John Hulk was born in Coventry in 1831 and apprenticed to Thomas Hill in the city in 1844. In 1853 he took out a mortgage of £250 from the Coventry and Warwickshire Benefit Building and Investment Society, with which he bought a plot of land on Cromwell Street (now Berkeley Road South) and had a house built upon it. This mortgage was a considerable sum for a young artisan, added to by a further £54 15s 0d to complete the building.
The repayments placed a heavy burden on Hulk with a wife and family to support. The way out of his difficulties which he chose was, unfortunately, bound to fail. There was a tendency among some masters and manufacturers in the Coventry watch trade to take on a large number of apprentices not with the intention of training them properly, but merely to exploit them as cheap labour. Hulk followed this path, calling himself a ‘manufacturer’ — and one can easily imagine the quality of the watches he produced.
His business was doomed to failure. In October 1857 he had to borrow a further £150 from an uncle. He lasted a further six and a half years, but in March 1864 the Building Society was forced to foreclose on his mortgage, his Earlsdon property was sold, and John Hulk disappeared from the watchmaking records.
Hulk’s story serves as a counterpoint to the success stories of Earlsdon’s watchmaking community — a reminder that the trade was competitive and unforgiving of shortcuts.