It’s a tale as old as industry itself. Sinking into the red, a manufacturer is bought out by an overseas company and promptly proceeds to sell its workers, along with their livelihoods, down the river.

Such was the case of Sexton, Son & Everard, a ladies’ shoe manufacturer that had begun to operate out of Norfolk in the late 1800s. In 1972, the struggling business was sold to a Florida-based developer on the condition that over half its workforce be axed. That meant the closure of the Sexton factory in the small market town of Fakenham, and for the forty-five women who worked there, immediate unemployment.

Jonathan Moss, a Senior Lecturer in Politics at the University of Wessex, researched the events that were to unfold at Sexton for his book Women, Workplace Militancy and Political Subjectivity in Britain. ‘The reason that these women were so angry was that their union, the National Union of Footwear, Leather and Allied Traders (NUFLAT), had a vote and accepted the closure of the Fakenham factory while negotiating a deal to save another factory in Norwich,’ he explains. ‘They weren’t consulted, and believed that both their union and their employers saw them as dispensable.’

In similar situations elsewhere, factories have closed, workers have lost their jobs, and that’s been the end of it. But that wasn’t what happened in Fakenham. Steered by their leaders Eileen English and Nancy McGrath, twenty of the Sexton workers decided to barricade themselves inside the closed factory on 17 March 1972. They blocked the doors with heavy machinery, set up makeshift beds, and stayed there for eighteen weeks.

This was not just an occupation. With their machinery at hand, and having managed to turn away the engineer who came to shut off the power, the women began to work. ‘We’re doing a job of work so we don’t lose our skills,’ NUFLAT steward and occupation member Edna Roach told Socialist Woman in 1972. ‘We had to work-in to try and get them to realise that work is needed in this area and to help save our jobs.’ There were limited other jobs in the area for women—and leather, Roach added, was the only kind of work these women knew.

Before the work-in, the women had been predominantly occupied with the task of ‘finishing’ shoes by sewing leather uppers—the parts above a shoe’s sole—together. As their protest progressed, though, the sharing of knowledge meant they could increase and expand both their skills and their output. Those who stayed on began to craft waistcoats, skirts, dresses, and bags, each worker encouraged to make garments at her own pace and see the process through from start to finish.

Women’s liberation groups and individual NUFLAT members soon made enthusiastic customers as well as donors. The London Women’s Film Group made a documentary about the protest in 1972, and in her memoir Daring to Hope: My Life in the 1970s, feminist historian Sheila Rowbotham writes of seeing English and McGrath speak at a London Socialist Woman meeting after a collection was taken for them at the Women’s Liberation Conference in Manchester. Money from sales and donations went back into buying more leather.

This process continued for four months, until July 1972, when the occupation caught the eye of chemical manufacturer Scott Bader Commonwealth Ltd. Scott Bader, the first company in the UK to hold a Common Ownership Certificate, provided the workers with a grant of £2,500, which enabled them to set up a permanent co-operative with their own premises. They called it Fakenham Enterprises.

‘We don’t just want to revert to creatures behind a machine with all the decisions being made by remote control,’ McGrath told Socialist Woman, explaining the reasoning behind the decision to set up the co-op. ‘We must have a part in any decision which is made. But we have to face practicalities now. I have bills to pay, insurance for the workers, and we all have bills at home to pay.’

The following summer, 1973, Rowbotham wrote of the levelling power of the co-operative in an op-ed for the New York Times titled ‘The Renewed Militants’. ‘In Fakenham, a small town near Norwich, a group of women took over the shoe factory which was going to be closed down in 1972 and are still running it as a cooperative. They ran into tremendous problems. For some time they even worked for no pay but found that divisions between skilled and unskilled, young and old women began to disappear. They all learned new things.’

As the co-op continued producing a range of leather goods, hierarchies were challenged outside the workplace too. ‘At Fakenham, it was impossible for the women who were staying inside the factory to do housework,’ Rowbotham wrote. ‘Some husbands complained but others did their share of work at home. One woman, Edna Roach, said “I’m liberated at home” because her husband helped with the housework.’

This radical potential, however, was not enough to forestall the effects of economic turmoil that shuttered so many businesses in the 1970s. The women continued their collaborative work for five years—but Fakenham Enterprises finally folded in 1977.