DEBORAH Meaden plans to ask Western Morning News readers to dig out attics and cupboards for memorabilia gone to earth, in a Great British Fox Hunt.

The Dragon's Den investor who bought Fox Brothers – the South West's oldest surviving commercial textiles mill – with managing director Douglas Cordeaux in November, is hoping to add locally discovered artefacts and also memories, to the Wellington Mill's historic treasure trove.

"Later this year we'll be enlisting the help of anyone with Fox Brothers garments or items connected to the Fox mill, to help us piece together as much of the company's history as possible," she said.

Since buying Fox Brothers, Meaden and Cordeaux have spent countless hours delving into the company's past, which date back more than two centuries.

When they bought the mill, they also acquired hundreds of dusty boxes stuffed with goods samples, labels, receipts and letters, many of which have still yet to be opened.

Finding new treasure and unravelling the firm's history is a pleasure that is absorbing Deborah's time: "I can get lost in archives," she told the WMN. "I can open a box, and then two hours later, I'm still there."

Fox is housed in a modern industrial unit, but its fixtures and fittings – saved from its now derelict Tone Mill – date back centuries. Employees still clock their cards into a long-since antique timepiece at the factory door. The plate glass window that fronts the building divides present from past.

Top fashion designers, including Ralph Lauren, fly in personally to inspect Fox's huge, canvas bound ledgers. They are pasted with cuttings of cloth, that show just how bright the fashions of long ago were.

The great "recipe" books include the chalk stripe Fox created for Churchill and Savile Row tailor Henry Poole and links to London's top tailors suggest that stars including Cary Grant and Fred Astaire sported Westcountry woven cloth.

In the Mill's heyday, when it employed 5,000 people, the River Tone would run indigo blue from the mill's dyeing works. During the Boer War at the turn of the 20th century, the British Army ditched its famous – and highly visible – red coats, to wear the new khaki colour standardised by Fox.

Since its foundation in the 18th century, the mill has gone from supplying cloth to the tailors of the Georgian era's haute ton, to mass production and a return to luxury again. It now provides tweeds, flannel and worsteds to the world's leading haute couture houses and Savile Row.

The mill's skilled weavers use techniques employed since the Industrial Revolution; hand-threading thousands of weft yarns onto loom's "tenterhooks" – the vertical threads through which the warp will be woven.

During Victoria's reign, Fox was deemed progressive in the extreme to have published a decree – recently found in a dusty old box – that no child under the age of eight would be employed at its looms.

Among the Fox Brothers archives and ephemera is a War Office order for 823 miles of cloth at a cost of £332,083, made into puttees worn by every British man that fought for King and country. The factory was also sent cloth from enemy POW puttees to analyse under top secret conditions. The samples still exist, with handwritten notes describing formulae that included "shoddy" wool – a term describing inferior fleece.

Girls keeping the home fires burning in 1914 wore snug wearing sweet flannel puttees with button-up sides. They would not look amiss in a teenage fashion magazine today.

Until the 1920s, Fox had its own legal tender and owned 55 banks around the Westcountry with deposits totalling £3.5 million, until a family member married into the Lloyd family and the local bank was subsumed. In Wellington, the Lloyds branch is still known as Fox Bank.

Both Somerset-born Meaden and Cordeaux share a strong sense of custodianship, rather than ownership over Fox, which says Deborah, "belongs more to Wellington, than to us".

This week, they announced they have taken on the lease of the old Counting House in the original Fox mill from its current owner and are currently in process of renovating it, to its original period style.

It will become a showroom to display the company's historical items, as well as showcase contemporary cloth collections to clients in a grand setting. The partners' vision is to perpetuate both the local legacy of Fox and a national pride in fine goods which are entirely British made.

Manufactured in the days when clothes were bought to last, there could be many items with the Fox label lying forgotten amid the mothballs in homes around the region.

Deborah said: "One of our commitments when acquiring the business was to protect and restore as much of Fox's heritage as possible. Who knows what treasures people will find – and WMN readers will be the first to know of our plans for the Great British Fox Hunt."