Sadly, on August 31, Thomas J. Bata passed away in Toronto aged 93. He was the son of the founding father of the modern Bata shoe industry, Tomas Bata, who conceived the East Tilbury factory but was killed in an air crash in 1932 before it was built.
The family cobbler’s business was started in the Moravian town of Zlin, then part of the Austro-Hungarian empire in 1894, but Tomas, having observed the mass production efficiency of the Henry Ford car manufacturing plant, adopted the same for mass production of shoes and boots.
Thomas also saw the benefits of building a linked community including houses and apartments for his employees and associated shops and cinema. Factories were soon established in Switzerland, Germany, England, France, Yugoslavia, Poland, Holland, United states of America and India.
Thomas J. Bata was born in Prague on September 17th 1914, on his fourth birthday his present from his parents was a miniature shoemaker’s bench!
He admired his father and as a teenager worked on the assembly line, side lasting 500 pairs of shoes a day.
After his father’s death, Jan Bata ran the business, Thomas carried on learning the ropes and for a time was in Britain working on the new East Tilbury factory and town.
The rise of Nazism threatened the home run business and Thomas decided in 1938 to move to Canada, soon establishing his headquarters and a factory with village called Batawa (Bata – Ottawa).
Thomas joined the Canadian Army during the 2nd WW, and at the end of the war although he would have liked to have returned to Zlin, it was now in the hands of the Communists who took over and nationalised the Bata business in Czechoslovakia.
In 1982 the Bata Shoe organisation (Shoe Makers to the World – motto) was operating from 92 countries and employed 85,000 people, selling 300 million pairs of inexpensive, study shoes that year.
It had extensive interests in tanneries and rubber processing to insure the raw supplies for its products. In some parts of Africa the word for shoe is ‘Bata’ as the Bata factories and supplies of plastic shoes were introduced to a non-shoe wearing culture!
However, the competition grew quickly from brands like Nike and Reebok and the Bata business went into slow recession and restructuring world wide – the East Tilbury factory being wound down and ultimately closed.
After the collapse of Communism the Czech president Vaclav Havel invited Thomas Bata to return to his homeland, and cheering crows greeted him at Prague airport.
However, his request for the return of the five Bata factories, 900 shoe shops, plus the rubber and chemical plants that had become state property was refused! His son Thomas George Bata, took over the company in 2001.
Thomas J Bata married in 1946, Sonja Wettstein, who survives him with their son and three daughters. Sonja has visited the Bata Reminiscence Centre in the East Tilbury Library and is clearly pleased and has supported the volunteers in their work keeping the memory and influence of the Bata name alive.
The next time you go through east Tilbury look out for our only public statue (above) – Thomas Bata, standing outside the administration building, close to Princess Margaret Road.
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