An organisation’s relationship with the environment and impact upon it can be the result of a variety of activities. These could range from how its products are produced and distributed – and how customers use them — to the patterns of work adopted by its employees. Changing environmental impacts may require altering the behaviours of a number of groups of people, including external stakeholders such as suppliers and business and channel partners. It may also result in cutting costs and consolidate debts. You can apply for a debt consolidation loan. Means need to be found of engaging and helping them.

Awareness of environmental impacts and responsibilities among corporate leaders and agreeing environment management goals, objectives, strategies and policies are sometimes seen as first and last stages of a governance process. Yet outside of the boardroom, little if anything, may happen, unless practical steps are taken to share an environment management vision and ensure that people are equipped to implement it.

Directing and enabling Governance and the work of boards have traditionally been concerned with providing uncertain and changing context they may be a necessary but not a sufficient condition for sustained success.

The name of his book sums up the purpose of the change of focus of ‘new management’, which is about high performance and delivery today, as much as getting in place the capability to hopefully cope with an uncertain future.

Important though many ‘traditional’ activities of boards are ‘new leadership’ looks beyond them. It also embraces assembling the knowledge, financial and other resources that may be required to implement them, and ensuring that the right processes and tools are available to ensure relevant resources are effectively applied to what an organisation is setting out to do (Coulson-Thomas, 2007a, 2012a and b).

The measurement of board effectiveness has been considered problematic (Allen et al, 2004). One possible criterion is the extent to which a board ensures that the people of an organisation are equipped to do what is expected of them, and those it wishes to help — including customers and users of an organisation’s products and services – are enabled to help themselves. Non-executive directors could question the extent to which performance support is provided to employees and other stakeholder groups.

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Despite its vocal support for shopping around to find the best annuity rate when you’re retiring, Saga, the over-50s specialist, is offering annuities from a single provider that often doesn’t pay the best rates, money has found.

Saga has a deal to only sell Legal and General’s (L&G) annuities, but when we analysed its rates compared to the rest of the market, provided by the Annuity Bureau, we found that in two out of three scenarios it didn’t even offer the best rates.

For a 60-year-old man buying a single life annuity with a £100,000 pension pot, the L&G annuity would pay an income of £5,699 a year – £112.44 less than market leader Canada Life. The same man with £50,000 did, however, get the best rate from the Saga annuities.

The deal, sits uneasily with Saga’s calls for prospective retirees to shop around for the best rate using something called the open market option (Omo), which can boost retirement income by up to 19.6% more than if you accept the rate offered by your pension provider.

Saga, and its director general Ros Altmann, have been among the campaigners pushing for consumers to be made more aware of the benefits of shopping around. Saga’s website highlights the importance of exploring the market, but then directs consumers to its tied service. We believe this is a confusing message.

When we asked Ros Altmann about this, she said: ‘We make it clear we only offer products from Legal & General. People should phone up to see what our rates are. If they are best in market, that’s fine. If they aren’t, people obviously should be looking elsewhere and will be doing so when they shop around.

You should do a research on the market before any investment. If you decide to sell jewelry, for instance, first check the price of the gold, because it changes every day and then check different jewelers about their rates. For more details about selling you jewelry visit ideapractices.org/cash-for-gold-the-good-and-the-bad/

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In the early 1940s, when Dobson & M. Brown Ltd decided to make a lace panel to commemorate the Battle of Britain, all the design and technical work was done by men. Chief Designer Harry Cross, who had been designing lace since boyhood, spent nearly two years designing the panel. The design was then transferred onto squared paper by a Mr Jackson, who had to mark out each thread in a separate colour. This took 75 square feet of paper and 15 months to finish. The next stage was the production of the jacquard, the punched cards that controlled the machine on the selection of threads during the production process. This took Alf Webster 6 months, hand punching 40,000 cards and having them sewn together in the right order. Only after all this could the manufacture of the panels begin. Some 20 panels were created, and then the &sign and the jacquards were destroyed so that the memorial would remain unique. The panels went on a tour of ‘Britain in the late 1940s, drawing huge and appreciative crowds.

The late Victorian and Edwardian period saw attempts to revive the traditional industry, often with the support of groups of concerned local ladies. Many were wives of local clergy or land­owners who bought old patterns, sought out the last of the lacemakers and learned the old techniques, which they in turn passed on to others. There was a big revival of interest stimulated by the Arts and Crafts Movement of William Morris and John Ruskin.

