Look down the manufacturer list on this site and a single Worcestershire town accounts for a remarkable share of it: S. Allcock & Co., Partridge, H. Milward & Sons, Edgar Sealey & Sons, and behind them Bartleet, Harrison, Warner, Woodfield, Holyoake, Adlington and dozens of smaller names. For roughly a century and a half, if a hook packet said “Made in England” there was a very good chance it came from Redditch. This is the story of how that happened, and why the answer runs through sewing needles rather than fishing.
Needles first
A monastic mill and a cottage trade
Redditch grew up beside Bordesley Abbey, a Cistercian house founded in the twelfth century, and the abbey’s water-powered mills on the River Arrow are the usual starting point for any account of the town’s metalworking. Needle making arrived in the area in the seventeenth century as a cottage industry: wire was drawn, cut, pointed, eyed, hardened, tempered and scoured in small workshops and outbuildings, with the scouring (polishing needles in bundles under weighted runners) done at water mills. Forge Mill, now the Forge Mill Needle Museum, is the surviving example of one of those mills.
By the eighteenth century Redditch and the surrounding villages had become the centre of English needle production, and the Milward family, whose firm dates its origins to 1730, were among the leading makers. Needle making needed very specific skills: drawing and straightening fine steel wire, pointing it by hand on a grindstone, hardening it without warping it, and packaging it in the paper “wraps” that later became so familiar on hook packets.
From needle to hook is a small step
A fish hook starts life as exactly the same thing as a needle: a length of straightened steel wire, pointed at one end. Add a barb cut with a chisel, a bend formed around a mandrel or in a die, and an eye or flattened spade at the other end, and a needle maker has become a hook maker. Redditch history records hooks being produced in the town in the late eighteenth century, and by the early nineteenth century the trade had a distinct identity of its own.
Allcock and the rise of the tackle factory
The decisive figure is Polycarp Allcock, who established the firm that became S. Allcock & Co. in 1803. Allcock’s began, like everyone else in the town, with needles and hooks, but under Samuel Allcock in the second half of the century it became something new: a fully integrated fishing tackle manufacturer. The firm moved from the top of Unicorn Hill to a much larger works in Clive Road in 1866. Those premises burned down in 1920 and were rebuilt bigger still, and by 1926 the company employed more than a thousand people in the town, with its own foundry, engineering shop and press shop alongside the hook benches.
The Allcock model mattered because it turned hooks into a branded, catalogued, exported product. Allcock’s “Standard Works” packets, with the trade mark and the “Estab. 1803” line, travelled to every corner of the British Empire and to the United States, and the firm sold hooks under an enormous range of pattern names as well as supplying unbranded hooks to other tackle houses. Collectors today spend a great deal of time working out which “own brand” packets from American and colonial dealers were actually Allcock stock.
A town of makers
Allcock’s was the largest, but never the only, name. A trade directory of 1868–69 lists well over a hundred firms in the Redditch district in the needle and fishing-tackle trades. Among the hook makers, Bartleet (later William Bartleet & Sons, celebrated for their Dublin Limerick salmon hooks), Harrison and Harrison & Bartleet, Warner & Son (who held hook patents as early as the 1860s), Adlington, Holyoake and Woodfield all appear in the angling literature of the 1840s to 1890s. Milward’s, with its needle heritage, had a reputation as a first-class hook maker through the nineteenth century and continued into the twentieth, and its hooks are well represented in this reference.
Partridge is the most recent of the great names. It appears as A. E. Partridge Ltd in the 1920s, and after the Second World War, as the older firms consolidated or faded, Partridge of Redditch became the keeper of the town’s hand-finished fly-hook tradition, especially for the classic salmon irons that tiers still ask for by name.
The Redditch scale
Redditch also gave the trade its sizing convention. The “Redditch scale”, also called the old scale, numbers hooks from 1 upwards with the number rising as the hook gets smaller, and uses 1/0, 2/0, 3/0 and so on for hooks larger than a 1. It competed for decades with the Kendal scale, which ran the other way, and with several Irish and Carlisle scales, but it is the Redditch scale that won and that every modern hook packet still uses. There is a separate article on this site about how that came about.
Competition from Kendal and Norway
Redditch was not unchallenged. Kendal, in Westmorland, had its own hook trade from the 1740s, and the Kendal firm of Hutchinson (earlier Adlington & Hutchinson) produced hooks of very high reputation, introduced the Sproat bend commercially in the 1860s and the Pennell pattern in 1870, and was closely involved in the arrival of the eyed trout hook in 1879. Kendal hooks were sized on their own reversed scale and were generally regarded as the finer article. But Kendal was a small town with a handful of firms, and it could not match Redditch’s scale. Hutchinson closed in 1934.
The larger threat came from abroad. In 1877 the Norwegian firm of O. Mustad & Søn, in Gjøvik, put into service an automatic hook-making machine that took wire in at one end and delivered a cut, bent, barbed and pointed hook at the other. Redditch hooks were still substantially hand-finished, bench by bench. Mustad’s machine-made hooks were cheaper, more consistent and available in staggering volume, and over the following half-century they took the bait, sea and commercial hook markets away from England. Redditch held on longest where hand finishing still commanded a premium, in fly hooks and in the prestige salmon patterns.
What survives
Allcock’s went through a series of mergers and changes of ownership after the war and the Clive Road name ceased to mean much by the 1970s. Milward’s became part of a larger group. Partridge continues, though under different ownership and no longer entirely in the town. The Forge Mill Needle Museum preserves the water-powered scouring mill and much of the story of the parent trade.
For the collector, Redditch’s legacy is the paper. Because the town packaged hooks the way it packaged needles, in printed wraps and boxes with the maker’s name, pattern, size and count, a great many Redditch hooks can still be identified today, which is more than can be said for most nineteenth-century hooks from anywhere else. When a packet turns up with an unfamiliar Redditch name on it, it is nearly always a tackle dealer’s own label on hooks from one of the firms above, and the bend, eye and finish usually give the game away. The compare tool is a good way to test that suspicion against a documented Allcock or Milward pattern.
Source and further reading
Anthony Green, “Fish Hooks” and “Needles”, Redditch History web portal. Thomas Turner Fishing Antiques, “Allcock’s of Redditch, established 1803”. Ron Reinhold, “Antique Hook Manufacturers”, on the restored Ronn Lucas Sr. site. Forge Mill Needle Museum, Redditch.
