the material ready for the next stage. On occasion, the hides or skins may be split in the limed state by being pushed edge on against a rapidly revolving endless band-knife, the top split being of prime quality because it has the grain. Sometimes splitting does not occur, or comes later, as is the case with chrome tanned hides intended for clothing, upholstery and shoe uppers.
• hides may be kept intact or cut into butts, bellies and shoulders, a process known as ‘rounding off’. On removal of the bellies and shoulders what is left is known as a ‘butt’, when cut down the back line, two ‘bends’ are produced. Generally the latter term refers to sole and bridlery leather (see Fig. 2).
• tanning, a process which turns pelts into leather by chemically stabilising the fibres of the material into a permanent state, the hides or pelts being suspended in pits or, in more modern procedures, placed in revolving drums containing tannage solution, weak at first, stronger towards the end. Vegetable solutions and chrome salts may be used in conjunction or separately. In the past the tanning process was a long one. In mediaeval tanyards a hide could take over a year to prepare and despite efforts to speed things up, the usual period for processing sole leather even by 1925 was five to six months. Subsequently the use of revolving drums to keep the contents in constant motion, and modification of the processes, reduced the tanning time from months to days.

Figure 2 The part of a hide. the diagrams show the various sections into which an unsplit cattle hide may be cut, according to the type of leather required. The best part is the butt, followed by shoulder leather.
Source: J.W.Waterer, Leather Craftsmanship, Bell, London, 1968. P.24

• drying out in a dark shed fitted with louvres is common with vegetable tanned hides destined for soling and bridlery; the method controls the rate of drying. The dried leather is ‘crust’ leather, ready for selling on. With chrome leathers the hides and skins are simply drained of water, perhaps by using a ‘mangle’ and left for further treatment as below.
• softening, re-tanning, oiling to make the leather resilient, dyeing - the introduction in the second half of the nineteenth century of synthetic dyes making many shades possible. These are activities which merge into the realm of the leather dresser.
• final drying and sorting.

All these processes may be carried out in one establishment but the later stages after tanning frequently have been organisationally separate, with different technological characteristics and this has resulted in contrasting locations for tanneries and leather dressing factories.

The leather dressing trade works on the principle of buying by weight and selling by area. This is a precaution against the possibility of various ruses being employed to increase the weight of the final product without any commensurate gain in quality. As distinct from the tanners, who process raw pelts (any skin with the hair taken off) the starting point for the leather dresser is rough tanned leather. During the twentieth century the Northamptonshire leather dressers used some UK procured materials but were heavily dependent on ‘E1’, the shorthand term used in the trade to identify goat, sheep and calf skins imported from the Indian sub-continent.

On arrival at the leather dressers the rough tanned skins and split hides or kips may be retanned. They may be buffed to remove growth marks, briar and barbed wire scratches and other marks which may be regarded as defects; this is known as ‘correction’. They can be dyed, oiled, stained or sprayed and glazed. If a smooth surface is required the leather is rolled in a press with heated and polished metal plates. When a distinct surface is required this is imprinted on the grain surface with plates on which the pattern has been engraved. Box calf leather, for example, is fully chrome tanned, black calf skin leather possessing a surface pattern of fine box-shaped creases. Willow calf is calf skin leather, commonly brown, full chrome tanned with a typical willow grain pattern. Both of these traditional grain embellishments were at one time applied by hand. The skins were rolled with a board strapped to the forearm, ‘box’ meaning that the skin was rolled in two directions to give the pattern of tiny boxes.

The technical characteristics of tanning are such that the industry has been capital rather than labour intensive. A large tannery might employ no more than 150 workers but would require a great deal of space, large amounts of process water, and plant to dispose of effluents. The characteristic smell associated with tanneries often makes them unpopular neighbours. Riparian sites are not mandatory, but are common. Out of town. semi-rural sites have been more popular with planning authorities than those in town. But in Northamptonshire there have been few tanneries, even at the peak and even if ones just outside the county are added to them. It has been the leather dressers who have been numerically important and economically significant because of their role in preparing and providing upper leathers for the footwear industry, the market which indeed provided them with their main raison d’etre.

