Belfast Linen and the Loop Bridge Mill

It can be argued that by 1911 Belfast was one of the most industrialised cities in the world, if you accept as definition of industrialised the simple proportion of the labour force engaged in manufacturing compared to other sectors.

Between 1891 and 1911 40% of the total labour force of Belfast was engaged directly in manufacturing industry, with another 6-7% employed in transport and communications and 9% in the production of clothing and shoes. By comparison, the figures for the United Kingdom as a whole were 23% in manufacturing and 8% in clothing and shoes and the levels of such employment in Ireland were even lower. It is against this context that we must consider the history of the Loop Bridge Mill, it is not perhaps an exceptional place but it can be seen as symbolising a history of manufacturing and labour that is long-gone! As a building the mill lacks what some would call ‘outstanding architectural features’ but the point is perhaps that is because of its very function, this was never intended to be a building to be admired, it was a building to be worked in! Those who worked in the preparing rooms and spinning floors of this mill had little leisure to consider the ecstatic aspects of their surroundings.

Linen had been a feature of Ulster's economy since the end of the seventeenth century and during the eighteenth century it had become one of the main growth sectors of the Irish economy. Belfast became a major centre for the finishing and marketing of linen produced by spinners and weavers in the rural regions in these years and from 1783, with the opening of the white Linen Hall, the town’s links with Dublin were broken. However, in terms of textile production, it is cotton not linen that was important in the city; by 1800, according to evidence given to a House of Commons Committee, GBP192,000 had been invested in cotton machinery and 13,500 people were employed in the industry within a ten mile radius of Belfast. It is sometimes claimed that this industry introduced the modern factory to Ireland, but this is the case (both brewing and milling had adapted to a factory system earlier) however, in Ireland only Belfast could be considered a 'factory town'. The industry peaked in 1825 when there were 3,500 workers in 20 cotton mills in Belfast, mainly concentrated in and around Smithfield, but from this point decline in the face of English competition was rapid.

The decline in the cotton industry was matched by the growth of factory produced linen. Until 1825 there had been serious technical difficulties in manufacturing linen by machine, the basic flax fibre was too brittle to be spun and woven by machinery of the type used in the cotton industry and linen remained basically a hand produced, and thus more expensive, fabric. This problem was overcome, at the same time as Belfast cotton mills found themselves being forced out of business by larger and more efficient producers in Lancashire, when James Kay of Preston patented the 'wet-spinning' process which was quickly developed into a viable machine by Marshall’s of Leeds. The new machinery was first used on a significant scale in Belfast when Sinclair Mulholland rebuilt his cotton mill, which had been destroyed in a fire, as a linen spinning mill using three steam engines to power 15,300 spindles in a huge five story building. At full capacity the mill employed 900 workers and was capable of producing 700 tons of top quality yarn a year, this establishment set the pattern for others. By 1834 there were as many workers in linen mills as cotton and by 1850 there were only four cotton firms left in Ulster compared to 29 flax-spinning establishments.

It is at this stage that of the industries development that Moreland Cowan & Co leased just under three hectares of land from the Marquis of Downshire to construct a spinning mill alongside the Loop River. Robin Johnston pointed out that the lease shows that the partners in the firm were James Cowan Moreland, Alexander Moreland, William Harrison Moreland, John Harrison Moreland, Andrew Cowan and William Cowan. Slater's Directory of 1856 lists the firm as flax spinners rather than weavers and shows that they had an officer at 17 Rosemary Street, in addition to their mill in Ballymacarrett. By 1862 the structure of the linen industry was changing in the aftermath of the Great Famine, labour was more expensive and manufacturers began to install machinery to replace hand-loom weavers. There were 13 weaving mills in Ulster, mainly in and around Belfast, with 4,108 looms out of an Irish total of 4,933. The long-term success of linen was not certain, yard for yard cotton was still a far cheaper fabric and it is likely that the Belfast industry would have declined had the American Civil War not resulted in a worldwide shortage of raw cotton in the early 1860s. If you can not get cotton then linen was the obvious alternative in this period and Belfast enjoyed an unprecedented industrial boom. By 1868 there were 15,217 looms in Ireland, 12,149 of which were in Ulster, and the number in Belfast increased from 3000 to 9000 in less than six years at this point Loop Bridge probably acquired its first weaving sheds.

The re-emergence of cotton after 1870 caused problems in Belfast, there were clear signs that there was excess capacity and a number of smaller or more indebted firms succumbed to bankruptcy and period depressions caused company failures notably in 1875, 1881 and 1898. It was in this environment that the owners of the Loop Bridge Mill, known since 1865 as Moreland Bros, joined with another company Preston, Smyth and Co. to form a new limited liability company, the County Down Flax Spinning and Weaving Co. Ltd. with a capital of GBP120,000. By the mid-1880s the area around the mill was being developed for housing and the Belfast and Ulster Directory of 1890 shows rows of workers houses in the area. However, the linen industry remained highly volatile and in 1894 the company went into voluntary liquidation on the grounds that it was not profitable and linen production ceased. In fact the basic problem was the mill was too small and could no longer compete with larger and more efficient producers in what had become a highly competitive market.

The directors of the Co. Down Spinning and Weaving Company seem to have recognised what was happening because in 1893 they leased the building to the printing firm of McCaw Stevenson and Orr Ltd, who renamed the building the Linenhall Works, and in 1896 this firm brought the premises. The firm were already successful, in part at least because they had been quick to adopt new technology and had developed the Glacier window transparency which allowed advertising material to be fixed to windows. In later years this was developed to produce a decorative product that gave windows a stained glass appearance without the cost and was marketed through agencies in France, Germany, Canada, Australia, Chile, Argentina and the Philippines. When they brought the mill building in 1896 they employed 800 people and in that year turnover reached GBP75,600 they were by contemporary standards a ‘big business’. In 1904 the company took its first orders from Meccano Co., which had just commenced manufacturing children’s toys, this firm were to become the main customers until McCaw and Co closed in the 1970s.

