Glove Making in nineteenth-century Ledbury.

The glove-making trade fluctuated in demand with the vagaries of fashion and the effects of trade treaties. After the Napoleonic Wars there was a change in fashion to softer lighter gloves made of kid. Demand soared as ladies bought pairs of gloves to wear with different outfits. Glove makers in Worcester expanded their workshops, using women and girls to sew the glove pieces together in their own homes. These “gloveresses” were employed on piece rates, whilst the preparation, cutting, dyeing and finishing of the gloves was carried out in the workshops by men on regular wages.

As the industry grew there was a need for more gloveresses to keep pace with the cutters, and employment spread from Worcester into the surrounding market towns and villages. Between 1790 and 1820 300 manufacturers employed 30,000 worker in and around Worcester – half the glovers in Britain. Ledbury became an important centre. At least two young women, Sarah Jones and Sylvia Fleetwood, were working as gloveresses in Ledbury at this time, as the parish registers record the baptism of their illegitimate children. Rather more respectably, Robert Baggott, glover, lived and worked in the High Street and had his name entered in a trade directory in 1838. In the 1851 Census 60 glovers (mainly female) were recorded in Ledbury, and this number grew steadily to 1871, when employment reached a peak with 139 women and girls recorded. This represented almost one third of female ‘industrial’ employment in Ledbury and was rivalled only by those in domestic service, with dressmaking occupying less than half the number of those in glovemaking. The vast majority of the gloveresses were below 50years of age (perhaps not surprisingly with the low life expectancy at that time). Many of the girls were in their early teens, the youngest recorded in 1871 was aged 11years, but from an account of a local gloveress much younger girls would help their mothers and sisters far into the night, helping with the threading of needles for example. Older women were often recorded as glovers not gloveresses and may have had a more formal training but these were very few in number as were male glovers (fewer than four in each census year.)

The invention of the Glove Donkey in 1807 by James Winter from Yeovil in Somerset greatly improved the quality of the stitching and the speed of production.. With the help of this instrument the women were able to produce as many as six dozen pairs of gloves a week for which they would be paid about 6/- to 8/-. They then had to deliver these, often on foot, to such firms as Dents and Fownes in Worcester, which had now grown from workshops into factories. Many may have walked as far as 15 miles. In some villages the gloveresses gathered together at a given time to a prearranged meeting place such as an inn where a local “bag” woman would collect the gloves and distribute the new pieces. Sometimes this was done by a carter. In Ledbury there was a Glove Agent, William Crocket of New Street recorded in 1871 and it is possible he collected the gloves and distributed the new pieces to the gloveresses. In 1891in Homend Street, a Glove Depot Manageress, Eliza Jenkins is recorded, perhaps acting as an agent for a Worcester firm.

Sewing gloves using a Gloving Donkey

Life for the gloveresses was harsh. Many of them worked in the fields during the day and worked long into the night to produce their quota of gloves. In 1839 the chartist leader Henry Vincent visited Ledbury and recorded that:

Leather glove-making is the principal employment of the female part of the population. We visited one house where two young women were at work. They stated that their wages had considerably declined of late years. One of them said that a few years ago she could earn two shillings and six pence per day BUT NOW SHE HAD TO WORK VERY HARD FOR ONE SHILLING! And yet articles of consumption are much dearer now than they were then.

In 1871most of the139 gloveresses lived in the many crowded closes and alleys off Homend and Bye Street in small cottages and lodging houses. In 1871 there were 10 gloveresses in Smoke Alley, 6 in Common Garden, and 17 in Back Lane (now Church Street). They were poorly paid compared with factory workers, and working conditions were extremely unhealthy: They worked hunched over the Glove Donkeys in poorly ventilated and ill-lit rooms often without heating. Their eyesight suffered.

As the century progressed the demand for piece workers declined. Sewing machines were adapted to sew the glove pieces together and to tambour the backs of the gloves. For a time machines were rented out to the gloveresses but production soon moved into the factories, where output per worker as much as trebled. In 1891 only 28 gloveresses were listed in Ledbury and by 1901 there were two gloveresses and one ‘machinist - glove’. Seventy-one year-old Elizabeth Weaver, a retired gloveress was living in the workhouse. The domestic trade had entirely ceased by the First World War.

Sources: Ledbury parish registers and wills (Herefordshire Record Office)

Census enumerators books for Ledbury (TNA and on microfilm at HRO)

Robson’s Directory of Herefordshire 1838

Vision of Britain

Author’s name: Jenny Silcock