The Clothworkers' Company Annual Review 2018

THE CLOTHWORKERS’ FOUNDATION ANNUAL REVIEW 2018

ANNUAL REVIEW 2018 THE CLOTHWORKERS’ COMPANY ANNUAL REVIEW 2018

ANNUAL REVIEW 2018

THE CLOTHWORKERS’ COMPANY 2018 MASTER John Coombe-Tennant

CLERK TO THE COMPANY Jocelyn Stuart-Grumbar

WARDENS Sir Jonathan Portal, Bt John Wake Denis Clough Joanna Dodd

DIRECTOR OF FINANCE, PROPERTY AND INVESTMENTS Hamesh Patel

COURT OF ASSISTANTS Dr Carolyn Boulter, DL Tim Bousfield Melville Haggard Nicholas Horne Michael Howell Tom Ingham-Clark Dan Jago Michael Jarvis Christopher Jonas, CBE Richard Jonas Antony Jones Peter Langley Col Alastair Mathewson, OBE Christopher McLean-May Alexander Nelson Philip Portal Dr Lucy Rawson John Stoddart-Scott, DL Andrew Strang Andrew Wates Robert West Andrew Yonge HONORARY ASSISTANT Andrew Blessley

CHIEF ACCOUNTANT Andy Boon BEADLE AND HALL MANAGER Michael Drummond HEAD OF GRANTS Philip Howard SENIOR ARCHIVIST Jessica Collins MEMBERSHIP AND COMMUNICATIONS MANAGER Renée LaDue The Clothworkers’ Company Clothworkers’ Hall Dunster Court Mincing Lane London EC3R 7AH +44 (0)20 7623 7041 enquiries@clothworkers.co.uk www.clothworkers.co.uk Like us on Facebook!

Twitter: @ClothworkersCo Instagram: Clothworkers_Co

Company photography by Kate Darkins and Richard Valencia.

INTRODUCTION

CONTENTS TEXTILES TRUSTEESHIP

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The Clothworkers’ Company is a 500-year-old philanthropic membership organisation with roots in the textile trade.

Established by Royal Charter in 1528 through the merger of The Fullers’ Company and The Shearmen’s Company, we were founded to promote the craft of clothworking in the City of London. We supervised the training of apprentices and protected standards of workmanship.

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ARCHIVES & COLLECTIONS

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AFFILIATES

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The Company’s mission is to play our part in the civic life of the City of London, support the textile industry through education and skills development, foster Fellowship and promote Trusteeship among our members and more widely, and use our position and wealth for charitable causes and social good.

The Clothworkers’ charitable giving is principally channelled through our grant-making charity, The Clothworkers’ Foundation, established in 1977 with a significant endowment from The

Company. The Company passes our income, having met the costs of running the livery hall and our other activities, across to The Foundation each year. This, together with income from The Foundation’s own investments, is distributed to a broad range of charities.

The Company also directly makes grants to our military affiliates, or in support of textiles and trusteeship across the UK. The following pages of this publication cover our key activities in these areas, and more, for 2018.

The reverse side of this publication contains information on the activities undertaken by The Clothworkers’ Foundation.

The Annual Review is directed both at the members of The Company as well as outside parties; we hope it will make interesting and informative reading on the modern role of an ancient livery company in the City of London today.

Cover and facing page: Details from Abraham Moon & Sons during a mill visit with students attending the Making It in Textiles 2018 conference. Photography by Paul David Drabble.

THE CLOTHWORKERS’ COMPANY ANNUAL REVIEW 2018

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TEXTILES Over the past decade or more, The Clothworkers’ Foundation (principally) and The Clothworkers’ Company have committed close to £12m in textiles-related support, with the categories of Academic Research and Innovation (42%) and Heritage and Conservation (34%) accounting for the lion’s share.

that bring this innovation to market.

From 2017, in order to allow the grants team and trustees of The Foundation to dedicate their full attention to improving the lives of people and communities facing disadvantage, we have consolidated all textiles grant-making within The Clothworkers’ Company.

TEXTILES STRATEGY

This decision places textiles firmly alongside trusteeship at the heart of The Company’s mission. There are encouraging signs of groundbreaking innovation in textiles (not least at the University of Leeds), and also of investment in the mills

•

As a result, we felt it was the right time to reaffirm The Company’s roots in cloth, clarify what direction our enduring interest in textiles should take, and discover how we might achieve the most meaningful impact on the industry.

