THE INDUSTRIES OF LEICESTER 65 
development has taken place in the manufacture of boots and shoes. 
Its meaning is better seen if we consider the function of the shoe. Most 
feet, like most faces, appear to have their individual peculiarities of 
proportion, and a slight misfit, such as in clothing would pass unnoticed, 
is of vital importance in shoes. Again, the simple and inert rigidity of 
the last contrasts with the complex flexibility of the human foot. Herein 
lie the problems of the mass production of boots and shoes—to produce 
them by the million and to place them upon the market so that any one 
can walk into any shop and obtain a pair that will fit his own ‘ particular ’ 
pair of feet. 
Until 1790, when Thomas Saint invented a chain-stitch machine for 
sewing together the various parts of the upper, shoes were made entirely 
by hand, slowly and laboriously. While to-day some four hundred types 
of machines are in common use, the wider application of machinery to 
manufacture did not really begin before the middle of last century. 
Mechanisation, however, once established, made rapid progress. Walter 
Hunt’s first lock-stitch machine (1832), improved by Elias Howe in 1846 
and followed in 1849 by Allen Wilson’s rotary hook principle, represents 
a further stage in the manufacture of the upper. Early in the century 
Randolph and Brunel had applied themselves to methods of riveting by 
machinery. Then Thomas Crick, the ‘father of the Leicester shoe 
industry,’ securing an iron plate to the sole of his last, clinched rivets, 
driven through the leather, against it. His son introduced the method 
of inside riveting, whereby uppers and insoles were riveted together, 
then turned and the sole attached. This was in 1853. In the same 
decade appeared the ‘ Blake ’ sewer, whereby the outer and inner soles 
(the latter with upper attached) were sewed together, an invention which, 
by its revolutionary effects, heralds the modern period. The rest is a 
matter of detail—the ‘ clicking’ press, the eyeleting machine; screwing 
and heeling machines, edge-trimming machines, burnishing machines and 
so on, until the introduction of the hand-method lasting machine in 1885 
completed the industrial revolution from hand to machine. 
Under the Domestic System, when each worker’s home was a law unto 
itself in the matter of hours and working conditions, when father and sons 
riveted and ‘finished’ and the womenfolk performed the ‘ closing ’ 
operations on crude treadle machines, when workshops were badly 
ventilated and insanitary, and tuberculosis was rampant, life was a frantic 
struggle, a demoralising experience. When this system, even under 
rapidly improving conditions, received its death-blow, after the national 
strike of 1895, and the present factory system firmly established itself, 
most people looked to the future with much confidence and little regret. 
A century ago the raw materials of shoe production included horse-hide 
and ox-hide, the skins of sheep, calves and goats, and little else. ‘To-day 
a wonderful variety of materials, drawn from all over the earth and made 
from scores of species of animals, birds, reptiles and fish, enters into the 
routine of large-scale manufacture. The canvas is too large for even the 
sketchiest of outlines. 
Boot and shoe manufacture has thus become a highly specialised 
industry. Even so, few realise to what extent variety in choice of material 
E 
