Good grief, Trees, your family is choc-a-bloc with glovers! You might be interested to know that Yeovil in Somerset was another centre of glove making - another friend of mine is descended from Farrants who were in the trade there, though some of them ended up in Worcestershire and in America, in a town called Gloversville, when the industry took a downturn in England.
Yesterday's visit to the library, and a trawl through old newspapers on Find My Past in the afternoon, paid off. An article on William Vaughn's funeral in 1903 reveals that "his coffin was borne to the grave by the following glove cutters employed at the [Vaughn's] factory: Messrs W. Bowden, H. Squire, J. TAPSCOTT, W. Gilbert, P. Judd, W. Quicke, C. Booth and W. Thomas," so the James Tapscott I located in the census returns was an employee of Vaughn's. Tapscott left Vaughn's to set up his own business a few years later, but by 1928 had retired and moved to Exmouth, while his daughter Florence Gertrude's husband, a Mr Charles Ebsworthy, managed the business. At this point Tapscott's was in New Street and the company seems to have survived well into the 1980s - moving to the Calf Steet premises along the way. It only amalgamated with Vaughn's in 1989, apparently (hence the White's Lane factory being generally remembered as "Vaughn Tapscott"), and they were then taken over by Sudbury's who finally closed down in the early 2000s.
James Tapscott was a staunch member of the Baptist Church and, like William Vaughn and John Jackson, a prominent figure in the town before his retirement. Tapscott must have been well paid by Vaughn, because he owned a three-storey house in New Street by 1892 - either that or he or his new wife had money of their own! Most of the big glove manufacturing families seem to have socialised with each other generally; I found a reference to Hannah (eldest daughter of glove manufacturer Joseph Bangham) Handford's younger daughter marrying Richard Pettle, another glove manufacturer, and all the big names regularly crop up at the funerals of fellow tradesmen.