In Northamptonshire the wife of the Rector of Paulerspury bought some old patterns from the widow of a lace dealer in 1878 and set about re-establishing the craft. Within a few years at least 130 women were again making lace in the village. Other groups were established at about the same time, most of which faded away before the First World War.

In 1910, in an attempt to keep the industry alive, a group of ladies in the Wiltshire village of Downton tried to the industry. Linder their auspices the trade was revived in much the same forret -as in earlier years, although laeemaking Wits’ now a sideline rather 4 than the main source of income. Young girls of school age were t ‘making skills and made small amox t of lace that were sold either to patrons Of the group or via local fairs.

During the First World War, they made a special design known as ‘the Propellor’, which they sold to Americans who were learning to fly on nearby Salisbury Plain. Downton lace was also given as wedding gifts to the Princess Royal in 1922, Princess Elizabeth in 1947, Princess Margaret in 1960 and Princess Alexandra in 1963. Unfortunately the Downton group increasingly depended on one or two ageing individuals and was formally wound up in the mid 1960s. In more recent years a lace group has formed again in the village to keep the tradition going and there has been a general revival since the 1960s in lacemaking as a craft, supported by the Lace Guild. And many adult education colleges offer classes encourag­ing people to take up the craft.

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The late 18th century saw the emer­gence of lace schools which taught children as young as five the basics of the art. Workhouse children would often be sent to the school and their lace sold to travelling dealers to purchase more thread and help provide their keep. Fees were generally between three and six pence per week, though boys were often charged more because they were thought harder to teach. Hours at the school were long and conditions hard. Young children might expect to work eight hours a day and their older brothers and sisters up to twelve hours.

The children were Closely linked to the lace industry was bobbin manufacture. The bobbins were used to weight the thread and keep it taut during the making of the piece. Honiton and East Devon bobbins are made of wood and take the form of simple smooth pointed cylinders. In the East Midlands bobbins could be made either from bone or wood, usually apple or cherry and weighted with a loop of beads known as spangles. It soon became common for the bobbins to be quite elaborately decorated and often personalised. Names of loved ones, election slogans and even advertisements for the bobbin manufacturers could be incised. The bobbin maker would travel the villages carrying a stock of bobbins he’d made on a lathe. These were often inscribed with the more popular Christian names or romantic mottoes.

Archibald Abbott was one Bedfordshire bobbin maker who inscribed his own name on each bobbin; Jesse and James Compton of Deanshanger in Buckingham­shire were father and son who ran a successful business in the mid 19th century; the Haskins family of Bedford made bobbins through three generations. One maker, William Brown of Cranfield, was so prolific that he was known as `Bobbin Brown’.

Very occasionally bobbins can be found that are inscribed with names of specific individuals, perhaps with dates of birth or death. Bobbins were also produced to commemorate violent deaths such as murder, suicide or hanging, particularly around Bedford. Among those commemorated was Sarah Dazeley, who was convicted of poisoning her second husband and hanged at Bedford in August 1843. These bobbins are rare and, if you can find one definitely recording a member of your family, will be extremely valuable.

The first attempts to manufacture lace by using machines were made at the end of the 18th century. A basic net was made ‘using a primitive machine, onto which patterns were sewn by hand, which considerably speeded up the manufacture, Gradually machine makers.

Developed that could duplicate the more complex patterns produced by it. the pillow, lace makers, The centre of the machine-made industry was Nottingham, where John athcoat -patented his first, machine M 1808. He was driven from his factory Loughborougn when it was attacked 1-) Luddites in 1816, and he moved to Tiverton in Devon. Many of the Honiton lace-makers had made the basic lace net, which was now easily duplicated by Heathcote’s machine. The price of net collapsed to a tiny fraction of its original cost and hundreds were thrown out of work or were reduced to working for a pittance.

By 1841 it was possible to imitate almost all of the bobbin lacemakers’ skills by machine and the handmade industry had virtually collapsed. The 1834 History of Wiltshire says: “the occupation of lacemaking which was formerly universal among the cottagers of the [Downton] district has been much diminished by the application of machinery to this purpose and the industrious wives and children of the labourers are condemned to a material diminution of their scanty comforts.”

