64 SCIENTIFIC SURVEY OF LEICESTER AND DISTRICT 
installation of improved machinery ; several types of machines used are, 
however, still made abroad. The community, too, has benefited greatly 
by the introduction of knitted garments, which are cheap, efficient, 
hygienic, comfortable and stylish. In many cases woven goods have 
been replaced by knitted goods, so that Leicester has prospered at the 
expense of her competitors. On the whole, considerable enterprise has 
been shown in the development of new garments, new fashions and new 
designs. Nevertheless, in spite of statements to the contrary, the hosiery 
trade remains a seasonal trade subject to fluctuations of weather and 
fashion. As production is high and machinery developments are 
prodigious, severe competition at home and abroad is inevitable. 
Both machine builders and manufacturers have realised the advantages 
of technical and art training, and at the local colleges combined courses 
have been instituted with success. At Leicester alone some 500 students 
attend courses in the Hosiery Department, and that in spite of the 
absence of any definite apprenticeship scheme. Of these, approximately 
80 per cent. attend in the evenings, but signs are not lacking that more 
attention is being paid to the advantages of day training. In this and in 
other ways the Leicester and Leicestershire hosiery manufacturer is 
playing a worthy part in British trade. Fortunately or unfortunately, the 
hosiery industry lends itself to the establishment of small self-contained 
manufacturing concerns which may employ from 300 to 400 people without 
the necessity of instituting elaborate and costly systems. ‘Thus personal 
contact is preserved between employer and employee, matters can be 
arranged quickly and satisfactorily, and rapid changes can be effected to 
follow the day’s fashion. Businesses launched with comparatively small 
capital outlay may, by the use of modern methods, the purchase of 
modern machines, and the study of modern fashion and design, be 
developed quite successfully by sheer grit and hard work. 
Tue BooT AND SHOE INDUSTRY. 
The history of the hosiery trade in Leicester and Leicestershire takes 
us back into the remote past ; both town and county have grown up in 
a ‘ tradition of wool,’ and we acknowledge a certain fitness in the sequence 
of events on learning, for example, that on the site of the present Friar 
Mills there once stood the Monastery of the Black Friars of St. Dominic, 
themselves wool merchants as long ago as the early thirteenth century. 
In contradistinction to this, the story of boots and shoes is quite modern, 
and falls almost entirely within the last hundred years. A company of 
* jornemen of schomakers ’ existed in the days of Elizabeth, but it remains 
doubtful whether before 1830 the shoemakers of the town ever satisfied 
a wider need than that of its own inhabitants. 
In long-period considerations of industrial growth we perceive the 
principle of development as a transition from the slow handicraft of many 
highly skilled individual productive units (a system characterised in its 
early stages by personal acquaintance between craftsman and customer) 
to the rapid mass production of mechanised industry, in which the 
craftsman is replaced by the ‘machine minder,’ and the customer 
becomes, at least for the workman, a generalised abstraction. ‘This 
