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Button making had been practiced in Dorset cottages for centuries but can only really be described as an industry after Abraham Case of Shaftesbury placed it on a more business like footing during the reign of Queen Anne. The cottage industry reached its peak during the 18th and 19th centuries.
Initially the buttons were made from a disc of the horn of Dorset Sheep, which as you can see from the picture of the Portland sheep provided a plentiful source of raw materials. The disk was covered with a piece of cloth and then overworked with a fine tracery of linen thread. The diameter of the buttons ranging from half an inch down to an unbelievable eighth of an inch.
Twenty years later there was a revolution in the button making industry when Abraham Case’s grandson started importing metal rings from Birmingham to use as the base for the buttons instead of horn. They were far easier to work with - and cheaper. Combined with the ready supply of labour the industry now spread out in all directions, reaching as far south as Bere Regis.
The centre of the button making industry was to move from Shaftesbury to Blandford Forum, when, after the fire of 1731, a Mr. Robert Fisher opened a Button Depot at his drapers shop in Market Place, Blandford. The out-workers could bring or send their completed buttons at any time; and the depot was regularly visited by travelers who bought them in bulk.
Cloth covered buttons were sold at between eight-pence and three shillings a dozen, while the women workers averaged about two shillings a day for making approximately six or seven dozen buttons, compared with the nine-pence a day they might expect from farm-work, the only real alternative for these women.
Although it was a major factor, it wasn’t just the money that attracted so many women to this cottage based industry. There were many other advantages. Working indoors was always preferable to being out in the fields in all weathers. It enabled women to be at home to look after the family whilst still retaining an income. Apart from the direct benefits, there was at least one indirect benefit that was very important when money was tight. Their clothes and particularly their shoes, didn’t wear out at anything like the rate they did when worn in the fields in all weathers. It was therefore no surprise that poorer women flocked to join in this new cottage industry.
The industry thrived throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, still run primarily by the Fisher family of Blandford. Many families lived in relative comfort, and were able to survive the loss of the male breadwinner, something that had been very difficult in previous times.
In 1851 Prince Albert’s Great Exhibition of art & industry was held at the purpose built Crystal Palace. Among the exhibits was the Ashton Button Machine a contraption that within years would virtually wipe out the Dorset button industry, bringing unemployment and starvation to Case’s cottage outworkers and their families. Naturally, escape in the form of emigration was a much sought after alternative. Indeed, it was said that the government paid for the expatriation of some 350 families from Shaftesbury alone, to begin a new life in Australia and Canada. For those who remained Ashton’s invention became responsible for the appearance of the button factory proper at Birmingham and elsewhere.
For about the next fifty years buttony was off the commercial radar in Dorset until early in the 20th century, when Dowager Florence (Lady) Lees of the Lytchett Mission, and a beneficiary of the Case family estate, sought to revive the industry at Lytchett Minster after the death of Henry Case in 1904. Lady Lees set up a small business specialising in the production of “Parliamentary” buttons for Dorset MP’s in their respective constituency colours: pale blue for South Dorset Conservatives; purple for East Dorset Conservatives. In 1908 these buttons were in full production, but Lady Florence’s brief revival of the industry was brought to an untimely end by the outbreak of the First World War. More recently the clearance of an old cottage on the Lees estate turned up several boxes full of buttons that were then sold to Americans to raise funds for religious film productions. Lady Lees died a few months before the last of these films was completed.