RUBBER BOOT PROBLEM

Wairarapa Times-Age, 1 April 1942, Page 4

RUBBER BOOT PROBLEM

MANUFACTURE OF CLOGS. •Women who as young girls made clogs for Britain’s factories in the years gone by are today returning to work alongside their sons and daughters at benches. There they make heavy protective footwear for munition factories, steelworks, and all kind of industrial concerns. More important than ever now that the loss of Malaya means less rubber for gumboots, Britain’s present production of 50,000 clogs weekly can be stepped up to 100,000 without adding to existing plant. And the raw materials need no shipping space; much of the leather comes from Britain’s cattle herds, the wood from the beech woods of the Chilterns and the iron tips and nails from the foundries of the Midlands. The clogs are very different from the all-wooden Continental sabot. Built up carefully and skilfully like a heavy boot, sometimes with felt linings for comfortable wear, they are clogs only so far as the soles are made of shaped beechwood, the best material for the purpose. Resisting heat, cold water, molten metal, glass, and injurious chemicals, they are much bettei than leather-soled boots, which would ciack or perish under such conditions. They last longer and are quite 50 per cent cheaper than rubber.