As the Welsh woollen mills emerged from the Second World War, the Rural Industries Bureau again turned its attention to their current condition and future prospects. During the war, the work of the Bureau had been diverted from ‘marketing craftsmen’s goods’ to ‘the campaign for increased food production inaugurated by the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries.’ 1 As a result:

Little direct technical work was done for the Welsh textile mills, about eighty of which continued to produce during the war. Prior to the war, the Bureau had provided a design service for the production of Welsh tweeds of good design, but the war-time allocation of wool depended on the mills making only essential goods such as knitting yarns or service blankets.2

An estimated 78 mills were still in business in 1948, many of them (like Esgair Moel) primarily or solely producing knitting wool, which required less manpower, less machinery and, if sold as wool ‘in oil’, no precious ration coupons.

In 1947, the Development Commission (the UK government body responsible for rural economic and social development) appointed an economist, G.M.Dykes, to provide an interim report on the Welsh textile industry as a basis for determining future policy and support.3 This was accompanied by a survey of mills and their equipment in operation in 1947.

Dykes’s seven page report summarised a familiar situation and issues, frequently n echoing W.P. Crankshaw’s comprehensive survey published twenty years previously. In the smaller mills, the equipment was ‘generally old and a good deal [was] in a dilapidated condition.’ The question was whether such machinery could be overhauled to produce cloth for the postwar market in terms of quality, design and price. Inevitably, larger mills with greater resources were better placed to reach non-local customers by producing ‘high-quality tweeds, rugs, scarves and the like for the London market…’ However, Dykes observed: ‘For the great majority of the mills … flannel and knitting yarns are still the sole products and, while under present condition conditions of postwar scarcity, the industry is relatively prosperous, the future is regarded by many owners with a good deal of apprehension.’ 4

According to Dykes, the issue was not that the small mills were incapable of producing good cloth, so long as their machines were in good order, but that the mill owners lacked the time and knowledge to ‘develop their trade’. This is the perspective of the external economist: overlooking the value of local networks in favour of longer commodity chains, and prioritising growth over the flexibility of small-scale production. It was, however, undeniable that many mills were not at all business-like: some owners still costed their cloth only by weight; some sold to both wholesale and retail customers at the same price; and some found it difficult to deliver on time and to an agreed specification. And now these family firms, operating within a local circuit of suppliers and customers, had to contend with dramatic price volatility in the wool trade. Nor were they immune to difficulties of recruiting younger workers to their small enterprises which offered few opportunities for training or promotion. The photograph (above) of 16 year old Arfon Davies in Penmachno Mill is a rare image of a young millworker in the 1940s and 50s.

Dykes concluded:

… the problem of the woollen industry of Wales is essentially one of adaptation to new conditions…A number of manufacturers have shown away by the production of quality tweeds and special specialities, which retain the best traditional Welsh features and characteristics, but it is clear that many of the smaller producers need expert advice, and assistance, not only in the design and manufacture of new types of fabric, but also on the marketing side.5

How could the small mills be supported to navigate the postwar economy? By the time Dykes presented his report, the Rural Industries Bureau had already resumed its prewar activities. A new Technical Officer (Welsh Textiles), George Gaunt, was appointed in June 1947 and produced his own analysis the following year. Ostensibly designed to complement the Dykes report, the Gaunt report was more knowledgeable, more technical - and more critical.

Having enumerated the number and types of carding and spinning machines and looms in use across the country, and having inspected the quality of cloth in production, Gaunt was evidently baffled by the continued existence of tiny factories making old-fashioned cloth for local customers. With a few exceptions (such as Holywell Textile Mills and Cambrian Mills in Drefach Felindre), Wales was far cry from the Yorkshire scene with which he was familiar. Gaunt recognised that the small mills could not compete on quantity or price: therefore, they should specialise more, not less. Here was an opportunity to make high quality, distinctive cloth for a niche market. He even advocated support for a return to cottage hand weaving as a means of supplementing household incomes in the countryside:

A line of development for a rural community which is impervious to competition offered by mechanisation is genuine hand-loom weaving…Although speed of production is lower when compared with the power loom, tremendous scope is available to a Designer, allowing easy changing, at the same time being highly suitable for weaving short lengths of exclusive specialities. 6

Gaunt concluded that ‘the industry should follow the same policy as that of the Harris tweed trade by adopting a registered trade mark and a cloth possessing distinctive characteristics.’ 7 At present, ‘there were no textiles produced in Wales that could not be made cheaper and often of a more consistent quality in Yorkshire, where the weaving mills were adjacent to dyeing and finishing works.’ The only hope for the future of the Welsh industry was to concentrate on ‘either traditional wool fabrics or special weaves for discriminating customers.’ 8

Gaunt’s tone was sometimes critical, but his ideas were reflected in subsequent attempts to register a trademark for Welsh woollens and in the increasing identification of Welsh textiles with distinctive double-cloth weaving from the 1950s onwards.

His time in Wales was, however, short-lived. In 1950, Gaunt moved to Sweden to manage an up-to-date mill employing 350 people - more than half the total workforce of the Welsh industry at the time. He resigned from his post with the Rural Industries Bureau after two and a half years of, in his view, attempting to achieve the impossible. In response, a sigh of relief can be detected between the lines in the Bureau’s archive. Gaunt’s parting shot was that there was no point in the recruiting another Technical Officer as no individual could reverse the inevitable decline of an industry which he described as recalcitrant, apathetic and uncooperative. 9

The officers of the Rural Industries Bureau thought otherwise. In June 1950, a Scotsman, Spencer J. Hoy, was appointed as Gaunt’s successor. Two years later the Bureau reported a more positive attitude among all concerned:

Previously the service was of a general advisory nature with what might be termed a ‘Yorkshire textile’ bias, due principally to the background and outlook of Mr. Hoy‘s immediate predecessor. Mr. Hoy’s training and expertise in the Scottish border woollen industry provided a fresh outlook and gave new impetus to the Bureau’s services… His first impression [is] that the Welsh woolen mills have a greater affinity to the Scottish border, textile industry then to any other and that the quality and characteristics of many of the traditional Welsh textiles compare favorably with the Scottish products. 10

Still, the issues facing the Welsh mill owners - and, by extension, Hoy - were many and complex. The greatest challenge was the wildly fluctuating price of wool: difficult for every mill to manage. For most, the only option was to ‘wait and see’ if prices became less volatile once international trade resumed. Meanwhile, Hoy was impressed by the response of the Welsh mill owners: ‘The calm reaction to the terrific price fluctuations is amazing, although there has been no stable basis on which to conduct business, there have been no signs of panic in any quarter.’ 11

Hoy was convinced that diversification into synthetic fibres would be disastrous for the Welsh industry. ‘To the Layman an apparently obvious answer to high wool costs is to use other fibres and so reduce the price of the finished cloth, but in Wales this would not only be difficult, but highly dangerous.’ 12 In fact, synthetic fibres were expensive and hard to obtain, and few Welsh mills had the appropriate equipment to weave with nylon. But Hoy’s argument was existential as much as economic:

In Wales the mills use all virgin wool, and as such enjoy a certain standing because of that. Take that away from them and we will find them in the highly dangerous position of losing what is perhaps their most valuable attraction to the discerning public. The Welsh manufacturer takes great pride in the article he produces, and considering the handicaps under which he works, this is a highly justifiable pride, and he would abhor the idea of adulterating his wool by using synthetic yarns, which would reduce the quality of his cloths. 13

Alluding to his Yorkshire predecessor, Hoy commented that, although the attitude of ‘if it’s got two ends we’ll spin it’ prevailed elsewhere, the Welsh industry was defined by its use of ‘virgin wool’. (In fact, during the First World War, a number of the mills had mixed cotton with wool to produce ‘angola’ flannel for army shirts: a profitable, but short-term expedient.)

In many ways, the small Welsh firms dealt with the economic uncertainty of the new decade better than their larger Yorkshire and Scottish counterparts. Hoy reported that 10,000 employees had been laid off from the Yorkshire industry in 1951, and in Scotland some tweed mills were working a three day week, producing ‘khaki and government contract cloths … a last resort in Scotland.’ 14 Unlike Dykes, Hoy understood that the Welsh mills ‘failure’ to expand allowed for greater flexibility, and that local customer networks were more reliable (if less profitable) than longer supply chains. Meanwhile, the mills’ least worst option was to buy only as much wool as they needed - ‘on a hand to mouth basis’ - and to resist selling their stock at the bottom of the market.15

Hoy recognised the strengths of the Welsh mills, but he was not blind to their shortcomings, including the condition of their premises and the average age of the workforce. Buying replacement or updated equipment might be desirable in some instances, but was not always the answer, given the long lead times for the delivery of new machinery and the need to obtain finance from the Rural Industries Loan Scheme. A complementary approach was to make more efficient and creative use of existing equipment by providing technical and design training for both managers and operatives. The majority of mill owners and workers had learned their trade from their predecessors; as a result, levels of understanding and aspiration were often replicated rather than expanded. With a grant from the Welsh Industries Fund, Hoy instigated annual scholarships for a small number of Welsh workers to attend courses at the Scottish Woollen Technical College in Galashiels.

By now, the Rural Industries Bureau had established a base for its Welsh operations in The Plas, Machynlleth, a large mansion on the edge of the town, which had been given to Machynlleth Urban District Council in 1948. As well as office space, the Bureau had room to develop educational resources for manufacturers. Hoy set up a ‘laboratory’ to investigate practical questions relevant to mill owners: for example, how to calculate the weight of different types of cloth from an analysis of the twist and density of the yarns used in its production. He also intended to ‘start a survey to determine the average relative humidity and temperatures prevailing inside the mills’ in order to understand better ‘the cause of “wildness” in some of the Welsh yarns.’ 16

Hoy’s colleague in these activities was R.D.Morrison, appointed as Designer (Welsh Textiles) in 1951. Alongside Hoy’s ‘laboratory’, The Plas contained a library of weaving patterns and a textile display. Any factory that manufactured a ‘Bureau design’ was asked to supply a length of cloth to show how the weaving draft had translated into a piece of finished fabric. As well as a library of designs available to the mills, the ‘textile room’ contained a small, portable exhibition used to advertise the work of the Bureau and the mills at trade fairs and county shows.

Among the firms that adopted Morrison’s designs was a new experimental factory which had opened in Dinas Mawddwy, Merionethshire, in 1948 (marked on Gaunt’s map of the same year shown above). Originally proposed by the Rural Industries Bureau to provide an exemplar of economic development in mid-Wales, the idea was taken up by the Meirionethshire Branch of the National Farmers Union, which raised sufficient capital from its members to buy a disused quarry building and second-hand machinery to start the new mill. Trading as the Welsh Wool Society Ltd., the enterprise began with great optimism, but before long, the challenges of running a mill became apparent to its directors. Who better to take charge of the fledgling enterprise than Spencer Hoy? In 1952, he was offered - and accepted - a higher salary and a permanent position as the manager at Dinas Mawddwy.

Following Hoy’s departure from the Rural Industries Bureau, John Schofield was appointed as his successor. Schofield’s brief was extended beyond Wales and his post was temporary, subject to review after five years. In the event, the position of Textiles Officer came to an end with the creation of the Welsh Woollen Manufacturers Association in 1955. The idea of this new Association was that the mill owners would take over responsibility for the development and promotion of the industry. The Rural Industries Bureau continued to provide design support through the work of R.D.Morrison, but henceforth the mill owners set the agenda for their own development and promotion.

Find out more about the success (or not) of both the mill at Dinas Mawddwy and the Welsh Woollen Manufacturers Association in future articles in The Welsh Blanket.

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The time will soon come, we trust, when the Welsh Folk Museum will integrate within itself all the elements of Welsh life. As a picture of the past and a mirror of the present, it will be an inspiration for our country’s future: from it will radiate energy to vitalize Welsh life.1

The Welsh Folk Museum at St Fagans, on the outskirts of Cardiff, opened to the public on 1 April 1948. It was an informal occasion: the official opening ceremony did not take place until 1954 and at first, the exhibits were confined to the historic rooms inside St Fagans Castle, a Tudor mansion previously owned by the Earl of Plymouth. In 1946, Plymouth had donated the castle and its estate to the National Museum of Wales as the site of the first national open-air museum in Britain. From the outset, this new museological experiment was conceived as ‘a living picture of the Welsh tradition’2 and as a cultural resource for the present and the future.

What did the idea of a ‘folk museum’ mean to its founders and, in particular, to its first Keeper-in-charge, Iorwerth C. Peate? The Welsh translation of ‘folk’ is gwerin - hence the name of the museum in Cymraeg: Amgueddfa Werin Cymru. However, the connotations of gwerin are complex and ambiguous. A previous Substack introduced Peate as a young curator at the National Museum in Cardiff in the late 1920s. He used his study of the yarn factory at Llanrhystyd in north Cardiganshire to articulate his view of Wales as an essentially rural nation, rooted in bro (connection to a particular place), Cymraeg (the Welsh language) and a conscious identification with shared traditions and histories. For Peate and fellow nationalists of his generation, diwylliant gwerin (folk culture) expressed values that were vernacular, traditional and local, and implied a social order that resisted distinctions of class and wealth. This idealization of gwerin became central to a foundation myth of Wales forged in resistance to nineteenth-century impact of Anglicisation and industrialisation. As Prys Morgan has observed: ‘… Gwerin was a useful myth, based like all successful myths, on a certain amount of realism, but a little bit too good to be true.’3

In many ways, the creation of the Welsh Folk Museum was the materialisation of Peate’s conception of an ideal Wales. In its early years, the Museum focussed on a history of Wales that was rural rather than urban, and craft-based rather than industrial. The central idea was to create was a ‘folk park’ where domestic and working buildings at risk of demolition, from different centuries and different parts of the country, would be re-erected as an assemblage of vernacular history. Peate’s vision for the museum was that it would consist of ‘two parts… a modern block of buildings for the scientific exhibition of the materials of our life and culture, and an open-air section where buildings are seen in their environmental setting.’ 4

The important precedents for the Welsh project existed in Scandinavia, starting with the creation of the first open-air museum in the world, Skansen, on the edge of Stockholm, founded in 1891 by the Swedish language teacher and folklorist, Artur Hazelius. Peate clearly felt an affinity with Sweden and its people whom he described as another ‘small nation, but like many other small nations, they are, in several directions outstanding.’5 Hazelius’s vision for Skansen was to create a Sweden in miniature: a distillation of its culture and history. For Peate, Skansen was a ‘warm and living picture of all that is most characteristic in the long history of the Swedish people.’6 Now there was the prospect of creating a microcosm of Wales in the grounds of St Fagans Castle, a short bus ride from the centre of Cardiff.

