Fletcher Jones
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Sir (David) Fletcher Jones OBE (14 August 1895 - 22 February 1977) was an Australian clothing manufacturer and retailer, and a pioneer in workforce participation. It has been claimed that “Arguably, no single person or firm had done more to transform and, for a time, homogenize Australian dress standards, particularly among men, than Fletcher Jones and his staff.” [1]
Fletcher Jones was born in Bendigo, Victoria. In his childhood he suffered from a bad stammer, but he practised reading aloud to overcome this. He left school at age 12.
He served with Australian forces in France in World War I. On his return his stammer had returned, but he was determined to defeat it so he commenced a door-to-door sales business in Melbourne. He then decided to become a hawker in the western Victorian region. He purchased a menswear store in Warrnambool in 1924. His business expanded, and in 1941 he decided to form a new wholesale business making nothing but high-quality ready-made trousers. His first store Fletcher Jones Trousers Pty Ltd was located in Melbourne.
In 1946 Fletcher Jones moved to making all trousers from personal fittings, and to deal direct to the public. In 1948 he constructed a clothing factory on the site of a rubbish dump near Warrnambool, which had once been a quarry. The site was extensively renewed with gardens, and became a much-visited tourist site. In the late 1940s he began to turn his business into a co-operative, named Fletcher Jones & Staff Pty Ltd. He structured his business such that all the employees owned shares in the company. Initially the Jones family had a two-thirds interest and the staff one-third, but the balance gradually swung so that by the 1970s the staff held over 50 per cent of the shares. From the mid 1950s, the business also made women’s attire. At its peak, his company had 55 stores and over 2,700 employees. The company was sold in 1998.
Fletcher Jones & Staff was awarded a contract to outfit the Australian women’s team for the 1956 Melbourne Olympic Games.
He was appointed an Officer of the Order of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 1959, and knighted in 1974 for services to decentralization and the community.
Although he had always expressed Labor sympathies in word and deed, he publicly renounced his political allegiances when Labor Prime Minister Gough Whitlam and his wife Margaret made it known they were agnostics.
His first wife died in 1970, and he remarried in 1971. He published his autobiography Not By Myself in 1976. Sir Fletcher Jones died in Warrnambool in 1977, and was buried there. He was survived by his second wife, and by the daughter and two sons of his first marriage.
A one-hour Australian telemovie The Fabric of a Dream: The Fletcher Jones Story went into production in 2006.[2]
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