A Cut Above The Rest

Greater Manchester outfitters Alexander James of Pendlebury have been named as the Daily Telegraph Best Traditional Business in the 2006 Best Rural Retailer competition.

The Daily Telegraph

Christopher Middleton visits Alexander James, winner of The Daily Telegraph’s Best Traditional Business award

Spread out on the worktable in the Alexander James cutting room is a single piece of cloth, six feet by five. It’s a fawny-grey colour, criss-crossed with thin lines of green and purple. It’s attractive to look at but, in terms of size, it would barely do to cover your knees at a point-to-point.

All the more amazing, then, that after three days inside this firm’s cramped little workshops (four old terraced houses in Salford), this unassuming rectangle will have been transformed into a glorious tweed jacket, complete with specially sewn-in pockets for brandy flask, bagged hare and all the other accoutrements a country gentleman might wish to carry about his person. And even more surprising than this miracle of the tape measure is the location in which it takes place. Although Alexander James of Pendlebury supplies hand-tailored country clothing to the very cream of British society, its own headquarters are not in some leafy Home Counties hamlet, but in distinctly doner kebab territory, just off the main Manchester to Bolton Road.

The shops at the end of the street include Bargain Booze and Hairtistique and, on the face of it, the business is a rather unlikely choice as a category winner in the Countryside Alliance’s Best Rural Retailer of the Year competition. That said, though, the judges had no hesitation in awarding Alexander James first prize in the Best Traditional Business category, sponsored by The Daily Telegraph. What set the firm apart was not just its contribution to the local economy (providing solid employment for 16 people in a socially deprived area), but also its services to the nation as a whole.

The foundation stone upon which the company is based is its refusal to make garments with anything other than British-made textiles. At a time when firms such as Burberry are moving their manufacturing operations out of Wales and into China, Alexander James is not only staying put, it’s staying British. Forget your synthetics from Asia; if it’s not Brora Estate tweed from the North Highlands, or superfine worsted from the mills of Huddersfield, Alexander James won’t touch it.

Rural Retailer of the Year judge Alexia Robinson approves:

“Britain’s wool industry was always the backbone of British agriculture – something we led the world in. For a retailer to be doing so much to keep this industry alive, amid huge competition from overseas markets, it’s a wonderful example of British grit, determination and pride in our traditions.”

Human embodiment of that grit and tradition is Alan Little, the firm’s founder. According to Joyce Hilton, his secretary for the past 16 years, Alan was an enthusiastic knitter even as a five-year-old, which made him something of a rarity in Salford, circa 1950.

“I got a job at a clothing manufacturer’s when I was 15 and signed up for the in-house sewing course as soon as I could. I remember one of the girls coming up and asking if I wouldn’t rather be a joiner or a plumber,” says Alan. “I did suffer, being the only teenage boy in a class full of girls, but it had always been my ambition to become a master tailor and I wasn’t going to be put off.”

Always keen to learn more about his chosen craft, the young apprentice spent most of his spare time studying clothes-making at night school, or visiting the homes of more experienced pattern-cutters to pick up tips on the (even then) dying art of made-to-measure.

“I’d go round to their houses on my Lambretta scooter,” he recalls. “I’d take my wife, Margaret, on the back, plus a tailor’s dummy.”

Forty years on, he and Margaret are still working in close proximity. Together, they set up the business in 1977 (with Alan’s elder brother, George, now retired), and together they still run it, with the help of their two sons – Mark, 34, and Carl, 32 – whose middle names combined (Alexander and James) solved the problem of what to call the company. Just for good measure, secretary Joyce is Margaret’s sister.

“One day, a local butcher came in the shop because he’d started hiring out his horse and cart for weddings and needed a livery uniform,” says Alan. “That led to us supplying livery outfits for competitors in carriage-driving competitions, which in turn led to us deciding we should expand that side of the business and start exhibiting at country fairs.”

So the Littles bought a second-hand tent and caravan and took a stand at a country show being held in the grounds of Shugborough Hall, the estate of Lord Lichfield (later to become a client). Here, they got another rude awakening.

“Also exhibiting at the show were two or three companies to whom we’d been supplying country clothing – and they weren’t at all pleased to see us,” says Alan. That said, the experience served as a clear signpost to the future. From then on, their policy would be to specialise in country clothing – and sell direct to the customer. This is what they have done ever since, though they have branched out into brass-band and male-voice choir uniforms – a detour they took during the foot and mouth crisis in 2001, when country shows were cancelled left, right and centre, threatening to dry up their sales outlets at source.

You might have imagined, too, that the 2005 ban on foxhunting would have affected sales; but not a bit of it.

“There’s currently a big demand from the hunts for discreet tweed riding jackets,” says Margaret. “To begin with, I think, people took the view that if there was going to be a ban, then at least the tweed jackets would come in handy for everyday use. Now, perhaps, they’re choosing tweed because a darker colour isn’t quite as confrontational as, say, bright red.”

Witness the special Alexander James jacket designed for the Belvoir Hunt, in Leicestershire. It’s made from muted Scottish tweed, supplied by a mill in Hawick, and it carries a fine overcheck in the Belvoir maroon. The chosen weave is called “keeper tweed”, so-called because it’s the traditional fabric of choice for gamekeepers across the land.

“It’s warm, it’s thornproof and it’ll last you long enough to be buried in it,” says Joyce proudly. “One of our lady customers was so determined to prove its waterproofness that she poured a pint of beer over herself.”

This just goes to demonstrate the loyalty of Alexander James customers to their clothes. “When we started out, finding customers was a bit of an uphill task,” says Alan. “Nowadays, though, people want to find us as much as we want to find them.”

They no longer suffer from the shifting client base of old, but instead have a steady list of customers: from the former footballer Vinnie Jones (shooting breek & gillet) to Rainford Brass Band in St Helens (uniforms); from Britain’s two biggest side-saddle riding organisations (32 oz cavalry-twill riding habits) to actor Jimmi Harkishin, who plays Dev in Coronation Street (he wanted a hand-tailored jacket for a Christmas party). And now that the Littles have started exhibiting at American race meetings, such as the Kentucky Derby, orders are flooding in from across the Atlantic.

Key to the firm’s success is the weaving-together of reasonable prices with old-fashioned, high-quality hand-tailoring.

“When I began working in this industry, you could walk out of one clothing factory and across the road into another,” says the company’s pattern cutter, Geoff McCracken, who, like most of the staff, remembers the days when everyone worked at the nearby Montague Burton mill. “These days, all the old cutting and grading skills are gone. Master tailoring is a dying art.”

Except, that is, in this small corner of inner-city Manchester, where grass might be in short supply, but the spirit of the countryside is in full bloom.