The leather dressing establishments have always been smaller than the tanneries. Individually they have employed fewer people, needed less space, and demanded less water. Generally any liquid effluents have been such that they could go into local authority drains. They have not necessarily depended upon local tanneries for their supplies for since the arrival of rail transport in the mid-nineteenth century, they have drawn in their leathers both locally and from places further afield. In 1956 the County contained seventy active leather dressing/currying establishments providing direct employment for 1,791 people, an average size of just over twenty-five workers. At the end of 2002 there were only seven concerns in existence; Blenkinsop’s in Higham Ferrers; Saxby’s and Harmatan, in Higham Ferrers – the last a world leader in supplying bookbinding leathers; Clifford Collins in Rushden; The Northampton Tanning Co.; Dickens in Kettering Road, Northampton; Glenn Leathers in Irthlingborough. Geo. Fensome, makers of leather linings for men’s shoes at Higham Ferrers since 1900, closed in December, 2000. Between them the survivors in 2002 employed barely a hundred people.

Technological and economic developments and locational change during the twentieth century

In 1847 there were 11 tanneries in Northamptonshire with three others in parts of neighbouring Bedfordshire, at Harrold, Olney and Bedford. They used vegetable-based infusions for tanning, especially ones derived from oak bark and hemlock. By 1854 there were eight, and only 3 in 1890, one of which had the same corporate identity as in 1847. (3) A recovery of sorts occurred thereafter. According to Butnam there were four tanneries in 1911 (see Table 1) and Kelly’s 1928 Directory for Northamptonshire lists nine establishments. The majority of these were family businesses which, although significant employers in footwear manufacturing towns such as Kettering and Wellingborough, were not heavily capitalised. Nevertheless, by 1956 there were 12 tanneries employing 1,518 people in total at an average size of around a hundred workers each. The largest were Harris Bros. Ltd. in Rushden, W. Pearce and Co. in Billing and the British Chrome Tanning Co. (1950) in Northampton. (see Table 2 and Fig. 3). By the year 2003, however, there were no tanneries left in the county, Pearce’s being amongst the last to close, in August 2002.

Table 1

Aurthur B.Butnam's List of Tanneries present in Northamptonshire in 1911

Note: these were all ‘light’ leather tanners. Amongst a list of 112 heavy leather tanneries in England and Wales, Scotland and Ireland, none was in Northamptonshire.

Source: Butnam, A.B. (1912), Shoes and Leather Trade in the United Kingdom, US Dept. of Commerce and Labour Bureau of Manufacturers Special Agents Series No. 49, Washington, Government Printing Office.

Table 2

Northamptonshire Tanneries in 1956 – 1957

Source: H.M. Factory Inspectorate (Health and Safety Executive) Registers.

Figure 3 Photographed by the author on 23 September, 1976, the then-disused works of the British Tanning Co. (1950) Ltd. in Grafton Street, Northampton employed 170 people in 1957.

To distinguish between currying and leather dressing we should consider a description of currying written in 1882:

'Leather as it leaves the tannery is a comparatively rough, harsh and intractable substance, and the duty of the currier is to dress and otherwise fit it for the use of the shoemaker, coachbuilder, saddler and the numerous other tradesmen who work on it. The currier has to smooth the leather, so to pare it down as to reduce inequalities of thickness, to impregnate it with fatty matter in order to render it soft and pliable, and to give it such a surface dressing, colour and finish as please the eye and suit the purposes of its consumers.’ (4)

Whilst methods and equipment have changed since 1882, a modern currier would not quarrel with this as a definition of his work. Tanned cattle hides are taken by the currier and the bends and butts stuffed with fats. For the most part currying accompanies heavy leather tanning, the leathers being destined for soles, industrial use and bridlery. Thus, because Northamptonshire has dealt with light leathers, curriers in the county have been rare in the twentieth century and leather dressing much more common. Leather dressers concentrate their activities on thinner skins from India, Nigeria and elsewhere. They may buy rough tanned leather from the tanners and prepare it in anticipation of sales or in response to leathersellers’ orders. Alternatively, end users may contract with tanners for crust leather and then get the dressers to produce the type of leather needed, a fairly common practice in Northamptonshire. A survey conducted by the writer in 1957 indicated that eight of the leading footwear manufacturers in Northamptonshire were securing leathers from widely scattered places. Sole leathers were sourced from heavy leather tanneries in Alloa, Bolton, Warrington, Liverpool, London, Hull, Edenbridge (Kent), Runcorn, Exeter and Bristol. Upper leathers were obtained from Olney (Bucks.), Irthlingborough, Nottingham, Glasgow, Bolton, Liverpool, Ireland, Leeds, Northampton, Glasgow, London, Liverpool and Kettering. (5) Then, calf leather for ladies’ shoes was produced in the UK, men’s upper calf leathers being sought, as now, from France, with strong competition from Pebody’s. In the nineteen-fifties, many of the goat and sheepskins used in Northamptonshire were imported through London and were unloaded before the watchful eyes of leather merchants in the Pool and inner docks. They were then transported to the county by rail and road. Many imported skins are now handled by containers and often come in by air freight rather than by sea. (6)