However, if Loop Bridge was no longer producing linen others were, in the early years of the twentieth century demand increased, the industry once again expanded and by 1911 30,000 were employed in spinning, weaving or finishing linen in Belfast, with at least 13,000 others employed in the making up trades. But wages remained low - a skilled workman in the shipyards might expect to earn GBP2 a week and a labourer 16-19s in this city, yet female earnings in the linen trade averaged only 9s. In the spinning rooms the steam used to lubricate the flax produced an atmosphere not found in Belfast today outside a sauna, temperatures of 27C and relative humidity of 75-80%. The result was serious health problems for the largely female workforce - in areas where mill workers predominated the TB rate was 50% higher than the city as a whole and the death rate was a third higher than for the city as a whole. A critically important, but often forgotten, group of workers in Belfast were the tens of thousands of women working in the ‘making-up’ trades. The most important product in terms of Belfast was handkerchiefs, which were produced in huge numbers from the mid-1880s onwards and became a separately listed item in Ireland’s export statistics in the 1890s. The Frenchman Paul de Rousiers visited the Belfast shop of Robinson and Cleaver and saw the products of this trade:

I was shown hand-woven linen handkerchiefs at 4s a piece which I could hardly distinguish from machine-made goods at 4d each. The manager who accompanied me, pointed out with the aid of a magnifying glass the number and fineness of the threads, which could be counted in a square inch of the hand-woven one. The difference was very obvious when the magnifying glass was applied to the cheaper handkerchief. Side by side with these were cotton handkerchiefs at 2s a dozen and children's handkerchiefs at 2d a dozen. These were what the majority of the customers buy. Messers Robinson and Cleaver say they sell 30,000 dozen handkerchiefs each week, but the costly article, hand-woven because no machine can produce the necessary fineness, forms but a small fraction of the total.

The workers who produced these goods were hideously exploited, they saw little of the profit than came from sales on this scale. In order to compete with cotton, Linen merchants had to cut costs to the bone and fabric was a fixed price, therefore the wages of the workers were cut to a bare minimum. Mary Galway, of the Irish Union of Mill workers, told a meeting in the Ulster Hall in 1910 of the rates paid to out-workers: She said for clipping cotton pocket-handkerchiefs with 120 clips on each a sum of 1d per dozen was paid, and it took an expert worker five hours to clip twelve dozen. For thread-drawing pure linen handkerchiefs supplied by one of the oldest firms in the city, 1d a dozen and six dozen could be drawn in a hard days work. A widow with seven children could earn at most 4s a week at hand-spoke work, the rate of payment being 1/3 per dozen handkerchiefs.

It is often difficult in history to avoid making unsuitable moral judgements and I suspect that most of us today would probably agree that these workers were hideously exploited. However, there is a certain truth in the manufacturers defence of this trade, which was that it offered a source of income to those who stood in greatest need of even minimal additional income. It is a highly debateable point, but as a trade it serves to remind us that not everybody in pre-WW1 Belfast was prospering equally.

The outbreak of the First World War created considerable problems for McCaw Stevenson and Orr as export and domestic markets were reduced and they found it difficult to obtain supplies of paper and other supplies. They survived the war, largely due to producing glue for use in aircraft manufacture and in the early 1920s business began to recover largely due to an increase in demand for Meccano toys but this did not last. From 1926 to 1931 the book value of the company’s buildings and equipment declined from £118,000 to £36,000 and the value of stock and orders from GBP40,000 to GBP22,000 the company was certainly making losses over at least part of this period. The 1930s generally were a bad time for the firm and there were reductions in the numbers employed and a moratorium on capital expenditure. The outbreak of World War Two again resulted in reduced sales and shortages of basic materials, in 1941, bombing destroyed the lithographic printing department and the next night the varnishing department in the old mill was hit. The company survived partly through government printing contracts and partly through renting out space to the Admiralty, Ministry of War and Harland and Wolff, however, by 1945 the firm had reduced its workforce to only forty.

After the war the company began to rebuild and between 1946 and 1955 the turnover increased from GBP80,000 to GBP264,000 mainly based on export orders from companies such as Proctor and Gamble, Nestle, Michelin, Esso and of course its mainstay Meccano. They decided to close the letterpress department and concentrate on packaging and labelling products a move which made sense but which seriously reduced its product range. In the early 1970s following the death of the managing director, the liquidation of Meccano the firms major customer and the increasing ‘troubles’ in Northern Ireland the companies fortunes again slumped. In 1984 McCaw and Co. sold their interest in the printing business to W&G Baird Ltd as part of a series of purchases which resulted in the creation of MSO Ltd. At first the firm expanded operations at the mill site and invested in new plant and equipment but by 1989 they recognised that a 140 year old building was not suited to modern production methods and moved to a modern factory unit on the Castlereagh Road. As always the problem was what to do with an old factory? The building was let at various times to diverse tenants including a garage, an insurance broker, a photographer and an industrial rag processor. Amongst these tenants (one resists the temptation to say 'rag-bag') was Creative Exchange.

What will happen next? Sad to say the mill will probably be demolished, it may a rare example of Belfast’s industrial past but, as I said, it lacks architectural merit and the land is too valuable. What the bombers, German and domestic, have left us may now be destroyed by the developers? The price of renewed prosperity?

Dr John Lynch

Queen's University Belfast 2007