Mike Redwood
Columnist
International Leather Maker
I remember July 1971 very clearly. I was searching hard for a small cottage in the wonderful northern county in England known as Northumberland. I was working as a Junior Manager in the wet-end of Edward and James Richardsons in Newcastle, and had been there a year, my first job after leaving university.
What I had not expected was a call to speak with Alan Yeeles, our Managing Director, and to be told house-hunting should stop, as there were plans afoot to close the tannery. As the Barrow Hepburn Group that had put me there did a few days later.
Barrow Hepburn wanted to reorganise the Group, expanding production in Leeds, Beverley and Hull, where newer layouts would be more efficient. Although I was not to learn the term deindustrialisation for many decades, it is clear now I was being impacted close to its beginning in the leather industry.
I was allowed to retrieve some textbooks and a picture from the skip placed outside in Shumac Street where many staff lived, and after offering them to head office and the tannery library (yes, tanneries had big libraries in those days and I particularly liked ours in Beverley, Colomer in Spain and Friitala Leather in Finland), I ended up keeping the picture and one book which I now treasure.
The annotated water colour showed that Richardsons went back over 300 years and slowly expanded and relocated as the industry expanded, with the current location being built in 1863 between the Carlisle to Newcastle railway and the River Tyne, close to their big industrial leather customers.
Shumac Street
The houses in Shumac Street and Water Street were owned by the company and had mostly been built by them for the workforce. But although I acknowledged the hurt being felt by the workers and many middle managers, it slipped quickly into the background as I hurried on with my career. The picture should have told me that this was a lot more than a story about one regional tannery. Around the edges of the picture are some of the leathers they had made including sealskin, bookbinding and fancy goods, as well as hydraulic and belting for industry. By the 1960s, the focus was heavily on shoe upper leathers, but a lot of the residual tacit knowledge associated with such a long leathermaking history resided in that workforce, and in the wider community.
While there was a lot of nostalgia associated with lunching in a staff canteen, which I was told had once been Professor Procter’s laboratory – I had studied at the Procter Department at Leeds after all, it was the lack of investment since his time that mostly hit me. This was an old layout in old buildings created for batch production of varied leathers trying to make side leather that was a more continuous process than it was batch, and the place needed big changes.
For me, the logic of abandoning inefficient old buildings to move to fewer larger and better-equipped plants made sense. Looking back now, I recognise I was asking the wrong questions as the move to mass production of the British type of mass-produced corrected grain shoe leathers designed to be injection moulded were already moving to the wrong side of history. What became clear was that Barrow Hepburn were rushing to modernise tanneries to make leather that was guaranteed to fail, as however efficient they became they were never going to be able to compete with overseas low-cost competition.
I have only now become aware that two years after, a TV documentary was produced about the closure, focusing on the community that had existed around the tannery. Both the tannery and their houses had been demolished, and the remnants of the community were fighting to stick together. I hope to find a way to see it soon. I am clear for other information that this was a tragedy for the community and for our industry. In the absence of leather work of some sort, or something similar that makes use of their true, and varied, skills, it is hard for a community to retain its cohesion and if the replacement housing provided fails, all will be lost. As it has been.
By 1950, most industries like the British leather industry had evolved into a competitive market economy with old family businesses and new ones (there were a lot of start-ups in and around 1840), large tanneries and small ones, and many servicing niche positions such as chamois leather and parchment.
It was a competitive environment where customers had many choices. Prices and products did change but only slowly. Long-term relationships were built and rarely broken. The tanneries fitted in a mix with leather merchants and product makers involved in segments such as footwear, garments, furniture, industrial and sports leathers (footballs, rugby balls and the associated footwear were all leather in those days).
Barrow Hepburn
Ahead of the game, Barrow Hepburn had already grown to be a large conglomerate before the second world war, when it apparently supplied 60% of the leather for the British Army footwear. As apparent overcapacity ran through the UK, they chose to flex their financial muscle to acquire more companies to increase their market share in the hope of leveraging finished leather prices up. A policy destined to unravel, as the shoe companies had already found overseas sources they liked.