The mixed fortunes of the county’s tanning industry require more than cursory examination, especially when it is remarked that the decline at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century took place at a time when footwear factories were being built in numbers in the county. It was, too, the beginning of a period during which British tanneries came to depend heavily upon both imported tannin concentrates and imported hides and skins.

Until the end of the nineteenth century the oozes and tannin liquors were fed solely with vegetable matter containing tannin. Oak bark was traditional, providing 12 - 15 per cent tannin, but demand exceeded supply so other sources were added. These included the bark of larch, spruce and hemlock, willow, wattle (mimosa), mangrove, chestnut wood, quebracho, canaigre, valonia, sumach, myrobalans and others. In the eighteen-fifties English tanners used 20,000 tons of home grown bark and 30,000 tons of imported materials. By the eighteen-nineties the use of home grown bark had halved whereas imports had risen to over 700,000 tons. (7)

After 1900 concentrated extracts of these natural products became available and hundreds of thousands of tons of solidified extracts began to be imported, especially quebracho extract from Argentina and Paraguay and wattle extract from South and East Africa. Liverpool became the main importing port, handling 75 per cent of the extracts in 1921. The importation of hides increased, too, for example an increase of 23 per cent in bulk from 1910 to 1911. By 1913 native hides accounted for only 44 per cent of Great Britain’s hide consumption. (8)

This increased dependence on imported hides by the heavy leather trades producing sole and curried leather and on foreign-sourced tannin concentrates, together with an active export business, placed a premium on locations accessible to maritime trade, often seaboard locations, and there was a general reduction in the number of inland tanneries in Britain in favour of those in Liverpool, Warrington, Bristol, Hull, Newcastle and London. In 1938, sixty-two of the seventy-four firms tanning sole leather in Britain were located at ports, a third of them on Merseyside and in the lower Mersey valley. (9)

Spanning the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century, and precisely at what then seemed to be the nadir of the Northamptonshire tanning industry, a new process of mineral tanning was introduced from the USA and Germany. The three witches of Shakespeare’s play Macbeth would have felt at home with the ‘mystery’ that was tanning as it existed before about 1900, when everything depended upon judgement in the creation and use of tanning liquors and oozes in the tan pits.(10) After liming, hides were sometimes ‘bated’ by soaking them in an infusion of dog dung or bird droppings which softened them and further prepared them for tanning. Unless carefully controlled, bating, like liming, could easily damage the hides. (11) The tanning stage involved soaking the prepared hides in solutions of oak bark and water in pits or vats, great care and skill were needed in judging when the hides should be moved from one solution to another. Even in 1900, production methods were still very empirical and their use intuitive. The tanner used his senses - touch to check the state of the hides; sight for their appearance and state of processing; smell for the degree of putrefaction; taste for the condition of the tanning liquors (12). After 1900, however, things changed. The widening use of chrome salts gave the skills of the industrial chemist greater relevance. Empiricism and intuition gave way to measurement and calculation although flair and good judgement remained necessary. (13)