Peate first presented details and photographs of Esgair Moel Mill in Llanwrtyd Wells to the Folk Museum committee in April 1949. The mill had recently ceased operating and was offered, with its historic equipment intact, by its owner, Mrs Pugh Jones. The cost of dismantling and moving the building (and its machinery) to the Museum was estimated at £2,000. The committee agreed to the proposal on condition that, as well as making a complete photographic record of the structure and its contents, an architect would make a full set of drawings. These turned out to be useless, as all the angles were squared and all the uneven surfaces were flattened out. A portfolio of plans made by the museum carpenter and technician were more accurate, as was demonstrated when the re-installed water-driven machinery worked perfectly.

It took eight weeks for four men to record and dismantle the mill. Metal discs were used to number each timber, and a number was painted on every stone removed. As much timber as possible was saved and reused from the original building, whereas the masonry of the re-erected mill comprises a mixture of original stones with stones sourced closer to St Fagans.

Peate and his colleagues were learning the complex business of dismantling, moving and re-erecting an old building, as well as making curatorial decisions relating to authenticity and storytelling. One element of the mill which was abandoned in the move to St Fagans was a brick-built extension which had housed a power loom.7 Evidently this structure (and its use) did not fit the aesthetic or technological narrative that the curators wanted to promote.

The location of the mill within the Museum park was determined by the need for an adjacent supply of water to power the water wheel. Conveniently, a disused swimming pool belonging to St Fagans Castle was repurposed for the task. Since 1952, water has been pumped from the swimming pool to the top of a bank behind the mill, from which it runs by force of gravity along a leat (or channel) and over the mill wheel. The mill wheel then turns a cogwheel, which drives the mechanical belt that conducts power to the carding, spinning and fulling equipment.

When the doors of Esgair Moel opened to the public in 1952, the original machinery was again in working order. Since then, the mill has been operated by a succession of demonstrator-weavers, starting with W.E.Morris, who came to the Museum having been works manager at Meirion Mill, Dinas Mawddwy. This carthen, hand-woven at Esgair Moel by Morris in the 1950s, shows his remarkable skill in emulating another great weaver, Lewis D. Jones of Lampeter. We have met Jones in a previous article and already admired his carthen - acquired by the National Museum in 1926 - on which Morris’s piece is based.

The current weaver, Dewi Jones, is responsible for every stage in the production process in the mill, as well as looking after the antiquated equipment and talking to visitors. As he says: ‘I do everything- other than shearing the sheep.’8 Jones started working at the Museum as a trainee in 1988, learning his craft alongside the then weaver, Gareth Jenkins. Jenkins had started in 1981 and eventually retired in 2005. Each weaver has passed their knowledge of the mill to their successor. Like his predecessors, Jones keeps a book with the information he needs to operate and maintain the equipment, such as the spinning jack which is nearly two hundred years old and the only one of its kind still in use. The choice of dye colours is also his responsibility, using the same industrial products that were available when the mill was operating in Llanwrtyd Wells.

The idea is to manufacture ‘the range of products which would emanate from a small rural mill’ - including carthenni, shawls and suitings - using Welsh fleece.9 This blue and cream check blanket was the last piece woven by Gareth Jenkins before his retirement from the Museum.

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Esgair Moel Woollen Mill can claim to be the most historically significant mill in Wales. Not because this little factory was exceptional in either design or operation, but because it was the first building to be removed, rebuilt and exhibited in the Welsh Folk Museum (now St Fagans National Museum of History). The Museum opened to the public in 1948 and Esgair Moel went on display in 1952 as a fully-equipped mill, powered by water from the swimming pool in the grounds of St Fagans Castle. Like all ‘objects’ in the museum it has an acquisition number: in this case, 50.13.1. It has operated almost continuously from c.1760 to the present, with just a short hiatus when it was transported from its original site near Llanwrtyd Wells to the outskirts of Cardiff. Its machinery is the oldest in use in a Welsh mill today.

The fact that Esgair Moel was typical of the all-purpose rural mills of Wales was attractive to the founders of the new Museum, who were looking for exemplars of the general rather than the unusual. As very small factory, once part of a family farm, it also fitted into a history of Wales that emphasised the rural and the artisanal, at the expense of the urban and the industrial. In other words, it met the founding criteria of the Welsh ‘folk’ museum. Unlike larger textile factories in, for example, the Severn Valley, Esgair Moel was less connected with the wholesale trade with English merchants: it spun the fleece from local sheep to make cloth and blankets for local farmers and customers.

The story of Esgair Moel Mill comprises two chapters. The first, is its history as commercial enterprise from c.1760 to 1948: nearly two hundred years of weaving in the Breconshire countryside. The second is its afterlife from 1952 to the present: a hybrid museum exhibit and functioning mill, in which cloth is produced as both history lesson and quasi-commercial operation. This article recounts the life of the mill up to 1948 when its operator, Rhys Williams, unexpectedly died; next week’s article explores its post-1952 career within the Museum.

Esgair Moel mill was built c.1760 by a man called Richard Rhys Winston who owned farm called Esgair Moel Isaf, near Llanwrtyd Wells in Breconshire (now part of the county of Powys).1 Like many farmers, the Winston family combined agriculture with textile production. Initially, the ‘mill’ was probably little more than a weaving shed (tŷ gwŷdd) with one or two hand looms and perhaps rudimentary equipment for carding and dyeing fleece in an adjacent room. Spinning by hand on a spinning wheel (droell fawr) was traditionally women’s work and probably took place in the farm house until the 1830s or 1840s, when the availability of rudimentary machinery took spinning out of the home and into the factory. At this point, the mill building was extended to house the new equipment, allocating a specific space to each process and marking the transition to a factory system on a tiny scale.

Water power, required to operate the new machinery for carding, spinning and fulling was provided by a wheel inside the mill, driven by water from a mill leat (or channel) diverted from Nant Cledan, half a mile away.

The fact that in 1947, Esgair Moel still contained its original machinery was essential to its acquisition by the Welsh Folk Museum. From the outset, the idea of the Museum was to employ craftspeople and demonstrators to show visitors how, in the past, objects were made by hand or using relatively simple machinery. The equipment in Esgair Moel provided material evidence of the longevity of technology and ways of working in a small Welsh mill. For example, fleece was (and still is) dyed in a copper vat heated by a wood fire, and warps for weaving were (and are) made by winding yarn by hand around a simple wooden frame. These unchanging methods must have been sufficient for the volume of production needed for the mill to be sustainable. Sales of new textile machinery to Welsh mills (often supplied by Yorkshire manufacturers) during the first half of the nineteenth century reduced, but never entirely eliminated, reliance on processes by carried out by hand.

Some time around the 1830s, the Winston family sold the Esgair Moel farm and its mill. From then on, farming and textile manufacture became separate enterprises and the woollen mill was leased to a textile operator as an independent concern. This was also the period when the building was enlarged and equipped both with water power and new machinery. It is plausible to think that the expansion and modernisation of the mill marks its transition from part-time concern as part of a family farm, to a standalone little factory.

After this short period of expansion and innovation, the history Esgair Moel shows a preference for continuity over change, and adherence to inherited, small-scale processes.

As an all-purpose (or comprehensive) mill, every stage in the process of transforming fleece into cloth was undertaken in this little factory:

Dyeing: the custom at Esgair Moel was to dye the raw fleece at the start of the production process rather than the finished cloth at the end ( ‘dyed in the wool’ as they say) At the end of the nineteenth century, a lean-to dyeing room was added to one end of the building, but the method of dyeing stayed the same: liquid dye was heated in two copper boilers, each holding 30 and 100 gallons of dye respectively. The preferred wood for the fires was alder, which reliably reached the required temperature, and could be bought as off-cuts from the local Breconshire clog makers.

Willying: the next stage was to disentangle and loosen the wool, and also to mix shades of undyed fleece - for example, black and white combined to produce grey yarn for weaving flannel. First, the fleece was sprinkled with oil from a watering can and then passed through rollers into the water-powered willying machine - also sometimes called a ‘devil’ (diawl or diafol).

Carding: the disentangled wool was turned into long slivers of fibre (sometimes called rovings), opened out and aligned in preparation for spinning.

Spinning: the carded fibre was too weak and too thick to be used for weaving: therefore the next step was to create strong, even yarn through a process of twisting and compressing. The great spinning wheel (droell fawr) continued in use at Esgair Moel for bobbin winding, but for quantities of spinning, it was superseded by the purchase of a water-powered ‘mule’ (so called because it was a hybrid invention) manufactured c.1830 by a Welsh millwright, John Davies of Dôl-goch, Llanbrynmair. An advantage of this particular machine was that it held 80 spindles for simultaneous production; a disadvantage was that it still required the strength and skill of a mill hand to work the heavy mechanism.

Twisting: spun yarn required a further process of twisting to make three-ply thread for weaving blankets (single ply was used for weaving flannel and shawls). The twister at Esgair Moel was an ingenious wooden contraption connected to the water wheel via a driving wheel. When the machine was set in motion, a row of bobbins holding loosely twisted yarns revolved fast enough to turn a loose twist into a firm and even three ply yarn.

Weaving: the first stage in the weaving process was the creation of a ‘warp’ (ystof) of longitudinal threads, which were laid across the loom and intersected by the transverse threads called the ‘warp’ or ‘woof’ (anwe). At Esgair Moel, the most rudimentary method was used for making the warp: the weaver used a wooden warping bat to place the threads in the correct position as he wound them around a home-made wooden frame fixed to the wall. The simplicity of the warping tool kit was inversely proportional to the skill of the weaver who had to calculate the number and length of threads required for a specific width of warp, and ensure that the threads did not become crossed or entangled on the warping frame. Then, when the weaver attached the warp to the loom, he had to maintain an equal tension between each thread.

Esgair Moel was equipped with two eighteenth-century wooden hand looms: one wide (for cloth 88 inches wide) and one narrow (for cloth 54 inches wide). Both were operated by four foot treadles, allowing the weaver to raise and lower the warp threads in multiple combinations for the creation of complex patterns as well as plain weaves.

Fulling: when Esgair Moel was first built in the 1760s, the cloth was probably sent to a local pandy for fulling - ie. the process of closing the woven threads to thicken the cloth. The addition of water power at Esgair Moel reduced the need for ‘outwork’ and some time probably in the 1840s, fulling equipment was installed in the mill. Cloth was fulled three times under pounding hammers driven by the water wheel. Each time the cloth was soaked in a trough beneath the hammers: first, in urine; second, in fuller’s earth; and finally, in hot soapy water. At the end of the nineteenth century, the mill employed a specialised fuller, known as ‘Dafi’r Pannwr’ (Dafi the fuller).

Finishing: different processes for fulling and/or finishing were applied to different kinds of cloth. For example, cloth for blankets, which was not always fulled, had to be scoured (with a mix of soda, soap and hot water) both to get rid of the grime and grease of the mill, and to thicken and shrink it. Some cloth is also shorn, first by raising the nap (the surface texture) and then shearing it. At Esgair Moel, a mid-nineteenth century cropping machine combined these functions in the manner of a lawn mower moving across the taut surface of the fabric.

Last but not least, the cloth was dried outside on tenter frames, which held the cloth in shape at the requisite tension.

By the 1880s, Esgair Moel farm and mill were owned by the Pugh Jones family. The mill was leased to Isaac Williams, a skilled textile operative who had learned his trade at the nearby Cambrian Factory in Llanwrtyd. He ran the mill for the next fifty years until his son, Rhys, took over in 1932.

Two account books, covering the years 1913 to 1932, record the range of products made at Esgair Moel under Williams’ management, namely: plain white blankets, suitings, stocking yarn and knitting wool, flannel for shirts, and carthenni (plaid and double-weave bed covers). A list of stock in hand in September 1927 suggests the quantity and mix of inventory held at the mill at any time: flannel shirting (120 yards), 22 ‘pairs of blankets’ (ie uncut cloth), tweed (33 yards) and an unspecified quantity of ‘white cloth’.

In August 1925, the mill charged £4.14/3d for: 8 carthenni at 3 shillings each; 45 yards of stripe shirting (flannel) at 4d a yard; 38 yards of plain cloth at 6d a yard; 35 yards of tweed cloth at 6d a yard; and 37 yards of blankets at 4d a yard. This was not primarily retail business, but direct trade with farmers who supplied raw fleece to be woven to commission by the mill. Fleece that was not needed for the farmers’ orders could be made into cloth or blankets for sale to local customers. Each week, Williams travelled by train from Llanwrtyd to Builth Wells (a distance of about 12 miles) to sell his cloth at the Monday market. Jenkins notes, ‘Farmers from all over the region brought their wool to Williams’s stall: they placed their orders for cloth or bedclothes and collected the finished products.’2 Williams then took the raw wool back to Llanwrtyd on the train and left it at the railway station until a cart was going past the factory. In September 1920, Williams bought just under 295 lbs of raw wool from nineteen different farmers at the market.

In addition to weaving cloth, Williams found a lucrative use for the mill’s twisting machine. As well as plying yarn for weaving, the twister produced good wool for knitting. Williams developed a line in knitting wool for local customers, and also supplied yarn to the stocking (and sock) knitters of west Carmarthenshire. When his son, Rhys, took over the business in 1932, he carried on the work and, in 1939, added a stocking machine to the mill’s inventory. Producing knitting wool and stockings sustained the mill through the Second World War and its immediate aftermath.

In the 1930s, Rhys Williams had employed three men (two weavers and a spinner) and a boy to operate the carding machinery, but by 1947, much of the machinery had been idle for some years. Then, in 1948, Rhys died, and the building and its contents faced an uncertain future.

In fact, its future lay some 70 miles away in a suburb of Cardiff. A new chapter in the life of the mill started with the creation of the Welsh Folk Museum and the relocation of Esgair Moel to St Fagans during the summer of 1951.

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How did the Welsh woollen mills fare during the Second World War, 1939-1945?

The Great War of 1914-18 had provided the industry with a temporary reprieve from declining consumer demand for Welsh flannel, the mainstay of many mills. With the outbreak of conflict, quantities of woollen cloth were needed for military uniforms and blankets; government contracts reversed the position from the pre-war search for customers to a period of guaranteed orders and prices. The Welsh mills joined textile manufacturers across Britain in supplying the national requirement for cloth, simultaneously filling their purchase books. In the words of the historian, Asa Briggs, the First World War had demonstrated ‘the importance of wool as a munition of war.’1

Wool was again a necessity of war between 1939-45. By 1941, the British government was involved in every stage in textile production, from the supply of raw fleece to the manufacture and consumption of clothing. Long before war was declared on 3 September 1939, it was clear that the imminent conflict would be a total war that required the complete mobilisation of the country’s resources, as well as the social and economic reorganisation of civilian life. As early as April 1939, the government was placing orders for service uniform cloths, and on the first day of the war, trading in raw wool came under a new government regulation that had been planned and prepared in advance.

