Janet Hunter (2024) The Islanders and the Orb

The Islanders and the Orb is a revised edition, extended by Calum MacLeod to cover the periods between 1995 and 2023. Hunter’s scholastic examination of the evolution of the Harris Tweed industry from the nineteenth century is enhanced by the afterword, which highlights its positive effect on the Islands. The new edition, like the old edition, is sponsored by the Harris Tweed Industry. You pay for what you get.

‘Tweel’ is defined in the Concise Scots Dictionary as a local dialect form of ‘twill’, which is ‘a diagonally-ribbed cloth produced by passing the weft threads over one and under two or more warp threads’

I’ve got a bookmark from Harris made of its tweed. The Orb in the title refers to official Harris Tweed. Like Adidas with its three stripes. The Orb suggests a certain quality to do with the Scottish Islands in the same way Champagne is associated with a region in France. In essence, it’s a luxury good. And marketed as such.  Finding success mainly in the Asian markets of China and Japan in the same way it once was patronised by Queen Victoria and the middle-and-upper classes in the nineteenth century.

The population of Harris and Lewis 20 400 (Isle of Lewis has a population of around 18,500 people). The production of Harris Tweed employs around 350 people. During the First World War, an issue arose if the tweed could be handmade if a serviceman had lost his hand. If it wasn’t hand-woven, it wasn’t part of a craft industry and couldn’t be marketed as such. Harris Tweed could be associated with other islands, yet keep its singularity. Regarded as a cottage industry, making tweed or twills was something around 8000 crofters did in the same way they fished and gathered peat. Few depended on it, but the island economies were more liable to react to larger economic shocks like high unemployment in the 1970s with more people leaving the Islands. But there were issues with counterfeiting and association with yarn that was machine milled that helped bring the product and the goodwill associated with it into disrepute. Hence the Orb mark.  

The boom years for Harris Tweed were after the First and Second World Wars. Pre-First World War, nine out of ten weavers in Harris were women.

‘The older type of loom used in the islands was known as the beart bheag, the little loom, in which the shuttle, made from the shin-bone of a sheep, was thrown by hand. In the 1890s the Congested Districts Board made interest-free loans available for the purchase of a new bigger loom with a flying shuttle, the beart mhòr. These new looms, originally imported from Galashiels, had a much greater output per hour than the beart bheag, but as they were much heavier to work, they tended to be used by men.’

‘In my young days the practice was for the crofters to process their own wool. They would shear the sheep, wash and dye the wool and thereafter tease the wool by hand, mainly in the wintertime. They would then place the wool into bags marked ‘weft’ and ‘warp’. These bags were then handed to the merchant who had a contract with one of the island mills to convert the dyed and teased wool into yarn. After the first World War there were two spinning mills in Stornoway and another at Tarbert, if I recollect rightly.’

‘In the tweed industry, especially in Scotland, the truck system often involved weavers or other workers being paid with goods or vouchers that could only be redeemed at the employer’s store. This meant workers were often forced to purchase items at inflated prices, effectively reducing their earnings. It gave employers significant control over their workers’ livelihoods, and many workers found it difficult to escape the system.’

The story of Harris Tweed is the story of the Islands. Those that owned the land owned the people on the land. The Potato Famine in Ireland 1846-51, where over a million died and the population of Ireland now is half of what it was then was mirrored to a lesser degree in Harris and the Islands. Coffin ships left from all British Islands and not just the Irish or in the nineteenth century. The Iolaire slowly sunk on the Beasts of Holm in the early hours of New Year’s Day 1919. 181 survivors of the war, 174 from Lewis and 7 from Harris, were drowned at the entrance to Stornoway harbour in sight of wailing relatives. Each generation was emotionally scarred in their own ways. Harris Tweed which was once a fall-back, like fishing, became, for many, a full-time job done by men, exported outside the Islands. Like Scottish whisky, it’s all about marketing. The Islanders and the Orb is a marketing exercise. Read on.  

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