The development of chrome tanning solved some problems but created difficulties for some of the vegetable tanners, particularly small firms who had the task of altering buildings to accommodate new plant. Moreover, until the nineteen-thirties, the chemistry of the new method was imperfectly understood. Nonetheless, mineral tanning using chrome salts was a revolutionary technical process, faster and cheaper than what had gone before and allowing better quality control. It enabled a finer finish to be obtained and challenged vegetable tannage in the production of leather for shoe uppers. Locational divergence followed technological innovation, with the ‘vegetable’ tanners, especially those at coastal sites, specialising in the production of tough thick leather of the type used for the soles of shoes and heavy industrial use, such as machine belting. Their hides were imported in a state preserved by currying or salting so the tanning plants remained for the most part at the ports. Mineral tannage, on the other hand, which produced leather more suited to shoe uppers, wallets, handbags etc, revived some of the older inland centres of the industry. Northamptonshire, an important shoe manufacturing county, offered a sizeable local market, and a developed railway system. An old tannery at Higham Ferrers was converted to chrome tannage at the beginning of the twentieth century and was joined in the inter-war years by two others. During the 1930s the British government realised that the country was running short of indigenous boot upper leather suitable for the armed services and provided financial incentives for tanners, including heavy leather tanners such as those in Bolton, to move into upper leather work. German and other Jewish continental European technicians brought chrome systems with them in the 1930s and contributed significantly to the technological changes in Northamptonshire. A fourth tannery was opened in Wellingborough in 1948 where the premises of a former leather dressing firm were taken over and converted and the same company opened another tannery in Northampton in 1950.

During the twentieth century, from the first decade onwards, there was a clear distinction to be drawn in process, type of product and geographic location between ‘heavy’ and ‘light’ leather tanneries (see fig. 4). The former were heavily concentrated in northern England, producing sole leathers, drive belts and other items needed for industrial machinery. The tanners and leather dressers of Northamptonshire produced light leathers, processed sheep, goat and calf skins (kips), directed at the shoe trade, including linings and inner socks, at bridlery, and fancy goods. Vegetable tannage dominated partly because the product is more dimensionally stable and thus more suitable for fancy goods. Moreover, vegetable tanned leather accepts the processes of decoration via embossing and hand graining better than chrome tanned leather. The big advantage of chrome leather is its recovery properties, it comes back into shape well after creasing and folding. The leather dressers products were directed not only to the footwear industry but also to London for wallets, handbags and other fancy goods and Walsall, for bridlery. Some of the Northamptonshire tanneries, such as the Strong and Fisher Group at Rushden, Raunds and Higham Ferrers, were sheepskin tanneries having little or no dependence on the footwear industry: this was a firm with a world-wide reputation for clothing leathers during the 1970s and 1980s. Unfortunately the excellence of the product and the abundance of the raw material in the UK caught the attention of low-cost tanners in Spain and Italy, Turkey and India who were able to undercut the Northamptonshire firm which ceased production at its remaining works in Rushden in November 1997 after 65 years of trading there and in Raunds.

Figure 4 The location of heavy and light tanning in England and Wales 1911/12. Drawn from the data in A.B.Butman, Shoe and Leather Trade in the United Kingdom, Government printing Office, Washington, 1912 pp 77 – 80

NOTE: Kips constitute the main raw material processed in light leather tanneries. The term itself is applied to the skin of a young animal, often young cattle, intermediate between calf-skin and cow hide.

Table 2 itemises the working tanneries in Northamptonshire in 1956-7 as recorded by the then Factory Inspectorate (now the Health and Safety Executive). The fact that not one of the tanneries identified in Table 2 is now in existence points to both an increasingly difficult business environment which came to bear on their operations after the mid-century and to an apparent inability of industry leaders to meet the challenge of that changing environment. By the mid-1950s some 140 million pairs of boots and shoes were made each year in Britain and 80 per cent of the leather then produced by British tanneries was used in the manufacture and repair of boots and shoes in the form of uppers, soles, heels, insoles and linings. The British public were buying shoes made wholly or mainly of leather and many of them were having their boots and shoes repaired, too. Nowadays, when a pair of trainers are worn out or become unfashionable, they are thrown away but in the mid-1950s four million pairs of boots and shoes were handed over the counters of Britain’s shoe repair shops each week to be given a new lease of life, more often than not by using leather to repair the soles and/or heels.(14) During the 1950s and 1960s leather in both the new and repair markets was challenged by other materials, initially by sheet products such as resin and foam rubber and by synthetic leathers such as PVC and, later, Corfam. (15) Traditionalists sturdily defended leather for footwear manufacture as a material which allowed feet to ‘breathe’, others parodied the notion that people needed to breathe through their feet! Even so, as late as 1977 the footwear industry absorbed half of the UK leather output, leather garments taking forty per cent with the rest going to other purposes. More important was the subsequent arrival of injection moulding compounds and moulded sole-and-heel units, which had a profoundly negative effect on the sole leather market. Between 1954 and 1960 over a quarter of the firms in the British sole leather tanning industry went out of business. (16) By 1965 80 per cent of the shoe sole trade had gone over to substitute materials in one form or another. (17) The non-footwear markets were difficult to expand in compensation. Plastics replaced leathers in the making of handbags and purses, particularly in the lower price range of fashion goods. The saddlery and harness making industry of the West Midlands which was a significant market for some leathers from Northamptonshire, declined sharply in the second quarter of the century and became affected by imported material and finished goods in the latter part. Leather for car upholstery, hand luggage, belts and garments remained in demand but much of the shoe upper leather market was lost. (18) Perhaps the Asian market offers the best prospect for the future but chrome leather for car and furniture upholstery is now the largest of the UK tanning sectors. Unfortunately this requires machinery capable of dealing with whole hides and Northamptonshire was equipped for handling half-hides.

