The Coat Route (19 page)

Animal horn was a wonder material. The world’s first thermoplastic, it could be made pliable with heat and then pressed with designs or insignias, hammered into workable sheets, or powdered and melted down into a moldable goo. Sliced and pressed thin, horn was translucent as amber; leaves of it were used as panes for early lanterns—or lent-horns, as they were called in Old English.

Horn’s major drawback was the revolting smell it gave off in the early stages of processing. Before it could be worked, the central pith had to be removed, and this was done by simply letting it rot away.
In fifteenth-century London, which was already engulfed in human stink, rotting horn added a particularly vile note to the air—so foul that the Worshipful Company of Horners was banished to the outskirts of the city because of “the grete and corrupt stench” of their work.
This, despite the fact that at least one physician believed that the fumes from rotting horn actually kept horners from “hyp, vapours and Lowness of Spirit, the common malady of England.”

James Grove’s horn came from domestic cattle at first, and then from more exotic livestock, including water buffalo and oxen from India, Russia, South America, and Africa. Great lumpy sacks of horn arrived by ship at the Liverpool or London docks, to be loaded onto carriages or into narrow canal boats for the trip to Halesowen, where they were piled high in outdoor storage sheds.

At first, all horn buttons were molded in hand-carved patterned dies. Later, craftsmen learned to split open and press the hollow section of the horn, producing flat plates, from which disks could be punched out. They also used the solid tips for toggle buttons. When the horn had been sorted by color and quality and cut into usable shapes, the leftover was ground down and mixed with powdered pigs’ hooves (which gave off its own appalling smell) to make a nitrogen-rich fertilizer that was much in demand among English rose growers. Nothing was wasted.

James Grove’s first big orders were for molded uniform buttons for both sides in the American Civil War—a coup that was dampened significantly by the fact that neither army ever paid for its buttons. Grove was able to bounce back from that disappointment in 1861, when Prince Albert died. Queen Victoria went into a mourning period that ended only with her death some forty years later. Naturally, her black attire and that of the masses who followed her sartorial lead required black buttons. Affluent women adorned their clothes with buttons of carved jet, but most found the semiprecious fossilized coal, mined from northern England, too expensive. James Grove figured out a way to make affordable jetlike buttons from compressed horn. The firm couldn’t make them fast enough. The business expanded, and Grove hired more workers.

“There were probably five main families that worked here in the 1800s, then their offspring followed in their footsteps, and their offspring,” Peter says. We are in a small conference room with windows that look out on the back of the brick row houses James Grove built for his employees. The descendants of James Grove were not, Peter admits, always the best of bosses.

“My grandfather, God rest his cotton socks, was a womanizer and a drinker. He was not a very nice person,” he tells me. “Once
some factory inspectors came and told him he didn’t have enough toilets for the six hundred people who worked there, and he said, ‘Sack two hundred people!’ He lived on top of the hill, and he would have his horse saddled at five a.m. A lookout down at the factory would be watching for him. When he saw my grandfather riding down the hill, he would turn the gas lights down to let everyone know he was coming, and that they had to hurry up and get to the factory. They would close the gates, and if you were late you couldn’t get in. So you lost a day’s wages.

“In those days you’d also be docked pay for any mistakes you made, so people used to hide bad buttons in their pockets and throw them into the grass when they walked home. The field across from the factory was full of defective buttons.”

Peter Harold James Grove was born in 1946. Until he was eighteen, his family lived in a spacious brick four-bedroom house in Hagley. In the mid-sixties, when the button business was booming, the Groves moved to the far grander Ismere Grange, a baronial gabled country house near Kidderminster. It had a swimming pool and long views of poppy fields and of the low hills of Clent. Peter’s father made the seven-mile trip to the factory in a shiny blue Bentley.

“I was sent to boarding school at the age of six and a half,” Peter says. “It was a very Victorian way of being brought up. I was absolutely terrified.”

When he was home on holidays, he sometimes accompanied his father to the button factory.

“I’d go in on Saturdays to open the post with him. My father would open an envelope and say, ‘Oh that’s a nice order,’ and then he’d look in another and there would be a check or an invoice inside. I got the idea of how a business ran.

