The Development of the UK Clothing Industry, 1850-1950: Output and Productivity Growth

Business History

Volumn 37, Issue 4, 1995, Pages 46-63

  Godley, Andrew ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF READING   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

BRITISH; CLOTHING INDUSTRY; ECONOMIC INFORMATION; PRODUCTIVITY; SEWING MACHINES; TEXTILE HISTORY;

CLOTHING INDUSTRY; HISTORICAL STUDIES; INDUSTRIAL DEVELOPMENT; INDUSTRIAL OUTPUT; NINETEENTH CENTURY; PRODUCTIVITY GROWTH; TWENTIETH CENTURY;

UK;

EID: 0029412631     PISSN: 00076791     EISSN: 17437938     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/00076799500000127     Document Type: Article

References (74)

1. J.A. Schmiechen, Sweated Industries and Sweated Labour: The London Clothing Trades, 1860–1914 (Beckenham, 1984);
2. J. Morris, Women Workers and the Sweated Trades (Aldershot, 1986);
3. A.J. Kershen, Uniting the Tailors: Trade Unionism Amongst the Tailors of London and Leeds, 1870–1939 (London, 1995) for recent examples. The House of Lords Select Committee on the Sweating System (Reports, P.P. 1888, XX-XXI; P.P 1889, XIII-XIV; and P.P. 1890, XVII) and the Select Committee on Homework (P.P. 1908, VIII) are the most important original sources.
4. W.G. Hoffman, British Industry, 1700–1950 (Oxford, 1955), p.14.
5. Kershen, Uniting the Tailors;
6. K. Honeyman, ‘Montague Burton Ltd: The Creators of Well-Dressed Men’
7. in K. Honeyman and J. Chartres (eds.), Leeds City Businesses (Leeds, 1993);
8. S.D. Chapman, ‘The Innovating Entrepreneurs in the British Ready-made Clothing Industry’, Textile History, Vol.24 No.1 (1993);
9. A. Godley, ‘The Emergence of Mass Production in the UK Clothing Industry’, in I. Taplin and J. Winterton (eds.), Strategies for Restructuring The Clothing Industry in Transition (Aldershot, 1995);
10. and idem, ‘Immigrant Entrepreneurs and the Emergence of the East End as an Industrial District’, London Journal Vol.21 No.1 (March 1996 forthcoming).
11. Economist, 26 June 1851, cited in J.H. Clapham, An Economic History of Modern Britain (Cambridge, 3 vols. 1926–38), Vol.2, p.92.
12. R. Stone and D. Rowe, The Measurement of Consumers' Expenditure and Behaviour in the United Kingdom, 1920–1938 (Cambridge, 1966), Vol.II, p.9
13. and especially tables 71–2, pp.143-4, uses estimates for wholesale price changes, which - while not listed - are easily calculable. Unfortunately Stone and Rowe did not say how they constructed their clothing producers' price index. However, it would appear that this index closely matches that from the early attempts by the Board of Trade to gather data on clothing wholesale prices around the turn of the century. This focused on export prices, which while not representing wholesale prices exactly, were believed by officials at the Board to be nonetheless reasonable proxies, and certainly better than retail prices. Early estimates of trends in the retail price of clothing can be found in Board of Trade, ‘Second Series of Memoranda, Statistical Tables and Charts’. P.P. 1905, LXXXIV, pp.55-6;
14. and Ministry of Labour, ‘Eighteenth Abstract of Labour Statistics of the United Kingdom’, P.P. 1927, pp.138-41.
15. J. Weatherbum, ‘Clothing Statistics’, in M.G. Kendall and E.S. Pearson (eds.), The Sources and Nature of the Statistics of the United Kingdom, Vol.2 (London, 1957).
16. N.F.R. Crafts, Can Deindustrialisation Seriously Damage Your Wealth? (London, 1993), p.12;
17. A. Maddison, Dynamic Forces in Capitalist Development (Oxford, 1991), p.49. UK GDP per capita growth is estimated to have been 0.8 per cent per annum from 1913 to 1950.
18. D.L. Munby, Industry and Planning in Stepney (Oxford, 1951) especially Ch.1;
19. and M. Wray, The Women's Outerwear Industry (London, 1957) both discuss the rather limited impact of the newer technological innovations such as the Hoffman Press and buttonholing machines.
20. Clapham, Economic History, Vol.2, p.92.