Wartime measures affected every manufacturer in the British textile industry, from the largest to the smallest, and however geographically remote from the centre of government in London. The Welsh mills were no exception; like everyone else, their owners, workers, neighbours and customers had to adapt to the restrictions - and for some, new opportunities - of wartime.2 Arguably, those Welsh producers who had survived the economic depression and changing markets of the 1920s and 30s, had already demonstrated their resilience, either through operational flexibility or a stubborn determination to maintain a family business.

By 1939, the capacity of the Welsh mills to contribute to the quantities of cloth that were required for the war effort was greatly reduced compared with 1918. Over two-thirds of the mills in operation during the First World War had closed by the start of the Second World War: a drop from 217 mills in 1925 to 135 mills in 1930, and just 77 mills registered under the wartime regulations for woollen manufacture in 1939. The picture is therefore one of continuing, but slowing, decline: 82 mills closed between 1925 and 1930, compared with 58 mills between 1930 and 1939.3 The continuing trend of mill closures was undoubtedly due both to the situation of the individual (including an ageing workforce and outdated premises) and the country (including the prolonged economic depression, mass unemployment and associated out-migration from Wales). It was also in the 1930s that the Rural Industries Bureau and the Welsh Textile Manufacturers Association began to provide resources to support the industry - at least, in principle. This is not to say that the support available to the mills was ineffectual; rather that, inevitably, it was better suited - in practice and by inclination - to some mills than others.

In October 1939, the entire wool clip of the United Kingdom (in addition to imported wool from Australia, New Zealand and South Africa) was requisitioned by the Ministry of Supply and collected by the newly created Wool Control. In effect, wool as a raw commodity was nationalised by the British government. Prices were set by the Wool Control and individual transactions (based on the quality of the fleece) were negotiated by local merchants, acting on its behalf. The merchants paid the farmer and then were reimbursed by the Wool Control. In general, wartime prices were higher than their pre-war equivalents and included a level of subsidy. For example, the price of ‘Ordinary Welsh’ washed fleece went up from 11d per pound in weight in 1937 to 21d per pound in 1942. It was a far cry from the old Welsh custom of the farmer taking his fleece to the village mill and collecting a finished blanket or length of cloth a few months later.

The distribution of supplies of wool to textile manufacturers was the first stage in the wartime regulation and supervision of textile production. The overarching policy objective was: ‘the acquisition and distribution of suitable raw materials for production of essential war supplies as well as the maintenance of a sufficiency of wool clothing for civilian requirements.’4

At the time, 80% of British wool manufacturing output was concentrated in West Yorkshire (then the West Riding of Yorkshire). The Wool Control therefore established its headquarters in the town of Bradford, at the heart of the industry. Already a number of the medium-sized and larger Welsh mills had business connections with the Yorkshire trade, where they sent cloth to be finished. In some areas, Welsh farmers sold their fleece to local agents who worked on commission (a farthing per pound in weight) to supply Bradford yarn manufacturers.5 One of the effects of wartime regulations was to incorporate all of the Welsh mills into an overtly British industrial enterprise, if only temporarily and in theory.

In terms of wartime manufacturing, the first priority was the production of wool for military use. Between 1939-45, it is estimated that over 4 million garments in heavy cloth were produced for the armed forces and other war personnel. The second priority was the maintenance and development of export trade to support the national economy; a diminishing prospect as European markets were successively closed to British trade. Third in order of priority was production of cloth for civilian use. Here the government intervened to manage both the design and quality of manufactured clothing, and the quantity of clothes that could be purchased by the individual.

The first measure to regulate public consumption of clothing and textiles was the rationing of clothing and knitting wool, introduced by the Board of Trade in May 1941. Each person was issued with 66 clothing coupons each year: for example, eleven coupons were needed for a dress, three for a pair of socks, and one coupon for two ounces of knitting wool. Stricter rationing was enforced in March 1942 when the number coupons per adult was cut to 60 over fourteen months: a reduction of about a quarter in ‘coupon power’. In 1945, the individual allocation was cut again, to just 41 coupons a year.

Although knitters were encouraged to unravel old garments and reuse the yarn, sales of knitting wool remained buoyant during the war, boosted by campaigns to knit ‘comforts’ (socks, scarves, gloves and headgear) for the armed forces. Producing knitting wool provided a good line of business for a number of Welsh mills. As well as being generally profitable, ‘market shortages …[and] a certain laxity in understanding the definition of coupon-free yarns certainly did much to boost their sales.’6 Here ‘coupon-free’ refers to wool that remained off the ration - namely, mending wool and wool ‘in oil’ - the definition of which was evidently open to interpretation.

The next step in the regulation of clothing consumption was the introduction of the Utility Scheme in September 1941. An unintended (if foreseeable) consequence of rationing is that manufacturers and retailers are incentivised to produce and sell more expensive products. The Utility Scheme was designed to produce cloth and clothing that was sold at controlled prices within the reach of most customers. The amount of cloth per garment was limited, with no allowance for trimmings or superfluous decoration. Similarly, Utility cloth had to conform to prescribed standards of quality and weight, designed to be hard-wearing and long-lasting. The price that a manufacturer could charge for Utility cloth was controlled, but, in turn, a Utility factory’s allowance for civilian production was increased, with some additional job protection for its workforce from the Ministry of Labour.

As an inducement to consumers, Utility clothing was exempt from a purchase tax of 66% on non-Utility clothing. By the end of the war, 80% of clothing consumption in Britain fell under the Utility scheme.

In the wider context of wartime measures to control cloth production, the Welsh industry was small and peripheral. Comparisons are tricky, but in 1947 it was estimated that the entire output of the Welsh industry ‘probably approximates to that of a fairly large Yorkshire Mill.’ 7 Based on the amount of raw wool consumed each year, Welsh industry was less than half the size of the Harris Tweed industry. The Welsh mills used about 2 million pounds in weight of raw wool compared with 5 million pounds in weight used by the mills in the Outer Hebrides.8 Nonetheless, all firms - large and small, efficient and inefficient - were subject to the exigencies of a war economy as, of course, was the whole population. In 1947, the number of workers employed in Welsh mills estimated at about 600, an increase from about 500 in 1942. Reflecting wartime employment patterns, the ratio of women employees had expanded and now accounted for roughly half the workforce. These female workers often remained in place after the war when employment in the Welsh textile industry was evidently an unattractive option for returning servicemen: wages were low and prospects were limited in what was perceived to be a declining sector.9

Within the context of Wales, let alone the whole of Britain, 600 was a tiny number of workers.

A handful of Welsh mills ceased production during, or shortly after, the war. Specific reasons for closure must have varied, but a sentence in a 1948 report commissioned by the Rural Industries Bureau is suggestive: ‘Four mills have remained idle since the advent of the Wool Rationing Scheme, and it is extremely doubtful whether they will ever be able to commence production again, owing to the dilapidated condition of the machinery.’10 It is unclear whether the reference to the ‘Wool Rationing Scheme’ refers to the 1939 Wool Control or to the introduction of clothing rationing in 1941. Either way, there is an inference that wartime regulations were difficult to accommodate, perhaps in a small set-up with limited flexibility and resources. And if the machinery was already in a bad state, a period of inactivity was likely to make matters worse.

By 1948, the number of Welsh mills had dropped to 74. During the war, the support provided by the Rural Industries Bureau for rural ‘craftsmen’ (including the Welsh textile industry) was suspended and its activities were wholly redirected to ‘the campaign for increased food production inaugurated by the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries.’11 While the services of a consultant designer would have been superfluous in the context of wartime restrictions, the lack of technical assistance to help fix or replace broken equipment may have had material consequences, especially in more isolated mills.

Surviving the war was one thing; adapting to the transition from a war economy to peace-time production was another. In place of wartime regulation, textile producers were again faced with challenges of fluctuating costs and an unpredictable equation between supply and demand. At the same time, many wartime restrictions continued: clothes rationing finally ended on 15 March 1949 and the Utility scheme lasted until 1953. Amid the austerity of the post-war years, the industrial landscape of Wales was also being transformed: Acts of Parliament in 1947 and 1949 respectively, nationalised coal mining and then iron and steel production. The British government designation of South Wales as a Development Area spearheaded the construction of new factories, as well as conversion of munitions factories to civilian production.

Against this backdrop, the Welsh textile industry was an economic minnow. Could it survive at all in the post-war economy and if so, under what conditions? Spoiler alert: it did, and in future articles we’ll explore its evolving significance within the linked economies of heritage, craft and tourism.

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William Crankshaw’s 1927 survey of the Welsh textile industry reported that many of the mills relied almost exclusively on local customers to sell their goods; in practice, exchanging cloth for farm produce, selling on a market stall or through a mill shop. Manufacturers had neither the means nor the inclination to spend money and time promoting their products further afield. In 1918, a company called Associated Welsh Textile Mills Limited had been established to provide a centralised warehousing and sales service to the Welsh industry, but ceased trading in 1924. Since then, most mills reverted to selling locally, leaving them vulnerable to price-cutting in a narrow market.

Recognising the problem was one thing: taking practical action was another. Following Crankshaw’s recommendations, the Rural Industries Bureau (in conjunction with the Welsh Industries Fund administered by the University of Cardiff) organised technical and design support for the Welsh mills, but help with marketing was more ad hoc.

What was the point of improving the design and quality of Welsh cloth if it could not reach customers in non-local markets?

One response to this question was to blend public information, public relations and business promotion through the medium of exhibitions. In the 1930s, it was a strategy used by many organisations similarly in the business of persuasion, such as the Design and Industries Association (DIA), as well as government departments and public bodies. This was the context in which the Rural Industries Bureau instigated, and participated in, its own distinctive mix of country and urban exhibitions.

Issues of its quarterly magazine, Rural Industries, carried numerous advertisements for forthcoming exhibitions of ‘handicrafts’, ‘home arts and industries’ and ‘applied arts’. These were opportunities for artisans - such as potters, weavers, basket makers and wood turners - to put their wares in front of urban consumers attracted to the aesthetics and provenance of country crafts. Other products - such as scythes, shepherds crooks or peat shovels - were less likely to find customers in London or Manchester and so, to promote these, the Bureau presided over a network of outdoor county shows. These were organised by local Rural Community Councils and combined agricultural displays with exhibitions of practical, as well as decorative, manufactures. In both the urban exhibition hall and the country showground, there was a single aim: to enable the rural craftsman to reach customers ‘far afield’ with the practical support of the Bureau.1

In February 1932, the Monmouthshire Rural Community Council collaborated with a family-owned Cardiff department store to mount a ‘Rural Industries Exhibition’ in the centre of Wales’s largest city. David Morgan first opened as a small drapers shop in 1879 and, by the 1930s, it was a large and thriving six-storey emporium, known for its support for Welsh craft production. For example, David Morgan also gave free exhibition space to the Brynmawr Furniture Company, a Quaker initiative to help relieve unemployment in the south Wales Valleys. The Rural Industries exhibition was a success and became an annual event. The following year, the technical adviser to the Welsh mills, H.Maldwyn Williams, negotiated the inclusion of Welsh weaving alongside displays and demonstrations of ‘home industries’ also supported by the Rural Industries Bureau, such as hand quilting.

Reaching Welsh consumers who lived and worked at a distance from the rural mills was desirable, but a much bigger potential market existed in London, where the head office of the Rural Industries Bureau was based.

Among the earliest exhibitions organised by the Bureau, which included Welsh textiles, was a display in the ticketing hall of Charing Cross underground station in November 1932. Other exhibits included pottery, quilts, furniture and ironwork, as well as daily demonstrations of basket making.

An underground station might seem an unlikely venue, but from the mid-1920s onwards, Charing Cross was used regularly for exhibitions ranging from ‘Design in British Goods’ (1932), ‘The Association of Rubber Growers’ (1932) to ‘New Homes for Old’ (1935). In 1935, the Milk Marketing Board promoted the health benefits of drinking milk by installing a live cow on the station as part of their ‘model dairy’ display. The purpose of these exhibitions was to inform and entertain the travelling public, as well as to position the London Passenger Transport Board as a design-conscious and public-spirited company. For the Rural Industries Bureau, it was an opportunity to remind Londoners of the survival - and appeal - of traditional crafts made in the countryside.

The following year, 1933, the Welsh Textiles Association took a display stand in the textiles section of the British Industries Fair, an annual event held across three sprawling venues in London and Birmingham. Created by the Board of Trade in 1915 with the aim of boosting British exports, by the 1930s the Fair was frequently derided by its critics as a vast display of ‘gadgets’ and ‘knick knacks’, which prioritised novelty and ingenuity over good design. Nonetheless, it had become a national fixture and was invariably visited by members of the royal family, who thereby applied a coat of patriotic lustre to a mercantile enterprise. The textile section (held at White City in west London) was generally regarded as the least egregious. It comprised regional and national displays - such as ‘Lancashire Cotton’ - as well as stands taken by individual firms - such as Courtaulds and Warner & Sons. Described as the ‘nation’s shop window’, participation in the Fair laid down a marker that the Welsh textile industry should no longer be dismissed as outdated or peripheral.

In 1934, the ‘special correspondent’ of The Manchester Guardian reported an ‘unexpected’ visit to the exhibition by the Welsh former Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, and his daughter, Megan, the MP for Anglesey and the first female MP in Wales. According to the article, Lloyd George headed immediately to the Welsh Textiles Association stand and afterwards gave his verdict on the display:

Welsh tweeds are extraordinarily tough - as all Welshmen are. I always wear Welsh tweeds on my farm, and they have only one disadvantage - that they never wear out… I used to get my stuff from a mill run by water right in the heart of Snowdonia… Like old John Jones who supplies me with my materials, many of the weavers are farmers in the summer and manufacturers in the winter time.2

He added that he was ‘amazed in the advances in design of these Welsh fabrics. Not only were they more beautiful, but the range of their varieties had increased.’ By the 1930s, Lloyd George was on the margins of British politics, but he kept himself - and the causes he espoused - in the public eye. Such an endorsement must have been music to the ears of those responsible for the Welsh exhibit. The fact that the Welsh Textiles Association continued to take part in the Fair each year until 1939 indicates that the effort must have been considered worthwhile, if only in terms of public relations.

