Police investigate fire at sportswear firm Admiral’s old factory just hours ITV documentary Get Shirty sparks anger over treatment of women workers
Workers at the plant once made the England football kit, as well as replica shirts for Man Utd, Leeds United and Leicester City
POLICE are investigating a mystery fire which ripped through a sportswear firm Admiral's old factory just hours after it appeared on a TV documentary.
Workers at the plant once made the England football kit, as well as replica shirts for Man Utd, Leeds United and Leicester City.
One line of inquiry is whether the fire was linked to the programme screened last week on the history of Admiral and how female workers were treated there in the 70s.
The fire completely gutted the site in Wigston, Leicestershire, and it took firefighters more than five hours to bring it under control.
It started just three hours after ITV screened Get Shirty on Wednesday night, drawing in more than a million viewers.
It charted how a small midlands firm went from making underwear for nuns to becoming the most successful kit maker the then football world had ever seen.
Paul Crompton, the Executive Producer behind the programme for Fox Films, exclusively told the Sun on Sunday: “The response we have received to the programme has been fantastic.
There were, however, a small minority who were very angry at the archive footage we got from another earlier documentary called TV Eye, which showed a government advisor visiting the Admiral workplace in the 1970s as it was facing closure.
“They were unhappy at how this documentary footage - not ours - depicted the women.”
The admiral factory, or underwear firm Cook & Hurst as it then was, mainly employed a workforce of highly skilled women, and the company took great pride in employing several generations of the same families.
Bert Patrick, now 82, was the creative genius behind it all.
He said: “Young girls would stand at the side of the machines learning from their mothers and their grandmothers. We were at all times a family business, which was why I couldn't bring myself to close it, make everyone redundant, and set up in the Far East like Admiral”s rivals, as I was encouraged to do.
“We eventually went under but not before we had given many years of work to families across the Midlands at a time when scores of other textile firms were going to the wall.”
It was Bert who introduced the concept of worker incentives, unknown in the UK at the time.
As the documentary depicted, the best performing female staff would be treated go a trip to the hairdressers, and if they excelled even more they could win a perm.
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Bert said: “Jobs were easy to come by and we wanted to keep and reward our staff. The idea of incentives came from me but what they were and what they constituted came from the feedback from the female
workforce.”
Although it eventually went out of business, forced out by the willingness of rivals such as Nike and Adidas to use cheap foreign labour in China and the Far East, the Admiral Factory itself was
subject to a preservation order.
Bert said the joke doing the rounds was perhaps a disgruntled Coventry City supporter.
The documentary revealed how Admiral had produced a chocolate brown kit for Coventry on the 1970s which was loathed by fans, particularly as it made it difficult to pick out their own players when the light
was fading.
Such is the mystique of Admiral, however, that the original hated chocolate kits are now a collector”s item, changing hands for £400-a-time.
Bert said: “The joke doing the rounds it is either a Coventry City fan who didn't like to be reminded of that kit in the documentary, or someone who thought they would go back and see if there were any left, given that they now apparently change hands for £400-a-go.”
Police and Leicestershire Fire and Rescue Service were called at 2.45am on Friday and arrived in time to see the factory, which has lain empty for several years, completely ablaze.
They were still there ten hours later and arson is seen as the chief line of inquiry.
Bert, whose children Kerry and Shaun both worked at the factory at one time, also spoke of his sadness.
"It was a place which had many happy memories, because that was where we started.
“The employees always held Long Street, Wigston, in great affection.
"When we opened other factories they didn't have the same sort of history.
“Some of the women you saw in the documentary would have been making underwear before, when it was Cook & Hurst, and they saw the changes when we created Admiral.
“We had three generations of the same families working there, so the mother would train the daughter and then the daughter her own daughter. It was a special place. They would be taught at the side of the machine how to sew a football garment together.
“We want to know who did it and why?”
A Leicestershire police spokesperson said: “We are investigating.”