May 1935
Weaving should have been outlined near the beginning of our
series if we had followed a purely logical sequence. But in this
bundling up of so many diverse things, as Montaigne puts it, we
have not made any special logical rule, or rather have frequently
designed a disciplined procession - horse, foot, and guns - only to
find our interests taking us down byways and into odd corners of
history - a fine, mixed metaphor! Anyhow, in Scottish Woollens we
are dealing with an Art not a Science, so perhaps Fancy is a better
leader than Logic.
To tell the truth we have been frightened of the subject. Tartans
was a big subject that has filled a shelf or two of volumes from
the most sumptuous folios down to quite humble small books - but
Weaving has filled whole libraries. It seems a hopeless job to deal
with such a subject in four pages.
In fact we can only touch in a detail or two to suggest in a way
the vastness of our spaces, the wonderful diverse lines of human
activity, human invention, human effort that have gone to the
evolution of the modem industry of Weaving. Weaving is one of the
great arts - world wide, set at the very gates of civilisation -
uniting in a way all civilisations, all barbarisms, all people save
those in the tropics, in that desperate struggle for life against
the implacable destroyer and creator. Nature. It is always to these
few universal arts that we must go for the history of the race.
Building developed into architecture, and carries with it our only
knowledge of man's earliest struggle for protection against man and
beast and cold. This developing art gives us our only knowledge of
races that have vanished like breath from a window pane. As
difficulties were surmounted, the art blossomed up into some of the
loveliest flowerings of the human spirit, and mankind, freed from
the bondage of necessity, lavished on his buildings the imagery of
his dreams.
Weaving, in the same way, has developed from the purely primitive
function of protection to a vehicle of thought and imagination.
Weaving did more than steam, more than aircraft, to tell us of the
world and other people. It was sails that brought the civilisation
of the Mediterranean to our land, that brought the various
ingredients together that made the
Anglo-Saxon race, that joined the great continents of America to
the outside world - Phoenicians, Venetians, Vikings, C
onquistadores, Puritan fathers, French emigrés, Highlanders cleared
from their native glens to make room for sheep - and as though the
subject were too confined, the American expedition at present
exploring the ancient sites of the Bible has just unearthed coarse
linens evidently woven two or three thousand years before the Birth
of C hrist.
But this runs away with us. Our business is with Scottish
Woollens, and how the old craft developed into the great mechanical
industry of today. The trade has kept its old craft tradition in
Scotland . The old, skilled craft evolved slowly in our old, poor
country, much isolated by its poverty and as things then were by
its remoteness from the centres of light in Southern Europe . It is
to this ancient and still well remembered ancestry that our
Scottish Woollen Trade owes its marked individuality.
In the construction of ordinary cloths there are two sets of
threads : the Warp, running the long way of the web of cloth and
for ordinary purposes of clothing from your head to your feet; and
the cross threads, the Weft, or more anciently the Woof, a word
only remembered nowadays by poets. In the simplest form of cloth
construction the first weft thread is passed under the first warp
thread and over the second and so on right across; the second weft
thread - which is really the same thread on its return journey -
passes over the first warp thread and under the second, and this
simple weave is called the Plain Weave. But the great bulk of
Scottish Woollens are made in a denser and more pliable weave which
we call the C ommon Twill, but which has many other names
elsewhere. It is over two and under two, moving one thread onwards
each time. Apart from certain figuring threads used in decoration
of cloths and certain threads forming pile effects like carpets,
tapestries, and velvets, all woven cloths are constructed on these
lines.
Perhaps the best way to deal with our job is to visit one of our
Scottish mills, somewhere in the country amongst trees and fields
and hills, probably employing about three hundred, possibly much
less. We are not mass producers. No firm doing specialised novelty
work can be big. To begin with, it would be beyond the wit of man
to produce novelty in bulk. If bulk comes in at the door, novelty
flies out of the window !
As we walk towards the weaving shed a thin chattering fills the
air, while somehow through it runs a rhythmic metallic clink, a
sound that suggests thousands of typewriters all at work with the
distant sound of a blacksmith at his anvil, overlaid on the
chattering background of sound as the clear tones of the solo
violin rise through the complex background of the
orchestration.
As we open the door an appalling clamour overwhelms us. A noise in
which lecturing is impossible and even thought seems obliterated.