In October 1936, the Rural Industries Bureau (in practice, Maldwyn Williams) organised an ‘Exhibition of Welsh Textiles’ at the London Welsh Hall in Mecklenburgh Square: ‘the largest and most comprehensive collection of Welsh woollen goods ever shown in London’.3 Welsh public figures - including Dame Margaret Lloyd George - were recruited as exhibition patrons and daily ‘openers’. Exhibits were arranged in the following sections: dress cloths and coating cloths; flannels; blankets; travelling rugs and quilts; men’s suitings, ties, caps and hose; handbags and cot covers; knitting yarns; furnishing cloths and carpets. The objective was to shift the prevailing image of Welsh cloth:

No effort is being spared to make this exhibition worthy of the best traditions of Welsh factories… Many people associate the Welsh woollen industry with flannel and heavy, dark grey suiting cloths and it is desirable to show them the wide and attractive collection of cloths which can be gathered from Welsh mills.4

Many of these ‘attractive’ textiles were the work of the consultant designers employed by the Rural Industries Bureau to support the Welsh mills in the 1930s. Unlike the British Industries Fair, which was aimed at trade buyers, both retail and wholesale customers were welcome at the Bureau’s exhibitions. The difficulty was how to fulfill orders from the general public without a dedicated retail outlet. The indefatigable Maldwyn Williams provided an answer of sorts by setting up a mail order service, trading through the Welsh Textiles Association, c/o the Post Office, Newcastle Emlyn, Carmarthenshire.

Finally, Welsh textiles were a significant component of an exhibition held in October 1935 at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, in the east end of London. Although many of the pieces in ‘The Exhibition of Spinning, Weaving and Dyeing’ were for sale, this was a primarily a cultural event: a survey of contemporary textiles made by hand. It was an unusual addition to the Whitechapel programme which generally focussed on contemporary painting, including the output of local art societies. Described as a showcase for ‘the present state of handloom weaving in the Great Britain and the Irish Free State’,5 the exhibition was organised by the weaver Elizabeth Peacock, who co-founded the Guild of Weavers, Spinners and Dyers in 1931. Peacock had trained with Ethel Mairet and was part of her circle of friends and colleagues, including the weavers who worked in Wales in the 1930s: Margery Kendon, Gerd Bergerson and Marianne Straub. It was this approach to weaving which dominated the exhibition, and excluded the neighbouring textile trades of Spitalfields and Whitechapel.

Although the exhibition primarily focussed on the work of individual makers, an important section demonstrated the role of the hand weaver in developing prototype designs for production on power looms: ‘Handweaving by Factory Designers and Factory Woven Stuffs Designed on Hand Looms’. The twenty four exhibits in this section exemplified the philosophy of Ethel Mairet and her circle (including Marianne Straub and Gerd Bergerson) that the primary role of the hand weaver in a modern economy was to design for and improve weaving in industry. Seven exhibits were designed by Straub and woven in Wales: two blankets, a rug, a selection of scarves and three lengths of tweed. Unusually, the names of the weaver and the type of loom were included in the catalogue. The tweeds came from the Holywell Textile Mills, while the blankets were woven by Hugh Pugh on a Dobcross loom at Glynarth Factory, Aberarth, and the rug and scarves were woven by Thomas Jones & Sons, on a Dobcross and Dandy loom respectively.

Gerd Bergerson, who had preceded Straub as consultant designer in Wales, was now in charge of the textile department at Dartington Hall, where an experimental mill had opened in 1931, equipped with unwanted machinery from some Welsh mills. The Dartington weaving experiment, influenced both by Ethel Mairet and by the small-scale production carried out in Wales, produced cloth which, since 1934, was sold through a London showroom. The list of Dartington exhibits in the Whitechapel exhibition provides a snapshot of its textile output under Bergerson’s direction, together with a ‘Fancy Tweed’ woven on a Dobcross loom from her time in Wales.

In 1947, the architect and designer Misha Black described exhibitions as ‘the materialisation of persuasion’ operating within a communications nexus of information, public relations and publicity.6 All of the exhibitions described here fit into that nexus. Selling was not the only goal; each was also a three-dimensional argument which aimed to change the perception of Welsh textiles in the minds of metropolitan consumers. The objective was to raise the profile of the Welsh industry and to assert its most attractive characteristics: the values of craftsmanship, quality and tradition, combined with a modern design sensibility.

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With intense application and formidable charm, the weaver Marianne Straub managed to transform design and production at a handful of Welsh textile mills. Her background in both industrial and Arts and Crafts practice helped her appreciate the special qualities of the yarns and cloths that these little mills produced and she found new markets for their textiles among modernist furniture manufacturers and architects. 1

Marianne Straub (1909 - 1994) was born in the village of Amriswil, Switzerland. She had tuberculosis as a young child and spent over four years in a hospital ward; immobilised by traction, she was dependent upon her hands and imagination for amusement. A gift of a small table loom set her on the course that she would follow for the rest of her life. Aged 19, she enrolled at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Zurich, attending hand-weaving classes taught by Heinz-Otto Hürlimann, a former student at the Bauhaus. Straub relished Húrlimann’s tuition, but she was not interested in designing textiles that only rich people could afford. Her ambition was to be designer in industry.

At this time, neither of the two technical colleges in Switzerland admitted female students. So, in 1932, she moved to England, having been accepted on a course in power-loom weaving at Bradford Technical College, albeit on the assumption that she was a male applicant. The College corresponded with her as ‘Mr Straub’. The only woman in her class, Straub soon demonstrated her technical ability in adjusting to the demands - and design potential - of industrial weaving. She passed the City and Guilds exam in weaving mechanisms in just nine months, instead of the usual three years.

Forty five years later, Straub reflected on the differences between weaving by hand and on a power loom, and on the need to understand the possibilities of each kind of loom:

You have to work within the scope of the machine you are going to use for production, even if you weave the prototype by hand. Therefore you get to know the various types of looms and work within the scope of each one.2

Following her immersion in the technology of power-loom weaving, Straub continued her education in a very different weaving environment. In1933, she moved to the philosophical and practical heart of English Arts and Crafts textiles: Ethel Mairet’s studio, Gospels in Ditchling, Sussex. Mairet was said to be sceptical about the benefits of technical college training for weavers, but Straub quickly established herself within the workshop. She learned the processes of hand spinning and plant dyeing from Mairet and, in turn, earned her keep by designing and weaving lengths of cloth.

Straub was a more technically skilled and innovative weaver than Mairet. Although she herself was committed to plain weaving, Mairet fostered creativity in others and Straub was able to expand the repertoire of techniques among her fellow weavers, including spaced warps, open and float weaves, and new twill effects. Her approach was both practical and experimental, often inspired by the hand-spun and plant-dyed yarns made at Gospels, as well as the beautiful and unusual fibre acquired on Mairet’s travels. Straub always made her own warps and sometimes combined hand-spun yarns of varying textures, which required great skill in spacing the warp evenly on the loom with the rudimentary equipment that Mairet preferred. Anticipating her subsequent innovations in Wales, Straub developed a method for double-cloth weaving, which took account of restricted options on a four-shaft loom for interchanging threads in order to bind the two layers of cloth.

Straub spent nine months at Gospels before taking up the position of design consultant to the Welsh mills (under the auspices of the Rural Industries Bureau) in 1934; the role vacated by Gerd Bergerson. Again, Mairet provided the introduction. Straub’s brief was to develop new products that would appeal to modern consumers and could be produced on the antiquated equipment in use in many of the mills. It was a role that called on her combination of technical, creative and interpersonal skills.

She later recalled the importance of knowing how to operate different looms:

The mills were all concerned with weaving woollen fabrics. Within that limitation, we wove a great range of goods, blankets, bedspreads, tweeds, ties and scarves etc. It was a great help that I could handle machines, because if the mill owner said he could not produce the cloth I had suggested, or just lacked the necessary enthusiasm to start something new, I could set the warp up myself and do some weaving, that soon got them wanting to do it themselves.3

Straub’s versatility and her willingness turn her hand to anything were essential. She spent a lot of time darning and finishing cloth once it was off the loom. It was, she said, ‘all very interesting and enjoyable.’4 Even the old-fashioned machinery had its advantages: modern methods were more efficient, but often the character of yarn or cloth was erased by automation. Looking back many years later, Straub reflected:

Mule spinning makes a much, much nicer yarn than ring or cap spinning, but they are much quicker processes. Whenever I see a pre-war Welsh yarn I could cry.5

Although Straub’s role was peripatetic, she had a working base at the Holywell Textile Mill in Flintshire, where she wove prototypes by hand before transferring her designs to the power looms. She also developed new and improved shades of yarn by hand-dyeing the fleece and then blending colours during the processes of carding and spinning. This method produced richer colours with more depth than yarn dyed ‘in the hank’ - ie. after it was spun. Control over the dyeing process also enabled the mills to produce knitting yarns to match their cloth. The idea was that a customer could buy a length of tweed, say, to make a skirt together with the knitting wool for a cardigan or jumper. It was a successful innovation and the continued production of knitting yarn kept a number of mills in business during the Second World War.

Not only was Straub drawing on her apprenticeship in the dyeing shed at Gospels, she was putting into practice the collaboration between craft and industry that both she and Mairet espoused, and which reflected wider debates about the relationship between hand and machine in modernist design.

Not that it was all plain sailing; Straub encountered resistance from some mill owners. According to her friend, the designer Enid Marx, ‘the first obstacle that she had to overcome was the suspicion of the weavers: they believed she had been sent to steal their ideas.’ Mary Schoeser estimates that Straub worked regularly with about a dozen mills, producing fabric to her designs; others she visited less frequently and offered advice. On average, she designed about 100 textiles each year, including blankets and bedspreads, rugs, dress tweeds and furnishing fabrics. Holywell was by far the largest mill and occupied much of Straub’s time. Each year she produced some 30 designs exclusively for Holywell, which supplied bespoke cloth to trade clients in both fashion and furnishing.

As Tanya Harrod (quoted at the top of this article) observed, Straub’s success in Wales resulted from her ‘intense application and formidable charm’. It was also due to her understanding of the types of cloth best suited to Welsh wool and for which there was a contemporary market. In place of traditional flannel, Straub encouraged the mills to make rugs, blankets and tweeds, for both clothing and upholstery. She worked with individual mills to devise products appropriate to their machinery, skills and inclination. For example, at the Wallis Factory in Ambleston, she introduced Finnish-style rug weaving, which could be made on a power loom with tufts of yarn introduced by hand. Elsewhere, she continued to develop the double-cloth upholstery tweeds that her predecessor, Gerd Bergerson, had initiated and which made good use of the qualities of Welsh wool. Tweed has a flexible structure, making it ideal for upholstery as it can be stretched and fitted over a three-dimensional form. As tweed is usually woven in either a plain weave or in a twill or herringbone pattern, it could be produced on the relatively simple Welsh power looms.

The market for upholstery fabrics was primarily wholesale. Success therefore depended on contracts with large manufacturers and retailers; a far cry from the market stall and mill shop. Building on her predecessor’s efforts, Straub established business connections with two companies at the forefront of selling modernist design to British households: Gordon Russell Ltd and Heal’s. Both companies had transitioned from an Arts and Crafts aesthetic to manufacturing a version of European modernism that appealed to middle-class consumers: new enough to be fashionable, but comfortable and functional too. Gordon Russell’s business model was based on the democratization of ‘good’ design: in his own words, ‘I want to make decent furniture for ordinary people.’ In this context, ‘decent’ signalled the use of appropriate materials, a lack of superfluous decoration and no attempt to disguise an object’s purpose. The muted colours, subtle rhythms and expressive textures of Straub’s tweeds fitted the look perfectly, as did her creative philosophy ‘…to design things which people could afford. ... To remain a hand weaver did not seem satisfactory in this age of mass-production.’6

A very practical influence on Gordon Russell Ltd as a tastemaker came from the firm’s buyer of textiles, glass and ceramics in the mid-1930s: the design and architecture historian, Nikolaus Pevsner. Pevsner had left Germany in 1933 and was now living in London, having already finished the text of his influential book Pioneers of the Modern Movement: from William Morris to Walter Gropius (published 1936). Straub herself was, of course, familiar with Bauhaus principles from her early training with Heinz-Otto Hürlimann in Zurich. While working for Gordon Russell, Pevsner was finalising the text of Industrial Art in England (published 1937) in which he prescribed the ideal type of fabric for modern upholstery: ‘… simple texture effects or slight patterns such as indistinct stripes etc, are aesthetically more successful than the more explicit motifs.’7 As Schoeser observes, he could have had Straub’s Welsh tweeds in mind while writing this.

Both Gordon Russell and Heal’s used Welsh cloth for curtains and soft furnishings, as well for furniture. Fabric was also sold by the length. In1937, Welsh tweed was priced 8 or 9 shillings a yard at Gordon Russell Ltd, compared with something like 2s/6d at a mill shop. Straub’s tweeds continued to be used by both firms into the 1950s, and some of her designs were still in production in the 1960s. When, in 1965, the fashionable Italian typewriter company Olivetti opened a new London showroom, the furniture was upholstered in Holywell tweed.

Thanks to Straub’s deep understanding of the relationship between craft and machine production, and between tradition and modernity, Welsh textiles had now reached new, design conscious metropolitan clientele. Enid Marx believed that Straub was responsible for the very survival of a number of mills: ‘… the Welsh hand weaving and some factory weaving today … really owes its existence to existence to Marianne’s efforts.’8

The longevity of Straub’s Welsh designs exceeded her time working for the mills. Although she enjoyed the work - and must have been proud of her achievements - by 1937, she was tired of being on the road and not having a home of her own. Throughout her time in Wales, she worked closely with her counterpart, the Technical Adviser to the industry, H. Maldwyn Williams. They were each based at opposite ends of the country: Straub in Holywell in the north-east and Williams in Newcastle Emlyn in the south-west. Together, they must have travelled many miles to see each other and to visit the isolated mills.

Straub left Wales in 1937 to the firm of Helios Ltd. as head designer, becoming managing director in 1947. Her working relationship with Williams, based on a shared understanding of the needs and potential of the industry, had changed the image of Welsh cloth and penetrated new markets - at least for a while.

Coming next in The Welsh Blanket: the role of exhibitions during the 1930s in creating a new image for a traditional industry.

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This edition of The Welsh Blanket opens with an image of a weaving studio far away from the hills and valleys of Wales. It is Gospels in Ditchling, Sussex: the workshop of the weaver, teacher and writer, Ethel Mairet.

