Twilight in Batawa: They Closed Tom Bata's Shoe Factory This Spring, Marking the End of a Company Town That Had Outlived Its Time

Abstract

The triumph of Tomas J. Bata Jr. has long appealed to Canadians' sense of their country's receptiveness to emigres wishing to make a fresh start. The Nazis forced him to flee from Zlin, the original Bata company town in central Czechoslovakia, and from a new base in Canada, Bata then defied the odds against success in rehabilitating a shoemaking dynasty that lay in ruins. At least that's how the story went in the popular imagination. To be sure, the accomplishments of Bata in creating a miniature Zlin in southern Ontario at age 25, building an enormous factory and filling it with 1,000 shoemaking machines spirited out of his homeland as the German army closed in, were considerable indeed. But the worldwide legacy of his father was largely intact in 1939 when Tom Bata Jr. first came to Canada. As the Second World War began, Bata factories and shoe stores were still operating in Britain, Asia, South America, Africa and the U.S. There was even a Bata sales representative already stationed in Toronto. With some difficulty, the far flung outposts of the Bata empire found ways to continue functioning after being cut off from Zlin. During the war, and for many years after, the enterprise was a loose confederation of semi-autonomous fiefdoms run by missionaries dispatched from Zlin, most of them graduates of the founder's Bata School for Young Men.