Yet the girls and men seem to go about their business unaware of
the pandemonium. It is very seldom that a worker fails to become
completely accustomed to the outrageous noise or to be in the least
deafened by it. Possibly the fact that outside the weaving shed the
sound hardly carries means that the volume is not great, and so the
ear after the first shock can endure the sound without
injury.
As the yarn is brought in from the spinning room it is fast wound
on to various types of bobbins or, as we call them, pirns. Other
machines are winding down hanks of coloured yams that have been
dyed in the yam. For the warps the yam is usually wound on
"cheeses" - solid cylinders of yarn with a wooden core possibly six
inches long and four or five inches in diameter - holding somewhere
about three-quarters of a pound. Several ingenious types of
machines are winding the weft on to long narrow bobbins for the
shuttles. The slick work of the girls who tend these machines is
delightful to watch - as is all dexterity. True, the eye is easy to
deceive, but no eye can follow the movement of the worker's fingers
as she ties one thread to another - the dexterity of the conjurer
applied to common jobs.
Next comes the warping, rows upon rows of the cheeses are being
built into the bank of the warping mill. A "bank" is a tall holder
something like a bookcase, and in it, each on its steel spindle,
the cheeses are arranged according to the pattern to be produced,
just as the volumes in a bookcase follow some prearranged order.
From there these threads are drawn off on to the great sparred
cylinder of the mill, where by various devices each thread is kept
in its proper place - and as the cheeses whirl round, the bank-boys
watch the whole rushing spider's web to signal to the warper to
stop his mill if a thread breaks or runs out. An elaborate and
tricky job on complicated work such as our Scottish manufacturers
make.
The bell rings to show the needed length has been warped, and then
the contents of the mill cylinder are unwound on to the weaver's
beam, a heavy, strong, wood-clad steel affair, say, nine feet long
and eight or nine inches in diameter. It is shown in the diminutive
pattern loom size in our plate of Drawing. "And the staff of his
spear was like a weaver's beam," an ill weapon to fight with a
sling and smooth stones from the brook !
Next comes the skilly job of Drawing. Every individual thread of
the warp on the beam has to be drawn separately through a little
eyelet in the weaving harness, again all according to a more or
less elaborate scheme, rhythmic and balanced in its sequences like
a verse of poetry, but often more elaborate in its scheme than any
verse.
And all this time other preparations are going on. Some yarns are
going through the doubling machines where two or three or more
threads are being twisted together, sometimes at two or even three
stages so as to produce some particular effect of colour blending -
sometimes only to produce thicker or stronger threads. The twister
spindles run invisibly at possibly two or three thousand
revolutions per minute, putting on the turns per inch with
mathematical precision according to whatever may have been decided.
" C hains " are being put together by which the automatic action of
the power loom changes the shuttle colours according to the pattern
of the cloth, however intricate the design may be. Other chains are
being made up by which the weaving mechanism is controlled and by
means of which the actual construction of the cloth is decided,
apart altogether from the colour scheme it may be carrying.
And so we arrive at the point where all these diverse activities
converge in the power loom. The weaver's beam is lifted in and
connected to the machinery. The weaving harness with its
innumerable threads, each in its little eyelet, is tied up. The
warp threads are attached to the cloth beam in front of the loom.
The chains for the weaving and shuttle mechanisms are placed in
position. The wheels governing the number of weft threads per inch
are put on. The "reed" for beating up the weft threads put across
the web by the shuttles is fixed in the "lay". The different
colours for the shuttles are brought from the winding frames and
put into their allotted shuttles. The shuttles are placed in their
proper "boxes". The power-loom tuner in charge of the gang of looms
weaves through a repeat or two of the pattern, examines the work
carefully along with the standard for that pattern and sees that no
thread has been wrongly placed. The man in charge of the work of
the power-loom shed checks everything over again and sends for the
weaver who looks after that loom. The weaver pulls over the
starting handle and her machine adds its part to the infernal
pandemonium.
Note-Space does not allow us to reprint the diagrams from No. 1
illustrating weave constructions, nor from No. 10 showing the chief
parts of the loom. The hand loom is from a sketch by the late James
Riddel, A.R.S.A., R.S.W., of an old weaver at Kirriemuir, Barrie 's
Thrum.