With our current textiles strategy, The Company will aim to: • •

•

• Facing page: Photo of the archway welcoming visitors to The Clothworkers’ Departments at the University of Leeds.

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prioritise British textiles; focus on cloth, rather than costume, and on the manufacture of cloth; direct our involvement in textile design towards talented students at higher-rated institutions, with an interest in people who are studying or possess the ability to convert ideas into a product capable of being manufactured, as well as an understanding of textile technologies; rigorously explore the prospective usage of equipment that we fund; direct our support in heritage towards cataloguing, indexing, storing, conserving, displaying and improving access to important textile collections and archives.

EDUCATION AND INNOVATION IN BRITISH TEXTILES In 2012, we helped to establish the Clothworkers’ Centre for Textile Materials Innovation for Healthcare (CCTMIH) at the University of Leeds, with a £1.75m anchor donation. The Centre works to develop enabling technologies based on advances in textile science and engineering. From bioactive wound dressings capable of speeding up healing rates in the management of diabetic ulcers, to implantable devices capable of promoting the regeneration of bone or skin – the application of textiles in healthcare is a rapidly developing field. Working with nurses, orthopaedic, dental and cardiovascular surgeons to identify unmet needs in current clinical procedures, the CCTMIH team is developing physical prototypes that overcome the performance limitations of existing products. Research in this field is increasingly motivated by the need to stratify or personalise the structure and properties of medical textiles in response to patient needs, instead of a one-size-fits-all approach.

For example, CCTMIH has recently created a patent-pending manufacturing platform to produce fibres made of collagen with adjustable biodegradation rates, mechanical properties and liquid

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TEXTILES

absorption. As the most abundant protein found in humans, collagen is an attractive building block for the design of both implantable and topically-applied medical devices.

Using the new platform, collagen fibres, membranes, gels and coated products are being produced with individual properties customised according to clinical needs.

The Company has also been a principal supporter of Textiles and Colour Science at Leeds University since they were established. We currently provide bursaries for a number of postgraduate students across the two departments. In addition, subject to access and utilisation criteria, we make capital grants to assist with the purchase of cutting-edge specialist equipment.

The Company and the University have also been co-funders of an Innovation Fund to foster commercial ideas in textiles and colour science. Since 2005, this fund has disbursed more than £1.2m to allow the development of early-stage innovations.

For a number of years, we have also funded student bursaries through the Royal College of Art, Central Saint Martins and the University of Huddersfield, as well as making capital grants for the

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purchase of specialist equipment.

SKILLS DEVELOPMENT For exciting innovation to make the journey from university laboratory to the marketplace, it is important to nurture the technical skills that enable students to take a concept from crucible to loom, and on to market.

We aim to encourage students experimenting and innovating on campus to look ahead towards commercialisation in the real world. Breakthrough ideas in textiles – and materials more widely – must satisfy the demands of sustainability and, where possible, bring a societal benefit over and above what is currently offered.

We encourage young people to go into the UK textile industry through sponsoring work placements, organising the annual Making It in Textiles conference in Bradford (which aims to highlight opportunities in the industry), and fostering apprenticeships in Yorkshire. In 2016, we committed £90,000 over three years to the Crafts Council, funding its flagship education programme, Make Your Future. This handson programme is designed to bring together traditional textile

THE CLOTHWORKERS’ COMPANY ANNUAL REVIEW 2018

making with digital technologies, to stimulate the creativity of young people, and inspire future careers in textiles.

Our successful partnership with creative business incubator Cockpit Arts continues to flourish. Cockpit provides studio space and access to equipment for graduate weavers, enabling them to set up in business. Our support has allowed the studio to purchase the cutting-edge desktop looms currently in use by its resident weavers.

DESIGNS FOR THE FUTURE We are long-standing supporters of TexSelect, New Designers, and the Bradford Textile Society Design Competition, and it is so exciting to see alumni of these schemes flourishing. TexSelect 2019 will be the last exhibition of the programme in its current format. It will be interesting to see what emerges from its legacy.

CONSERVING THE PAST We are one of the foremost supporters of textile conservation in the UK. Since the 1980s, we have made capital grants, funded research, and provided bursaries for students at the Centre for Textile Conservation, supporting

the Centre to the tune of £1.75m when it was at the University of Southampton, and now in Glasgow.