Nottingham lace curtains became a symbol of Victorian middle-class respectability. Dozens of factories sprang up employing thousands of machine operators, but these were not the skilled craftswomen that had made the bone lace.

The one area that still required great artis­tic and technical skill was the preparation of the pattern cards that the machine used to create the lace. This was a male preserve.

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By Fran and Phil Tomaselli

Lacemaking once provided a major source of employment for women and children in Buckinghamshire, Bedfordshire, Northamptonshire and the West Country, particularly around Honiton in Devon and throughout Dorset and Wiltshire. It seems to have been introduced into England from Italy and the Netherlands in Tudor times. There is a legend in Ampthill, Bedfordshire, that it was taught to local women by Catherine of Aragon, who was imprisoned there after her divorce from Henry VIII. In the case of Honiton it may have been arrived as the result of the local wool industry’s connections with the continent.

Bobbin lacernaking is really a form of weaving; the lace was traditionally thade on a straw-filled pillow from thread, which was originally made out of flax or silk, and later cotton. Using’a pattern drawn on parchment, which showed where pins should be placed, the lacemaker would interweave the threads and keep them taut using bone (and later wood) bobbins. As the pattern advanced the pins would be withdrawn and used to anchor the pattern further on. As early as 1596, the overseers of Eaton Socon, near St Neots, recorded that a Goodwife Clarke was being paid to teach bobbin lacemaking to children of the poor. It was also mentioned that poor parents who did not send their daughters to be trained could have their parish benefit stopped.

Though it might be thought that the complex patterns were the hardest pieces to make, quite often the simple lace net, which formed the basis for the larger pieces, was the most difficult. It would take a highly experienced lacemaker to maintain the necessary degree of tautness across a large piece of net running to eighteen square inches or more. The price of such an item might be calculated by covering it in shilling coins with the maker receiving the proceeds.

Although the wages that could be earned varied, a good lacemaker could make as much in a week as a labourer. In 1700 a week’s earnings was about seven shillings. Even though it was banned in 1779, some smaller dealers paid their workers not in cash but in goods from special shops, thus tying them closely to their merchant.

Oliver Cromwell was reputedly buried in his best lace

By 1560 lace was becoming fashionable, as shown in the portraits of the period, and there are references to lace in customs documents. Within 60 years the home industry was sufficiently established for the introduction of laws to protect it from foreign competition. In 1635 Charles I forbade the importation of foreign lace. A series of measures imposing customs duties on lace continued for the next hundred years. The fabric became a luxury item as a decoration on expensive clothing for both sexes — even the old Puritan himself, Oliver Cromwell, was reputedly buried in his best lace.

The industry depended to a large extent upon lace dealers, or lace merchants, who provided the lacemakers with thread and loaned patterns, deducting costs from the price they subsequently paid them for the lace. Dealers toured the villages on a weekly basis collecting the lace pieces which might then be sewn together to make larger items. They would also travel to L:Mdon and other cities to sell it on. Local haberdashers and tailors would often act A 11 as agents and cedlect lace locally to be forwarded to the merchants for sale.

At the beginning of the 18th century, a Londoner named Thomas Powell tried to obtain a monopoly over lace sales within the capital. He succeeded in having a clause inserted into a parliamentary bill which meant that all lace dealings would have to take place in properties he owned. A petition from the lace dealers succeed­ed in having the clause removed in the House of Lords. Decades later, further petitioning by lace merchants led to a tax on imports and they succeeded in having a tariff of 30 percent imposed on the best quality imports in 1806. This led to the final flourishing of the lacemaking industry. It was estimated that there were 150,000 lacemakers working in the East Midlands by the 1830s.

This tariff resulted in widespread smuggling. Kipling’s poem ‘A Smuggler’s Song’ mentions “Brandy for the Parson, `Baccy for the clerk, laces for a lady, letters for a spy”, reflecting the value of an easily portable luxury item, ideal for the criminal.

Many lacemakers in the 17th and 18th centuries undoubtedly learned their craft at their mother’s knee. There was an unofficial system of apprenticeship which bound poor girls to a master until they reached the age of 21, when they were free to work on their own. Some apprenticeship records still exist and may be useful in tracing an ancestor.

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