21. D.C. Hague and P.K. Newman, Costs of Alternative Locations: The Clothing Industry (NIESR Occasional Paper, Cambridge, 1952), p.19.
22. Ibid., p.20.
23. Ibid., p.18.
24. Stone and Rowe, Consumers' Expenditure, pp.143–4.
25. Board of Trade, ‘The Returns of Expenditure by Working Men in 1889’, P.P. 1889.
26. See I. Gazeley, ‘The Cost of Living for Urban Workers in Late Victorian and Edwardian Britain’, Economic History Review Vol.XLII No.2 (1989);
27. and idem, ‘Prices in Interwar Britain’, Explorations in Economic History, Vol.31 (1994)
28. on the reliability of this and other pre-1914 surveys of consumer expenditure. See Godley, ‘Censuses of Production’ for a more detailed discussion of how this calculation has been made, especially, pp.19–22 and 50–1.
29. Board of Trade, ‘Returns of Expenditure’, pp.33-44.
30. A.L. Bowley, Wages and Income in the United Kingdom since 1860 (Cambridge, 1937), table IX, p. 36.
31. W. Schlote, British Overseas Trade from 1700 to the 1930s (Oxford, 1952).
32. See R.S. Wechsler, ‘The Jewish Garment Trade in East London, 1870-1914: A study of conditions and responses’ (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Columbia University, 1979), pp.299-300.
33. W.J. Fishman, East End Jewish Radicals, 1870–1914 (London, 1975), pp.84-8;
34. Kershen, Uniting, pp.97 and 102-4;
35. and S.D. Chapman, Merchant Enterprise in Britain from the Industrial Revolution to World War I (Cambridge, 1992), esp. Ch.6 (‘The Home Trade Houses’).
36. Export data from Wechsler, ‘Jewish Garment Trade’, pp.299-300. Clothes prices are given in the two references in note 6 above, however, it is only the series of retail prices which goes back to 1880. Wholesale (export) prices were only collected from 1890 onwards.
37. Board of Trade, ‘Second series of memoranda’ gives retail prices for 1880–1903, pp.31-3 and 52–63
38. and wholesale prices for 1890–1903, pp.54-6 and 66; Ministry of Labour, ‘Eighteenth Abstract of Labour Statistics’
39. gives retail prices for 1892–1925, pp.139-41. Wholesale (export) prices from 1900 onwards are given in the sources to Table 2 above.
40. A more detailed discussion of these data is in Godley, ‘Censuses of Production’, pp.44-9.
41. Annual export data from Wechsler, ‘Jewish Garment Trade’, pp.299-300. Interviews with clothing manufacturers and exporters are contained in the Booth Papers and Passfield Papers at the British Library for Political and Economic Sciences. Examples include ‘Interview with Mark Moses’, Booth Papers, A19, f. 87;
42. and ‘Interview with John Gardiner’, Passfield Papers, Section VII. I, pt. 8, folio 46. This latter was conducted by Beatrice Webb and an edited version appears in My Apprenticeship (London, 1926), p.315.
43. Clothing industry employment can be calculated from the occupational information in the reports on the censuses of population from 1851 onwards. This data is summarised in standard collections of statistical information, but for the purposes of this paper the censal aggregate classes are too broad. The Dress trades include more than just the garment trades. For this reason the data presented in B.R. Mitchell, British Historical Statistics (Cambridge, 1988);
44. or C.H. Lee, British Regional Employment Statistics, 1841–1971 (Cambridge, 1979) are inadequate. See Godley, ‘Censuses of Population’ for more details and the appendix to this article.
45. Crafts, Deindustrialisation, p.12;
46. Maddison, Capitalist Development, p.49.
47. D. Ryott, John Barran's of Leeds, 1851–1951 (Leeds, 1952), pp.4-7;
48. also see D.J. Jeremy (ed.), Dictionary of Business Biography (London, 1984–86), entry on Barran.
49. Data on the value of American sewing machines exported to Great Britain from 1865 onwards has been published in A.B. Jack, ‘The Channels of Distribution for an Innovation: the Sewing Machine Industry in America, 1860-1865’, Explorations in Entrepreneurial History Vol.9 (Feb. 1957). His data shows that sales of American machines in Britain totalled $753,792 in 1865 and $926,896 in 1870. The unit price, he suggests, would have been $100 in 1865, falling slowly to about $75 in 1895 (p.137). Thus, annual sales of sewing machines may have reached 10,000 by 1870.