We have also funded internships in tapestry conservation through Historic Royal Palaces, at Hampton Court.

The Clothworkers’ Centre for the Study and Conservation of Textiles and Fashion at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), Blythe House, was made possible by our £1m grant towards the £3m overall cost of the Centre. The Centre allows students, designers, and researchers greater access to the V&A’s extensive collection. The Centre will move to the new V&A East site, in Stratford, in the early 2020s.

In 2014, the British Museum opened its World Conservation and Exhibitions Centre. Our £0.75m grant to the Museum went towards the creation of The Clothworkers’ Organics Conservation Studio, housed within the Centre, to bring conservation and scientific research together under one roof, with specially designed studios and laboratories.

Right: Visit to Abraham Moon & Sons, Making It in Textiles conference.

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TEXTILES: DESIGNED BY SCIENCE ◆ MADE BY NATURE Keracol Limited is a spin-out company from The University of Leeds, supported by The Clothworkers’ Company. Keracol received a tremendous amount of press coverage surrounding its hairdyeing technology, which is made from blackcurrant skins produced as waste after the pressing process for Ribena. The story attracted the attention of major newspapers as well as BBC News, Sky News, ITV, BBC Radio 5 Live, BBC Radio Scotland, and many local radio stations across the UK. Following the hair-dyeing breakthrough, Keracol launched its own cosmetic brand in July 2018: Dr. Craft. The brand’s USP is naturallyderived products developed through high-level scientific research – indeed the brand’s tagline is ‘Designed by Science; Made from Nature’. In its first year, online sales through Amazon and the Dr. Craft website have been promising. The team rejoiced when Dr. Craft’s flagship product, Natural

Purple Berry Brightening Serum, was nominated for the Pure Beauty Global Awards as the Best New Natural Product of the Year. Keracol is developing new naturally-based products to add to the Dr. Craft range in anti-ageing skin care and hair styling that will be launched later this year. From May 2019, Keracol will move into its new facilities in NEXUS and has started to expand its research team by hiring a new junior scientist.

The collaborative research Keracol has conducted in partnership with the University of Leeds has resulted in four publications in the past year: •

‘Extraction of anthocyanins from aronia melanocarpa skin waste as a sustainable source of natural colorants’, in Coloration Technology (2019, 135, 5-16).

•

•

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‘Enhancing the Potential Exploitation of Food Waste: Extraction, Purification, and Characterization of Renewable Specialty Chemicals from Blackcurrants (Ribes nigrum L.)’, in Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry (2018, 66, 12265−12273).

‘Application of Anthocyanins from Blackcurrant (Ribes nigrum L.) Fruit Waste as Renewable Hair Dyes’, in Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry (2018, 66, 6790−6798).

‘Selective enzymatic lipophilization of anthocyanin glucosides from blackcurrant (Ribes nigrum L.) skin extract and characterization of esterified anthocyanins’, in Food Chemistry (2018, 266, 415-419).

Facing page: The research team at Keracol Limited (Dr Meryem Benohoud, Professor Chris Rayner, Dr Alenka Tidder and Dr Richard Blackburn) above a lab where they’ve produced their innovative Dr. Craft Natural Purple Berry Brightening Serum.

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TEXTILES: LOW-WATER DYEING TECHNOLOGY Stephen Burkinshaw, Professor of Textile Chemistry, reports that a unique dyeing technology has been developed at the University of Leeds, enabling various types of fibre to be coloured with different classes of dye using very low levels of water and little-to-zero dyeing auxiliary chemicals. The patented technology stemmed from research, undertaken by Professor Burkinshaw and funded

by The Clothworkers’ Company, which sought to establish the precise role of water in textile wet processing.

Briefly, the research demonstrated that the water employed in aqueous textile processes, such as dyeing, can be divided into ‘bulk’ and ‘interstitial’ in terms of its functionality. ‘Interstitial water’ is the small amount of water that is adsorbed by the fibre and resides within the amorphous domains

in the porous textile substrate; crucially, interstitial water enables the fundamentally important stages of fibre wetting, plasticisation, swelling and dyeing to occur.

In contrast, the remaining ‘bulk water’, which is not present within the wetted substrate, provides other functionalities required for immersion dyeing processes, such as heating, agitation, etc.