Mairet ran her studio at Gospels as a school in the practice and philosophy of making by hand, with students, apprentices and assistants learning processes of plant dyeing, spinning and weaving on a four-shaft loom. Her weave structures were not complex; the originality of Mairet’s cloth derives from the textures and handle of her hand-spun yarns, her palette of plant-dyed colours, and her intuitive understanding of pattern and visual rhythm. She invariably developed designs as she wove, creating numerous samples in the process. Mairet did not design on paper in advance of threading the loom, and discouraged her students from drawing before they started to weave.

Mairet was an articulate proponent for the values of hand weaving (and spinning), but not advocate for a return to a pre-industrial system of textile production. Instead she argued that, in a machine age, hand-loom weaving should primarily be a resource to test and develop ideas for mass production. Her great achievement was in finding ‘a modernist context for handweaving.’1 Arguably, her legacy as a writer, advocate and teacher exceeded her output as a maker, beautiful as her weaving was.

In the interwar years, Ditchling village was an important hub for the Arts and Crafts revival. Far from working in rural isolation, Mairet was connected to a prominent network of craft makers and proselytizers, both in Britain and abroad, including Muriel Rose’s Little Gallery, London and Dartington Hall, Devon (both of which we have visited in previous issues of The Welsh Blanket). Her roll call of apprentices and assistants included eminent weavers such as Elizabeth Peacock, Margery Kendon, Hilary Bourne, Marianne Straub and Peter Collingwood, who, in turn, extended her sphere of influence during and after her lifetime.

Mairet did not visit Wales until 1937 when she toured a number of the small mills with her friend, Margaret Pilkington, honorary director of the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester. Some years earlier, her position within the field of weaving and the wider world of craft had brought her into the orbit of John Brooke, Director of the Rural Industries Bureau. In 1933, Brooke himself joined the newly formed Dartington Arts and Crafts Advisory Committee to help coordinate the design and marketing of craft products, including textiles, from Dartington Hall. The worlds of the hand weaver and the rural reformer intersected, and following the short tenure of Minnie McLeish as consultant designer to the Welsh Textiles Association, Brooke turned to Mairet for advice on the appointment of her successor.

McLeish had been selected on the basis of her reputation as a modernist designer who understood the requirements of industry; now the search shifted to find an experienced hand weaver with the creative and practical expertise that was needed in Wales. The ability to experiment, design and solve problems at the loom was prioritized, and the next three designers to work for the Welsh Textiles Association were each recommended by Mairet: Margery Kendon, Berg Gerderson and Marianne Straub.

Margery Kendon is a rather elusive figure in the history of 20th century weaving. Unlike Mairet, she did not publicise her ideas beyond letters to friends and colleagues, and her work was not acquired by museum collections. However, she was a highly respected practitioner with a deep understanding of spinning and weaving, gained through her apprenticeship at Gospels and her subsequent travels in Ireland, Europe and Egypt. Her time in Wales was no doubt equally informative, and she later reflected on the unbroken ‘feeling’ for wool, the indigenous yarn of England - and Wales - which seemed to surmount the loss of craft skills in the face of new technology:

… since we were the first country to become mechanized … and we have lost much of the technical skill of the traditional weavers, I think no mere lapse of time could ever kill in us our inherited feeling for wool… After all, it is a great thing to have inherited n understanding of one’s raw material. 2

Despite her affinity for Welsh yarn, and indeed her liking for the Welsh people whom she met, Kendon felt ill-equipped to apply her weaving skills to the requirements of industry. In a later interview, she looked back and said that she ‘… realised at once that I didn’t want to work with machinery, but I liked the human beings so much.’3 Brooke and Mairet did not want Kendon to give up so soon, and they were reluctant to give up on her. Conscious, perhaps, that McLeish had only stayed in Wales for six months, they gave Kendon the opportunity to spend some time at the celebrated weaving school in Askov, Denmark, as a way of building her confidence for the role,

Mairet had visited the Askov school during a visit to Denmark in 1932. She shared its commitment to the role of hand weaving in modern design, particularly in relation to architecture, and had formed a connection with the school’s founders, Paula Trock and Henny Baumann. In June 1933, Mairet returned to Askov, this time with Kendon, who stayed on for a few months and who taught spinning in return for weaving tuition. It was during this visit that Mairet purchased an eight-shaft loom from the loom maker Anders Lervad, who had founded his business making looms for the Askov school.

We will see this loom again when it travels to Wales and takes up residence in the studio of Alison Morton, herself a designer for Meirion Mill, Dinas Maddwy, in the early 1970s.

Meanwhile, Kendon’s time at Askov did not convince her that she was the right woman to work with the Welsh mills. At the end of 1933, she told Brooke that she could not do the job. Looking back at her involvement with the Rural Industries Bureau, she doubted whether external interventions could succeed in their efforts ‘to fit the craftsman … into the present state of affairs.’ She continued:

Although all of these groups [including the Bureau] may have had their uses, not one of them seems to me to have ever pulled anything off… 4

Despite her short time in Wales, some cloths were produced to Kendon’s designs on the Holywell looms: primarily ‘tweeds’ for the furnishing industry. The rough surface texture of tweed, with its flexible structure and hard-wearing quality, was ideal for upholstery and, aesthetically, complemented the 1930s modernist interior. This was a new direction for Welsh textiles, and one that Kendon’s successors pursued with impressive results.

Following Kendon, the third designer appointed to work in Wales was a Norwegian weaver, Gerd Bergerson.

Bergerson had studied design at the Home Industries School for Women in Oslo and worked in Spain, before moving to England in 1932 at the age of 23. She was appointed as Kendon’s successor in 1933.

Bergerson continued Kendon’s work in designing tweeds, woven at the Holywell mill under contract for furnishing companies. One advantage of focussing on the wholesale furnishing trade was that it entailed a clear marketing strategy. Maldwyn Williams, the Technical Adviser employed by the Rural Industries Bureau, worked with Bergerson on developing samples and products that could be exhibited in trade exhibitions and advertised in professional journals. The Bureau assisted with promotion, showing samples to wholesalers, dressmakers and its informal network of taste makers, including, of course, Etherl Mairet. Selling to a wholesale market also sidestepped the complexities of retail sales.

Already, a strong relationship was forming with one particular furniture manufacturer: Gordon Russell Ltd. During the 1930s, the firm of Gordon Russell was known for manufacturing well-designed, modernist furniture and interiors for a middle-class retail market, as well as undertaking contract work for business and the public sector. Bergerson’s Welsh tweeds, with their distinctive textures and muted colours, suited the Gordon Russell ‘look’. Adapting the Welsh tradition of double-cloth weaving for a contemporary market, Bergerson devised the first double-cloth upholstery fabrics for Gordon Russell.

Despite these successes, Bergerson too left Wales after a relatively short time; in her case, after about 18 months, when she was offered a position in Yorkshire. Then, in 1936 check, she joined the Textiles Department at Dartington Hall.

We can only speculate about the factors that might have prompted McLeish, Kendon and Bergerson to move on from the Welsh mills. Of course, new opportunities are always attractive and the role of consultant designer was not a job for life. But it’s also plausible to suggest that the challenges of working across such a fragmented sector might have felt insurmountable. There is evidence that some mill owners resisted encouragement to innovate and collaborate; hardly surprising in a manufacturing culture that valued tradition and was often geographically isolated within Wales, let alone the rest of Britain. There were practical obstacles too. Looms were set up to weave a specific pattern and while colours could be changed, mill owners had to be convinced of the merits of making bigger alterations.

In the early 1930s, designers came and went, but Maldwyn Williams remained in post as Technical Adviser, providing an essential introduction to successive colleagues and invaluable continuity in terms of liaison with the mills, as well as marketing and promotion. The importance of his role - and the mutual professional regard that existed between him and Bergerson - is recognised today in two designs for woollen blankets produced by Mourne Textiles, County Down, Northen Ireland.

In 1949, Bergerson (now Gerd Hay-Edie) founded the hand-weaving studio which, in due course, became Mourne Textiles. Today the company is run by her grandson and two of Bergerson’s 1933 designs have been brought back into production in the modern micro-mill where Bergerson’s commitment to the values of hand weaving endures:

Named after Maldwyn, the skilled weaver Gerd collaborated with in Wales to develop this fabric, the blanket is a testament to their combined craftsmanship and vision. 5

The contemporary production of Bergerson’s designs in the Irish mill that she founded 75 years ago, is a story of continuity of practice and philosophy . Her designs from the early 1930s provide an important reference point for the company’s ethos and image.

Together with Margery Kenton, by 1934 Gerd Bergeron had laid a foundation for design innovation in the Welsh industry. The next designer to take up the mantle was one of the most important weavers in 20th century Britain: Marianne Straub.

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We ended the previous article in The Welsh Blanket with a statement of ambition by John Brooke, Director of the Rural Industries Bureau:

…. with the help of a well-known designer and the Textile Department at Dartington Hall, we hope to produce some of the finest textiles in the country, which will retain the hard wearing qualities and low price so typical of the Welsh industry, and yet have a bright sparkle about them to give them a distinction of their own.1

With the backing of the Bureau, the Welsh Textiles Association had been set up in 1932 under the leadership of Thomas Waterhouse, the managing director of Holywell Textile Mills, by far the largest cloth manufacturer in the country, with commercial links to the wholesale markets of northern England. Aware that business innovation required resources beyond the means of the individual small mills, Waterhouse agreed to the use of the Holywell machinery for technical and design experiments, the results of which could be disseminated across the country.

Given the condition of much of the weaving equipment in many small mills, the first requirement was the employment of a technical adviser to provide up-to-date support on the best use and necessary maintenance of machinery. And, if resources allowed, where and how to buy new equipment. The post was funded by the Rural Industries Bureau which was fortunate in its appointment of H. Maldwyn Williams, who combined a detailed understanding of production processes with a flair for developing marketing opportunities. Williams had trained at the Scottish Woollen Technical College in Galashiels, founded in 1922 with the support of the Scottish Woollen Manufacturers Association. This pioneering college incorporated a working mill which operated as both teaching facility and research laboratory. Nothing of the kind existed in Wales, and the appointment of Williams marked the start of a relationship between the Welsh industry and the Scottish college that continued into the 1950s.

As a recent Galashiels graduate, Williams demonstrated his professional expertise by publishing a highly technical paper on the elimination of irregularities in loading weaving yarn on to cheese-shaped spools.2 The paper was based on observations and calculations conducted by Williams in the college mill, and showed precisely the kind of practical understanding and scientific analysis that Waterhouse was looking for in Wales.

As well as providing technical advice to the mills, Williams’s brief was to instigate new activities to expand awareness of and markets for Welsh products. In 1933, he initiated an annual exhibition in David Morgan, a large Cardiff department store, as well as organising a stand for the Welsh Textile Association at the yearly British Industries Fair at held Olympia, west London and Castle Bromwich, Birmingham, The Fair was an highly publicized exhibition, attended by royalty, wholesale customers and the general public, and the Welsh textiles stand became a regular feature in the 1930s.

In 1934, the Rural Industries Bureau reported on the Welsh presence in the Britush Industries Fair with some complacency:

The advisory and practical help which has been given to the smaller textile mills throughout Wales has now definitely succeeded in enabling these small producers to put on the market fabrics which, entirely Welsh in material and workmanship, have the essential qualities of modern dress fabrics.3

Was the transformation of Welsh manufactures really as rapid and as successful this suggests? It was true that by 1934, the Bureau’s intervention was beginning to take effect; however the initial appointment of a consultant designer to work with the mills had not been straightforward.

The challenge was to devise and implement a design strategy that would update the image and utility of Welsh cloth, while taking account of the inclination and capacity of the industry to adapt to new markets. Of course, the word ‘industry’ is itself misleading: the Welsh Textiles Association aimed to represent the interests of nearly 200 textile producers operating across the country.4 Many were small enterprises, operated by the owner and a handful of employees. Inevitably, the combined efforts of the Bureau and the Association were greeted with varying degrees of enthusiasm - or resistance - across such a diverse landscape.

However, it was the very fact of the Welsh mills’ geographical isolation and lack of modernization that sparked the interest of some weavers in England in the early 1930s. These advocates for the values of the artisanal and the vernacular were attracted to the traditional processes and appearance of Welsh cloth. As a result, the effort to improve Welsh textiles was caught up in wider debates about the relationship between industry and craft, technology and the handmade.

In 1925, Dartington Hall, Devon had been acquired for development as a pioneering hub for the arts, education and rural regeneration. In the following years, its owners, Dorothy and Leonard Elmhirst, sponsored a number of new facilities - including a weaving mill - with the objective of testing the economic viability of rural crafts. The idea was both to promote the values of artisan production based on Arts and Crafts principles of dignity in work, communality and truth to materials, and also to measure its business potential. This combined interest in aesthetics and economic performance was shared with the Rural Industries Bureau and, within a couple of years, Dartington and the Bureau crossed paths; hence John Brooke’s reference to the Dartington Textile Department the start of this article.

The Dartington Textiles Department was established in 1927 by an Anglo-Irishman, Heremon ‘Toby’ Fitzpatrick, whose inspiration came from the hand spinners and weavers of the west of Ireland. Fitzpatrick firmly believed that expert hand weaving was superior to machine weaving. He also acknowledged that, in order to produce cloth that was profitable, it was necessary to use some simple machinery in the process, particularly for carding, spinning and finishing. Artisan textiles at Dartington would therefore be made by both machine and hand. Fitzpatrick’s objective was to combine the technology of the early Industrial Revolution with the skills of the hand weaver as a means of providing creative and honest work for local people, and making an attractive craft product for discerning consumers.

In 1928, Fitzpatrick toured the Welsh mills where the kind of system he envisaged (and which William Crankshaw had described the previous year) still survived in some country areas. He was particularly struck by the beauty of some of the Welsh yarns and textiles because - rather than despite - of their relatively primitive mode of production. Dartington provided him with the resources to realise his ideas. A new water-powered textile mill, built beside the Bidwell Brook, was in operation by 1931. The mill was equipped with a spinning jack and other machinery that Fitzpatrick had brought back from Wales, where it was no longer used or needed.

By the end of 1932, the Dartington mill was producing a modest amount of yarn and woven tweed, but the supply of water was often insufficient to maintain adequate power and had to be supplemented with electricity. However, the greatest obstacle encountered by Fitzpatrick was the recruitment of local weavers who were willing and able to participate in the scheme. Anna Noemi concludes that at Dartington:

….two competing visions of industry’s place in the countryside co-existed uneasily, one of which prioritised the creation of an organically integrated community of makers, the other of which concentrated on the recurring issue of commercial viability…5

Despite the limitations of Heremon’s experiment, Dartington forged a significant connection with the Welsh Textiles Association and catalysed a wider conversation about the value of small-scale artisan production. Working practices that were regarded as outdated and inefficient by modern standards of manufacture and business, were prized for their adherence to traditional skills and methods. The links between Dartington, the Rural Industries Bureau and the Welsh Textiles Association would influence the choice of consultant designers hired to work with the Welsh mills between 1932 -1937. However, the designer first appointed to the role came from a very different background, and her involvement only lasted six months.

