Inside Private White VC, Manchester’s last operating clothing factory

Private Jack White won the Victoria Cross in 1917, aged 20, when an attempted crossing of the Diyala River in Mesopotamia went disastrously wrong. Under heavy fire, he managed to rescue injured men and equipment by using a telephone wire to tow his pontoon to safety. After the First World War, he moved to Manchester to work in the local raincoat factory, founded in 1853.

Over the next few years he trained as a pattern maker, before becoming supervisor, general manager and eventually owner of the factory. Eden repurchased the factory in 2010 with the aim of ensuring the site not only survived but thrived as a new menswear brand, making handmade clothing with historical and local expertise. He named the brand and renamed the factory Private White VC in honor of his great-grandfather.

“I grew up immersed and inspired by the billowing smoke and industrial environments of Lowry’s works,” says Eden, as we step over the threshold where the artist once stood and enter what is now the factory’s showroom. Panels of a comic strip from a 1987 issue of Victor, documenting his great-grandfather’s heroism, are blown up like giant wallpaper behind the dressing room. “So when the opportunity arose to work with the estate of LS Lowry on this collaboration, it was not only a real privilege, but it felt very authentic.”