(An Account of the Boot-Making Industry in the Village)
This is a copy of an article published in The Peak Advertiser,
the Peak District's local free newspaper on 26th July 2004 (p13),
reproduced by kind permission of its author, Julie Bunting.
In the years leading up to the Second World War, a writer named Ethel
Carleton Williams spent many happy days in the Peak, gathering memories
to be published in 1948 as Companion into Derbyshire. She had the knack
of finding something of interest wherever she went, and her description
of Stoney Middleton takes us back almost 60 years.
At that time the village still had a flourishing boot-making industry
with six factories, one more than 100 years old. Ethel asked a small
boy, playing with a motor tyre, which one she should visit. He pointed
up the hill: ‘Yon's best. If you take boots there, they come back
better than new.’
Taking his recommendation, the visitor found a room crowded with work
benches where men were making massively heavy hob-nailed boots, solid
enough to last a lifetime and guaranteed to keep out the wet ‘even in
floodtime’. The noise in the factory was a constant subdued roar, what
with the clang of machines driving in rivets, the whirr of industrial,
sewing machines and the friction of emery wheels. At the cutting table
a man with a sharp knife and keen eye was carving uppers and tongues
from a large sheet of leather, cutting round patterns in such a way
that not a scrap of leather was wasted.
‘Arriving Home’
Meanwhile, young women were stitching the leather sides together as
easily as if they were made of fine cloth, while another girl was
pressing the backs in a machine and a third was working a foot pedal to
insert the eyelets, which poured down a tube to be fastened into place.
Leather soles were being cut out by another machine, ready to be joined
to the uppers by young boys who knocked in the nails.
Further deafening activity continued on the lower floor, where yet more
heavy machinery finished off the boots: “Two elderly workmen, veterans
in their craft, were knocking iron ‘tackets’ into the soles in neat
rows, a more difficult art than anyone would suspect by watching them.
Then came the last stage of all, when the leather was smoothed with an
emery wheel, and any fragments rounded off with a sharp knife.” The
finished boots were piled up by the door ready for despatch.
Ethel concluded that Stoney Middleton had every right to be proud of
its industry, for its products were sent to all parts of the world. It
has not been possible to locate the rights holder to our illustration,
‘Arriving Home at Stoney Middleton’. The photograph was taken by E.W.
Tattersall and published by Methuen along with Ethel's story.
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[Created 29 Aug 2004. Last updated 16 Nov 2008 - 17:21 by Rosemary Lockie]