The innovative research showed that of the very large amounts of water that are routinely employed in conventional aqueous dyeing processes, in which a ‘liquor ratio’ (the fibre-to-water ratio) of 1:10 is typically employed, only a very small proportion that is present in the fibre as interstitial water is required for dyeing to be achieved.

For example, in the case of the conventional dyeing process for 1 tonne of cotton that uses a 1:10 liquor ratio, the aqueous dyebath

contains 10 tonnes of water. Only 2.2% (ie 0.22 tonnes) is adsorbed by the cotton fibre and is present as interstitial water, from which the transfer of dye molecules to the substrate (ie dyeing) occurs. This means that the remaining 97.8% (ie 9.78 tonnes) of bulk water in the dyebath is not directly involved with the dyeing process. Instead, the excess water provides other, mostly mechanical, functions.

The innovative technology being developed at Leeds only requires liquor ratios of approximately 1:1.5 for dyeing, thereby resulting in sizeable reductions in water consumption. The low-water dyeing technology also makes it possible to reduce or to exclude the use of dyeing auxiliary chemicals, which offers both economic and environmental advantages to manufacturers.

The initial application identified for commercial exploitation was the dyeing of cotton and cotton blends, primarily polyester/cotton (aka ‘polycotton’).

Whilst research outputs relating to this dyeing technology have had to be necessarily restricted for reasons of commercial confidentiality, they are described within various patents as well as a series of academic papers. Further outputs are in-process.

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TEXTILES: BRADFORD TEXTILE SOCIETY COMPETITION At the beginning of April, Clothworker Emily May represented The Company as a judge for the 2019 Bradford Textile Society Design Competition. The Clothworkers’ Company presents four of the 20 awards open to students, independent designers, and designers employed in the UK textile industry. The competition covers a variety of areas within textile design (including print, weave, and knit), and awards special prizes for designs using wool, responsible design, and a design taking historical inspiration from the Bradford College Textile Archive.

The first prize for The Clothworkers’ Company Award for a Printed Textile was won by Jessica Dryden

of the University of Leeds. Her design was inspired by the textures and linear shapes found in a rocky landscape. Clothworker judge, Emily, reported that judges were impressed with Jessica’s technical superiority and subtle use of colour.

Our final prize was awarded to Katie Dyson from the University of Derby for her innovative use of processes to produce a fabric from nonconventional methods. The judges were all impressed by the overall sophistication of her project.

Evie Brownlee from Heriot Watt University won our award for a Knitted Design for children’s wear. The designs stood out as technically advanced as well as beautiful and thoughtful.

Emily said her experience as a judge was a wonderful chance to see the entrants’ work in depth and to witness first-hand the great variety of work being produced. She continued, ‘I came away feeling very inspired and am looking forward to meeting the winners in person at the presentation ceremony in May.’

The award for Woven Fabric Design was bestowed upon Eleanor Newton from Loughborough University, who produced an excellent main sample for interiors as well as an equally good and commercial supporting collection.

Below: Katie Dyson’s innovative design with layered transparencies.

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TEXTILES: GRANTS Academic Research and Innovation University of Leeds, School of Design

Acquisition of a bi-component spunbound system

£166,000

and a solution-blowing web former University of Leeds, School of Design

Postdoc at the Clothworkers’ Centre for Textile

£125,000

Materials Innovation for Healthcare (CCTMIH) University of Leeds, School of Design

Postdoc for research into low-waste, reduced-water

£113,000

methods for dyeing-on-demand with manufactured textiles Technical Education and Vocational Support The Weavers’ Company Textile Education Fund

Industry placement scheme

£34,333

Textiles Centre of Excellence, Huddersfield

Trailblazer Development Programme

£30,000

Textiles Centre of Excellence, Huddersfield

Funding for Apprenticeship Champion

£22,000

Making It in Textiles (in partnership with

Conference for third-year textile students

£15,000

Young Textiles Technician Training Fund

£10,000

MPhil bursary

£21,450

Royal College of Art

Equipment

£21,000

Royal College of Art

MA Bursaries

£19,000

Central Saint Martins

Materials fund and student bursary

£15,000

Bradford Textile Society

Textile Design Competition

£5,650

New Designers

Sponsorship and Printed Textile Design Prize

£2,800

Campaign for Wool, The Drapers’ Company and The Weavers’ Company) UK Fashion & Textiles Heritage and Conservation Centre for Textile Conservation Textile Design

Total (2018-’19 FY)

£600,233

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This page: Speaker Sheila-Mary Carruthers from the Making It in Textiles conference. Photo by Paul David Drabble.

