Mending the Faults

A. Well there was half hose, you know how you buy them ready flat out, they come from the trimming, from what I call the trim shop.  Well we had them like that and we to turn them over like that and find menders.  As you saw the menders you threw them out here, put up a stack, then you sat and mended them to make them perfect and if you was a good mender you made them perfect.

Q. It was called invisible mending?

A. Yes, yes

Q. So there was no sign of the..

A. Yes, you couldn't, actually if you mended them properly, you couldn't see where they had been mended, but like everything else there is good menders and bad menders.  Well if you are a good mender then you save the company a lot of money don't you, because they go as perfects. Well if you're a bad mender they go as imperfects and then that's it they lose on that.  Eventually, of course and there was stockings in those days there was cashmere stockings. Kiddies. And of course you, men's socks are like that stockings are like that, you'd throw them over like that and look from top to bottom and stack them up in heaps ready the men to put them up. You does your menders and pressed them with an iron and if they are perfect you put them in and er then the men had them and paired them up.  And then a bit later on we had what I call artificial silk hose.  They were terrors.  You can imagine ladders in them, you know what I mean, ladders, don't you.  Mind you I liked picking those stitches up but it was bad for your eyes and some girls so they wouldn't mend them would they used to pull them so they wouldn’t have to mend them, which was a loss to the firm, but in those days they didn’t seem to bother about it.

Q. You say they used to pull them, what did they do.

A. Well if you've got a, if you've got a hole in your stocking and there is what I call a ladder going from it, instead of mending it they put their finger through it and pulled it longer. So it couldn't be mended

Q. So it wasn't worth mending?

A. Yes.  There's tricks in every trade ain't there.

Source: East Midlands Oral History Archive (Accession Number 001151)