Mountsorrel has for many years been known primarily as an industrial village. The quarry has obviously been the most well-known industry, with hosiery, boot and shoe manufacture, elastic web production and aeronautical engineering providing many jobs over the years. But what about the leatherboard industry? Never heard of it? To be fair it doesn’t readily spring to mind when considering Mountsorrel’s industrial heritage.
So firstly, what is leatherboard? It is a synthetic material produced from scrap leather from the boot and shoe industry and milled wood fibre. Combining these materials, which each contained carbohydrate and protein fibres, gave a strong and hard-wearing sheet of leatherboard. This was an early “composite material” and explains why some workers called the place where they worked the “compo mill”.
Now to the next question – where was this product made? The mill was situated alongside the river with its entrance on Loughborough Road opposite the present-day Spice Cube restaurant. We are fortunate that part of the mill site is still visible if you look down the yard towards the river. There had been a corn mill on this site for many years.
The earliest record of the leatherboard industry in the village dates from the 1891 census which shows one George Barks working as a leatherboard manufacturer. The 1901 Ordnance Survey map shows the corn mill and the leatherboard mill alongside each other. The Kelly’s Directories of 1900/1904 show the leatherboard mill being run by Scattergood and Barks, so it would seem that the company had by then expanded. It is not known why this industry was started in Mountsorrel but the ready access to the river and the A6 must have been contributing factors. George Barks originated from Staffordshire, as did several other people working in the industry in Mountsorrel so it could be that Barks brought fellow workers to the village from his home area.
After a steady start the mill really came into its own from 1912 when it was bought by Paulson and Paulson whose name became synonymous with leatherboard manufacture and were the biggest producers in the region. The head of the business was Geoffrey William Paulson who was born in 1887. His father was a local surgeon, but Geoffrey preferred the world of business to that of medicine. In 1913 the company bought Sileby Mill and so began a period of successful production which lasted until 1972.
