There is a record of glove-making in Dorset as early as the 14th century and the industry was certainly an established trade in Bridport in the 15th and 16th centuries. Glovers were also working in Beaminster, Cerne Abbas, Bere Regis and Sturminster. The industry seems to have had its heartland in the north-west sector of the county near the Somerset border, especially in and around Sherborne. This is probably related to the proximity of Yeovil, where the leather from which the gloves were made was tanned and prepared, ready for distribution to the Dorset cutters and stitchers.Before the time of surfaced roads, minimising transport distances and costs would have been especially important.
Until the industrial revolution however, glove making was wholly a cottage or home-based occupation carried on by ‘outworkers’. This made economic sense, since the demand for their product was seasonal. By the early 19th century the leatherworks in Yeovil were dispatching leather to women glovers in Sherborne for sewing. It is likely that this town also may have acted as a distribution and co-ordination centre, apportioning leather to an outworker class living in the hinterland villages. At Cerne during the same period skins were being prepared for parchment and leather goods including gloves. In Sherborne and elsewhere in Dorset and Somerset the Sugg family and its branches had a particularly strong representation in the gloving trade.
In 1820 the glove-making business of Jefferies was established. A descendant, Chester Jefferies, in partnership with Gilbert Pearce, founded a factory at Slough in 1937, but then devolved business to outworkers in Dorset and elsewhere in Wessex. CJ made gloves from South American hogskin over the next 25 years, establishing their main works at Gillingham, Dorset in 1962. The business has supplied dealers such as Dents; Fownes; Morley and Brettles, and today has markets worldwide.
By the time of the 1851 census, 1,686 people in Dorset were describing their occupation as glovers. The 1881 census returns from Bridport Union Workhouse lists one Mary Reed as being a pauper glove-maker, while the 1891 census notes that an unmarried woman named Emily Elliot was making gloves at Marnhull near Sturminster. Interestingly, by that year the number of glovers recorded in the county had fallen to 422, of which only 31 were men, with 144 married women.
There was still a thriving glove-making industry in Sherborne in the 1930’s, where H Blake & Sons; Seager Bros and Stewart Adams & Sons were the foremost manufacturers. Besides Chester Jefferies, Fownes Bros were at Gillingham in the 1930’s and George Baker was gloving in Beaminster in 1922. Dent, Allcroft and the Goldcroft Glove Company were operating in Sturminster. On the Hants border, cottagers were making “Ringwood Gloves” knitted from soft string.
Sherborne also became a centre for the silk industry, and it has been noted that the making of silk fabrics had become an established trade in Dorset by 1585 using raw silk from Italy, China, Spain and Bengal. The next reference to the industry appears to come from John Hutchins who noted that “…about 1740 a silk throwster settled here” (i.e. at Sherborne). By 1756, silk stockings were being made at Poole.
But it was principally John Sharer of Whitechapel who introduced silk-throwing when he took over a grist mill at Westbury. As the trade progressed the mill was re-built and enlarged on three occasions and Sharer went before a Parliamentary committee in 1765 to testify that he was employing 400 people. Most of his workers however, were women and young girls, child labour being common in those days. Subsidiary works were established at Cerne and Stalbridge, and silk houses, each connected by feeders, were in operation at Dorchester and Bradford Abbas.
In 1799 Thomas Bartlett, in a letter to Thomas Wilmott, expressed his desire to establish a silk works in Evershot. This led to outworker women and children silk-winders becoming established in the village (silk-winding was probably the devolved home-based part of the process, whereby raw silk was wound from the cocoons produced by the silkworms, in preparation for the spinning or weaving into fabrics at the mills). The Kings Head Inn at Wimborne once advertised for girls aged about ten to do silk winding.
By 1800 two-thirds of those employed in silk were home-based outworkers, while the other third were in the mills. Most of these workers were young women paid five shillings per week and children paid one shilling per week. It is recorded that in 1802 women were knitting silk stockings at Corfe. In 1809 Sharer’s successors acquired the Castle (or East) Mill and, five years later, the Oke Mill, both at Sherborne.
Kellys Directory for 1920 notes that A R Wright & Sons Ltd were manufacturing silk in Sherborne by this time.
