Hi Joe,
BUSMC has been based here in Leicester City, UK for over 100 years. It has
now moved to an industrial estate in a village on the outskirts (3 miles
from where I live). It exported shoe-making machinery all over the world:
"During the mid- to late-19th Century the mechanised boot and shoe
industry began to grow in importance. Although Northampton is synonymous
with the manufacture of footwear, Leicester was on equal terms in the mid-
19th Century, especially for the cheaper end of the market. In the 1860s
the Leicester manufacturers patented ‘Leicester welting’, which was
machine-applied steel staples for cheap mass-produced footwear. The
headquarters of Stead & Simpson, Freeman, Hardy & Willis, Timpson’s and
Equity are still in Leicester.
Leicester, however, excelled in the production of boot and shoe machinery.
The industry began in the 1850s with the manufacture of the ‘Blake Sewing
machine’, the first successful attempt at mechanised shoe leather sewing.
The collections include two examples of this now very rare machine.
Throughout the late-19th Century the principal boot and shoe machine
builders included Standard, Gimsons, Bennion and Pearson, all represented
in the collection. In 1899/1900 Bennion established the British United
Shoe Machine Company (BUSM), based on its American counterpart. BUSM soon
became the only serious supplier of footwear machines for the country and
by the 1930s over 90% of the country’s footwear was made on machinery
produced in Leicester. Many of their key machines, such as the
consolidating last, are represented in the collection, together with an
extensive library of BUSM trade literature."
(Extract from Cornucopia
http://www.cornucopia.org.uk/html/search/verb/GetRecord/5148 online
database of information about more than 6,000 collections in the UK's
museums, galleries, archives and libraries).
---------------------------------------
Connection with the American Shoe Machinery industry, see:
Business History
Publisher: Routledge, part of the Taylor & Francis Group
Issue: Volume 46, Number 2 / April 2004
Pages: 195 - 218
URL: http://taylorandfrancis.metapress.com/link.asp?
id=hpvr52gckk4ana6p
DOI: 10.1080/0007679042000215106
American Machinery and European Footwear: Technology Transfer and
International Trade, 1860-1939
José Antonio Miranda
A1 Universidad de Alicante
----------------------------------------
And see:
Warner, Sam Bass Jr., Today's Boston; A History. The Massachusetts
Historical Review 1 (1999): 47 pars. 20 Sep. 2006
http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/mhr/1/warner.html .
--------------------------------------
See http://www.usmgroup.com/ for the modern company.
Jim Roberts
****************************************************************
Jim Roberts Hon FMA
Webmaster
University of Leicester
Department of Museum Studies
http://www.le.ac.uk/museumstudies
+44 (0)116 252 3961
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