“But I couldn’t get close to him,” Peter goes on. “He almost treated me like someone who worked in his factory. He had had a difficult childhood. My grandfather was very strict, and part of it rubbed off on my father and my uncle. We did have a very privileged life, though. We traveled in summer, took holidays to Europe.

“That was an adventure in the nineteen-fifties. The Bentley had to be craned into a hold on the ship to go across the Channel. Then we would go on these great drives. I remember stopping for wonderful picnics in France. When we would get to a hotel, the suitcases would be unloaded and people would stop and stare at the Bentley. Everywhere we went, people admired the car. And my father always looked smart. He wore custom shoes and tailor-made suits—always with our buttons, of course.”

Peter joined the company when he was twenty-four.

“I had no formal training, I suppose, other than my father deciding at an early age that I would enter the family business. I first worked as an apprentice engineer at a German company, making button machines. Then I went back to Halesowen and learned everything about production.”

By that time, Grove & Sons was making buttons for all the best Savile Row tailors and the top English brands: Burberry, Aquascutum, Daks Simpson, Marks & Spencer.

“They all had factories in England,” Peter says. “Most of them either have closed down now or moved production to Asia. The biggest clothing manufacturer in the world was in Leeds. That’s gone. We’re just not making clothes in England anymore.

“We’ve lost all that expertise. And, once you lose it, it’s gone. It’s happening all over. I was in the Shetland Islands recently, where they are famous for their hand-knit sweaters—and everyone I saw making these beautiful garments was old. And they
said, ‘We don’t know what will happen when we give it up. It will probably just die.’ ”

Grove’s own children have no interest in becoming sixth-generation button makers. One is a firefighter, one is a physiotherapist, and one is in high-tech—“He’s quite clever; he makes chips for these iPod things,” Peter says.

I ask how it feels to know that he may be the last Grove to run the button factory.

“I suppose every family is disappointed when the [next generation] doesn’t want to carry on. But there is no point in forcing them to do it. They won’t survive. You have to have an interest in what you are doing,” he says.

“I don’t know what will happen. We may skip a generation. I do have a grandson. I can put the business in trust.”

By that time, though, the mysteries of working with animal horn may have died with Peter Grove.

“I am the only one here who knows anything about the character of horn,” he says. “I grew up with it, you see. I think a lot of it is knowledge you can’t pass on. There are very few of us left.”

“That’s sad,” I say.

“ ’Tis. ’Tis sad.”

Outside the door to the factory floor, Peter hands me protective safety gear—government regulations.

“I hate that I have to put on glasses and earplugs before I go into my own factory,” he says, blinking through oversized clear goggles. “I feel like a bloody freak.”

Once inside, I can still hear the banging of the barrels and the whine of a saw. There are buttons in various stages of production everywhere, in bins and carts and barrels. One container holds stag-horn ovals, their brown-ridged surfaces rough as bark.
Another is filled with dark shiny toggles. Nearby is a bin filled with buttons with ridged perimeters, about the size and shape of the ones on Keith Lambert’s coat.

“I think these are like the ones on the vicuña coat,” I shout to Peter above the din.

He picks up one of the disks.

“It takes five weeks to make a button like that,” he shouts back.

I look around the room and picture Keith Lambert’s buttons moving, cartoon-like, through the production chain—first turned, then drilled, tumbled, dyed, lacquered, dried, and then, at last, buffed to a lovely soft finish—with just enough sheen to catch the light, but not so much as to bounce it back.

In the next room, we are allowed to take off the safety glasses and remove the earbuds. Here aisles of shelving hold bins filled with button blanks—dusty-looking wafers sent from India that have been punched out of bone and horn and hoof.

“This is how we do it now,” Peter says, holding up a disk that is grained with power-saw marks. “We don’t deal with the whole horn anymore.”

In another small room, three women are working at metal tables, picking up buttons one at a time, and sorting them by natural color.

“Sorting is our real expertise,” Peter says with satisfaction.

