GLOVING.
‘A pair of gloves, if you please.’—‘Yes, sir. Kid gloves?’ The customer indicates the kind of gloves he requires; and down comes a long shallow box, divided into several compartments, in each of which there lies a neat bundle of gloves of various colours and shades, held together by a band of paper. ‘What size, sir?’ The size is mentioned; and one of the bundles is lifted out of its compartment and quickly and carefully opened at one end. Gloves of the exact size and shade required are selected, the price is paid, and there, for the most part, the transaction ends. How many of the thousands who every day go through this process have any idea of where and how the soft, delicate, tight-fitting gloves they wear are made?
Enormous numbers—said to exceed two-thirds of the entire consumption—are imported from France, Germany, and Sweden. But there is a large home manufacture, which is carried on to a considerable extent in and about Worcester, but principally in the west of England.
If the reader will glance at a railway map, and let his eye follow the main line of the London and South-Western Railway, he will find, about midway between Salisbury and Exeter, a station marked Yeovil Junction. Should he actually travel down the line and change at this junction, he would speedily find himself landed at the ancient market-town of Yeovil, the centre and capital of the glove-trade, or as it is locally described, ‘the gloving’—a town of about eight thousand inhabitants. A visitor from the North or the Midlands would probably be surprised, on entering the gloving metropolis, to find nothing of the noise or dirt which is usually associated with manufacturing industry. No tall chimneys belch out black clouds of smoke; no gaunt factories rear themselves aloft above the houses; no ponderous machinery makes its throb felt even by passers-by in the streets. No obtrusive signs of the trade which is being carried on meet the eye anywhere. The place is clean and bright and quiet; and surrounded by green hills and luxuriant valleys dotted over with magnificent timber. Yet it looks—what, indeed, inquiry proves it to be—a prosperous and thriving town, presenting a marked and agreeable contrast to most of the sleepy old towns whose glory has long since departed, in this beautiful west country that Kingsley loved so well. In this respect the capital is a fair sample of all the gloving centres—a general air of prosperity pervades them all.
The area over which the trade extends is not large. A line drawn east and west through Yeovil and continued for ten miles in each direction would intersect the whole district, which lies on the borderland of Somerset and Dorset, and includes some half-dozen small towns and fair-sized villages, of which Milborne Port, Sherborne, Stoke-sub-Hamdon, and Martock are the principal. Nor can the trade itself be compared for magnitude with many other industries; it is a mere pigmy beside the cotton, the iron, or the woollen trade.
Let us have the pleasure of conducting the reader over one of the glove factories, fourteen or fifteen of which may be found in Yeovil alone, that he may see the present state of one of the most ancient industries in the country, and have an idea of the number and variety of the processes and hands through which his gloves have passed.
Beginning at the beginning, we enter a room in which the raw material lies before us in the shape of hundreds of bundles of sheep-skins tanned and bleached as white as the driven snow. Handling them, we find them soft and elastic to the touch. These are not the skins of our high-bred English sheep, which are wholly unfit for the purpose, but the skins of half-wild mountain-sheep, which are collected by Jews over the east of Europe and the western part of Asia. The glover does not care for the skins of your wool-producing sheep; his dictum is, ‘the rougher the hair, the better the pelt’ (skin). These skins were formerly imported untanned; but the German tanners have now beaten the English tanners out of the market, and they are bought in the condition in which we now see them here, in Berlin or Vienna. As the skins are required, they are taken out of the store and soaked in a vat containing the yolks of eggs, in the proportion of ten dozen skins to one gallon of yolks. In order to secure that every part of the skins shall be thoroughly soaked, they are trodden by men’s feet. This is done, it is said, ‘to feed or nourish them;’ or, in other words, to make them still softer and more elastic. The soaking over, the skins are next taken to the dyehouse, and laid face uppermost on a slightly convex, lead-covered board. Here they are rapidly and frequently brushed over with dyestuff until they have absorbed a sufficient quantity to give them the desired colour, when they are again brushed with what is called ‘a striker’—that is, a liquid preparation that will fix and render permanent the dye already put on them.
