During the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, the Were family of Wellington began producing serge as a cottage industry. In the early 1700s, Edward Fox married Hannah Were, and soon took over the trade. The wool industry thrived in areas used for sheep farming. The Were family established Tone Mills in 1754, and over the next seventeen years, the family's assets quadrupled as the industry thrived. Thomas Fox, after learning the trade in Germany and Holland for three years, entered the business as a partner, and formally founded the company as Fox Brothers in 1772. In the 1790s, Fox Brothers purchased a complex of buildings in Tonedale known variously as the "Old Town Mills" or the "Old Flour Mills" to centralise their processes. This move facilitated an increase in both quality and quantity, while cutting costs as other production was brought in-house; basket weaving, joinery, book binding and metalworking was all carried out on the site. When steam power was introduced they opted to retain their water management system as it might prove useful. Thomas Fox had water basins excavated between 1801 and 1803, establishing a series of waterways, weirs and sluices to manage the water supply. The original timber mill burned down in 1821, replaced with today's brick building. At its peak employed around 3,600 people around Wellington, and produced 6,500 metres (21,300 ft) of material each day. Dyers working for Fox Brothers developed a khaki dye which was used by the British soldiers in the Second Boer War. It once owned 9 mills and employed nearly 5,000 workers in all it's sites. During the First World War it won a War Office contract to provide 852 miles (1,371 km) of khaki coloured cloth for military puttees. The complex was the largest woollen mill in South West England, and was rare in it's integrating ancillary processes on the same site. The mill continued to produce cloth on a large scale until it downsized in the 1980s. Most of the site is now abandoned. Investor Deborah Meaden who features on tv's Dragons' Den, purchased a majority stake. Meaden grew up in the area, living 10 miles from the factory, while Meaden's husband Paul (m, 1993) went to school with two members of the Fox family of the original owners. With Managing director Jack Hudson looking to retire, in November 2009, textiles expert Douglas Cordeaux and Meaden bought the company, with Meaden taking 80% and Cordeaux 20%., allowing production to continue at Tonedale, after the company had been in danger of falling into bankruptcy. (In an interview she gave to the Telegraph by Lorraine McBride p.12th January 2014. she said when asked, what’s your proudest achievement? She said: I very much live in the moment, then get on with the next thing. I don’t sit there and think “Gosh, I’m proud of that” but I saved the last surviving woollen cloth mill in Wellington. Fox Brothers was founded in 1772 and when I got involved it had already died. Yet here we are, three years later, it’s turning in a very nice little profit. For me, it was important to keep its heritage going and our workforce has gone up from 16 to 26. To me it wasn’t a museum piece. I thought: “This is amazing. It’s got so much history, but it’s relevant, interesting history.” I’m not being all romantic, I saw a business opportunity; Then asked on how did your childhood influence your attitude to money?: I grew up in a single-parent family and we didn’t have a lot of money. I don’t say that looking for any sympathy, because a child doesn’t notice, except that we naturally assumed our money was spent on food and clothes. Both my parents were hard workers and they had absolutely no choice. When I was seven I set up a flower stall, but quickly realised that I was on the wrong side of the road for traffic. So I moved them over to our neighbour’s drive, which was a little bit posh. They were livid and my mother told me off, but I could see that she was proud as punch;) Tonedale Mill is mostly all of brick, some parts dating from c1830. A rare example of a textile factory where all the processes, from raw wool to finished cloth, are carried out by the same firm and on the same premises. It is probably the largest integrated woollen mill complex in the south west. The mill was founded in 1790 and continued in large-scale production until the early 1980s. The site has a wide range of mill buildings, some from the late C18, but most C19 or early C20. Of particular interest is a range of C19 spinning mills and warehouses, including an early fireproof mill with a cast iron roof, an unusual roof. The site expanded significantly in the later C19 with the construction of a large steam-powered spinning mill, weaving sheds and other buildings. There is a large waterwheel chamber, and 3 engine houses, and an early DC generating plant illustrating the development of power at the site throughout it's industrial past. If you made it this far THANK YOU for reading it's history!

• published: 07 Aug 2015
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