SM: I was born in Glastonbury, Northover, in 1902.
AH: Gosh, that's a few years ago! [Laughs]
SM: Yes, yes!
AH: Right, can we talk about, about the tanned, the tanned leather used for gloving because we found out that there were glovers here in Glastonbury? Can you tell me what kind of leather that they would of used?
SM: Well, that's difficult because the, a good pair of gloves would need the sort of leather we, as far as I know, we never produced in Glastonbury. You see our old firm, the sheepskins, and we certainly had skins, which were no good for woolled hearthrugs and so we tanned them and as far as I know, although I was very young at the time, made gloves out of them. But during the First World War, we had quite a business with that and sent a van round the country, villages, taking gloves to be sewn. We cut them at the factory and they were sewn in people's houses and they were collected, a week or so later.
AH: What kind of gloves were these then?
SM: They must have been heavy gloves because we didn't make proper glove leather. Proper glove leather needs to be something finer, not something made out of large, heavy sheep. They were the sort of gloves that you do gardening in, that sort of thing. And I don't know what purpose they were used in the war, certainly the First World War we had a van going round and by the time I got into business some years later, that trade had stopped. That was various sorts of sheepskin and lambskin from the fur-trade.
AH: Can you explain when you say from the fur-trade?
SM: From the fur-trade?
AH: Yes.
SM: Well, for instance Persian lambs which are quite an expensive type of fur, or were then and smallish lamb-skins. And the business used to have them sent in by fur-merchants in London who wanted them dressed and dyed, they all had to be dyed black, they were a black nat', naturally but they had to be dyed even, even blacker, it was a very soft, purpley-blue leather. And other types of lambs, I used to go to Italy myself, once or twice a year, buying lambskins, there.
AH: So, it's not British lamb, lambskins? It was, it was European lambskins then?
SM: By that time. It, the, well the London factory. But we also dressed Australian, South, South American, South African skins. Depends where you can buy skins of a good enough, regular quality to be worth buying because the problem with that trade, always, is that the, a number of skins aren't good enough for the purpose and you have to get rid of them somehow and that's expensive.