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TRUSTEESHIP The nature of The Company’s commitment to Trusteeship is twofold. First, we have established The Clothworkers’ Company as a grant-maker and a champion for change and improvement to charity sector governance in the UK. Second, we encourage and support our members in serving as trustees or school governors.

We are proud to sponsor and host the annual Charity Governance Awards to celebrate the best practice and innovation of trustee boards throughout the UK. The awards are made possible through the partnerships we have forged with New Philanthropy Capital (NPC), Prospectus and Reach Volunteering. Members actively participate as well by undertaking the first-round evaluation of entries submitted to the Charity Governance Awards.

However, we know that it is not enough to shine a spotlight on good governance, and we must find a way to help create the changes we seek across the sector. Working with our partners, we support efforts to increase participation of wouldbe trustees, to improve diversity and inclusivity on boards, and to enhance the capability of those already serving.

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“Trusteeship is increasingly part of the ethos of The Company’s membership, and 33% of Clothworkers reported that they were serving as a school governor, trustee or volunteer in 2018.”

is hard work and challenging, but 93% of trustees say it is immensely fulfilling. And yet, recruitment remains a problem.

This is partly due to the naturallylimited pool in which ‘word of mouth’ recruitment (still making up more than 90% of recruitment strategies) operates. Rich pools of talent are inexcusably overlooked.

It is important to reach out to those who have not previously considered becoming a trustee.

Recognising these challenges,

The 2017 ‘Taken on Trust’ report from the Charity Commission found that the c. 700,000 trustees currently serving in the UK were mostly white, male and over the age of 55 – and many were serving on multiple boards. While those serving are making a meaningful contribution to the charity sector, most charity boards are not effectively representing the communities they serve, and there are still an estimated 100,000 trustee vacancies that boards are struggling to fill.

A charity’s service users are dependent on its trustees for the leadership to keep the organisation capable, nimble and sustainable.

This means having the right breadth of talent, lived experience and range of skills at the table. Being a trustee

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Below: Guest Speaker Rosalind Oakley takes a poll of the audience at the Charity Governance Awards 2018 (left). The audience responds with a show of hands.

The Company has invested in and supported the Cause4 Trustee Leadership Programme (a fiveweek training course in London that ends in a trustee-matching event) and regional one-day seminars, the Reach Volunteering Trusteeworks recruitment service (which matched 564 trustees in 2018), and trustee training seminars from NPC, among others.

In all that we do, The Company welcomes expressions of interest from members. The flourishing partnership with

Reach Volunteering provides Clothworkers with access to fascinating trustee roles, published directly to the Members’ Area and highlighted in the e-newsletter.

The Trustee Leadership Programme, co-funded by Close Brothers Asset Management, is offered free of charge to members. For those already on trustee boards, a number of NPC’s seminars are offered at Clothworkers’ Hall. Finally, The Company also hosts an annual trusteeship dinner to allow members to get together to discuss

and debate relevant issues.

The volunteer activities of individual Clothworkers are many and varied. Realistically, it is difficult to quantify existing commitments to trustee or volunteer roles, or the extent to which this might be expanding.

However, trusteeship is increasingly part of the ethos of The Company’s membership, and 33% of Clothworkers reported that they were serving as a school governor, trustee or volunteer in 2018.

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ARCHIVES & COLLECTIONS We continue to preserve, make accessible and develop our archives and collections, whilst supporting talented artists and craftsmen in a number of fields.

ARCHIVES Our Company archivists were busy in 2018. The number of historical enquiries received was at an all-time high. There was an increase in the number of academics consulting our archives to research property ownership in the City of London before the Great Fire, the early history of University College Bristol, The Company’s role as a lobbyist for the cloth trade in the early 17th century, early modern dress and mantuamakers, and the former Clothworker scholar (and radical preacher) John Field – to name but a few of the fields of enquiry.

The breadth of such interests demonstrates the research potential of our archives, and we are committed to working to continually improve access to our collections through the provision of detailed cataloguing Facing page:

information and prudent engagement with digital projects wherever possible.

