Lance Clark
Scion of the Clarks shoe dynasty, who designed the Wallabee, as worn by the hero of Breaking Bad
LANCE CLARK, who has died aged 81, was a sixth-generation leader of his family’s Somerset-based shoemaking enterprise, C&J Clark. Clarks traces its history to 1825 when Cyrus Clark, a tanner and fellmonger, established a new venture making sheepskin rugs in premises owned by his father-in-law in the village of Street.
Three years later Cyrus’s brother James began using outworkers in their cottages to produce slippers known as Brown Petersburgs from the sheepskin offcuts, and the footwear business was born.
As devout Quakers, the family provided high standards of welfare – including housing, schooling and playing fields – for their growing workforce as the business industrialised in the Victorian era.
By the mid-20th century, Clarks was a recognised industry leader on the strength of its fitting system for children’s’ shoes and its crepe-soled “Desert Boot”, whose design (by Lance Clark’s cousin, Nathan) was based on suede boots bought by wartime British officers in Egyptian bazaars.
Clark’s father Anthony, the company’s sales director in the postwar years, often took him into the factory as a boy – as a bribe for going to the Quaker meetings on Sundays.
He found it “a magical place”, and worked there in school holidays and university vacations – but briefly contemplated joining an artists’ commune in Australia before accepting his destiny and entering the business. His first management task was to drive sales in continental Europe.
Clark’s own distinctive contribution to the shoe range was the Wallabee, a flatsoled, lace-up moccasin design launched in 1967 and manufactured in a factory that Clarks had acquired at Kilkenny in Ireland.
The Wallabee became an unlikely must-have wardrobe item in the worlds of reggae and hip-hop – and even for Walter White, the chemistry teacher turned drug baron played by Bryan Cranston in the television series Breaking Bad.
Lance was managing director of
C&J Clark’s manufacturing and wholesaling activities from 1974 – the year in which his father retired as chairman – until 1994.
Creative and freethinking, he adhered to Quaker ideals of ethical capitalism and fiercely disapproved of what he saw as modern corporate greed. “He spoke quietly, but you were forced to listen … He could ruffle feathers in the boardroom,” recalled one colleague, though “never for his own gain, but for the greater good”.
Lancelot Pease Clark was born on April 30 1936, the third of five children of Anthony, who was a great-grandson of James Clark. Lance’s middle name came from his paternal grandmother, who descended from two other notable Quaker industrial dynasties, the Peases and the Frys.
Clarks remained a private company with many family shareholders – of whom Lance, with around 6 per cent, was the largest. Towards the end of his tenure the dynasty was riven by disagreement over the marketability of the shares and the future of the company, one faction favouring a sale to Berisford International, a former commodity-trading concern.
But Lance was opposed, telling his children: “I’ll never sleep properly again if I let this company slip through my fingers.” In May 1993 he led a dissident group who defeated the proposal in a mass meeting of shareholders at the Shepton Mallet showground by 53 per cent to 47. After his time the company turned to non-family managers, and to buying in shoes from overseas factories rather than manufacturing in the UK.
The extended Clark family’s majority interest is still valued at more than £500 million.
After retiring from Clarks, Lance remained active in the industry. He was involved with men’s shoe brands such as Barkers and Edward Green, and was chairman of his eldest son Galahad’s venture Vivobarefoot, which makes “minimalist” running shoes with ultra-thin soles.
But the largest portion of his energy was devoted to Soul of Africa, a shoemaking social enterprise which he established in 2003 after visiting Durban to advise on employment for women in the industry.
The project makes shoes in South Africa, Ethiopia and Tunisia, using locally sourced materials and reinvesting profits into social and educational projects.
Clark was also a talented watercolour painter – and gave the proceeds from the sale of his paintings to Soul of Africa.
Lance Clark married first, in 1967, Helga Hoffmann, who died in 2000. He married secondly in 2003, Ying Zhou, who survives him with their three children, and four children of his first marriage.