[BITList] Scotland's Forest

[HUGH]

Dave,

The Newark Sailcloth Company, aka the Glen Mill, had nothing as romantic as a water wheel.  No doubt they had a steam engine at first, then electric motors driving overhead shafts with pulleys.  My mother worked there from age 14, as did her aunts - photo to prove it.  The water piped in was for various treatment purposes - I don't think they did bleaching, though they had a big grassed area bordering the river on which cloth might have been spread to bleach in the sun - we played on it. In that case clean water would have been needed.  The mills in Greenock, served by the Cut (a meandering water conduit from Loch Thom on the hills, now a listed industrial monument) required great quantities of water.  Unfortunately, the water in its natural state was, and is, peaty, so no use for treating white cloth.  Sand bed filtration had to be introduced.  None of this was known to me when I was researching information on public health in Greenock for an essay on the history of technology.  Received opinion was that the clean water supply was to benefit the inhabitants by reducing the need to draw water, and cholera, from public wells and taps.  Not so, it was to keep the cloth clean in the mills, and the sand bed filters with back flushing introduced by Robert Thom, predating those hitherto accepted (till I pointed it out) as the first (in London), were invented by him in response to the mills' problems. Thom is/was a very distant relation of mine by marriage.

I found that few of the Glen Mill's employees, mostly female, lived anywhere near the mill, and one source says many of them used to gather in Greenock, some 3 or 4 miles west, and march to work each morning singing.  Shades of Gracie Fields, and probably woe betide any man they met en-route. During breaks at the big mill at the east end of Port Glasgow, Birkmyre's, the ladies would gather outside on the pavements and shout benign insults at passing men. There were areas in the mill where an unaccompanied male would never go, unless he was doing maintenance or was just a lad, when he became an honorary woman. Debagging, and painting of the parts, might be the least of it, if one believed it all. This all hearked back to the dim Celtic past, when aspects of the making of cloth were a female mystery, not permitted to be witnessed by men under pain of something nasty.

End of lecture.

Hugh.
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