Agricultural History Review, Volume 57 Part 1 (2009), p. 142

Tanning was by far the most common method of turning skins into leather in post-medieval times. Martin Bodman’s study identifies 180 sites in the larger cities, market towns and villages of Devon. Tanneries once relied on hides and skins from the stock farming of the county but increasingly made use of imports from Ireland, western Europe and South America. Other local linkages were with woodland management – each hide required twice its weight in bark in processing – lime-burning and the local foundries that provided plant.

Martin Bodman came to industrial archaeology as a spare-time pursuit and has been particularly energetic in searching old newspaper files, often un-indexed, to augment our understanding of the physical evidence of past industry. His previous publications have been concerned with watermills in the west, but an earlier interest in the Woollard Tannery near Bath has now been extended to Devon.

Devon Leather does not intend to provide a business, industrial or technical history of tanning in Devon in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Neither does it deal with the associated trades of the fellmonger, currier, harness-maker or cobbler. Brief chapters introduce the history of the trade, the operation of a Devon tannery and a case-study of one family, the Sharlands, who produced 13 tanners over three generations. The bulk of the book is a gazetteer of sites from Alphington to Woodbury. Sale notices and occasional reports from newspapers provide much of the detail in these entries, with use of census data, trade directories, local histories and such primary sources as the journals of Bodley’s Foundry in Exeter that supplied bark mills and steam engines to some of the larger concerns.

Good use is made of tithe maps and apportionments, and the Ordnance Survey 25-inch and 1:500 plans from the 1855–7 Plymouth survey onwards. Parts of the 25 inch plans have been redrawn to show the location of the sites and a brief highlighted summary for each entry provides a six-figure grid reference, date of closure, the number of bark mills, tan-pits and staff, and output wherever this is possible. The fate of the buildings and the present state of the site, or details of surviving buildings in a few cases, are described and illustrated with photographs. Some tanneries worked until quite recently – Swimbridge closed in 1965 and the one at Colyton remains as a unique example of a traditional oak-bark tannery at work.

The book concludes with a brief list of nineteenth-century sites that could not be identified and earlier tanneries with the date of the earliest known record. There is also a useful glossary of technical terms and an appendix which lists, by parish of origin, Devon-born tannery workers living in Bermondsey, the major centre of the trade, in 1871. Some 31 men were born in Bow and the exodus seems to have started after the death of a long-serving tannery foreman here in 1854. There is a detailed index and end-notes for each chapter.

Great care has been taken with the production of this A4-format book which can be strongly recommended to local historians and archaeologists working on the history and evolution of their communities. It will also serve as a good starting point for scholars working on the business, technical or industrial history of a once widespread and important industry that has been somewhat neglected by historians of our rural economy.