September is the time for back to school, for clearing out the closet, putting away summer clothes and making room for fall and winter apparel - in my case, a task long overdue. While cleaning out my clothes closet, I found a tailored Harris Tweed suit I'd brought from England with me in 1963. It still looked terrific. The young college student who was helping me - she of the polyester tanktop, bare midriff and designer jeans - had never heard of Harris Tweed, didn't even know that the Tweed was a river in Scotland. So thereby hangs the tale once more; let me tell you the story of this wonderful cloth.
Obsolescence is a rule of thumb in the fashion industry, but obsolescence doesn't apply to this famous hand-woven fabric; it's chic even with elbow patches. But the cloth doesn't grow on pegs in expensive stores. It comes from Scotland's Outer Hebrides, as full of legend and as romantic as the fabric itself. The Vikings discovered the island group around 800 A.D. The "Clo Mor" (the bog cloth) was woven even then - though the invaders wore skins.
Scratching a living in those bleak, unyielding, windswept isles was always a challenge, but seldom harder than in the 1840s. With famine threatening, the wife of a nobleman who had acquired lands tried to help by finding a market for the locally produced tweeds. Later she brought in experts to perfect the cloth, which until then had been made solely for the islanders' own use.
Dismayed at what the Industrial Revolution had wrought, the locals sang long and loud in praise of the independent, sociable and courageous artisans who applied their skills in the crofts ("among their familiar crags and hills") rather than in England's "dark, satanic Mills." An infant industry was about to be born. The time s were right. There was a keen interest in the weaving craft, and John Ruskin and his fellow poets were behind it.
Nowadays the Campbells and the MacLeods and the MacDonalds continue to weave the noble cloth in their stark, small homes. Their managers and foremen, operating their own looms in their new homes, produce 7 million yards of Harris Tweed per year. This luxury product, sold throughout the world, annually commands more than $10 million - a remarkable achievement for a cottage industry.
When last I heard, there were more than 600 weavers. Their crofts are widely scattered. From the air you can spot them: lonely places connected by roads, skirting lochs and hillocks. One can't see the bundles of woven tweed put on the roadside, amid the milk cans, but they are there, awaiting collection by vans from the mills that do the sorting and cleaning of the wool, the spinning, the dyeing and finishing of the hand-woven cloth - processes once done on the spot but now by machines.
The Vikings named these islands Hav-Bred-Ey (Hebrides), "islands on the edge of the sea." But "islands on the edge of the world" would have been as appropriate. The Outer Hebrides lie 50 miles off Scotland's west coast. One reaches them by chessboard progression, leapfrogging from one isle to another using car ferries.
The hub is Stornoway in the Lewis section of the main island. The mills are there - but not a mill town in the usual sense. Gaelic, the old Celtic language, is spoken alongside English. The kirk (church) is strong. Flocks of sheep bar the motorist's way, and it's the kind of place of which I heard said, "Only a brave man digs his garden on Sunday."
The inspiration for many of the impressive range of designs and colors comes from nature, what the crofters see outside. The sky is ever changing, deep blue to steel gray and, just as rapidly, rosy pink. Other tweeds are inspired by the colors of moor and mountain and known by names of certain landmarks.
Using nature's colors has been customary since earliest times. It came about for a practical reason. Clad in colors of his moorlands and glens, an islander was made almost invisible. Camouflage, we call it: useful when hunting or being hunted. Today's pop-ular "estate plaids" and "glen plaids" have sprung from this tradition. The manufacturers have access to hundreds of these patterns and are ever ready to produce new ones when the need arises. A "Glen Madison" cloth has been sold in New York, promoted as the "protective covering" of Madison Avenue advertising executives. It is an ink gray. Incredible that such sophistication could come from such an unsophisticated source: a 1920 handloom on a croft 3,000 miles away.
Once the wool was dyed with lichens, which grow on rocks. Bog myrtle made a deep tallow; crotal, a rusty orange. The crofters' children gathered these plants and knew them by their traditional names: Hornbeam, Meadow-sweet, Ladies Bedstraw, Ling, Whortleberry and Woad.
There have been rumors of a weaver who still used the natural dyes. It was said he took orders for cloth to be made in summer, when the plants could be gathered. However, this custom, like the one called "waulking," is probably just folklore.
Waulking is a process now called "finishing." The cloth was thickened with soap and lye (stale urine gathered in special tubes for the purpose), then pummeled on a trestle table to the accompaniment of song:
Roll the cloth, bundle the wool,
Tight as the wall, smooth as the egg,
Thick as the bum of the pastor's wife.
Nowadays, the tweed is finished by mechanical means, and the ceremony of waulking is performed solely as a tourist attraction.
Some crofters still sell retail - not weaving exclusively for the mills, which, in addition to processing cloth, move it to the markets of the world, including some here in Seattle.
Genuine Harris Tweed, the real stuff, is woven by hand. The lack of motor power - that, and the tweed being made in the islands - seems absurd by this date, yet there is good reason for it. In the 1930s, manufacturers tried to steal the name, putting a machine-made product on the market. The weavers and the mill owners went to court, offering their attested interpretation of Harris Tweed: a product wholly made in the Outer Hebrides from 100-percent pure Scottish wool, not wool dyed, carded and finished on the mainland in factory-like conditions. The courts upheld this contention. Later, it was ruled that weaving must be done on looms driven by nothing more mechanized than the weaver's feet. The treadle loom was a ball and chain but also a guarantee of survival. No outsider could cash in, unless he converted to a cottage industry - an unlikely move. To ensure that members toed the line, a system of self-inspection was set up. A weaver caught connecting power to his loom was excommunicated.
So if your Aunt Mabel offers you a gift of her old Harris Tweed suit, don't be proud - take it. And gentlemen, even if that old, dark gray-and-white herringbone tweed jacket is getting frayed at the elbows, don't throw it out; get leather patches put on, and you'll have something that can never be replaced with polyester.
I gave my Harris Tweed jacket a jolly good brush and found that, with its perfect tailoring, it still fit perfectly. The skirt, on the other hand, had provided a few good meals for the moths, and didn't fit anyway. So that could be discarded - or maybe we'll make a hat out of it. My helper thought it was "cool" and suggested I wear it over her grandmother's satin-and-lace nightgown. And the pronunciation was, "Wow!"
TTFN
[[In-content Ad]]
