Connecting Threads

On display in the Scottish Design Galleries is a jute and cotton bomber jacket by designer Nicholas Daley, from his Juteopolis collection of 2017 (Image 1). With its light brown fabric and utilitarian appearance it stands out from the riot of colour that adorns the rest of the gallery. Daley’s work is inspired by his Jamaican and Scottish heritage and the Juteopolis collection points to his Dundonian family and their connection with Dundee’s jute mills. As a dress historian I find this fascinating in itself as it is a great example of the relationship between design, clothing and identity. On a broader level, the jacket also makes me think of Scottish textiles as part of a wider, global history - one that is intimately connected with colonialism, imperialism and slavery, and where jute is just part of the story.

[Image 1: Bomber Jacket from Spring/Summer Juteopolis collection. Lent by Nicholas Daley]

The growth of the jute industry in the nineteenth century, for example, depended a lot on the skills, trade networks and technology that developed with the Scottish linen industry in the eighteenth century. While the jute industry looked primarily east, particularly to the Indian subcontinent, for its raw materials, the eighteenth-century linen industry looked more westwards to the West Indies and North America, not for raw materials but as markets for their products.

Linen manufacture in Scotland really took off after the Union of 1707. It was seen as something that would not compete with the English woollen trade and so it received a lot of financial and state encouragement. Some fine goods were produced, including fine damask table linen (Image 2), but much of the industry focused on coarse linen which was cheaper and easier to make. Unlike the cotton and jute industries of the nineteenth century where we have textile samples and even some factory buildings, very little material evidence of the coarse linen industry survives.

[Image 2: Woven linen damask napkin, 1762, T.112-1932]

Thousands of people worked for the linen industry in Scotland and one piece of cloth would have passed through many hands before it was finished. The flax had to be beaten and heckled (combed) before it could be spun into yarn. Spinning was women’s work and spinning schools across the country taught girls as young as eight how to spin the flax. Once the yarn was spun it would be woven into cloth, a job that was typically done by men. If the desired result was a whiter linen, then the cloth would have to be bleached which made it more expensive. Often, however, the linen was left unbleached.

One type of coarse linen was ‘osnaburg’ which was a medium weight, plain weave linen cloth. The key site of manufacture for this cloth was Osnabrück, Germany, but it was also made in Scotland from the 1740s onwards. Some Scottish manufacturers even tried to rebrand it ‘Edinburg’ to undercut the German competition, even though a lot of it was produced in the region in and around Dundee.

Osnaburg was a practical fabric: it could be used as clothing or for household textiles and would have been found in many homes across Scotland. It also provides us with a direct link between Scotland, the West Indies and North America as it was the basis of the clothing that was allocated to enslaved people by their enslavers. Along with cheap woollen cloth from the north of England and Wales, large quantities of osnaburg were regularly shipped from British ports to the colonies in the eighteenth century. Once there it was made up into shirts, shifts, breeches and trousers, jackets, and petticoats for field slaves and domestic household slaves [Image 3]. Osnaburg was considered a particularly suitable fabric for this purpose because it was cheap, relatively durable and easily accessible.

[Image 3: Detail from the print ‘A View of Virgin Valley Estate, Jamaica, ca.1780’. Slavery Images: A Visual Record of the African Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Early African Diaspora, accessed January 18, 2021, http://slaveryimages.org/s/slaveryimages/item/1429]

Enslavers typically distributed clothing to their enslaved labourers twice a year and the garments were often loose and unfitted – this was not out of consideration for the wearer but more of a cost cutting exercise for the enslavers. Sometimes the clothing allocation was as little as one shirt and pair of trousers for men, and one shift and petticoat for women, and this was expected to last the wearer at least six months. Garments were therefore repaired, re-worn and recycled until they were no longer recognisable and became rags. Surviving examples of clothes worn by enslaved people are extremely rare, and there are no known surviving examples of Scottish osnaburg.

If they were able to, enslaved people could raise livestock or grow vegetables and use these goods to barter or exchange for other items of clothing. Some enslaved people might have been able to decorate or adapt their clothing by dyeing cloth or adding patches, for example, but they would have had little to no say over what they were given by their enslavers. The plain and often inadequate clothing made from cloth that could have been made in Scotland, England or elsewhere in Europe, was a clear marker of their enslaved status.

The bomber jacket shows how modern fashion and design can help and inspire us to think about the past. It is a celebration of Daley’s roots and it is also a window into Scotland’s textile past and what role it had on a global stage. It also allows us to think about the lives of the people who were affected by these textile heritages - those who made the fabric, and those who wore it – even if the textiles themselves no longer survive.