In 1905 Harris Lebus opened a factory in Tottenham - in those days a semi-rural area on the outskirts of London. Lebus was one of the most highly regarded employers in the burgeoning cabinet-making industry in London’s East End and his new furniture factory was the largest in the country, occupying a 13 acre site and employing over 3,000 people. His employees were mainly Jewish immigrants, most of whom commuted by tram each day from the East End where Louis Lebus, Harris’s father, had founded the business nearly half a century earlier. They manufactured high quality Arts and Crafts bedroom and dining room furniture.
Louis Lebus had arrived in England in the 1840s. He had come from Breslau in Germany (now Wroclaw in Poland) and settled in Hull where he started to work as a cabinet maker. By 1857 he had moved to London, opening a small furniture workshop in Whitechapel with his two sons, Harris and Sol. Lebus’s workshop was one of the very first Jewish-owned furniture manufacturing facilities in the East End; by the end of the 19th century there were hundreds of similar workshops, employing an estimated 5-10% of the Jewish population. Furniture making, or cabinet making as they tended to call it, became the second most populous trade among Jewish immigrants. Believing that furniture making was a better career choice for young men than the dominant East End industry of tailoring, the Jewish Board of Guardians established an apprenticeship scheme, paying workshop owners to train up young workers..
The cabinet making trade grew rapidly during the 1880s with the arrival of tens of thousands of persecuted Jewish immigrants fleeing from Russia. vast majority of those who came to England settled in London’s impoverished, squalid East End, just as generations of immigrants had done before them. Many of the Jewish immigrants were skilled or semi-skilled craftsmen, predominantly tailors, shoemakers or specialists in one of the woodworking trades of turning, carving, joinery or carpentry. Desperate to find a job and a place to live as soon as possible, knowing very little English and in most cases anxious not to have to work on the Sabbath, they gravitated to the Jewish-owned workshops where they would be employed in a Yiddish-speaking, Jewishly observant environment.
Their influx had a knock-on effect; the more skilled workers who arrived, the greater the opportunity for workshop owners to expand their operations, to produce and sell more. Soon the demand for skilled workers outstripped supply. Workshop owners would send representatives to the docks to offer jobs to immigrants as they came off the boats (in sharp contrast to the appalling treatment of immigrants today). Demand for skilled workers was so great that Harris Lebus is even believed to have advertised in the Jewish communities of Poland and Russia for workers. Nor was it just skilled craftsmen who the workshop owners needed. There was plenty of opportunity in the furniture trade for unskilled staff too, in polishing finished items or filling upholstery.
As the number of people working in the industry increased, individual workshops tended to specialise in particular items. Most concentrated on the high-volume production of high-volume household furniture: bedrooms, dining sets and living rooms. A few top of the range firms specialised in high quality reproductions of period English pieces, particularly Queen Anne, Georgian and Regency styles, which they sold to the up-market stores in the West End, to Harrods and to long vanished emporia like Maples or Waring & Gillow. They sourced their timber, veneers and fittings both from English firms and from other immigrants who had managed to accumulate sufficient capital to set themselves up as suppliers.
Conditions in many workshops were miserable. Even before the Jewish immigrants arrived in London the demand for cheap goods had reached a level which encouraged many English furniture makers to concentrate on the production of mass-produced items. Known as garret-masters they opened workshops in the East End, where labour was cheap. Like sweatshop owners the world over, they cared little for the welfare of their staff or their safety, they paid them as little as possible and worked them for as long as they could. Workshops would compete with each other to sell their products to the wholesalers, driving prices down and further diminishing working conditions.
The situation was little different in the other two dominant East End trades; tailoring and shoemaking. Along with furniture making they became known as the ‘sweated trades’ and in the mid-1880s social campaigners and the newspapers began to take an interest. There was already a growing backlash in the country about the high level of Jewish immigration and the prevalence of these trades in the East End led to the claim that it was the immigrants who had caused the sweatshops to spring up.
Parliament established a Select Committee to look into sweating labour in the furniture trade . They reached the conclusion that sweating had existed before the Jewish immigrants had arrived, and that those Jews involved in the trade had merely joined an existing system. The medical journal, the Lancet, conducted its own investigation and announced that the presence of Jewish immigrants, squalor and unsanitary living conditions were all interrelated. A populist politician accused Jewish immigrants, who he said were prepared to work in the furniture trade for a ‘miserable pittance’, of putting native born English workers out of a job. The sweating debate was one of the principal factors that led, in 1905, to Parliament passing the Aliens Act that limited Jewish immigration.
In fact the vast majority of Jewish cabinet workers did not work in the crowded sweatshops. By 1920 there were around 500 furniture workshops in the East End, each employing between 3 and 6 people, with a far smaller number of middle-sized firms where 50 to 100 people worked. There were no more than three manufacturers that employed over 500 staff.
My great grandfather, Isaac Sklanowitz, arrived in London from Kolno in Poland in 1885. He had trained in Poland as a cabinet maker and in 1887, at the age of 25, he established a workshop producing high quality period pieces and bedroom furniture. He sold his products into the West End stores under the brand name Sklan furniture. His sons followed him into the business and in 1924 they all changed their surnames to Sklan, the name by which the family is still known. When Isaac Sklanowitz died in 1914, his oldest son Sol took over the business. After he retired he was succeeded by his son Jack who ran the firm until it finally closed in 1960. Most of the old East End firms have now gone.
Harris Lebus died just two years after his new factory in Tottenham opened, but his business survives. During the First World War they temporarily stopped making furniture and produced wooden munitions for the military instead. Tent poles, wheelbarrows and ammunition boxes were not as glamorous as the furniture they had originally made, but Lebus was always commercially astute; while his competitors were transporting wood on barrows from the East End timber yards, Harris Lebus bought his timber by the shipload: satin walnut, oak, ash, walnut and mahogany from the USA and mahogany for veneers from Cuba. He had his own private telephone line to the Maples furniture store; his furniture accounted for nearly 15% of their turnover.
During the Second World War the Lebus company once again contributed to the national emergency, manufacturing aircraft parts for the De Havilland Mosquito and Airspeed Horsa glider. They went public in 1947; Sir Herman Lebus, Harris’s son who had been knighted for his war work, becoming chairman. Then in 2001, with the future of the furniture industry as uncertain as it had ever been, the Lebus shareholders took the innovative decision to sell the business to their employees. They said it would ensure the continuity and integrity of the business, “while fully engaging a committed workforce in the knowledge that they will all share in the future success of the Company”. The business is now owned by an Employee Ownership Trust and based in Lincolnshire, from where it supplies upholstered living room furniture to retailers across the UK. It is a long way from the East End.