One tailor’s tale sees successful story sewn up
BEATRIX Potter’s “The Tailor of Gloucester” is a children’s classic. Published in 1902 it tells the story of a poor tailor who is commissioned to make a coat for the city mayor, but falls ill before he can complete the task.
Mice finish the work for him and everyone lives happily ever after. Oddly enough, the story is based on truth.
Beatrix Potter led the sheltered life of a Victorian spinster, living with her parents in London. When she was 28 she made her first trip on her own to stay with relatives named Hutton who lived in Harescombe Grange, near Stroud. It was the first of a series of such visits.
She kept a daily diary, writing in a code of her own devising that wasn’t deciphered until after her death and described Stroud as “All up and down, a straggling, county town devoted to brewers and some dye works.”
Beatrix and her older cousin Caroline Hutton explored the area around Harescombe and visited Gloucester on a number of occasions. Harescombe she wrote had “a very little old church with a curious belfry and a handsome Saxon font”. She also made sketches of local scenes, such as the one of Brookthorpe farmhouse you see here.
On a visit to the Huttons in May 1897 Beatrix Potter was told the story of John Pritchard, who was the real life tailor of Gloucester on whom the story was based.
This captured her imagination and some time afterwards she met up with John Pritchard’s wife to hear of the tale in more detail.
Mrs Pritchard explained that her husband had been tasked to make a waistcoat for the new Mayor of Gloucester whose first official duty was to walk from the Guildhall to Shire Hall on the occasion of the city’s Fruit and Grain Society Show.
Mr Pritchard was inundated with work at the time and on the Saturday evening prior to the show went home exhausted leaving the ceremonial waistcoat unfinished on his workbench.
When he arrived at his shop next day he found to his surprise, relief and delight that the garment had been completed in his absence, save for one button hole.
Believing this to be the work of fairies, Pritchard posted a note of thanks to his unseen helpers in the window of his shop, much to the amusement of passers-by.
In fact it wasn’t the little people who’d done Mr Pritchard a good turn, but his apprentices who had returned to their workplace to finish off the Mayor’s waistcoat as a way of helping their harassed employer.
They pinned a note to the unfinished button hole explaining that they had not been able to finish off this detail because there was “No more twist”.
Beatrix Potter adapted the story, added colour here and there, used artistic licence and the result was one of her most loved and enduring stories, which she wrote out by hand in an exercise book.
Besides having a way with words Beatrix Potter was an accomplished artist and on the carriage drive from Harescombe to Gloucester she put pencil and sketch book to good use.
Once in the city she drew scenes that later
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appeared in the published version of “The Tailor of Gloucester”, most notably the raised room at St Michael’s Gate in College Court that leads to the cathedral precinct and was depicted as the workroom where mice set to with needle and thread despite the threat of Simpkin the cat.
The model Beatrix Potter used for the tailor was the son of the coachman at Harescombe Grange.
Gloucestershire provided the inspiration for another of Potter’s books. During a visit to Harescombe she found a pair of mice caught in a cage trap in the kitchen that were about to be despatched.
They avoided this fate because Ms Potter took them back to London with her, naming her new pets Hunca Munca and Tom Thumb. They subsequently appeared in “The tale of two bad mice”, published in 1904.
John Pritchard died in 1934 at the age of 57 and is buried at Charlton Kings, Cheltenham.