NOSTALGIA: Mike Pryce on the history of Fownes glovemaking

Those Frenchmen wouldn’t have stopped at slaughtering a few Saxons when they stepped off the Calais ferry in 1066. But not many would be related to a Norman knight who sired a dynasty that founded one of Worcester’s greatest industries.

When Miss Ann Fownes Rigden died in 1997 at the age of 74 she was the last direct descendant of Sir William Fones, a Norman knight who came to England with William the Conqueror. After several generations the Fones family somehow acquired a “w” to its surname, becoming Fownes.

And it was in Worcester in 1777 that John Fownes started what was to develop into a major national and international glove-making company and one eventually renowned as being the oldest such firm in the UK.

John Fownes was the founding father of a breathtaking boom in glove making which made Worcester a national glove making centre with 150 manufacturers employing no fewer than 20,000 people and producing 7.5 million pairs of glove a year.

John Fownes also spread his wings and established a large factory, warehouse and showrooms at Battersea in London. He died in 1838 but the running of the Fownes glove making empire was to remain in the hands of his descendants right up until the 1960s.

For Worcester, the industry had long been a traditional local craft. It had a “Glove Makers Street” way back in the 1200s and is recorded as having a Glovers’ Guild from 1497. But when the Great Crash came for British gloving in 1826, the effects for Worcester were devastating with scores of closures. Only two leading companies were to survive the dramatic recession – Fownes and Dents.

Fownes became international manufacturers and wholesalers with its main offices in London, but moved to a new purpose-built factory in Worcester in the mid-1880s. This stood in Talbot Street, which disappeared with the building of City Walls Road in the 1970s and was to provide employment for many hundreds of local people until it closed in 1971, only a few months after Fownes had merged with Dents. The old factory, by now fronting City Walls Road, lay forlorn and empty for more than 15 years before being transformed into a hotel by Worcestershire businessman David Hutchins in 1987.

Ten years later Miss Ann Fownes Rigden, the last of the Fownes family line, died in hospital. Her father Stanley Fownes Rigden had been a principal of the company, both in London and Worcester, for more than 50 years and his daughter headed the company’s continental sales department.

“I am obviously greatly saddened when I think of the past,” Miss Fownes Rigden said. “It depresses me. However, I am naturally proud to have been a Fownes.”