During the course of the year, our Porter plan books were digitised. These beautiful late 19th-century watercolour plans of The Company’s extensive property holdings were produced

by Frederick William Porter, The Company’s surveyor, and are heavily used in research – the most recent example was a group of Watford-based local historians who were engaged in tracing the history of Hamper Mill.

We have also been fortunate to recruit two excellent volunteers to respectively catalogue our 16thcentury Book of Deeds and Wills (our earliest record of gifts and bequests to The Company) and begin an extensive project and long-held ambition to create up-to-date family trees for all our current Clothworker families. New Freedom members are now each presented with a copy of their Clothworker family lineage following their admission ceremony; initial feedback on this recent innovation has been very positive.

The Porter watercolour of Hamper Mill.

Top right: ‘City Guilds Reform’, a press cutting

We are also delighted to be helping to foster skills and training by welcoming an archive student from UCL’s master’s programme

in Archives Administration for a short placement at Clothworkers’ Hall this spring. Anne Courtney will be cataloguing our papers relating to the seminal Royal Commission on Livery Companies in the 1880s.

It was the first time the City of London livery companies were exposed to public scrutiny, and some of the more radical of the Commissioners advocated for the companies to be de-established and disendowed. William Ewart Gladstone’s government fell before moderate legislation could be introduced; however, the Commission is credited with encouraging the livery companies to modernise and reconnect with their root crafts, fostering the development of technical education.

Behind the scenes we have introduced data loggers to monitor

found in Echo on Wednesday, 12 October 1881.

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ARCHIVES & COLLECTIONS

environmental and lighting conditions in storage and display areas in the Hall, and have recently introduced LED lighting in all our Entrance Hall display cases.

September 2019. Please check our website for information: www.clothworkers.co.uk.

COLLECTIONS

The Company is fortunate to possess an extensive collection of silver, dating from the early 17th century to the present day.

Highlights include the magnificent suite of plate presented by Samuel Pepys (Master, 1677-78) and the extravagantly rococo-style beadle’s staff designed by the Huguenot silversmith Samuel Courtauld, whose bill of 28 November 1755 still survives in our archives.

During 2018, we welcomed more than 2,000 visitors for Hall tours, tapestry viewings and open days.

The latter included our first foray as a participant in London Craft Week (May 2018) with a series of weaving masterclasses run by Dovecot’s master weavers with our tapestry The Caged Bird’s Song serving as a backdrop in the Livery Hall. Additionally, more than 1,240 members of the public came through our doors on a wet and windy September weekend for Open House London. We are most grateful to the enthusiastic Clothworker volunteers who helped steward the ceremonial rooms and field all manner of questions from a very appreciative and knowledgeable body of visitors during the day.

SILVER

Our collection exists in large part due to the generosity of past Masters and members; however, we seek to build

We will be repeating both initiatives in 2019: we’ve recently announced an exciting collaboration with Contemporary British Silversmiths for a silverthemed London Craft Week event in May 2019 and will participate in Open House London on 21

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a representative collection of the best of contemporary British silver. To that end, we place commissions with eminent modern designers every two years. In 2018, we initiated a design competition for two new loving cups – in order that we may retire our 18thcentury cups from active use during livery dinners. We are delighted to announce that Miriam Hanid and Yasuke Yamamoto, both extremely talented silversmiths, have been selected for – and accepted – these commissions. Work has now begun in earnest on their pieces, and we hope to have them both in the Hall by the end of 2019.

ACQUISITIONS AND COMMISSIONS On occasion our core collections

This page: Gold tooling by bookbinder Pamela Richmond.

are supplemented with other This page: acquisitions works of Itart.

This Speaker fromof the Making in Textiles

Facing page: The Courtauld mace (left) and an

year, we were gifted a fine 16thconference.

Photo

by Paul David

example of work, a tumbler, by

century portrait of Sir William Drabble.

Miriam Hanid (right).

Hewett, the first Clothworker and first Protestant Lord Mayor of London in 1559. It was generously donated to The Company by the sitter’s descendent at the conclusion of a long-term loan to the Museum of London. It now hangs in pride of place in the Court Corridor, replacing a 19th-century copy of the same work.

