At The Secret Dyery, we are incredibly proud of our textile heritage. Kate’s great grandfather, textile chemist John Tomkinson, was the co-founder of The Premiere Dye Works in Leek, Staffordshire, then one of England’s three major silk towns and a key part of the textile industry. He trained with the world-famous Sir Thomas Wardle, known for his innovations in silk dyeing and his collaboration with William Morris, who visited Leek to learn the alchemy of natural dyes.
One of John Tomkinson’s accolades was finding a way to fix the colour black for William Morris, which was notoriously difficult at the time. William Morris believed that in Leek, he would find “craftsmen who remember the old secrets & recipes; subtle colours of red madder, indigo blue and weld yellow; husks, bark, roots and insect dyes. “The mystery of the dyer”, an old Leek phrase, was used in reference to the secret recipes which dyers made to produce each of the factories’ unique colours. These were closely guarded recipes and has inspired our name, The Secret Dyery