We watch the women group buttons that will be part of matched sets, then I follow Peter into an adjacent room, which is filled with dye vats. This must be where Keith Lambert’s buttons were dyed navy blue.

“It’s very tricky dyeing a natural product,” Peter says. “It’s not an exact science. There is a grain to horn. One batch works, one
doesn’t. We are the only ones who ever figured out how to dye it black.”

I raise my camera in front of one of the vats.

“Oh, you can’t take pictures of that,” Peter says quickly. “Secret formula.”

We move into a narrow storage area, which has floor-to-ceiling shelves filled with row upon row of small cardboard boxes. Every box has a handwritten description on it. Some of the names are familiar brands (Burberry, John Lewis, Jaeger). Others whisper of mist and heathlands (Cotswold, Balmoral, Windsmoor) or intrigue (Sabotage), or even redemption (Reforma). Still others (Sticky Finger and Hot Rockin’) hint of buttons that were designed chiefly to be undone.

In another small room, two women sit in straight-backed chairs placing buttons, one by one, on trays painted with a grid like a giant checkerboard. When they have completed a board, they slide it carefully onto a cart. Once the cart is filled, it will be wheeled into another area for the next phase, the spraying of lacquer. I can smell the acetone bite in the air.

“A lot of places, the buttons come off [the production line] and go into a box,” Peter says. “But we do one-hundred-percent inspection. It’s our reputation on the line. If we do get a complaint—and it doesn’t happen very often—we take it seriously. You have to instill in the people that work here that what we make is a quality product. And they are all of that mind. They won’t say, ‘That will do.’ ”

I ask him what else sets his buttons apart from others.

“The character of the person who makes it—it’s built right into the button. Our buttons are the best in the world.”

I follow him back through a bright room close to the front entry.

“This is where I hope to have the button museum,” Peter says. “Eventually.”

On the walls there are already several framed sixties-era black-and-white photographs, gauzy and evocative as balladeer album covers. In one, natural light streams in on a line of women sorting buttons in front of shiny metal funnels. In another, a group, again mostly women, are walking through the factory gates, coiffed and smiling, as if they might be headed for a Petula Clark concert rather than getting off a long shift. Peter lingers over the pictures.

“They were great old days.”

In that era, the luxury brands always wanted quality horn buttons on their garments. Then, looking for places to cut costs, they began to scrimp and went with plastic—or they found cheaper versions of horn.

“There are others who do horn—in India, for instance, but their quality is absolutely appalling,” Peter continues. “We build a shape into ours, with corners and definite lines. Our competitors’ buttons are wishy-washy. They take the easy way, and we take the more difficult way, to produce a better button. A good horn button takes time.”

These days, Grove’s main trade is with the niche world of high-end tailoring. Grove buttons adorn the garments of the powerful and the famous.

“Prince Charles’s suits would have our buttons on them, but we can’t say it,” Peter tells me. “Buttons are the ass-end of the clothing business.”

Bespoke tailors, such as Anderson & Sheppard in London, view Grove’s buttons as the best. David Walters, the head trimmer, who is in charge of securing buttons for all the firm’s garments, told me in an email that he has to explain to his customers
that horn buttons are one of a kind and can enhance the beauty of a garment.

“We educate and guide them towards understanding,” he said. “Most [clients] have been brought up in a mass-produced era where the button is simply a tool to fasten their garment together.”

The truth, of course, is that most of the world’s buttons are simply that. They have not been hand-sorted for subtleties of tone and grain or inspected for uniformity of sheen and hue. They are likely wafers of cheap polyester resin, sometimes cut with chalk filler and prone to breakage under the weight of a dry-cleaning press or in the battering chaos of a washing machine. And there is a very high probability that they were made in Qiaotou, an industrial boomtown in southeast China that in the past thirty years has become the center of the button universe.

Qiaotou—you know you have arrived when you see the twenty-foot-high silver statue of a winged button—produces fifteen billion buttons a year, or about two-thirds of the world’s button needs. In the thirty years since local factories made their first buttons, the town went from agricultural backwater to industrial juggernaut—and, along the way, wiped out most of the international competition.