We also initiated a new commission for a second Great Twelve Visitors’ Book, following the completion of the inspired gift of Past Master Neil Foster (2009-10), which featured a series of illustrations of different stages in the clothmaking cycle. Pen-and-ink artist Emma Bashforth was chosen to create a series of details of architectural features in the Hall for the new Visitors’ Book. Her painstaking and intricate drawings – each taking between 12 and 15 hours to complete – has more than fulfilled the brief.

The book is to be bound by Bayntun’s of Bath, and will be presented to The Company by the current Master as a most generous Master’s gift.

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This page: QBAS apprentice Andreas Maroulis sews sections of a book together.

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ARCHIVES & COLLECTIONS

BOOKBINDING Bookbinding is an endangered craft that The Company has supported for 10 years now.

We are slowly building up a collection of designer bookbindings, and currently have several commissions in progress with eminent bookbinders. We expect to take delivery soon of three completed bindings, including one by Pamela Richmond. Pamela is renowned for her fine tooling. Her binding of Chris Ofili: Weaving Magic – the catalogue accompanying the 2017 National Gallery exhibition dedicated to The Caged Bird’s Song – is inspired by our tapestry.

Our bindings are displayed in prominent positions in the Entrance Hall, alongside a striking selection of bindings generously lent by a member of our Court.

SUPPORTING TALENT We have acted as a patron of the arts for many centuries and, in addition to our commissions, we continue to foster talent and nurture skills development.

In silversmithing, we make an annual grant to Bishopsland Educational Trust to enable

students to purchase raw materials as well as essential tools, which will assist them in their careers, long beyond the end of their formal studies.

Bishopsland is a unique oneyear residential workshop for emerging silversmiths, providing master classes in craft techniques coupled with essential training in marketing and business skills.

In bookbinding, we fund prizes in the Open Choice category of the Designer Bookbinders Competition, which consistently attracts submissions from talented crafts people. We again organised a temporary loan of the Clothworker prize winners’ bindings, which we displayed at the December Court and Livery Dinner.

We are the sole funder of bursaries to enable deserving binders to attend training master classes jointly organised by Designer Bookbinders (DB) and the Society of Bookbinders, and recently approved a small grant for Transferring Design, a pilot devised by DB to deliver training to students on allied courses in UK art colleges and universities as a means of skills transfer.

Finally, we are a founding partner of the Queen’s Bindery Apprenticeship

Above: A tooled binding by Matt Stockl, QBAS apprentice.

Scheme (QBAS). Now in its third year, QBAS currently has five apprentices gaining unparalleled experience at the Royal Bindery at Windsor and attending external workshops and placements in the UK and beyond. They will acquire a broad range of bookbinding skills including fine leather binding, edgegilding and gold finishing, which may otherwise be lost forever, receiving City and Guilds qualifications for different levels of study.

It is the first bindery apprenticeship to be established since the 1970s, and we are keen to ensure the scheme is sustainable. The development of Apprentice Bookbinder Standards through the Trailblazer Programme is considered to be a significant step forward within the profession. We hope employers will think seriously about the merit (and financial benefits) of recruiting apprentices to replace crafts people who will soon retire.

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AFFILIATES The Clothworkers’ Company is proud to share an affiliation with the HMS Dauntless, No. 47 Squadron RAF, the Scots Guards and the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry (FANY). Our financial support primarily assists with a range of welfare activities for the service men and women, and their families, as well as grants for special projects.

In June 2018, Clothworkers attended the unveiling of a new memorial to FANY contributions to WWI, ‘The Coffin Jump’ by artist Katrina Palmer at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park. In July, the Royal Air Force celebrated its centenary, and the commemorative flypast from Ipswich to London included our own No. 47 Squadron, in charge of the C-130 Hercules aircraft. Members of the Court and Livery visited the Squadron at RAF Brize Norton this past autumn, exploring the C-130, the longest-serving operational aircraft currently in use. Flt Lt Tom Arnold says it has often been the first aircraft to land at forward locations, close to intense military activity. Currently, the Squadron has two C-130 aircraft continuously deployed in Cyprus, in support of Operation SHADER in Iraq.

Above: Members of the Court and Livery explore RAF Brize Norton and are treated to a flight.

Facing page: Detail of the Squadron’s Standard, as displayed at Clothworkers’ Hall during the Masters’ and Clerks’ Dinner.

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