The surprising nonconformity of tanners

Mike Redwood

Columnist

International Leather Maker

It was a warm November evening in the Addis Ababa Hilton hotel in 2019. My phone rang during a casual dinner, and it was industry veteran George Donath suggesting that the moment was right to produce a book on the history of the British leather industry. Long retired George was a longtime Stahl executive and later a raw materials trader in Kaufman-Demuth. The outcome has been that an expert historian, Dr Ian Stone, was hired and sometime in the next eighteen months, the book will be published. Sadly, George has since died and will not be with us to see it published.

One fact that has come to light through the research is the surprisingly large number of Quaker, Baptist, Unitarian and other nonconformist families who worked in the leather industry from the 17^th century onwards. Clarks shoes have been well publicised and Charles Booth’s Unitarian roots also, but the more the history has been uncovered, the more nonconformist tanners come to light.

Until roughly the end of the 19^th century, if you did not support the Church of England, founded by King Henry VIII, you could not attend the best universities, hold senior public office, or join professions or organisations like Livery Companies. Yet, there was no restriction related to being involved in trade and business.

So, from the 16^th century onwards in England and Wales, non-Anglican nonconformists—including Baptists, Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Methodists, Unitarians and Quakers—started to become prominent in the leather industry, be it in tanning, currying or shoemaking. Because of its reputation for odour and dirt, leather was a somewhat marginalised business—accepted as important, indeed strategic, but at the lower end of the scale. Usually, it was located outside town such as in London (Bermondsey) and New York (‘The Swamp’), in a downwind area previously designated for the butchers to throw away their hides.

Nonconformist thinking

The real fit came with the fact that leather was capital intensive and slow. Tanning had a long process cycle time to obtain a moderate income. It was dependent on patience and, with it, trust and reputation. This was perfectly aligned with nonconformist thinking: those who did not want to make easy money via speculation or through pushing innovation too fast. They preferred stability with low anxiety and risk, which involved making products to a consistently high standard.

Tanners who were educated in the 1960s will remember the mantra that “Time and Tanning Make Leather,” which certainly came from a time when vegetable tanning was dominant and tanners had to wait patiently for the tan to penetrate through the thickness of the hide. Failure to do so would lead to case hardening, with the surface over tanned and the interior raw. In the UK, oak bark was the primary vegetable tan used: it gives a tough, resilient product, but it is slow to penetrate, and after laws passed in the 16^th century, all top-quality leathers had to be in the pits for at least one year.

Cheating was common, but nonconformists could be trusted. Their business cultures placed strong emphasis on integrity, record-keeping and intra-sect credit networks, all advantageous in long-cycle trades dealing with hides, bark and large inventories. The long-term approach was foundational to their thinking. Long before modern contract laws, tanning depended on sound supplier relationships (butchers, bark merchants, customers), delayed settlement systems and verbal agreements. Truth-telling was mandatory.

When I wrote last week about the lead times involved in initiating and managing sales with major clients, a colleague from Canada commented on social media that she was struggling “with the short-termism and narrow scope of the business school types who have gained undue influence in modern economic and political spheres. To conduct business as a caretaker planning for a long and robust future is a very different proposition than it is to scheme quick, extractive payoffs with little shared benefit and dubious long-term prospects.”

Some worthy things take time

As she so correctly points out, “some worthy things take time”. This resonates deeply with Quaker and Baptist thinking, which embodied precisely this enduring, caretaking mentality.

There was a deliberate commitment to intergenerational stewardship—passing businesses through the generations, training future staff via apprenticeships, preferring dialogue to argument, learning over persuasion. This philosophy suited leather perfectly. Like the hide itself, truth in tanning emerges slowly with patience and time. The better the tanner makes the leather, the more that quality reveals itself long after it leaves the tannery, appreciated by the consumer through years or, sometimes, decades of use. Leather does not forgive excessive haste; it rewards consistency.

Even with more modern processes we need to grasp the “tempo” of tanning. While vegetable tanning is slow, patient and largely irreversible once begun, we have always had alum and oil, or vegetable bag tanning for skins, which were much more rapid. Yet, whatever the process, the hide or skin will punish corner cutting. The hide benefits from rest, carefully horsed or laid in a pile, where chemicals can complete their fixation, moisture can drain away after tanning or retanning, or humidity can level after conditioning prior to staking.

In my part-time role as a Teaching Fellow at the University of Bath, I taught many aspiring entrepreneurs and observed that those who succeeded—in any field—did so because they pursued a genuine passion with sustained dedication and disciplined execution. Yet even passionate vision proves insufficient without the structural foundations to sustain it. The recent collapses in the biomaterial sector illustrate this sobering lesson. Piñatex, Mylo, and Natural Fibre Welding each failed; not from lack of conviction but from poor market research into both product demands and market size. They ran out of runway before proving volume viability. Passion alone cannot overcome a structural business problem—which is precisely why the patient, capital-efficient approach of traditional tanners proved so durable.

In a world that is ageing, automating, geopolitically uncertain, and in the midst of an energy transition, simplicity and stability matter profoundly. And that requires taking time. In the past, many tanners in a hurry failed not through poor leather, but through poor accounting—a penny or more added to the expected selling price per foot when it was not realistic, or the budgeted area per side quietly increased requiring ugly, untrimmed leather to be sold.

If automation and AI cannot intervene, then demographic decline will continue to cost economies 0.5% annual GDP loss. Leather is an industry that itself cannot grow very much, which demands a strategic pivot: higher quality, not higher volume; better value for customers, not cheaper commodities.

What the materials sector often fails to grasp is what traditional tanners understood intuitively: leather does not yield to domination through thoughtless bulk processing. Each hide must be allowed to speak for itself—its character, utility, durability and repairability are the measure of value, not conformity to a standardised specification. This is not romantic nostalgia; it is economic resilience.

The old family-run tanning businesses—the quiet dynasties of the leather industry that we encountered in Europe and New England in the U.S. —embodied this philosophy. They were conservative in innovation and growth, guided by a moral conviction against what was to become reckless expansion. When aggressive entrepreneurs arrived with expansionist agendas, most overextended themselves financially and could not sustain operations through the 20^th century downturns.

Quaker families in the late 1700s and 1800s who built substantial yards, bark mills and commodious houses are remembered as pillars of their local economies, linking tanning to education and civic wellbeing. Their approach of patience, dignity and trust sustained their leathermaking for generations. That wisdom deserves renewed attention as we navigate an uncertain economic future.

mike@internationalleathermaker.com

You can find Dr Mike Redwood across social media at @michaelredwood.

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