Quote:
Originally Posted by Cribyn
I have been able to find a little bit of basic information about 'The New Zealand Clothing Factory' from some New Zealand websites.
They were the first clothing factory in New Zealand, set up in 1873 by a "German-born merchant Bendix Hallenstein (1835-1905) ..... to supply his stores .... offering shoppers .... a single garment at wholesale price". At some point they obviously expanded to take on military contracts.
They were clearly garment/uniform manufacturers but I suspect that they did not make the buttons themselves but imported them in sufficient quantity to persuade the actual maker to use their name as the backmark. Can anyone confirm this and say where they got the buttons from?
Roger
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There is evidence that some small NZ tailoring businesses imported their own button making machines into NZ in the 1880s, so if you take into account that the Hallenstein Brothers were the largest uniform supplier to the NZ Volunteer forces, I think it likely HB would have had their own button making machine.
However, IMO it is most likely the components for HB to make a button, such as the shank, backing plate and the front blank, all would have been imported from England.
The question is who supplied HB with dies to press the blank plates into planchets, were the dies made in NZ or were they imported from England?
Whatever the answer is the Hallenstein Brothers were only one of many button makers to manufacture buttons for the NZ military.
The following picture shows my J. R Gaunt made 1911 NZA Forces button, a Birmingham made 1911 to 1921 NZ Territorial Artillery button and my Gaunt made post 1911 Dress/Undress Artillery gun button.
As yet I have not been able to find an exact date when the "NZ" was added to the gun button, the earliest uniform that I have seen so far is a 1930s blue artillery jacket.
The following picture shows my 1923 NZ Mess Dress Artillery ball button.
My 1947 pattern NZ Dress/Undress Artillery gun button and 1954 pattern NZ Artillery anodised gun button.