Minnie McLeish trained as an artist and designer at Mount Street School of Art, Liverpool, the city of her birth. By the 1920s and 30s, she had travelled widely and absorbed avant-garde influences from Paris and Vienna into her bold schemes for modernist interiors. She was equally pioneering as a textile designer, producing furnishing fabrics for prestigious companies such as Morton Sundour and William Foxton Ltd. Although she was primarily a designer rather than a weaver, McLeish had considerable experience of the needs and processes of industry.

An articulate proponent of design principles, McLeish became increasingly involved with the Design & Industries Association (DIA), founded in 1915 with the aim of raising standards of design in British manufacturing. Her skills as a committee member, writer and exhibition organiser were very useful to the DIA; in turn, she became a trusted member of an influential network (including manufacturers, commissioners, critics, retailers and designers) committed to the cause of modern design.

When the Rural Industries Bureau asked for a recommendation for a consultant designer to work in Wales, the DIA suggested McLeish.

Based at Holywell Textile Mills, McLeish spent six months working with the Welsh mills in 1932, before leaving for a similar role advising a Cottage Industries initiative in India. Surely there must have been a cultural disjunction between this progressive designer from London and, say, a mill owner in rural Wales; but if so, such problems were omitted from the archival record. In practical terms, the primary difficulty encountered by McLeish, which she was unable to rectify, concerned the quality of synthetic dyes available through the Welsh Textiles Association. The Association had decided that, in order to achieve consistency of quality and colour, dyeing should be carried out under an external contract. Apparently, the results were ‘metallic horrors’6 and despite her expertise in designing for modern dyes, McLeish was not able to resolve the issue during her short time in the role. It was a problem inherited by her successors.

If McLeish’s design tenure in Wales feels like a stuttering start, it was a start nevertheless. The need for a design consultant was now established and, arguably, the requirements of the role had been clarified. By contrast, the next two designers to come to Wales were experienced hand weavers; both were trained in the ethos of the interwar Arts & Crafts, and both had connections with Dartington Hall.

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Previously in The Welsh Blanket, we explored the crisis in the Welsh textile industry in the 1920s. William Crankshaw’s 1928 report into its current condition and future prospects provided a clear diagnosis of the challenges facing mill owners and a pragmatic prescription for modernization. Among the systemic weaknesses that Crankshaw identified were: geographical fragmentation, with many small independent enterprises spread across a rural landscape and relatively few areas of concentration; a lack of investment in modern machinery; an ageing workforce, often resistant to innovation in design and manufacture; the absence of coordinated marketing and promotion. In short, he concluded that the industry as a whole was not well positioned to respond to external competition or to develop new markets.

Given its situation, the Welsh textile industry was unsurprisingly identified as a sector in need of support by the recently formed Rural Industries Bureau. The Bureau had been established in 1922 as an arm’s length public body, with a remit to promote prosperity in the countryside. During the interwar years, the impact of social and economic change in rural areas was rapid, widespread and irreversible. In the words of Captain J. R. I. Brooke, Director of the Bureau: ‘The object of the village is no longer to supply itself.’1 Gone was the ‘rural polity’ with its self-sustaining systems of production and exchange between farmers and artisans, described by Iorwerth Peate.

The Bureau’s remit was first to define what constituted a ‘rural industry’ and then to devise schemes to support those tradesmen and craftsmen whose services and products were being overtaken by modern life. The Bureau was concerned not with farming, but with the viability of rural trades - such as wood-turning, blacksmithing, pottery and thatching - that existed alongside agriculture. Its interventions were designed to develop new approaches to old practices, and often involved a trade-off between craft and technology, tradition and modernity. The Bureau’s efforts were directed towards industries at risk; it was uninterested in activities that were already profitable. The concept of ‘industry’ was broadly interpreted: early publications addressed occupations including rabbit keeping and lime burning. In effect, ‘rural industries’ were small enterprises, located away from towns and traditionally home- or workshop-based.

The transformation of the village smithy into to a general repair shop and petrol station was the kind of initiative encouraged by the Bureau, although its aversion to the aesthetics of the petrol pump is telling: ‘One blacksmith who started a pump many years ago now has four housed under a neat roof admirably designed to hide the pumps and not spoil the village.’2

Among the best-known schemes sponsored by the Bureau in its early years was the organisation and promotion of women’s hand-quilting in the coalfields of south Wales and County Durham, officially designated as Distressed Areas. Launched in 1928, the scheme was devised to enable miners’ wives and daughters to earn money from quilting - often the only wage coming into a family - as well as to promote a traditional craft. Brooke reported on the operation of the scheme with satisfaction:

In Wales and Durham quilting survived as a homecraft, and the Bureau has not only preserved the tradition, but created an industry which in three years has turned over eight thousand pounds. When our search for quilters first started in Wales we found miners’ wives quilting in the fine patterns handed down from Tudor times, but their materials were calico and old blankets. These women have the pattern units in their heads, and with these units are composed an infinite variety of designs. To foster this industry we have organised seven quilting groups under an organiser whose job is to visit groups, purchase materials required, and above all to maintain the standard.3

Critical to the success of the scheme was the supply of high-quality materials and access to a discerning metropolitan market, willing to pay for hand-made items.

In the esrly 1930s, this little tea cosy journeyed from a miner’s cottage in south Wales to a shop in Chelsea where it was bought by a wealthy customer and years later, in 2004, into to the collection of the Victoria & Albert Museum. It was made by an unknown woman in the Welsh valleys with silk and thread supplied by the Bureau, and was purchased by Muriel Rose, co-owner of The Little Gallery, Chelsea. Rose was authorised to sell quilted products sponsored by the Bureau, which she displayed in her fashionable shop alongside objects by well-known craftspeople as Enid Marx, Ethel Mairet, Bernard Leach, Shoji Hamada and Michael Cardew.

Only the most skilled quilters were supported by the scheme and classes were organised in local centres to teach traditional patterns. As a result, the Bureau established a new type of professional quilter who worked for a luxury market outside her own locality. The number of quilters registered with the Bureau was as high as 170 in 1928; about 60-70 quilters were still working when the scheme closed in 1939.

Addressing the conditions of the woollen textile industry in Wales was, as Crankshaw had identified, a complex challenge on a different scale. Brooke acknowledged the difficulties:

There is still a traditional Textile Industry in Wales with about a hundred small factories, containing about 800 looms. The smaller mills in the industry have survived almost unchanged from the eighteenth century. A few of these factories are still run in winter only by owners who farm in summer, scour, card, spin and weave their own wool in winter, finally taking cloth and flannel to market with fat sheep and store cattle. This industry makes the miners’ shirtings, blankets and bed rugs, and also dull but everlasting Sunday-go-to-meeting cloth. Since 1921, when its trade association broke down, the industry has been gradually bleeding itself to death by throat-cutting competition in the narrow local market- a market which shrinks every year as fashion penetrates Wales. 4

In other words, Welsh woven textiles were regarded as uninspiring in design and quality, and prices were depressed through reliance on retail sales through mill shops and market stalls. This unhappy situation contrasted with the excellence of woollen goods made in rural Scotland:

In the Highlands and Islands of Scotland … the tweeds and knitted goods produced by the crofters are of their kind unsurpassed. There is little need for help either with colour or design, merely necessity for rigid maintenance of standard, work admirably performed by Highland Home Industries, and the Bureau has nothing to do but to watch and admire.

To praise the Scottish crofters was to chastise the Welsh mills; crucially, two factors were present in Scotland that were absent in Wales. First, the design and quality of Scottish goods was both consistent and consistently high. Second, the Highland Home Industries Limited was a company founded in 1921 with the aim of supporting traditional Scottish crafts through marketing and promotion, such as exhibitions. Its success helped to sustain numerous cottage artisans. This was the model that the Bureau would apply to Wales. And in 1932, Brooke reported that: ‘After two years of meetings and negotiation, the Bureau, with the assistance of Thomas Waterhouse, has succeeded in forming a Welsh Textiles Association.’ 5

Waterhouse was an industrialist whose father had bought Holywell Textile Mills in Flintshire from another Englishman, William Brown of Chester. At the time, this was a large and thriving concern with 156 looms and 139 employees primarily manufacturing cloth for wholesalers in Manchester and Lancashire. 6 The business traded as ‘Welsh Flannel Manufacturers Ltd’ although both its management and its markets were more English than Welsh. Between 1909 and 1957, Waterhouse was successively manager, director and chairman of the company. Despite - or perhaps because of - his English connections, he was vocal advocate for Welsh textiles as a member of the University of Wales’s committee to promote the woollen industry. His entry in the Dictionary of Welsh Biography describes him as ‘a good example of a person of wholly English stock who became rooted in Wales, which he then served skilfully and tirelessly.’7 His broad outlook, business acumen and connections made him an obvious choice as chairman of the new Welsh Textiles Association.

This was not the first industry-wide initiative to support the Welsh mills, but the impact of previous organisations had been either limited or short-lived. For example, the Associated Welsh Textile Mills Limited, formed in 1918, set up offices and a warehouse in Penarth, Cardiff, to which members could send goods for sale. At its peak, the company handled the products of about sixty Welsh firms. However, the slump in values in the early 1920s, combined with the depression in the Welsh coalfields, undermined its activities, and it ceased trading in 1924. 8

With the backing of the Rural Industries Bureau, the ambition and scope of the new Welsh Textiles Association was much broader. Overall, it aimed to provide technical advice and assistance to mill owners; secure registered trademarks for Welsh textiles; coordinate publicity, advertising and sales; and encourage the opening of new mills. It also focused on the question of design. Welsh woollens needed a new image if they were to compete with the wider choice of fabrics and clothing increasingly available in local towns. Both Waterhouse and Brooke recognised that external expertise was needed in the form of consultant designers in tune with modern tastes:

A number of experiments have already been carried out, and, with the help of a well-known designer and the Textile Department at Dartington Hall, we hope to produce some of the finest textiles in the country, which will retain the hard wearing qualities and low price so typical of the Welsh industry, and yet have a bright sparkle about them to give them a distinction of their own.9

This would be radical shift for an industry grounded in tradition.

In the next two editions of the Welsh Blanket we will find out how the first three designers - Minnie McLeish, Margery Kendon and Gerd Bergerson - succeeded (or not) in launching this considerable task of modernisation.

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By tradition, the blankets and carthenni in constant demand in west Wales are of the wide, double-bed variety and there has never been a market for single-width blankets. The small rural mills never had the equipment to produce double-width blankets, so that they were woven on narrow looms and sewn up the middle. The products of the small mills were easily recognizable by this feature.1

As Geraint Jenkins tells us, Welsh wool was traditionally woven on hand looms (by the end of the 19th century, on small power looms) measuring, say, 36 inches wide. Two pieces of cloth were then hand sewn together to form a heavy and hard-wearing blanket, with a seam running down the centre. Alternatively, a length of cloth was sold to a customer who could make up their own blanket. Narrow-loom blankets of this type were the norm until the early twentieth century, when the adoption of the double loom by Welsh mills enabled the production of fabric wide enough to cover a double bed. Some of the smaller mills, as well as individual weavers, did not convert to wider looms, and narrow-width blankets continued to be produced in the 1920s, 30s and even later.

Data compiled by Geraint Jenkins shows the continuation of narrow-loom weaving into the post-war years. In 1947, out of a total of 365 power looms operating in Welsh mills, 151 looms were 40 inches or less in width. In addition, he calculates that there were 23 hand looms in use for commercial production. By 1967, the number of narrow power looms had decreased to 38 out of a diminishing total of 176, with just 19 hand looms still in use.2 Of course, by then there was no need to sew a blanket up the middle, and the production of narrow cloth had many other uses, such as for clothing and homewares.

In the 19th and early 20th centuries, narrow-width blankets were often woven in simple stripes or checks. The ends were sometimes fringed, but also hemmed by machine or blanket stitch. The centre seam, joining the two pieces of cloth, is visible in this image:

Narrow-loom blankets were generally produced for a local, rural market and woven from undyed or plant-dyed yarn. Jones gives an exhaustive list of plants used to dye woollen yarn (and sometimes the raw fleece) in Wales prior to the adoption of synthetic dyes in the 20th century. These include: madder (red); old fustic or dyer’s mulberry (yellow, greeen and olive); weld or dyer’s rocket (yellow and light brown); woad and indigo (blue); lichens (green and brown); gorse (yellow); bracken (brown); walnut (dark brown, also mixed with indigo to make black).3

This blanket was woven on a 34 inch handloom; the finished blanket is 68 inches wide. Again, the centre join is visible in the image:

Not all narrow-width blankets were simple in design. This beautiful example from Anglesey was woven at Pandy Parc, Llandyfrydog between 1890 - 1920, and was owned by Joseph and Ann Jones who lived in the nearby village of Penysarn. It is 68 inches wide and comprises two panels, each 33 inches wide:

Finally, a striking example of narrow loom weaving from the inter-war period, is the carthen (bed cover) hand-woven by Lewis D. Jones of Lampeter c.1925, now in the National Museum of Wales (Amgueddfa Genedlaethol Cymru) which we have already seen:

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As we saw in the previous Substack, Iorwerth Peate’s close study of the operation of the Llanrhystyd Woollen Yarn Factory in Cardiganshire enabled him to develop his concept of a ‘rural polity’.1 This was a view of village life based on mutual interest and cooperation, with artisan-farmers at the centre of a self-sustaining economy. The system was exemplified by the conversion of fleece to yarn to cloth, based on a ready supply of raw materials and the proximity of a spinner, weavers and a finisher (fuller). In addition, Geraint Jenkins has shown that cloth was often paid for in goods, rather than money: rural mills routinely exchanged cloth for butter, lard, milk, potatoes and even pigs. The use of cloth as a medium of exchange extended to the wages of servants and apprentices who were sometimes paid in a combination of cloth or clothing and cash.2

Peate mapped the textile economy around Llanrhystyd at the end of the 19th century, marking the location of sheep farms in the hills behind the village, as many as eleven weavers working in the vicinity and, crucially, a pandy (fulling mill) close by.

When Peate visited Llanrhystyd in 1927, the pandy still existed, but its owner, Thomas Williams, now relied more on farming than fulling. The number of weavers in the area had dwindled to just one, and the spinning factory had just closed. The trades of Peate’s ‘rural polity’ were leaving the villages and entering his own professional domain: the museum.

