\nLeeds, city of men’s clothing<\/strong><\/p>\n
First a bit of history \u2013 West Yorkshire used to be the textile manufacturing heartland of the UK. Leeds was men\u2019s clothing; Bradford was wool; Halifax was carpets; Huddersfield was high quality cloth and engineering, especially for textile machinery; and Batley and Dewsbury were for shoddy \u2013 the recycling of rags.<\/p>\n
The Jews came mainly to Leeds and it was a good partnership \u2013 Jews brought with them tailoring skills and Leeds was the expanding centre of the UK men\u2019s clothing industry.<\/p>\n
Production had moved from one individual making an item of clothing to a factory system with a distribution of labour \u2013 workers doing an individual task in the factory.<\/p>\n From Moshe to Montague<\/strong><\/p>\n Sir Montague Burton, born Moshe Dovid Osinsky in the Kovno Province of Lithuania in 1885, came to the UK in 1900 aged 15 along with thousands of other Jews. He opened his first shop in Chesterfield in 1904 and when he was naturalised in 1910 he became known as “Morris Burton” living in Sheffield, but the shops were called “Montague Burton”.<\/p>\n Burton built up a chain of men\u2019s clothing shops and by 1919 he had 40. In 1921, he acquired the land at Hudson Road, Leeds where he built his factory, which at its height employed over 10,500 people, the largest clothing factory in the world.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/blog.nli.org.il\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/08\/Montague-Burton-Factory-early-20th-century-Courtesy-West-Yorkshire-Archive-Service.jpg\")
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