This is one of a collection of 17 films made by the giant Burton clothing company between 1950 and 1971. They mainly show the production and design of their clothing, but also feature other aspects of the Burton clothing empire, including the memorable Hudson Road factory in Leeds.   The film collection includes promotional films for the company featuring aspects of the factory itself as well as the facilities for employee welfare, while producing “high quality made-to-measure suits at low...

This is one of a collection of 17 films made by the giant Burton clothing company between 1950 and 1971. They mainly show the production and design of their clothing, but also feature other aspects of the Burton clothing empire, including the memorable Hudson Road factory in Leeds.   The film collection includes promotional films for the company featuring aspects of the factory itself as well as the facilities for employee welfare, while producing “high quality made-to-measure suits at low prices.” The collection also features instructional films for tailors and sewing machine operators in addition to a 1960s fashion show which displays the latest men’s line of suits, overcoats, formal wear, and other accessories. An oddity in the collection, that is also on YFA Online, is a rare Candid Camera film, The Suit (1966) filmed in a Burton store in Leeds, featuring the extraordinary Jonathan Routh.

 

Some will recognise the well known voice of the narrator, Kenneth Kendall, the BBC and ITN newsreader, contemporary of Richard Baker and Robert Dougall.   He was a good choice for the film, being known for his elegant dress sense, and being voted best-dressed newsreader by Style International in 1979. The connection doesn’t stop there, as he also played a part in helping John Inman in the early days of his career; who of course is best known for his role as a camp, senior assistant in the menswear department in the BBC comedy Are You Being Served?  Two years before making this film Kenneth had a cameo role as a newsreader in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

 

The Burton Company was founded by Montague Burton, originally named Meshe Osinsky, who came from a Jewish immigrant family from Lithuanian Russia. The establishment of businesses by Jewish immigrants was not that unusual at the time, as Jews escaped persecution in Eastern Europe to find a sanctuary here, often in the clothing trade. Another was Michael Marks, the co-founder of Marks and Spencer. In fact it was the Zimmerman Brothers, Jewish wholesale clothiers in the Leylands area of Leeds, who first marketed Burton’s wares. By the time that Montague Burton died in 1952 (becoming ‘Sir Montague’ in 1931), he had amassed 600 shops and 14 factories and was clothing one in four men in Britain.  More on Montague Burton can be found in the Context for The Suit.

 

The factory on Hudson Road was started in 1921.  At its height it employed around 10,000 people, producing over 30,000 suits a week, and was the biggest employer in Leeds.   Being right near the centre of the West Riding textile industry, Leeds had ready access to skilled tailors and machinists. The great majority of these were women: ten to each man employed. The reason often given for this predominance of women in this line of work is that women have smaller hands for the delicate work – but being able to pay less may well have come into the equation. In fact the Equal Pay Act came out in the same year this film was made, 1970; inspired by women sewing machinists at Ford’s in Dagenham going on strike in 1968. There are some anecdotes of those working in the factory at Leodis, the Photographic Archive for Leeds (see References).

 

The film provides a detailed picture of the process of making a suit, from drawing board to finished article. As can be seen, mostly these are somewhere in-between being an off-the-peg suit to being a bespoke one. They offered, and still do, ‘bespoke’ suits at a cheaper price than is to be had in Savile Row, from where the term originated.   Burton can be said to have occupied this middle ground. This is shown in the combination of automation and hand work in the manufacturing process. A combination that is doubtless common in many clothing factories today. The majority of these, however, will be found in the Far East, where much of our clothing is now produced.  

 

Another aspect of the film that is especially worth commenting upon is the welfare role that the company played in providing health services.  Apparently Hudson Road once had the largest works canteen in the world, to go along with being the biggest clothing factory in the world.  It is little wonder that the company often employed whole families.  But there is a tradition of this too. Another example is that of the Newton Chambers steel works at Thorncliffe, near Sheffield, which could also be described, as Hudson Road was by former tailor Sam Bernstein, as "a town in itself" – see the Context for Newton Chambers Festival Week 1951. 

 

There is evidence that Burton was responsible for the well-known phrases 'the full Monty' and 'going for a Burton'. The former was used to describe the entire range of clothing offered to soldiers being de-mobbed after the Second World War; the latter referred to an RAF office over a Burton’s shop, where men would go to sit exams.  Anyone failing an exam was said to have 'Gone for a Burton'. A year after the end of the war Burton branched into womenswear by acquiring the Peter Robinson fashion business. 

 

The company is still going strong, becoming the Arcadia Group in 1998, and part of Taveta Investments, the largest privately-owned UK retail group, in 2002. As well as owning Burton, this group also owns, Dorothy Perkins, Evans, Miss Selfridge, Topman, Topshop and Wallis. The factory is now gone, although it is still the location for Arcadia Group's accounting and facilities teams.   The Arcadia group now does not own or control any factories.   Instead it gets its supplies from all over the world. The industry is notorious in many countries for using child labour and having appalling working conditions.   Although the Arcadia group has fairly strong ethical guidelines, these can be breached, as witnessed in a Channel 4’s Dispatches investigations in 2010 (see labour behind the label, References). At the time of writing (December 2010) the billionaire owner of the Arcadia Group, Sir Philip Green, is advising David Cameron on public sector “efficiency” savings.

 

Also no longer operational is Guisborough Sunnyfield House, seen in the film as a residential training centre for the company.  Now it is a museum and space for exhibitions. 

 

The film was made at a time when both the fabrics being used and the fashions were rapidly changing. In this respect it is worth watching alongside Needlecraft Exhibition at Grosvenor Hotel (1968) and Harrogate: Boardroom Of The North (1970-1971), whose Contexts have more on this.   It has been argued that the popularity of Burton after the war was due to the ‘Gentlemanly ideal’; but Tim Edwards states that: “With the invasion of casual clothing, the teenage revolution and growing demand for off-the-peg fashion as opposed to tailoring, Burton has found itself increasingly lost.” (References, p. 63) This was written in 1997. As Tim Edwards observes, context is everything: a suit worn by Cary Grant signifies something very different from one worn by John Major.  There has been opposition to the all pervading suit: in 1929 The Men's Dress Reform Party was formed in London to challenge it, but had petered out by 1940. So, despite the diffusion of men’s fashion, suits seem destined to remain as the mark of respectability for men for all time. 

 

References

 

Tim Edwards, Men in the Mirror: Men’s fashion, masculinity and consumer society, Cassell, London, 1997.

BBC Leeds, Montague Burton

Leodis, Photographic Archive for Leeds

Arcadia

labour behind the label