“Be Manly In Morley!” (c.1954)
“More and more men are wearing the Morley shirt!” runs the copy below this quaint drawing of a garment that seems many sizes too large for the four men poking their identical heads from its buttoned front. “Little wonder that the Morley shirt is the choice of so many men. It has everything! High grade Egyptian cotton fully shrunk, gauntlet sleeves for buttons or links, fine pearl buttons, attached collar in two styles...”
It's the sort of thing you can well imagine Don Draper jotting down at the dawn of his career on Madison Avenue, probably between a sip of Martini and a slug of Scotch. But despite the luxuriant tone, the hosiery business founded by Sneinton-born brothers John and Richard Morley in the late 1700s, and taken over by John Morley's son Samuel in 1860, was very much a Nottingham concern.
Samuel Morley was a man of his time in his combination of Gladstone Liberalism and nonconformist religion. He owned a newspaper, helped found colleges, hugely expanded the business he inherited and got himself elected as a Nottingham MP in 1865. For a man of his time, he also had some rather advanced ideas about workers’ rights, the abolition of slavery and the creation of an equitable society many of which still seem relevant today.
It's this radical and dissenting side of Morley that has attracted fresh attention of late, not least from Matthew Chesney, director of Backlit Gallery. He became enamoured of Morley's achievements while researching the history of the former Morley factory building on Ashley Street that the Backlit gallery and studios now occupy.
Delving into the archives, collecting artefacts, interviewing former workers and working with video game designers to create a virtual reality version of the old Ashley Street factory floor, Backlit's research into the Morley company history, and Samuel in particular, have helped put its considerable achievements firmly back onto the local map.
That there's some weighty history behind this seemingly ordinary advert isn't in doubt, then, but a few mysteries do remain to be solved. The Morley Man of 1954, after all, could choose his shirt in any colour from a range including “white, cream, grey, ecru, blue and green”. But what on earth was the “trubenised collar” that merited not only its own italics, but a substantial mark-up on the regular price?
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