The function of the pandy was to thicken, felt, clean and ‘bleach’ or dye the cloth sent by the weaver. In other words, to ‘finish’ the cloth, making it ready for use. Like the yarn factory a couple of miles away, the Llanrhystyd pandy was powered by water which operated the ffustiau - two flailing hammers that pounded the cloth, which was traditionally cleaned with urine (mixed with dye), fullers’ earth and soap. Once the cloth was cleaned, dyed and felted, it was stretched (tentered) before going to the teazling machine, which raised the nap or pile. This raised surface was then shorn with a knife by the Llanrhystyd fuller, to give it a smooth surface, and finally the cloth was pressed between iron plates.

It was quite a process and by the 1920s, fulling was increasingly incorporated within the operations of a comprehensive or integrated mill, equipped to undertake every stage of production, from carding, spinning and weaving to finishing. According to Jenkins, last master fuller in Wales, who lived in Abergorlech, Carmarthenshire, gave up in 1938.3 This evocative photograph shows one of his contemporaries proudly standing next to the machinery in his pandy, not long before it too closed.

William Crankshaw describes seeing a pandy in operation during his tour of the Welsh textile industry in 1925:

… all the sights I came across during the survey I think the most interesting was the old-time “pandy” or “tucking mill” in Carmarthenshire, with the water wheel turning as merrily and the hammers beating the cloth as busily as ever fulling stocks did since they were first introduced by the Flemings of ancient times. According to the owner’s statement, his ancestors have carried on a “pandy” in that spot for over 300 years. He was dyeing a piece of flaming red cloth that reminded me of the famous red petticoats which are said to have scared away Napoleon’s soldiers. His apparatus for dyeing consisted of a simple washer-woman’s copper, with a wood fire burning beneath. The dye being on the boil, he was too busily engaged in turning the roller with one hand and passing the cloth over it with a stick in the other to be able to pay much attention to visitors.4

Like Peate, Crankshaw understood the interdependence between the spinner, the weaver and the fuller:

Also there was the tucker’s crony, the village weaver, who proudly escorted us to the loom shop in his dwelling, where he had a piece of blanketing in one of his two hand looms. If only there had been a hand spinner we should have had a complete picture of the Welsh woollen manufacture as it existed in the days when Welsh cloth was famous the world over.

The phrase ‘in his dwelling’ is suggestive of the building types that delineated the Welsh textile industry. While carding, spinning and weaving could be done by hand at home or in a simple shed - literally, cottage industries - water-powered fulling mills (pandai) were constructed as early as the 14th century. It was the first stage in the long transition of manufacturing from ‘homestead to factory’.5

The significance of the buildings in the economy of rural Wales is illustrated by number of place names that contain the word pandy or pannwr or twcwr (fuller). J. Geraint Jenkins’s comprehensive survey ‘The Welsh Woollen Industry’ includes a map of these places, illustrating the imprint of the textile industry on the economic and linguistic landscape of the country.6 This is not a geography of concentrated heavy industry, but of scattered sites of production in every county. In many places - as in Llanrhystyd- the local pandy would have been a critical link in a local chain of production between farmers, spinners and weavers.

The descriptions of working pandai (fulling mills) by Peate and Crankshaw (published in 1928 and 1927 respectively) record a disappearing component of the rural economy. Within a decade, the trade of the independent master fullers would be gone, and their mills would become picturesque relics within a visual economy of heritage tourism. Neither Peate or Crankshaw could resist these changes, but each sought solutions to the difficulties faced by the ‘industries’ of the Welsh countryside. For Peate, the role of the National Museum was to research, inform and interpret for the benefit of the public. It was part of the educational infrastructure of the whole country; with a remit not only to preserve the relics of the past, but to help build a new Wales, more conscious of and confident in its cultural identity.7

Crankshaw’s brief was more immediately practical. His report was sponsored by the Rural Industries Bureau (founded in 1921) whose wider concern with the rural economy often focussed on the potential to preserve (and simultaneously modernize) ‘craft’ production as a sustainable component of village life.

We will pick up this thread in future articles, to explore the aftermath of the Crankshaw report and the initiatives undertaken by the Rural Industries Bureau to support the Welsh woollen industry in the 1930s.

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.

A Survey of the Welsh Textile Industry (1927) commissioned by the University of Cardiff sounds like a dry read, but William P. Crankshaw’s report is sprinkled with lively pen portraits of some of the memorable characters whom he met on his journey through the textile geography of Wales.1 These were the crefftwyr (craftworkers) of rural Wales who still worked in the traditional ways: spinning, weaving and finishing the cloth in tiny ‘factories’ and workshops. Crankshaw was particularly impressed by two elderly women, still plying their trade as spinners - who also found time to to sweep the floor:

Just imagine a spinning factory owned and worked by two old ladies! A factory with roses growing up its walls, and windows filled with ferns and flowering plants! More remarkable still, a factory with spotlessly clean floors and machines in beautiful order and bright as a new pin! Without doubt this is the cleanest and tidiest factory in Wales, and an astonishing contrast to so many, in which floors and machinery are littered up with all sorts of rubbish and dirt.2

This posed photograph of Catherine Griffiths is typical of the portait genre of Welsh ‘cottage spinners’: women in traditional flannel dress and a tall hat, next to either an olwyn fawr (great wheel) or a troell fach (small spinning wheel) placed in a domestic setting. We can assume that the ‘factory’ owned by Crankshaw’s ‘two old ladies’ was a less picturesque operation, notwithstanding the roses growing up the wall. It is likely that their premises contained a number of machines for disentangling and carding the fleece, prior to the process of spinning itself.

Elsewhere, Crankshaw uses the word ‘factory’ in a loose, almost figurative, sense:

There is … the factory run by the old bachelor, who lives amongst his books in one corner of his weaving room and has what I believe to be the tiniest manufacturing plant in Wales. The whole concern - building, machinery, and owner - would make a most attractive - exhibit in the National Museum.3

Of course, these are a romanticized vignettes recorded by an outsider, perhaps weary of translated conversations with pessimistic mill owners in their untidy premises. In the wider context, Crankshaw must have been aware of contemporary debates about the viability of artisan production in a modern economy and of the status of ‘craft’ within shifting cultural perspectives. Given his relationship with the University of Cardiff, it is also possible that he knew about the emerging interest in rural industries within the National Museum of Wales (Amgueddfa Genedlaethol Cymru), Cardiff.

In 1927, the year when the Crankshaw Report was published, a young lecturer, Iorwerth C.Peate, was appointed to the post of Qualified Assistant in the Archaeology Department of the National Museum. One of the few Welsh speaking members of staff in what was then a markedly Anglophone institution, Peate was assigned to the collections of rural material, officially referred to as ‘Welsh Bygones’. It was a term that he disliked, as it implied that such objects were of secondary archaeological interest. Instead, Peate preferred the concept of ‘folk’ (gwerin) to describe the vernacular culture of rural Wales, where the ‘peasant artisan’ combined traditional craft production with working on the land. Peate was proud of his own descent from a lineage of country craftsmen (carpenters, wheelwrights and textile manufacturers) and he felt a strong affinity with the communities in which the products of such artisans were used and valued.

The National Museum had opened a ‘Bygones Gallery’ in 1926 with exhibits ranging from furniture, trapping and fishing implements, knitting and lacemaking tools, as well as the weaving loom of Lewis D. Jones of Lampeter. The aim of the gallery was to illustrate ‘the native arts and crafts of Wales prior to the advantage of modern methods of mass production.’4 Most objects were displayed in glass cases or hung on the walls, but there were also two room settings: recreations of a 19th century ‘Welsh Kitchen’ and a ‘Welsh Bedroom’.

It is possible that William Crankshaw visited the newly opened Bygones Gallery and had such an installation in mind when he suggested that a rural weaving shed, complete with its elderly weaver, would make a similarly ‘attractive’ exhibit. Certainly Iorwerth Peate would have endorsed the idea: the re-erection of working buildings, with their equipment operated by museum demonstrators, would be at the heart of the National Folk Museum (now St Fagans Museum of National History) which opened in 1948. The creation of the National Folk Museum was Peate’s great achievement as a museologist, cultural anthropologist and Cymro (Welshman). But that was twenty years into the future: for now, he was a junior member of staff, charged with researching and writing a description of a woollen yarn factory at Llanrhystyd in Cardiganshire. 5

The Llanrhystyd yarn factory, owned by Mr and Mrs James Jones, had closed in 1926 (prior to its conversion to a saw-mill) and its contents acquired by the National Museum. The machinery comprised ‘a small willy, a scribbler-carder, a condsenser-carder, a spinning billy and a spinning jack’6: the equipment required for each step in the process of converting raw fleece into spun yarn. First, the ‘willy’ was used to open and disentangle the fleece; then, the ‘scribbling’ machine began to draw out the separate fibres thereby ‘rendering the wool light and flaky’; and ‘carding’ continued this process until the fibres were ‘laid very lightly together … of regular and even size’.7 Finally, the operation of the spinning ‘jack’ and ‘billy’ twisted the loose fibres into strong and even yarn. The entire enterprise was powered by water, ‘supplied by means of a large undershot wheel, driven by water from a leat running from a pond supplied from the River Wyre.’8

Photographs taken before the equipment was removed, show the machinery in situ inside the Llanrhystyd factory. The old ladies’ spinning factory, so admired by Crankshaw, may well have operated on similar lines.

To research and publish a description of the yarn factory was an ideal assignment for the young Peate. Here was an opportunity to study the processes of a traditional workshop in detail, and also to consider its significance within the social and economic life of a particular village - and more broadly, of rural Wales. Llanrhystyd was located between Aberystwyth and Aberaeron, at the junction of a number of roads ‘which lead from an extensive hinterland … with its lonely concealed villages reached by mountain roads and lanes.’9 This was sheep farming country, providing the yarn factory with a ready supply of raw fleece.

If a farmer wanted a piece of cloth, he had two options. Either he could take his fleece to the spinning factory and place an order for yarn; he could then take the yarn to the weaver and, finally, take the woven cloth to the pandy to be dyed, scoured, fulled, dried and pressed. Or, more commonly, the farmer took his fleece to the yarn factory and placed an order with James Jones, the owner, for the finished cloth. Under this arrangement, Mr Jones was responsible for sending the yarn to a weaver who, in turn, sent to the pandy. Having paid the yarn factory directly for the cloth, the farmer did not need to transact directly with the either the weaver or the pandy.

What if a villager wanted to buy a blanket? According to Peate:

He gives the order to a farmer, who supplies the wool to the spinning factory; the spinner sends it to the weaver, the weaver to the fuller, and the buyer pays the farmer! 10

Peate regarded this as an ideal system of production and exchange, with the yarn factory at the centre of a self-sufficient rural textile economy::

It will be seen therefore that the Llanrhystyd factory served a large number of farming folk in an extensive rural district, and the woollen industry gave full-time employment to the yarn-spinner and his wife, while weavers and a fuller were able to obtain a comfortable livelihood through practising their craft, and farming in their spare time. In many ways the factory was the pivot of an ideal community where mutual aid was the ruling principle of life. It fell to more modern protagonists of mass-production methods to shatter a part, though not the whole, of that rural polity.11

From Peate’s perspective, the Museum’s acquisition of the contents of the spinning factory was of more than technical interest: these well-used machines were emblematic of a social network based on interdependence and mutual interest. Textile production - from the fleece shorn from the back of a sheep to a finished blanket - was at the heart of this little world. It was, of course, an idealized view of rural life, which has been critiqued and revised by subsequent historians. However, Peate’s belief in the social value and cultural significance of the lives and material culture of ordinary people made a profound impact on museum practice in Cardiff and beyond.

We will return to these questions of historical interpretation in future articles, but for now let’s finish with an image of Mr and Mrs Jones, standing outside their factory on the day in 1926 when the equipment that had provided their livelihood and identity at the heart of the village was taken away to the National Museum.

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In last week’s Substack, I touched on the condition of Welsh weaving in the 1920s when markets for local cloth were badly affected by the prolonged economic depression, widespread unemployment and the hardships endured by many communities. The contraction of the textile industry was also linked to the declining demand for Welsh flannel, the mainstay of many mills: fewer women wore the old woollen petticoats and shawls, and there were cheaper alternative fabrics for men’s shirts and underwear. Bluntly, families with a man on strike or out of work were not buying anything.

By the 1920s, Winifred Coombe Tennant was collecting samples of Welsh flannel in order to study and record traditional manufactures which, she felt, were at risk of going out of production.

During the First World War, government contracts for cloth to make military uniforms and blankets had provided a temporary respite for the woollen industry, but underlying vulnerabilities remained. In too many mills and weaving sheds, an ageing workforce relied on ageing equipment, with owners unable or unwilling to invest in either training or technology. In many places, it was a fragmented and scattered industry: across the country, over half of textile producers employed four or fewer workers. Advertising and marketing were rarely coordinated among suppliers, and firms struggled to sell beyond their local populations.

In the countryside, spinning and weaving sometimes provided a partial income alongside farming or fishing, and times were doubly hard when agricultural prices fell. In 1925, a dozen or so solitary weavers still operated their single hand-loom, often close to a spinner who supplied the yarn and a pandy (fulling mill) where the cloth was finished. But rural life was in flux, and theirs was a disappearing world.

 What was to be done?

A typically bureaucratic response came from the University of Wales, Cardiff, with support from the Rural Industries Bureau: namely, to conduct a review into current conditions and to make recommendations for the future of the industry. The University appointed William P. Crankshaw, the former Head of the Textile Department at the Royal Technical College, Salford, to travel the length and breadth of Wales to report on the situation of the factories, mills and workshops, their workers and products, and their success (or not) in selling sufficient cloth at a viable price. 1

Crankshaw was an intrepid investigator. He spent 36 days travelling around the country and visited 140 weaving sheds, mills and factories - a very high percentage of the 192 textile producers operating at the time. The enterprise was made practically possible by His Majesty’s Inspectors of Schools: a team of men who ferried Crankshaw around in their cars, knew the whereabouts of the remotest villages and, crucially, spoke Welsh and could translate for the Englishman.

Crankshaw’s ‘Report on a Survey of the Welsh Textile Industry, Made on Behalf of the University of Wales’ was published in 1927. His achievement was to write a coherent account of an industry that ranged from the cottage weaver working at his hand loom to a handful of factories each with over forty looms. The majority of medium and large mills undertook both spinning and weaving, and sometimes finishing too. Others still relied on separate fulling mills (pandai) for finishing. The greatest concentration of mills was in the south-west counties of Cardiganshire and Carmarthenshire, but textiles were produced in every area.

