Harris Tweed
Tweed enthusiasm of national tour guides
Representatives of the Harris Tweed industry are often quoted as saying there is great enthusiasm for the cloth in the world beyond the Hebrides – but over the last decade or more, more than one islander must have wondered if this was just wishful thinking as demand plummeted.
However, I can now confirm this is true – and I have seen it! In mid April a coach full of professional Scottish tour guides toured the Western Isles and, for them, the idea of Harris Tweed seemed like a teenage fan’s appreciation of a rock group – they want to buy the product, as many different varieties as possible; they want to meet the stars; they love the logo and the image; they want the spin-offs and the autographs; they have spotted it on TV; and they want to convince other people that their group is the best. They are 100 per cent Harris Tweed groupies.
The gaggle of guides – with members from Russia, China, the Netherlands, Japan, Argentina and Germany – poured into the Harris Hotel on the evening of Thursday April 22, laden with lengths of tweed, Harris Tweed handbags and so on bought during a tour of tweed mills and local craft producers, and literally brimming with enthusiasm for the cloth.
Despite it being the end of a long day, the group gathered quickly for a talk and screen display about Harris Tweed by Lorna Macaulay, who heads the Harris Tweed Authority.
The tour guides – all Blue-Badge members of the Scottish Tourist Guides Association – work throughout the year across the whole of Scotland – and in the Central Belt, with demand from business conferences, this can be a full-time job. Harris Tweed is one topic that their groups of visitors regularly bring up – why is there not a shop in Edinburgh to showcase the cloth and sell it, they asked? Why not market it in Argentina, said another – our winter is their summer so it would be ideal for maintaining demand for the cloth all the year round?
Lorna found herself constantly interrupted by questions as her audience tried to find out more – and get the answers to the questions which they get asked themselves by visitors. After several days of visiting and travelling, the group could have been excused for just wanting their dinner, specially with the laid-out tables visible from the room where they were meeting, bathed in the evening sun. But no – they just wanted to know about Harris Tweed, what it was and where it was going.
Lorna explained she was the fourth generation of her family to be involved in Harris Tweed. She became chief executive of the Harris Tweed Authority 18 months ago, taking up the post just after the closure of, at that time, the largest mill. That had been a difficult time for the industry but there was a much brighter position now. Harris Tweed remains a huge asset for the islands but it was in danger of becoming a liability in terms of the large number of livelihoods depending on it, she said, it could be said that the islands had been guilty of not exploiting the asset properly. But this was changing. “There’s been a real energy in the industry over the last year,” she said
She reminded the audience that the industry dated back to 1844 when garments were ordered in what became known as Harris Tweed for the staff of Lady Dunmore of Amhuinnsuidhe Castle. Visiting guests to the Castle took up the idea with further orders to local people. It had been a pioneer among local industries, winning the first case of “passing off” in 1906 in London against someone who had been pretending his tweed material was from Harris. In 1910 it gained the Orb Mark – now the oldest continuously used trademark – and then expanded over many decades. In 1966, a total of 7.6 million metres of cloth was produced. At the height of the industry in the 60’s there was said to have been up to 2000 millworkers and around 1300 weavers at work. Even 20 years later, around five million metres of cloth were being produced. But then sales started to fall until they were a tiny fraction of the peak production.
Harris Tweed remains the only cloth material with its own Act of Parliament – which also created the Harris Tweed Authority itself. However, that had not affected the change in market demand which meant that Harris Tweed had fallen out of favour with production falling to just over 400,000 metres last year. There were around 130 double width weavers involved and around 30 single width weavers, although only around 60 had been active in recent years, and with an average age of around 60, there was a need for younger people to join the industry. There were 10 new weavers being trained at present in a course organised with Cardonald College. There was also a need for wider markets, like accessories and soft furnishing.
Internationally, there was promising interest from Russia, India and China – and work was being done in the more traditional markets like Germany, the US and elsewhere. The HTA was responsible for promotion of the brand and maintaining the image of the cloth through advertising and other publicity. It is planning extensive publicity this autumn to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the granting of the Orb trademark in October. This will coincide with the publication of a book of photographs and text by the photographer Ian Lawson. There will also be a variety of other events – which were all coming in a year when Dr Who (Matt Smith) has catapulted Harris Tweed into the living rooms of millions of people every weekend with his choice of jacket for his central part in the iconic science fiction blockbuster. It was also important that Matt Smith was known to have chosen the jacket himself to create the image which he wanted – young man chooses classic jacket!
It was clear from the enthusiastic response of the audience – and the amount of tweed and tweed products they had bought earlier in the day - that Dr Who is very far from the only distant admirer of the Clo Mòr.
