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Hadley Spectacles

The Hadley Company was started in 1920 by Art Hadley. He was British but lived in Rhode Island, U.S.A. where he owned a factory making gold-filled goods. During his frequent travels around the world, he discovered that there was a shortage of metal frame-making factories in the British Isles, and started one, the first of its kind in the London area.

In 1925 the Hadley Company became a Limited Company, and additional buildings and extensions were made to the Portsmouth Road premises on the borders of Thames Ditton and Surbiton. Originally the factory's output was distributed through one outlet but later sold direct to opticians. Stockrooms to assist in this were established in Hatton Garden and Manchester. A small Prescription Laboratory was then started, so that opticians could have the frames they purchased glazed on the same premises.

During the Second World War the factory produced many aircraft components as well as Army and Air Force spectacles. A branch factory was set up at Guildford to meet increased demand, until it was closed in 1959. A few years after the war, owing to the extreme shortage of lenses, the Hadley Company made machines for the mass production of these in a specially constructed building at the Portsmouth Road site, and by 1949 approximately 500 people were employed there.

In 1964 the Hadley Company was purchased by the Ionian Bank and, due to the curtailment of the 602 bus service, which made local travel difficult, problems were experienced in recruiting sufficient staff at Portsmouth Road so a second factory was set up at Bognor.

Following the sale of the company to U.K. Optical Industrial Holdings Ltd. in 1967, the factory at Bognor was closed and the frame manufacturing section moved to Lurgan in Northern Ireland. The Hadley Company continued to function on the Portsmouth Road site within the U.K. Optical Group as a separate unit, until the Group was taken over in April 1986 by Suter plc, who then sold the ophthalmic interests of U.K. Optical to British American Optical Company Limited in December 1986.

Browse a selection of objects in our collection relating to Hadley Spectacles below.