On the supply side, one factor above all others has dominated the whole structure of the production and sale of leather, namely that, whatever the demand for this material, the supply of hides and skins remains fixed and determined not by the demand for leathers but by the demand for meat. (19) Notably, pigskin in the UK represents a largely untapped source of leather because pork meat is prepared almost always with the rind intact. Cattle hides are a by-product of the meat industry and constitute only ten per cent approximately of the value of the live animal. An increasing demand for leather in the early twentieth century was not accompanied by expanding hides supply in world markets and their price rose markedly. Between 1894 and 1913 hide prices in Britain rose by 155 per cent while the general price index increased by 35 per cent. (20) Volatility in hide prices has been important, too. During the 1920s fluctuations of 50 per cent occurred. Trends in UK raw hide prices are shown in Figure 4; in the twelve months to August 1979 prices rose by 57 per cent. In the footwear industry materials, including leather especially, traditionally account for about a third of factory costs. Two and a half square feet of leather, 0.23 square metres, are required to manufacture a pair of traditional men’s shoes. The average price of upper leather in 1987 was £1.20 per square foot and that of lining leather £1.00 per square foot. During 2001 foot and mouth disease raged through British cattle herds. The mass culls which resulted contributed to leather shortages and in 2001 shoemaking leather had increased in price by one third. In 2002 the cost of calf upper leather reached £4.50 per square foot.

In the later decades of the century British tanneries, including those in Northamptonshire, with a relatively fixed supply of raw material, had to gear production and sales to increasing the value of turnover without much increase in sales volume. In the 1970s and 1980s profits began to slide, so did the average return on capital employed. Firms began to amalgamate, were taken over, or were closed. Corporate struggles and restructuring during the late 1980s and early 1900s provided and uncomfortable backdrop. Two notable combatants were family firms, Strong and Fisher, upmarket supplier of clothing leather, and Pittard Garner based in Yeovil, Somerset, and heavily involved with gloving, shoe and glove leather. The struggle focused on the supply of sheepskins and at one stage involved the Monopolies and Mergers Commission and the Office of Fair Trading. Sheepskin supply was not a central interest for the footwear industry but in the process of restructuring Pittards sold its Irthlingborough shoe leather works, formerly Keunen’s oak bark Tannery, to R. Griggs, the Wollaston based manufacturers of ‘Doc Marten’s’ footwear. The works had been established in 1916 but provided with new buildings in 1987. Before the sale it processed 3,000 to 3,500 hides per week to produce suede and grain leather, a quarter of which was exported.

Some sources of foreign hides, mainly continental European, held an advantage in quality control. Supply side problems were exacerbated by the fact that tanning adds value to a hide or skin. Similarly the value of a finished hide is higher that that of one in a semi-finished state. Thus, source countries such as India and Bangladesh began to recognize that advantages accrued to them from sending processed hides to the UK rather than untanned ones. Low labour costs in these countries more that offset transport costs. Moreover, despite the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and the negotiations conducted through the World Trade Organisation to improve freedom of movement of materials and goods, major exporters of raw hides such as Argentina, Brazil, India and Pakistan have placed restrictions on the export of unfinished hides. International chemical companies appreciated the opportunity to supply their products to Indian tanneries, seen as a big market. In Northamptonshire the tanners were undercut by rising imports of semi-finished and finished products. Only Strong and Fisher made a genuinely successful switch. The firm had used Indian ‘red hair’ sheepskins, vegetable tanned, but moved successfully for a while to using more domestic English and New Zealand sheepskins for clothing leather, selling the graded wool as a by-product to the Bradford wool market.