The skin is next hung up in a stove or heated room, where it rapidly dries. When dry, it is handed over to a man whose business it is to examine it; and if, as is almost always the case, it is too thick for the purpose for which it is intended, or is of unequal thickness, to pare it down until it is of the required thickness and of one uniform thickness all over. In some places this process is carried on in the factory, but more commonly in an outbuilding attached to the workman’s home. It is done by means of a peculiar knife, shaped like a quoit, the outer edge of which is kept very sharp. Fixing the skin, by a dexterous movement of the hand, to a horizontal bar in front of him, he lays hold of it with the left hand to keep it stretched, and with the right hand scrapes off so much of the fleshy matter at the back of it as may be needed. Considerable skill is required to pare the skin without cutting it, and should the workman be awkward, he may not only injure his work but seriously cut himself.
The skins are next passed under the eye of an experienced workman, who assorts them into their various qualities. After this, they are passed on to another room, where they are first rolled up in damp cloths, very much after the manner in which a laundress rolls up clothes preparatory to wringing the water out of them; and, when so rolled up, they are vigorously pulled, so as to develop their utmost stretching capacity from head to tail. Then they are spread out on a broad flat table, and carefully, though very quickly, for the workman’s eye gets exceedingly sharp, examined for flaws or defects of any kind, such as the scar left by a wound or thorn-scratch, or a thin place, which when found is instantly made into a hole. The examination over, the cutter has made up his mind how this particular skin before him can be cut up to the best advantage—that is, in such a manner as to leave as little waste as possible. His mind made up, he lays on a paper pattern, taking care to place it so that it shall be the right way of the grain and not across it; then, with a pair of shears, resembling sheep-shears, he cuts it into as many oblong squares—each of which is just large enough for one glove—as the material will admit of. Out of the parts left he cuts pieces for the thumbs and fourchettes or sides of the fingers—usually pronounced ‘forgets’—and for the binding round the top and the opening just above the palm of the hand, which are called ‘welts.’ Having cut a number of skins, he proceeds to pair the pieces, endeavouring to match them exactly in colour and quality, and to make up little bundles containing all the pieces necessary for each pair of gloves. This process is one of the most important of all those through which the leather passes. A clumsy or careless workman will cut it to waste, getting several pairs of gloves less out of a dozen skins than a clever and careful one. As we watch the process, we are struck with the rapidity with which the work is done, and with the skill shown in dealing with flaws in the leather. Here, for example, is a skin with a hole in the best part of it about the size of a shilling; with seeming rashness, the man cuts the leather so that that very hole comes into one of the oblong squares. We call attention to the fact, when, with a smile, he points out that at that precise point a hole will be required for the thumb-piece.
The pieces of leather, called in the trade ‘trancs’—for they are no longer skins—are now passed on to another room, where they are cut into their final shape. Hitherto, we have been dealing with the preparation of the material for gloves, and a stranger might have followed all the processes so far without gathering from what he saw any indication of the use to be made of these pieces of leather. But now they begin to assume a shape which cannot be mistaken. The reader, especially the fair reader, has doubtless often seen, if not used, the shapes with which pastry is cut into leaves, circles, squares, and so on. Now, if you will put your two hands together, palms uppermost, and imagine a shape that would cut out the figure made by these two hands, minus the thumbs, and treating the two little fingers as one, you will have a very fair idea of a glover’s punch or ‘web.’ In the room we now enter we find quite a number of these punches, agreeing with the number of sizes manufactured. One of them is laid on a sliding table edge uppermost; then six of these oblong squares of leather—which have been placed face to face in pairs, so that right and left hand gloves may be cut together—are laid upon it, and covered with a thick pad of wood or vulcanite. The table is pushed forward until the punch and its burden rest under an iron press, not unlike a printing-press. One pull at the powerful lever, and the press comes down, and the leather is cut. The thumb-pieces are next treated in the same manner. Up the back of every pair of gloves there are three lines of ornamental work of some kind. If these gloves are to have the heavy silk-work on the back called tambouring, they will now be laid upon a block and punctured with as many holes as there are to be stitches in the tambour-work. Before leaving this room, the size of the gloves is stamped on the inside of one, and a consecutive or matching number is written inside each of the two pieces of leather that are now an embryo pair of gloves, so that if, in any of the subsequent processes, they should be accidentally separated, they may be identified and brought together again. After they have been looked over and carefully perfected with scissors wherever the punch may have left a jagged edge, they are ready to resume their travels.