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Well, I think it would have really started in Sydney after they were married with five
children. He packed them into a horse and cart and took them off to the coalfields to
preach. He had this sign from God to tell him that he should go and preach the
gospel. So he followed that. Going from camp to camp would have been extremely
difficult, very hard for her, and they lost a child in a waterhole while they
were there, and I think that would have been the start of the issues that she had
with her husband. I don't think she would have ever forgiven him for that.
When he decided to go back to Brisbane and go back to the profession he knew, she
then thought to herself, well, this is the ideal time for me to try and get out of
this poverty that we've been in. I have the experience, I can go in there and I
can help to get this happening, and she also had this feeling that she wanted to
make this corset to help women get out of the pain and suffering they'd been in.
I think Dove, from what I understand, was possibly a little on the lazy side.
Sarah was very driven, and that would have been a big difference between them.
Dove was definitely a talker, and Sarah was the doer of the family.
The training and experience in Sydney, in hospitals and with an orthopedic company
down there, would have been absolutely essential for the development of the
corset that she created. So that led her to believe that she could create a better
product, a better corset, than was on the market at that time.
Yeah, it would have been so essential to get the credibility with the orthopedic
surgeons to work with them in the development of her corset.
Fitting a corset that was correct, was the thing that set her corset apart from
everything else. The fact that that corset would relieve pain and suffering, it
would also give a good line to the body so she had both sides of the coin with
what she designed.
She was unique. I think her uniqueness came in the fact that she commenced at a
very early period a business herself under her leadership. I think Sarah's
convictions and her belief in what she could do, thrust her into creating
something unique, which she did, she classified eight separate figure types
and I think that took the surgical corset into the mass market.
She revolutionized the corsetry business with her designs from waste
whittlers fashionable type of products to something that was more acceptable and
obviously could be worn by a bigger population. All through her life she
she worked on designs that suited various figure types and then because of
the range of products she had it was essential that they be classified in
some way that they could be fitted more easily. She developed a corset with a
unique lacing system which was patented that allow the woman to say draw half a
pound and exert a pound. In a sailor's term it was a block and tackle. It was
simple and yet it made it easy to adjust and fit the figure.
Once she knew she had something unique I think she was prepared to take
risks. They set up a factory come retail in George Street and what they
call 317327 George Street and it wasn't very long only a few years that they
moved to the larger premises 309 George Street and that was a large factory and
it wasn't very long before she built that to the point where it had 200
machinists operating and was a substantial business.
So in 1910 she applied for and by 1912 she had been approved for both Australian
and world patents on her product and that enabled her then to go overseas with
confidence that her corset could not be copied anywhere else in the world when
she showed it. She packed up at that point and headed off to England and where
she actually showed her corsets in the major hospitals guys and the various
hospitals in London to the orthopedic surgeons who then looked at the corsets
tried them put them on their nurses and their patients gave her absolute
amazing praise said it was the world's best corset best corset the world had
ever seen.
In today's world we look at travel around the world and so it's simple but if
you could imagine packing your bags and taking a ship to England and then
shipping across to Europe and then shipping across to Canada and USA and
returning by ship to Australia that is a substantial effort.
Sarah Jennings created a business with 15 employees and that was in the 327
George Street building by the time I joined the business in 1953 we started
to move into the bra business and it became very clear that we needed
expanded production capacity. My fourth father formed what he called the House of
Jennings and from there we started an absolutely phenomenal growth pattern. Our
staff increased and by 1964 when we sat down with Triumph we had a staff of 1100
machinists and we had seven factories operating.
Sarah laid the path for four generations and she will always be remembered
as a very astute business leader.