A consideration which made life difficult for the boards of local tanning companies in the 1990s arose from the nature of the sites occupied by the tanneries and the need for disposal of effluents. Most of the tanneries occupied rural or semi-rural sites, a fact partly explained by the noxious nature of the effluent discharged and by the need for copious supplies of clean water for processing. Two tanneries in the Nene valley drew their water from the river and filtration was needed prior to its use. Other tanneries held non-riparian sites on the edge of the flood plain, where they drew water from wells sunk in the river gravels. These firms had to install water softening plant to cope with a water hardness amounting to 30 per cent. The water also contains some iron, but not enough to significantly affect quality control of the leather. At mid-century effluent was diluted and discharged either into the Nene or into main sewers and the location of the main county tanneries in the Nene and Ise valleys on or near the floodplains meant the watercourses were vulnerable to their discharges, even if accidental. Whilst oakbark coloured water promised little or no damage, the concentration of pretanning agents such as lime, sulphides, arsenic and chemicals such as chromium salts, could be environmentally destructive. The regulation and control of industrial effluents since the implementation of the UK Water Acts of 1973, 1983 and 1989 and the Water Resources Act of 1991, together with the Control of Pollution Act 1974 placed increasing emphasis on the the principle of ‘the polluter pays’. The Environmental Protection Act of 1990, whilst principally directed to deal with solid wastes, also affected the industry, as the cost of disposing of material to landfill sites increased and the regulation of liquid effluent tightened. The limitation of discharge of chromium salts from leather processing to 20 parts per million (20ppm), regularly monitored by the Water Authority and latterly the Environment Agency, was cited specifically by one firm as the reason for ceasing trading. The Annual Review of the British Leather Confederation’s Leather Technology Centre for 2001 - 2 included a prototype design for a solid waste gasification plant to convert leather processing wastes into ‘more useable gas than that required by the tannery and enabling the recovery of chrome from the residue ash’ (21). But it was too late for the tanners of the county and the pressure from further control and regulation is likely to grow in the twenty-first century consequent upon implementation of the Integrated Pollution Prevention and Control Directive of the European Union.

Summary

Interdependency between tanning and footwear manufacture in Northamptonshire during the century has been mediated through the activities of independent leather dressers. The fortunes of all the leather producing and processing industries have been subject to a complex and constantly changing business environment, a nexus in which some elements have been under the control of the firms themselves and others not. In the terms of modern organisation theory endogenetic and exogenetic factors have been evident, their relative and absolute importance varying through time. Given sufficient capital and willpower, decisions whether or not to introduce new technologies, such as chrome tanning, have been within the power of the firms themselves. So have manning levels and decisions regarding the scale and nature of output. Increases and volatility in hide prices have not been in the firms’ control but various responses to price variations have been possible. Some have depended on capital availability; for example, a policy of buying when prices were low and storing the raw material for use when prices were high involved not only good judgement and luck in price forecasting but also adequate on-site space and the additional burden of keeping stored hides in good condition.

As the century wore on, foreign suppliers of raw and semi-processed hides, such as India, became competitors. They saw the opportunity to increase their own profits by increasing the value of their product. Thus, in the import streams, raw hides became semi-processed, then fully tanned, then tanned and dressed, and finally, cut out and closed uppers ready for attachment to sole units have been brought in. Increasingly stringent externally-imposed regulation of waste disposal has been difficult to lobby against and expensive to meet. No doubt as the business strategies of individual firms were shaped, and re-shaped, mistakes were made. Sometimes they were slower than continental leather firms to stimulate the market with new colour shades and finishes. New methods of shoe construction, especially the rapid increase in the use of non-leather soles and sole units, adversely influenced the leather market. In the late twentieth century the footwear industry, the main market, began to show the characteristics of an assembly industry rather than those of a mechanical handicraft using traditional materials. The decisive factor, however, has been the collapse of the footwear industry since 1980. During the century local tanners and leather dressers have never offered sufficient output either in quality or variety to provide more than part of the local footwear industry’s needs but the gap in demand for leather created by the near-demise of the footwear industry proved difficult to fill.