Buying Richardsons in 1969 and closing them in 1971 was the simple process of buying and eliminating a weak competitor from the Barrow Corporate point of view. The new Managing Director was Richard Odey and he was aggressively minded to expand the group and he was the perfect client for Business Consultants in the newly formed Management Schools in the UK Universities. Running around with the interpretations of the Boston Matrix with its Cash Cows and Stars in the four box diagrams beloved of consultants was not altogether wrong.
But the loss of local and regional tanneries as bigger corporations are created and consolidate has knock on effects that get ignored in such moves. Local glove, shoe and leathergoods businesses have to look elsewhere for leather and will likely find the larger tanneries less interested to meet their more niche needs. Machinery and chemical companies have fewer customers, albeit bigger. Trade magazines have fewer companies to buy advertising and get thinner. Smaller training colleges lose courses and income. In fact, the entire local industrial ecosystem weakens when a leather ecosystem is destroyed.
But in the main, the bit that they ignore which I certainly missed in 1970s, industrial Britain is what we might call today Braudel’s ground floor in his three-floor schema (subsistence/material life on the ground; market economy in the middle; corporate/financialised top floor). It appeared in the late 1960s in French so it would never have reached a UK CEO in time to apply to Richardsons, and it was never part of my MBA or work until lately.
When I started in Newcastle, I was entering the middle, or Market Economy floor of the three, where competition and diversity flourished. But almost immediately, I found I was being manoeuvred by the third-floor corporates with their ultra-modern ideas of management which I was desperately trying to learn. But down on the ground floor is where the more subsistence level skills live. The repair service, smaller workshops, traditional craft workers, libraries, museums, conservation specialists and of course, skilled tannery workers, apprentices, local and regional hide suppliers and the farmers.
If you lose your only tannery, all this will be swept away. Perhaps initially redirected but soon withering away. In 1950 Britain, we might fairly say that all three levels were strong but today the ground floor doggedly survives only in fragments. Sometimes described as “the lowest floor of civilisation” that survives after industry has gone, it remains the foundation of it all. And this is where the community exists.
In the UK, that middle layer has now all but disappeared, dramatically, at every level be it tanneries, footwear, glove making or leather goods manufacturers. While the top floor survives roaming the globe, with the homes of the brands often far distance from where products are made and with owners and shareholders for whom financial income far exceeds manufacturing value.
Braudel’s hypothesis
Today as I write about meritocracy and value, and the problems of an aging and slowing economic world, we have to worry about economies becoming separated from the material foundations on which they depend. In Braudel’s three level house, it feels like the stairs have been removed.
Over recent decades, Britain seems to have created a model that puts finance, property and services above manufacturing, engineering and certainly regional industry.
By contrast, Italy and other parts of southern Europe have supported industrial districts such as Santa Croce, where all the small skills are retained, Japan enthusiastically supported exports and Germany appears to have retained high levels of patient capital to support its manufacturing.
Richardson did not disappear in isolation. Its story lives within a much longer balance between defending sterling and maintaining Britain’s productive economy, a tension we can watch from Churchill’s Gold Standard decision in the 1920s, through devaluations in the 1940s and 1960s, to the strong-pound era of the early 1980s. It is hard to escape the thinking that local industrial decline was part of a century-long debate about what Britain chose to protect and what it allowed to diminish.
Apart from anything else, I made some good, long-lasting friendships in Richardsons and in Barrow Hepburn. I am lucky that my personal leather “community of friends” have largely survived their personal navigational experience through all this complexity.
We were all trying to read a landscape that kept being redrawn beneath us as we were participant observers in one of the most significant episodes of British deindustrialisation and watching and taking decisions in other areas of survival, of growth and success. How moving upmarket, choosing and sticking to a niche sector, making leathers better to specification and to higher specification and so much more gave so many of us rewarding careers in a rough sea.
The fact that we are only “grasping it” retrospectively is not a failure of perception: it was genuinely opaque at the time, even to the most well-informed actors in the room.
At the moment, things are no less complicated, especially in Europe, and with limited statistics, the regulatory battles over EUDR and the unhealthy fear of synthetics, it is hard to find the band width to see the wisest way forward. Perhaps the summer break will bring us guidance, but we all need to avoid repeating the same pattern of decisions made far from the ground floor.
mike@internationalleathermaker.com
You can find Dr Mike Redwood across social media at @michaelredwood.
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