Sound Newbury

A Sheep's Coat at Sunrise, a Man's Coat at Sunset. At a dinner party in Newbury, Berkshire, in 1811, John Coxeter made a boast. He told his guest, Sir John Throckmorton, a baronet, that the machinery he had recently installed at Greenham Mills was so efficient, he could take the wool off a sheep's back at sunrise and present a finished coat before sunset the same day. Throckmorton, apparently finding this preposterous, laid a wager of one thousand guineas. Coxeter accepted. He went home and calculated the time each step would take. At five o'clock on the morning of June 25, 1811, Throckmorton arrived at Greenham Mills with his shepherd and two Southdown sheep. The shearing began immediately. What followed was a continuous relay of industrial labor, each stage handed off the moment the previous one finished: the wool was sorted, washed, carded, spun into yarn, warped, loomed, woven into cloth, scoured, fulled, tentered, raised, sheared again, dyed a deep damson blue, dried, and pressed. Eleven hours after the sheep walked in, the cloth was ready. Coxeter handed it to James White, the tailor, at exactly four o'clock in the afternoon. White and his nine tailors had spent the day measuring Sir John and pre-threading all their needles so not a second would be wasted. They cut, stitched, pressed, and sewed on buttons. Word had spread through the surrounding villages throughout the day. By the time White and his men finished, a crowd of more than five thousand people was watching. At twenty minutes past six in the evening, John Coxeter presented the completed coat to Sir John Throckmorton. Sir John put it on in front of the crowd. He sat down to dinner at eight o'clock with forty gentlemen wearing it, the wool having been on the backs of sheep thirteen hours and twenty minutes before. Coxeter had won with an hour and forty minutes to spare. He celebrated by distributing the two roasted sheep to the crowd, along with one hundred and twenty gallons of strong English ale. The witness account, certified that same day and signed by Coxeter with a cross, he could not write, is still held at the West Berkshire Museum. The coat itself, a hunting coat in dark Wellington blue, still exists. It can be seen at Coughton Court, the Throckmorton family's ancestral home in Warwickshire, in the care of the National Trust. Five thousand people watched a sheep become a suit in a single summer's day. The man who pulled it off signed the paperwork with an X.