BataStory.net

1876-1890

A brief reminder to start with: this project begins in the year 1876 and it was not possible to achieve it in one go. It is a constant process, which is not always chronological or according to the importance of the events. Sometimes apparently outdated, less substantial things are more important, but it’s all a question of time: everything will gradually come together. ( < : ) And an extra remark: BataStory exists also for the older ones, notes marked as TIP belong to them. You younger ones, who knew it all, leave ( > : ) This will help those who really experienced the Bata history, so that they at least for a moment return to it, and maybe help us enrich it…

Can you imagine what Zlín looked like when Tomáš Baťa, the initiator of its future and spectacular development was born, on April 3, 1876? It was just a very small town, rather a village. It had already quite a rich history. Its 2,300 inhabitants usually earned their living from agriculture, but also with small crafts like cobbling, pottery and the clothing industry. There was here no public water system and wood was the only source of heating. A regular cause of fire were the thatched roofs of houses, all the more since oil lamps were used for lighting, and also much cheaper candles, in the styes and meadows as well.

František Křižík presented in Jindřichův Hradec the first electric public lighting, in Prague the National Theater burnt.

Bigger towns of the lands of the Czech crown of that time, mainly Prague and Brno, but also Plzen or Moravská Ostrava, in the framework of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, had already belonged for a long time to a bigger world and experienced most of its changes. Zlín at that time was usually stirred once or twice a year, for example with the annual market or the pilgrimage to holy places like Hostýn or Velehrad, reached usually by foot. You couldn’t find a less suitable place for creating a modern industrial town than Zlín.

Alfred Nobel announces in Sweden that he discovered a smokeless black powder, George Eastman developed in America the first photographic roll film.

Now is the right time to talk about traditional shoe-making. Thomas’s father himself, Antonín Baťa, was a shoe-maker, and this for the ninth generation. Anna Minaříková-Bartošová (by the way, the widow of a shoe-maker) he gets married to, brings with her a daughter from her former marriage, Josefka and has, with Antonín, apart from Tomáš: Antonín (older) and Anna (younger). She dies relatively young in 1886 and the family moves later to Uherské Hradiště.

Emile Berlinger developed the first table phonograph. Bedřich Smetana dies in Prague, Ferenc Liszt in Budapest. New York inaugurates France’s present to the New World: the Statue of Liberty.

In Hradiště the father Antonín marries again after two years, this time with a widow, Ludmila Hruščákova. She has a son from her former marriage: Josef. With Antonín, she has four sons: Bohuš, Jan, Leopold and Jindřich, and one daughter Marie. The family thus totals ten children. From these Tomáš, Anna and Antonín as children of Anna, their mother dead in Zlín, rather stick together and they will be the ones who will soon change the future. But for the moment they don’t stand out from the other families of shoe-makers.

^{English translations/corrections enabled thanks to the kind help of Michèle Morsa}