Glasgow’s Textile Industry

Before Glasgow built ships, it made cloth. Textiles were the first of the great industries that turned a tobacco port into a manufacturing city, and they remained, in one form or another, for the best part of two hundred years — not cotton alone, but a whole empire of thread, dye, pattern, needlework and carpet that clothed, coloured and carpeted a remarkable share of the world. Long after King Cotton’s crown had slipped, the west of Scotland still spun the planet’s sewing thread and dyed its brightest cloth.

This page tells the wider story: the move from linen to cotton, the weavers and the spinning mills, the Paisley thread dynasties that conquered the world, the blazing scarlet of the Vale of Leven, the shawls and fine needlework, the carpets and the warehouses, and the long unravelling of it all in the twentieth century.

From linen to cotton

Glasgow’s textile trade began not with cotton but with linen. Through the eighteenth century the west of Scotland spun and wove flax into linen and lawn, whitened on the bleachfields that spread along its rivers, and it was in linen that the region first learned the arts of spinning, weaving, bleaching and dyeing on a commercial scale. When cotton arrived from the 1780s it found those skills, and the capital of the tobacco lords looking for a new home, already waiting.

Cotton transformed everything. Powered first by water and then by steam, great spinning mills rose in Glasgow and in mill villages up the rivers — New Lanark on the Clyde, Catrine and Deanston in the countryside — while firms such as James Finlay & Co grew into industrial giants. The city became a world centre for the fine muslins and printed calicoes that Glasgow spun, wove and, above all, finished; the bleachfields, and later the chemical bleaching powder of the city’s great works, turned brown cloth brilliant white for printing. By the early nineteenth century cotton was the engine of the Glasgow economy, and the trades that clustered around it — dyeing, printing, thread, machine-making — were making the region rich.

The weavers & the mills

For a golden generation, the handloom weaver was the aristocrat of the trade. Weaving the fine cottons the mills could not yet make by machine, the handloom weavers of Calton, Bridgeton and Paisley were skilled, well paid, famously literate and fiercely independent — a radical, self-educated class who read and argued as they worked. Their story turned tragic. As early as 1787 the Calton weavers struck against wage cuts and troops fired on the crowd, killing six of them in one of the first fatal industrial disputes in Scotland. Then the power loom did to the weavers what machinery so often did: over the 1820s and 1830s it drove their wages down and down, until a proud craft collapsed into desperate poverty, and the independent weaver gave way to the mill-hand tending a machine.

The mills themselves rose and, in time, faltered. Their great crisis came in the 1860s, when the American Civil War and the Union blockade of the Confederacy cut off the supply of raw cotton, and the ‘cotton famine’ threw mills idle and thousands out of work across the west of Scotland. Cotton spinning never fully recovered its dominance afterwards — but by then the region’s textile genius had already spread into a dozen specialisms, several of which would outlast cotton entirely.

The thread empire

The greatest of them was thread. In neighbouring Paisley, two families — the Coats and the Clarks — industrialised the making of sewing thread, spinning cotton into strong, even, spooled thread for a world that was beginning to sew by machine. From a small mill built by James Coats at Ferguslie in the 1820s, J. & P. Coats grew with astonishing speed, building mills across America and Europe to leap over tariff walls; and in 1896 Coats merged with its great rival, Clark & Co, to form a combine worth some £22 million with tens of thousands of workers around the globe. Headquartered on Glasgow’s doorstep, J. & P. Coats became the largest thread manufacturer on earth and one of the largest companies of any kind in the world — so that nearly every hem sewn on the planet paid a fraction of a penny back to the west of Scotland. Paisley thread money endowed the town with parks, churches, libraries and an observatory, and, remarkably, Coats survives as a global thread company to this day.

Turkey red

Colour was a Glasgow trade too, and its capital was the Vale of Leven, the string of villages along the River Leven north-west of the city. There the dyers mastered Turkey red — a brilliant, unfading scarlet, produced from the madder root by a long and closely guarded process — and turned it into an industry. The printfields and dyeworks of Alexandria, Renton and Bonhill employed thousands, and shipped bales of blazing red and boldly patterned cloth to India and across the Empire, each bale marked with its own decorative label for its distant market. So dominant was the trade that in 1898 the main firms combined as the United Turkey Red Company. It was a spectacular business while it lasted — though, as with so much of the industry, cheaper synthetic dyes and changing markets would eventually undo it.

Pattern & needlework

Two more specialisms carried the region’s name around the world. Paisley gave its name to a pattern: weaving imitations of the costly Kashmir shawls that were the height of Regency fashion, the town’s weavers reproduced the curving teardrop motif so prolifically that the design has been called ‘paisley’ ever since, and has never quite gone out of production. And in the counties to the south-west, organised and financed from Glasgow warehouses, thousands of countrywomen worked the exquisite white-on-white embroidery known as Ayrshire whitework, or ‘sewed muslin’, whose fine needlework trimmed christening gowns and collars far beyond Scotland. Cloth, thread, colour, pattern, stitch: the west of Scotland had made itself master of every stage of the textile art.

Carpets & warehouses

The city’s own showpiece was woven underfoot. James Templeton & Co of Glasgow Green made carpets of such quality — Axminsters and the chenille that the firm perfected — that they furnished ocean liners, parliaments, cinemas and grand houses the world over, and the company raised, beside the Green, the astonishing Doge’s-Palace factory that still startles the eye. Around all these trades worked the great wholesale warehouses of the city centre — ‘soft goods’ houses such as Arthur & Co and Stewart & McDonald — whose warehouses supplied drapers across Britain and the Empire and whose grand Victorian buildings gave the Merchant City much of its later character. Glasgow did not only make textiles; it warehoused, financed and distributed them to the world.

The long unravelling

The twentieth century unpicked it all. Synthetic dyes undercut Turkey red; the imperial markets that had bought Glasgow’s cloth began to spin and weave their own; and the long post-war retreat of British manufacturing did the rest. One by one the mills, printfields, dyeworks and warehouses closed or were converted to other uses. Templeton’s wove its last carpet in 1980, and the United Turkey Red works were gone by then too. What survives is threads, in every sense of the word: Coats endures as a world thread company; the old warehouses have become flats, offices and bars; and the patterns — a paisley swirl on a scarf, a Turkey-red quilt in a museum case — carry the memory of the trade lightly around a world it once helped to clothe.

Glasgow’s textile empire