My name is Ray Hatley and I'm originally from the South Coast of the UK. A rather quaint little place called Seaford, a small coastal town near Brighton. I grew up boating, fishing, surfing and doing the things all coastal kids enjoy. It was also a great place to start my first leather business. My early fascination with leatherworking became a lifelong love affair. It hasn't been easy and I've lost my way a few times; but right now I'm happy in my workshop every day and I can't imagine wanting more from life.
No other job will have you making a naval sword scabbard for a museum one minute and the 'costume' for a naughty exotic dancer the next!
I digress... After a rather eventful fifty odd years, I'm now settled in Bromyard in Herefordshire, about as far from the sea as a person can get in the UK, but the similarities between the two towns are amazing. Seaford had a real community spirit with all kinds of groups of people taking a pride in their surroundings. Bromyard is just the same. Lovely folk and a great place to live and work.
I had three shops in Sussex back in the 1970s and 80s. Trading as The Leather Man, I developed many of the products I still make today. A few months back a young woman pointed to a bag on my stall (I often trade at Medieval Fairs) and said "That bag is soooo retro. It looks like it came straight from the 1970s" I didn't like to tell her that I designed it and made the first one in 1976... The joy of getting older eh?
Having trained as a harness maker and been a leatherworker, on and off, for almost fifty years, I've also watched the development of science and technology, the coming of the mobile phone and enthusiastically embraced the rise of the 'computer age' by becoming a 'techie' columnist on a National newspaper for quite a while. I also took time out to read for a history degree at the University of Sussex but always breathed a sigh of relief when I could return to my bench at the end of each day and do some 'proper work'. Having said that, I often feel that being a leatherworker isn't a proper job as I still enjoy it far too much!
When journalism and academia stopped being fun, I left Sussex, Fleet Street and 'Fortress Wapping' far behind and moved to the glorious West Midlands, not too far from Walsall which was once the hub of the horse tack industry. Hey, even their football team is called 'The Saddlers'. As I walked around the scruffy steel doored lockups and barbed wire draped industrial units I often chatted to the 'old school' leather craftsmen and quickly realised that when these wonderful old fellas were gone there wouldn't be anyone to replace them. Despite everyone's best efforts the old leather industry was dying on its feet.
As the workshops closed, so the demand for quality leatherworking tools died back until finally I had a call informing me that Joseph Dixon and Sons, arguably the best leatherworking tool makers in the UK, had finally closed their doors for the last time. Having dealt with the firm for more than forty years, the news was initially devastating and then thought provoking.
Given the number of businesses that were closing down around me, I began collecting vintage leatherworking tools and machinery. Strap cutters, presses, punches - the list was endless. I attended countless auctions, spent hours on eBay and bought up every tool and machine I could find. I simply couldn't bear the thought of this wonderful stuff being dumped in a skip and 'weighed in' for scrap. My house filled with the detritus of a hundred leather businesses. My workshop was crammed with kit I couldn't bear to part with. In my effort to preserve leatherworking history I was drowning in the death of an industry.
For lots of reasons that seemed perfectly sensible at the time, I decided to move my cosy, if a tad cramped, home-based business with its tool and machine store into an industrial unit. A very worrying time for me as bills for rent, lighting and heating came in with alarming regularity (just so you know: a 1500sq ft industrial unit eats money, but the really expensive bit was heating it in winter).
I needed a long term solution so sold my lovely old (and far too big) house and found a much smaller one with enough land to build my own workspace. But that, as they say, is another story!
I still miss the seaside...
