We have no accurate information about which companies purchased Fielden Royle's work. Once sold to the mass fashion textile and clothing print trade in Manchester, through an agent, or directly to the Manager of an in-house design studio for a large company like Tootals, or to the huge Calico Printers Association, Fielden Royle's women's fashion print designs became anonymous. They may have been used on cotton, rayon and silk blouses, dresses and into the widely used cotton overall pinafores made up by the many ready-to-wear companies in the region, and possibly for lingerie. We have so far been unable to find any information on this issue, beyond Ray Watkinson's guess that some designs may been sold to the Calico Printers Association. The actuality is that Fielden Royle's bold, colourful, fresh and endlessly varied designs were simply absorbed into the industry, desperate as it was for 'novelty' and continual change, even during the Depression years of the 1930s. As Watkinson also commented, a good few of Fielden Royle's designs, targeted with professionalism at the mass roller print market (rather than for the more expensive screen-printed market) would anyway very probably have been altered in colour and print size for example and thus would become difficult to identify.

Watkinson commented that the status of the designer of these everyday prints was very low in the trade. They were never called 'artists' or artists—designers. He noted in his letter of October 23rd, 1985 that the term 'Artist' was a term 'of abuse in the Cotton trade and always has been'. Rather, Watkinson stressed, the free-lance designer - like Walter Fielden Royle - had to know his place because he then he 'should submit more readily to [the] altering [his designs] at the whim of the man who might or might not buy them: it indicates your willingness: it indicates your willingness to do this: and if English cotton print design is abysmally bad as so much of it has been, it is because we get the fruit of the wisdom and sensibility of  the mill manager not the work of the designer.' It is nonetheless possible to track designs in surviving garments and in period advertisements for example, that are close in mood to Fielden Royle's work, if not exact reproductions. 

One of the aims of this web site is to recover the history and imagery of the textile design work of Walter Fielden Royle and to place his professionalism, skill and creativity alongside that of well known textile designers  of the same period, who worked for the far more expensive, better known 'artist-designed,' wood block or screen printed textile market – Paul Nash, Barron and Larcher and Joyce Clissold, for example. Fielden Royle was a designer of 'everyday' roller printed fabrics used widely in British ready-to-wear clothing for both men and women for nearly forty years from 1926. He is one of a lost and forgotten army of usually anonymous textile designers who have been the creative force within this Manchester trade throughout the city's many centuries of producing thousand and thousands of miles of printed cottons and rayons. Walter Fielden Royle certainly deserves his place in that history. The University of Brighton Dress History Teaching Collection, with its clear interest in 'everyday' fashion and textile design, seems a fitting place where the resurrection of Fielden Royle's name as an established, recognised, highly professional and creative textile designer from 1926 to 1961 should begin.