From The Sunday Times June 15, 2008
Stop the woolly thinking on Harris Tweed
Cost-cutting at the Hebridean textile giant has come just when it should be capitalising on global interest in Scottish produce
Gillian Bowditch
During the short-lived craze for simple living which gripped the US in the aftermath of 9/11, there was a television programme which featured a slot entitled, “The thing that refused to die”. It became a bit of a cult, with people dusting off museum pieces that were still going strong against all the odds. A 1923 cash register in a barber’s shop; a 1967 Electrolux vacuum cleaner; a 1950s toaster which threatened to electrocute anyone who came within a 20ft radius.
I don’t know if it ever featured a Harris Tweed jacket but if BBC Scotland felt the need to liven up the schedules with a similar programme, it would be inundated with the products made from the “Clo Mhor” — the big cloth. There can be few households north of Perth which don’t have a Harris Tweed jacket, several generations old — the lining shredded, the pockets moth-eaten but the garment indestructible — mouldering in a cupboard.
Harris Tweed is the Bruce Forsyth of fabrics. A speciality taste, beloved of elderly maiden aunts, it may occasionally feel the need to drape itself around a leggy blonde model, but it remains resolutely bristly and unswayed by trends. While the fabric has no built-in obsolescence, however, disaster has been looming over the industry since the 1980s.
The latest setback to befall Harris Tweed comes in the form of Brian Haggas, the 75-year-old Yorkshireman who bought the Kenneth Mackenzie mill in Stornoway for £2m in December 2006. At the time Haggas, whose mill is responsible for the production of 95% of the cloth, was hailed as the saviour of Harris Tweed. Now he is being demonised as the worst thing to hit the industry since the arrival of Gortex.
Haggas has slashed Harris Tweed designs from several hundred to just five and, in his bluff Yorkshire way, has declared that Harris Tweed is henceforth a man’s product. There will be no more Kate Moss poncing about in Harris Tweed and no more Vivienne Westwood designs. From now on, Harris Tweed will be made into four styles of men’s jacket — Barva, Laxdale, Taransay and Dalmore. In addition, he has stockpiled enough bales of the cloth in China to make 70,000 jackets. There is to be no further production for at least six months.
Needless to say, this rationalisation has resulted in trouble at mill, with the livelihoods of more than 100 weavers threatened and half of the mill’s 78 staff laid off.
The big cloth is looking decidedly shrunken. It’s easy to say that the Harris Tweed industry has been not weaving but drowning for decades. I visited in 1993 to report on the introduction of the Bonas-Griffiths loom which was designed to weave the double widths from which most modern garments are cut. The loom’s introduction came with a £10m subsidy and wildly over-optimistic reports of a trebling of sales, the creation of 100 jobs and the injection of £11m annually into the local economy. Given that turnover had fallen from £28m to £5.5m in less than a decade and that 25% of the workforce were of pensionable age, this was hard to compute.
It would be easy to write-off Harris Tweed as a lost cause on a Jacobean scale. It is an industry which has made a virtue of eschewing the Industrial Revolution. Harris Tweed, by law, has to be hand-woven by the islanders in their own homes from pure virgin wool — as opposed to wool that has put itself about a bit — dyed and spun in the Outer Hebrides. While the rest of the world adopted mechanisation, the internet and fibre-optic technology, the weavers of Harris and Lewis considered the combustion engine a bit new fangled. It remains the ultimate cottage industry.
But if ever Harris Tweed’s time has come, it is now. The famous orb topped with the Maltese cross is one of Britain’s oldest trademarks. The brand fits perfectly with a Scotland which is finally waking up to the true value of the iconic products it has so long treated with contempt but which promote the country around the globe and give it an identity of which other nations can only dream. A new generation of designers — from Timorous Beasties to Scott Inness — are using Scottish imagery in clever and quirky ways. Kilts, thistles, shortbread, whisky and tartan are being reclaimed from the purveyors of tat. A generation of Scottish thinkers with chips on their shoulder the size of the Cuillins has given way to a generation of Scottish doers.
If Scotland is to shake off its reputation for binge and cringe — and it’s a big if — it needs to go back to the future and take genuine pride in the positive aspects of our culture. It’s all too easy for ambitious academics, keen to make a quick name for themselves, to trash our history. It’s depressing when those wanting to make a quick buck do so by devaluing our unique brands.
Harris Tweed has weathered the downturn in the Scottish textile industry which has seen many of the famous mills of the Borders crumble. If Harris Tweed were an Italian or French brand, it’s future would be secure. Subsidy is not the answer, however. Millions of pounds have been pumped into the industry to little avail. It needs a younger generation with flair, creativity and the ability to take calculated risks to take the cloth from Harris to Paris.
There are already a number of “kitchen sink” entrepreneurs making everything from Harris Tweed handbags to key-rings and cashing in on the trademark’s cachet. The recent de-mothballing of two small mills at Carloway and Shawbost give cause for hope.
An investigation by the Monopolies and Mergers Commission into the antics of Haggas, who has terminated agreements to finish the cloth of some independent weavers, would not go amiss.
Harris Tweed is a global brand with fantastic integrity and a strong reputation. It would be disastrous if it were to go into terminal decline just as Scotland is gearing up to welcome affiliates around the world for the Year of Homecoming celebrations next year. The next chapter in its long saga belongs to mills and boom. This is the wrong time to be losing the thread.
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