50. R.B. Davies, Peacefully Working to Conquer the World: Singer Sewing Machine in Foreign Markets, 1854–1920 (New York, 1976). Davies cites a number of claims by American clothes manufacturers in the 1850s and 1860s that these early sewing machines were able to do the work of ten hand sewers, pp.21-2. They were limited, however, and could only sew in straight lines, reducing the possibilities for the mechanisation of garment assembly considerably.
51. Munby, Industry and Planning, p. 55.
52. Davies cites the belief of one of Singer's agents speaking in1882that it was not until after1865that anyone of sound business judgement believed the sewing machine to be commercially viable because of continuing technical difficulties, Peacefully Working, p.5
53. Ryott, Barrans, pp.4-11 and 16–21 on that firm's product;
54. and Kershen, Uniting, pp.25-35 on the concentration on trousers production and the subcontracting out of the more difficult work.
55. Kershen, Uniting, p.26.
56. Chapman, ‘Innovating Entrepreneurs’, esp. pp.14–22 on Moses;
57. Kershen, Uniting, pp.4 and 26 on Hyams;
58. P.K. Newman, ‘The Early London Clothing Trades’, Oxford Economic Papers (1952);
59. and Kershen, Uniting, p.7 on subdivision preceding mechanisation in London.
60. Evidence on the role of steam-powered sewing machines given to the 1864 Children's Employment Commission is summarised in Kershen, Uniting, pp.13–15.
61. Kershen, Uniting, p.13 for citation.
62. On the nature of British domestic demand and the oscillating shuttle see J.B. Jefferys, Retail Trading in Britain, 1850–1950 (Cambridge, 1954), p.293.
63. On the technological innovations in the sewing machine industry see R. Thomson, The Path to Mechanized Shoe Production in the United States (Chapel Hill, NC, 1989), Chs.7 and 8.
64. On the nature of British domestic demand and the oscillating shuttle see J.B. Jefferys, Retail Trading in Britain, 18.50-19.50 (Cambridge, 1954). p.293.
65. On the technological innovations in the sewing machine industry see R. Thomson, The Path to Mechanized Shoe Production in the United States (Chapel Hill. NC, 1989). Chs.7 and 8.
66. NEDO, New Technology and the Clothing Industry (London, 1971).
67. D.S. Landes, The Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change and Industrial Development in Western Euorpe from 1750 to the Present (Cambridge, 1969), p.295.
68. The claim for Singer's market share comes primarily from the firm's own advertising materials held in the Singer Sewing Machine Company archives held by the State Historical Society in Madison WI, United States. For examples see Box 10813. For further details see A. Godley, ‘Singer in Britain: The Diffusion of Sewing Machine Technology and its Impact on the Clothing Industry in the United Kingdom. 1860-1905’. Textile History (forthcoming 1995).
69. Unfortunately the company accounts no longer list British sales separately after 1905 - presumably as a consequence of some internal change. The balance of demand was changing by then, however, as Singer increasingly penetrated the consumer demand for machines in the 1900s. Godley, ‘Singer in Britain’ deals with the change in the sewing machine from principally a capital good to principally a consumer good during this period.
70. A. Godley, ‘The Emergence of Mass Production’.
71. Kershen, Uniting, Ch.2, pp.25-59
72. and Tables 1 and 2, p.192. Also see J. Thomas, ‘History of the Leeds Clothing Industry’, Yorkshire Bulletin (January, 1955).
73. C. Booth (ed.), Life and Labour of the People in London (London, 17 vols., 1902–3 First series, Vol.4, ‘The Tailoring Trade’).
74. Godley, ‘Emergence of an Industrial District’.