NOTES AND REFERENCES

1. General Register Office, Census 1951 England and Wales, Industry Tables, HMSO, 1957

2. This is a generalised summary, necessary for an understanding of Northamptonshire’s role and position in tanning and leather dressing. More detailed accounts may be found in R.S. Thomson, ‘Tanning man’s first manufacturing process?’ Transactions of the Newcomen Society, vol. 53, 1981-82, pp. 139 - 156; The Encyclopaedia Britannica, ninth edition vol. 14, Edinburgh, 1882, pp 380 - 391 Idem, fifteenth edition, macropaedia vol. 10, Chicago, 1977. pp 759 - 764 ; J.W. Waterer, Leather Craftmanship, Bell, London, 1968, pp17 - 23

3. V.C.H. Northamptonshire 1907, vii. The year 1890 was one of deep recession in the industry.

4. The Encyclopaedia Britannica, ninth edition, vol 14, Edinburgh, 1882, p 386.

5. P.R. Mounfield, ‘The footwear industry of the East Midlands’, East Midland Geographer, vol 4 pt 3 no 27, June 1967, p 159

6. Former luminaries of the leather industry in the East Midlands have been of assistance in providing information incorporated in this entry. One is Mr. John Wilson, leather merchant, formerly with Bevingtons and later with his own firm, J.K. Wilson Ltd.. The other is Mr. Malcolm Jackson, former joint managing director of H. Goodman and Son, leather manufacturers, Wood Street, Kettering. Mr. Goodman helped via conversations with Mr. D.C.D. Cooper, a Northamptonshire resident and one-time member of the academic staff at the University of Luton. Mr. J.K. Wilson read the first draft of the text and commented on it in detail. Mr. Roy Thomson, B.Sc., A.C.R., C. Chem., F.R.S.C., F.S.L.T.C., F.I.I.C., Chief Executive, The Leather Conservation Centre, Northampton, read the penultimate version and suggested helpful amendments.

7. R. Thomson, ‘The nineteenth century revolution in the leather industries’, in S. Thomas, L.A. Clarkson, R. Thomson, Leather manufacture through the ages, Proceedings of the twenty-seventh East Midlands Industrial Archaeology Conference, Oct. 1983, pp 24 -33

8. J. Statham, The location and development of London’s leather manufacturing industry since the early nineteenth century, unpublished M.A. thesis, University of London, 1965, p152

9. Statham, op.cit. p 189

10. Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn and cauldron bubble.
...root of hemlock digg’d i’ the dark,
...gall of goat and slips of yew....
etc. etc.., Macbeth, Act 4, scene 1

11. It was not until the first decade of the twentieth century that the active ingredients in the dung were found to be proteolytic enzymes, secreted in the pancreas and activated by the ammonium salts. See R. Thomson, ‘Leather manufacture in the post medieval period with special reference to Northamptonshire’, Post-Medieval Archaeology v 15, 1981, pp 161 - 172.

12. A.G. Ward, Science and Art in Leather Manufacture, 1960, Leeds

13. The first practical success with mineral tannage came in 1879 when August Schultz in the USA developed a leather tanned with chrome salt solutions. The leather, however, was stiff, hard and coloured blue. In 1884 a Philadelphian tanner, Robert Foerderer, treated the hard chrome leather with soap and oil so that it became supple. Following this, American and European tanners became aware of the potential importance of chrome leather but widespread adoption took several decades to achieve.

14. The Times Survey of the Leather Industry, Sept. 24th, 1953 p.iv

15. Corfam, developed by the Du Pont company, is built up from a non-woven fine denier polyester web coated with polyurethene. As a substitute for leather in footwear manufacture it has not proved popular and by 2004 was not being used for shoes.

16. The Guardian, Aug. 26th, 1960

17. N. Topham, ‘The British Boot and Shoe Industry’, National Provincial Bank Review, no. 69, Feb. 1965. pp 10 - 15

18, UK sales of shoe upper leather in 1986 totalled 67,674 thousand square feet (7285 thousand square metres) worth £76.4 millions. Clothing and gloving leather sales amounted to 87,223 thousand square feet (9,389 thousand square metres) valued at £89.5 millions. Third came 40,138 thousand square feet (4,320 thousand square metres) of upholstery leather worth £50.9 millions. The total value of sales in the year was £228 millions; sole leathers were worth £9.1 millions and shoe lining leathers £2.1 millions.

19. E. Haydon, ‘The UK shoe and leather industry’, National Westminster Bank Quarterly Review, Feb. 1978, pp 46 - 54

20. Statham, op. cit., p 182

21. British Leather Confederation Leather Technology Centre, Annual Report, Northampton, 2002