Although Crankshaw’s recommendations focused on the practical and economic challenges and prospects of the present, he was equally alive to the values and skills of the hand-loom weavers who represented the last days of an artisanal rural economy. He observed that many were ‘fine craftsmen, who, by their outstanding intellect and character, worthily uphold the honourable traditions of their crafts.’2 Among them, Lewis D. Jones, weaver and former Mayor of Lampeter, clearly impressed Crankshaw with his dedication to, and dignity in, the trade that he had inherited from his father. Jones described the competitive expertise between the weavers of an earlier generation:

“When my father commenced weaving, he applied to a neighbouring weaver for assistance with the working particulars of some cloth he had been asked to make, and was refused.” Eventually he mastered the difficulty by his own efforts, and proudly sent a specimen of his production to the unfriendly neighbour. Thereupon the latter sent a seamless petticoat along with the inquiry, “Can you do this?” In response, the Mayor’s father wove a pair of seamless breeches and sent them over with the reply “Yes! But what do you think about these?” 3

Within a year of meeting Crankshaw, Lewis D. Jones would himself be dead and, as we have already seen, his hand-loom and weaving would be acquired by the National Museum in Cardiff.4

Although flannel weaving dominated the Welsh industry as a whole, Crankshaw was also very interested in the practice of double-cloth weaving for blankets or carthenni (bed covers):

… the only examples of figure weaving which appear to be now made are the coloured bed- covers known as “Carpet quilts,” probably from the fact that the structure is the same as that of the Kidderminster carpet. These quilts are technically known as “double plain” fabrics and are ornamented by geometric designs of a rectangular character which are accentuated by variegated colourings. They require sixteen shafts of heddles for their production and are woven in North Wales in wide power looms fitted with dobby machines and in South Wales in the old-fashioned style in treadle hand looms.5

As he was not a Welsh speaker, is it possible that Crankshaw was confusing the English ‘carpet’ with the Welsh carthen?

Among the ‘figure weaving’ that he encountered was an exceptionally striking blanket woven on a Jacquard loom at the Pwllheli Woollen Mill, owned by the Griffith family, which he describes in some detail:

.. I saw examples of the same kind of quilt with a jacquard woven design consisting of representations of Caernarvon Castle (Cymru Fu), University College, Aberystwyth (Cymru Fydd), and the Welsh Dragon surrounded by a border of leeks. It transpired that these quilts had been woven by a South Caernarvonshire firm of manufacturers, and that the design had been developed from a quilt woven by a hand weaver of Caernarvon, named John Roberts. By means of a sixteen shaft treadle hand loom, this old craftsman produced a representation of Caernarvon Castle in a quilt which is said to have been presented to the late King Edward VII when, as Prince of Wales, he opened Caernarvon Waterworks in 1876.6

He continued:

The South Caernarvonshire firm took up the idea, and by the aid of a jacquard loom produced a variety of elaborate designs, including the one above mentioned, which sold for a long number of years. This is the only example I have come across in which the jacquard machine has been used in a Welsh factory.7

Crankshaw’s account of the production of the ‘Carthen Pwllheli’ was broadly accurate, although the opening of the Caernarfon waterworks took place in 1868, not 1876. However, he did not see the original blanket, designed by John Roberts, which was significantly different from the later version (illustrated above) produced by the Pwllheli Woollen Mill.

John Roberts’s blanket woven for the Prince of Wales (illustrated below) included a duplicate image of ‘Carnarvon Castle’ viewed from Caernarfon dock, surrounded by a trellis pattern and a border of roses. As Crankshaw reported, the piece was handwoven and must have required hours of painstaking work. Roberts was evidently an enterprising man who regularly entered both literature and textile competitions in eisteddfodau, winning prizes for his cloth in the National Eisteddfod in 1876 and 1877.8 The presentation of this showpiece textile to the future king of England demonstrated both his weaving prowess, and also the complex contexts of Welsh identity in late 19th century Britain.

By the early 1890s, John Roberts had emigrated to America and in 1895, John Griffith Jones of Pwllheli patented a blanket design that was related to, yet distinctively different from, Roberts’s original design. This second blanket featured an image of Caernarfon castle and an image of University College Wales, Aberystwyth. Instead of English roses, the borders are decorated with Welsh leeks and daffodils. The woven texts have been translated into Cymraeg (Welsh) with ‘castle’ replaced with castell and Coleg Prifysgol Cymru for the name of the university. Above the picture of Caernarfon castle are the words Cymru Fu (‘Wales has been’) and above the picture of the university are the words Cymru Fydd (‘Wales will be’). Presumably the meaning and implications of these words were lost on William Crankshaw, but they undoubtedly resonated with customers of the Pwllheli Woollen Mill.

In 1892, the Welsh scholar and poet, John Morris Jones, published a poem Cymru Fu: Cymru Fydd which contrasts the age of the Welsh princes with the later oppression imposed by English kings (Cymru Fu), symbolised by Caernarfon Castle. The poem ends with the prospect of a bright future through the education of the Welsh people and the continuation of the language (Cymru Fydd). The final line reads: O, mor fawr Cymru fydd (‘Oh, how great Wales will be’). The phrase Cymru Fydd had already been adopted as the name of a political movement, formed in 1886, which campaigned for Welsh self-government and the promotion of Cymraeg. To produce or buy a blanket woven with these words and symbols was a tangible expression of cultural and political allegiance. In this photograph of the Pwllheli mill workforce, a specimen carthen is prominently displayed by the family matriarch, Frances Griffith.

The carthenni were woven at Pwllheli on a Jacquard loom, unusual in the Welsh industry at the time, as Crankshaw observed. The double-cloth is constructed from a layer of red wool and a layer of white wool, woven simultaneously. On the underside (with a red design on a white background) the woven text is, of course, reversed. A number of examples have survived, some of which are now in museum collections, suggesting that it was a successful product for the mill.

It is unsurprising that some of the cultural and political references encountered on his journey around Wales evaded William Crankshaw, but overall his report was sympathetic to an industry operating in difficult circumstances. His recommendations were pragmatic: improved marketing through advertising, exhibitions and coordinated activities; diversification of fabrics to reduce the reliance on flannel production; and the provision of systematic and up-to-date technical education for mill owners and employees.

Both Crankshaw’s diagnosis and prescription would be reiterated in subsequent interventions, similarly designed to remedy the economic fragility of a national industry that had not developed at the same scale as textile producers in England and mainland Scotland. The workers whom Crankshaw met were often ingenious, and also unwilling to adapt to changing conditions and opportunities. The structured training curriculum advocated by the English educationalist was the antithesis of the on-the-job transfer of skills that prevailed in rural Wales. Mill owners were habitually unused to organised cooperation, and Crankshaw had no authority to impose reform.

His report was among the first initiatives that highlighted the tension between tradition and modernity in the Welsh textile industry. It was far from the last.

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In my previous Substack (5 November 2025), we met two interesting characters in the early twentieth-century history of Welsh textiles: the weaver, Lewis D. Jones, and the collector, activist and artist, Winifred Coombe Tennant. Both were active and influential in their communities beyond their shared commitment to craft (crefft): Jones was an Alderman and Mayor of Lampeter (1920-21), and Coombe Tennant was suffragist, Liberal activist, and an outspoken advocate for Welsh culture who adopted the Bardic name Mam o Nedd (Mother from Neath).

Their paths crossed in 1918 when Coombe Tennant went shopping for a floor rug.

In her article ‘Beautiful Things Made in Wales’ (1928) Coombe Tennant describes how much pleasure she derived from the integration of local textiles into her daily life. Having slept peacefully under her hand-woven bed cover (carthen) from Cardiganshire, she describes how she got up and…

… stood on a large white wool rug, one of a number of which that prince of handloom weavers, the late Lewis Jones of Lampeter, had made for me ten years ago… I came down to breakfast in my Welsh dress, tying on my apron of ‘two blues’ Carmarthenshire flannel as I ran down the stairs. In the hall, the boys met me, both wearing suits of home-spun tweed made on a hand-loom in the Aberystwyth area, and which no Harris weaver could better for quality. Why does anybody in Wales wear Harris tweed when Welsh tweeds of the finest quality can be bought for a fraction of the price?1

She ate her breakfast on crockery from the Ewenny Pottery, at a table from a Swansea cabinet-maker, and then went into the drawing room ‘gay with its large white wool rugs - these but lately come from a hand-loom weaver, living near Tregaron.’2

Coombe Tennant’s evident pride in her possessions was tinged with the recognition that the survival of these craft practices was threatened by new technologies and rapidly changing markets. As a result, the expertise of the crefftwr (craftsman) was being lost to the next generation. She had recently visited Owen Davies, an elderly hand-weaver in Llangybi, who worked alone on a single loom at the back of his kitchen. His weaving was of the highest quality, but how could he take on an apprentice with such limited resources? Coombe Tennant appealed for action to preserve such skills in passionate, but general, terms:

Now if we in Wales really cared for the old crafts, which - and this is vital to remember - could well be carried on on a sound economic basis, we should see to it that such a man was provided with two additional hand-looms, and that two lads were set to learn from him the art of weaving Welsh wool in the traditional designs and colours. I do not know anyone in the whole of Wales who will make the things he makes once he is gathered to his fathers - and he is ‘up in years’…3

Coombe Tennant’s cry of ‘something must be done’ was an inadequate response to the desperate economic situation of Wales (and beyond) in the 1920s. The decade had started with economic recession, and continued with mass unemployment and a deep depression. Rural areas suffered as much as the towns and cities that relied on heavy industries such as coal, steel and shipbuilding. For some social reformers, nothing less than the de-industrialisation of parts of the Welsh valleys and the revival of traditional trades offered a partial solution. In 1927, the Quakers established an educational settlement in the Rhondda with tuition in craft skills, including weaving, pottery and woodworking. The following year, the Rural Industries Bureau launched a successful scheme to teach young Welsh women hand-quilting and promote their products to a wealthy metropolitan clientele.

Against this backdrop, Coombe Tennant’s advocacy of vernacular craft was spurred by her awareness of the fragility of the rural economy that had sustained the hand-weaver, the wood-turner and the wheelwright. It was a moment both of economic crisis and cultural transition. The artisan’s trade was no longer viable; his tools and products were becoming museum pieces:

Think of it! We have taken Lewis Jones’ hand-loom and set it up in the National Museum at Cardiff and put up a quilt of his weaving in the intricate design he loved (but not so fine a specimen as the one of his weaving that I treasure here) and there is not a man in Lampeter who is carrying on his work today.4

Lewis D. Jones’s legacy was thus assimilated into the official story of Wales when the National Museum in Cardiff acquired his loom and an exemplary carthen (bed cover) in 1926. Coombe Tennant was evidently aware of the extension of the Museum’s collecting interests to include the vernacular and artisanal. And she must have heard about the young man who had recently been appointed Under-Keeper in the Department of Archaeology: Iowerth C. Peate (1901-1982).

Peate would become an important figure in the preservation and reinterpretation of Welsh weaving as part of a cultural tradition. Already in 1928, he was researching and writing a detailed description of the machinery and operation of a woollen-yarn factory at Llanrhystyd, Cardiganshire, which had closed in 1926 and been transferred to the Museum. Himself a proud descendant of country crefftwyr (in his case, carpenters, wheelwrights and textile manufacturers), Peate was deeply interested in the centrality of craft production to the economy and social structure of the countryside. The role of the artisan, he believed, was integral to the development of a distinctive national culture. Twenty years later, his ideas would be materialised in the opening of the Welsh Folk Museum (now St Fagans Museum of National History) in 1948.

We will revisit Peate and St Fagans Museum in future articles, to explore how he applied his concept of gwerin (folk) to the material culture of Wales, and as a frame for the display and performance of heritage - including the history of Welsh weaving.

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Few objects are as ubiquitous or as useful as a woollen blanket. Across the world, blankets are woven into the textile cultures of the places where they are made and, invariably, used. This is true of the blankets of Wales: traditionally woven in distinctive patterns and colours, bought and bartered in local economies, and gifted as kinship practices.

A double cloth bedcover, like this beautiful example woven by Lewis D. Jones of Lampeter, is produced by weaving two interconnected layers simultaneously, creating a thick, dense and usually reversible fabric. It is often called a carthen and was a customary wedding present, passed on to subsequent generations.

In 2025, Welsh double cloth weaving was added to the Red List of Endangered Crafts in the UK, and today there are only a handful of weaving mills producing these blankets.1 But the situation is more nuanced than a familiar story of manufacturing decline and displacement. The sale of Welsh blankets has shifted from the market stall to lifestyle retailers, and the demand for both new and vintage blankets is buoyant. Caught between heritage and modernity, today their uses and meanings are double-coded.

The idea of this Substack is to unpick some of these threads and to explore the design, production, use and meaning of Welsh blankets, both past and present.

The carthen woven by Lewis D. Jones is a particularly fine and intricate design, and is relatively unusual in being associated with a named weaver. Although specific designs were produced by particular mills, patterns were (and are) often anonymous, part of everyday material culture of the places where they were woven. In this sense, they are characteristic of the Welsh tradition of crefft: local, rural and vernacular.

Linked to the practice of crefft are the concepts of gwerin (folk) and lle (place). All three concepts have been used to frame the curation and interpretation of weaving as part of the national story - for example, at St Fagans National Museum of History where Lewis D. Jones’s carthen is now displayed.

My aim is to journey through the textile geography of Wales in the company of curators and historians, and some of the designers and weavers who worked for the woollen mills in the last century, including Marianne Straub, Alison Morton and Ann Sutton. How successful (or not) were their attempts to innovate and modernise?

Bringing the story up to date, the purchase and resurrection of Elvet Mill, Carmarthenshire by Daniel Harris of the London Cloth Company is a striking rebuke to the apparent inevitability of further mill closures.

Much more to come, but I’ll sign off here with the words of the art collector and political activist, Winifred Coombe Tennant (1874-1956), who displayed both her cultural identity and her support for the Welsh textile industry by wearing traditional flannel costume at home. In 1928, she wrote an article called ‘Beautiful Things Made in Wales’:

I had slept well under the comfortable warmth of my ‘carthen’ (fringed woollen quilt), a thing of beauty woven for me by one of the few hand-loom weavers left in Cardiganshire. I looked down at its pleasant colouring - delphinium blue and maize, against a background of rich cream, and enjoyed once again the way in which the design played with the colours, now settling them against the other, and now combining them, much as the notes of music in a Bach fugue.2

We will revisit Winifred Coombe Tennant and her love of Welsh weaving in a future piece.

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