SCOTTISH HISTORY SOCIETY FIFTH SERIES VOLUME 9 The British Linen Company A ACKNOWLEDGEMENT The Council of the Society is pleased to record that the publication of this volume has been assisted by generous sponsorship from The British Linen Bank and its parent, Bank of Scotland. Founded by Royal Charter in 1746 as The British Linen Company, it gradually evolved into a financier of the linen trade, and in the late eighteenth century, into a fully-fledged bank. Publication of this volume marks the 250th anniversary of the foundation of The British Linen Company. British Linen Company one-guinea note, 1768. Ebenezer Hill, the Company’s teller, shortly after the issue of this note absconded with over ,£600 of the Company’s money. The British Linen Company 1745-1775 edited by Alastair J. Dune ★ ★ EDINBURGH printed for the Scottish History Society by PILLANS & WILSON LTD., EDINBURGH 1996 Scottish History Society 1996 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 0-906245-18-4 Printed in Great Britain Enclosed is the IS shortly. It is hof Society’s annual p Scottish History Society Enclosed is the 1996 volume: The British Linen Bank, 1745-1775. The 1994 volume. Miscellany XII, will be issued shortly. It is hoped that the 1995 and 1997 volumes will be issued in the first half of 1997, by which time the Society’s annual publication schedule should have returned to normal. Members are thanked for their patience. O /'', SR*. 6 fe, o if ‘*'1.•■V (QflJ CONTENTS Preface vi Abbreviations vii INTRODUCTION 1 BRITISH LINEN COMPANY PAPERS 20 1. Formation and Development, 1745-1753 20 2. Crisis and Recovery, 1753-1762 53 3. Debt and Devolution, 1763-1764 168 4. Disengagement, 1765-1775 191 Appendix: Note on the Manufacture of Linen 225 Glossary 227 INDEX 230 PREFACE It is now more than twenty-five years since I was first allowed access, thanks to the kindness of the then Secretary to the British Linen Bank, Mr David Antonio, to the papers of the British Linen Company. Letter books, ledgers, day books, journals and miscellaneous papers were alike stacked in large and rather dirty piles in the vaults of the head office at St Andrew Square. It was a research student’s dream to find such a remarkable hoard, amounting to the fullest set of business records for any manufacturing enterprise in eighteenth- century Scotland or indeed in Western Europe. Moreover it was a collection almost untouched, save for some examination of the early correspondence and the minute books of the Directon, which had been used by Dr C. A. Malcolm in his bicentenary history of the British Linen Bank published in 1950. But times have changed, and this collection is now carefully catalogued and cared for in the Archives Store of the Bank of Scotland at Sighthill, the Bank of Scotland having absorbed the British Linen Bank in 1971. During the preparation of this volume, the present Archivist at the Bank of Scodand, Alan Cameron, and his staff have been of immense service in producing and copying documents, not to mention supplying much-needed cups of coffee. Their interest and knowledge has helped to sustain my enthu- siasm for this project, first suggested to me by the late Professor Ian Cowan. And as a novice in the world of word-processing, I have drawn persistendy on the expertise of the Manager of the Design and Implementation of Software in History (DISH) lab of the University of Glasgow, Mike Black, who himself undertook some transcription. Through the good offices of the Bank of Scodand, Sandra Morrison also provided a section, for which I am grateful. The Pasold Research Fund was kind enough to provide some support towards the cost of travel, and the present British Linen Bank has made a very generous contribution towards the costs ofpublication. My wife Kate has done her best to heckle out the worst knots from my prose and the publication secretary for the Scottish History Society, Dr JuHan Goodare, has scrutinised the text with an exactness and care much needed. It has been an immensely interesting project, and a delight to pursue. A.J.D. University of Glasgow March 1995 ABBREVIATIONS BLC British Linen Company. BOTL Board of Trustees Letter Books. BOTM Board of Trustees Minute Books. BSA Bank of Scodand Archives, Sighthill, Edinburgh. NLS National Library of Scodand, Edinburgh. SRO Scottish Record Office, Edinburgh. DALHOUSIE BLEACHFIE'LD, Five ru!e« Couth from Edinburgh, WILLIAM DOUGLAS bleaches « the foilowirrj prices, wtz. All plain Linen yard broad, or under, iroeen below qco reed, not full wliire at iAJ. per yard, 9«Oirhite, 2d. IOCO J^d. HOo Jd. tlX) and t4oo and TJOO 4d. l6oo and all above at jd. Cambrics^ Damafts, and Tweels, 4d. Lawn, Cotton, and Diapers^ at 3d. and allcloth above yard broad to pay in proporticn. Cloth taken in at Edinburgh, by MelT. Andrew Gillef- pic uphollterer, abore the City guard; George Boyd cloth merchant, Lawn-market; Robert Smith merchant, oppoGre Fosntain-weil j WiHiam Bndgrs tnerchanr, head ofCanongatc; Adam M^.eilh merchant, foot of Nhk Old•IryVwynd; Filh-raarkct; Alexander Peter South1 hompfon Ihoemaker, metrhant, foot footof For- of refter’s-wyod; Alexander Rofs nierchant, Grsli-marketp Duncan Moir weaver, Siennet; Mrs. AnJerfon, Cjiapel- lireet; William Haldane mafon, Nichpifon's-flreetj Mift Stratoo milliner, foot of Tolbooth-wynd, Leith; Robert Maying ftablcr, St. BeTnard’s Hrect, ditto; Mrs. Cochran merchant, down the (bore, ditto; James Baird (hoem.-.ker, Borrowftovnnefs; Baillle JobnOon merchant, AnBruthet; Conv.ner Brown wright, Crail; John Cctkl'urn mer- chant, Filhcrrow;: Bcijamin Simplon merchant, Dal« ketth; James Knaird weaver, ditto ; John Hunter weaves, Middleton;Balientine merchant, Bailee Hiflop Well merchant,Linton; John Peebles; Niven wAndrew aver. Pennycuick; John Kerr, taylor, Selkirk; Robert Mejn1 merchant, New Bead, near Melrofs; Mifs Nelly Chi! holm mtrehant, Jedburgh; Laurence Smith, Libcrton- kirk John Trotter merchant, Loauhead. N. B And at the B eachfie.id, where thf re is fulaifs of pus* wuUr, ami the cloth returned vety foo.i. A contemporary advertisement for a Scottish bleachfield, showing a bleacher scooping water over pegged-out cloth so as to wash out the bleaching solutions. INTRODUCTION The rise of the Scottish linen industry in the eighteenth century to become the leading manufacture of the country is a considerable success story, made i all the more remarkable by the low level of proficiency from which the i industry started, and the level of competition from the established industries of Ireland and Europe.1 But grow the industry did in spectacular fashion, output doubling every twenty years or so between 1730 and the end of the century. And while there is debate over just how much of this linen was sold outside Scotland,2 there is no doubt that appreciable quantities of coarse and medium quality linens found their way to markets in England or in North America. Success in external markets, rather than merely the domestic, showed just how far the Scottish industry had improved its products and competitive- | ness in a context of rising demand. The linen industry had a long pedigree in Scotland, and had achieved a fairly substantial toehold in the English market by the later seventeenth century. Not surprisingly, therefore, linen along with black cattle featured prominently in the economic arguments of the pamphleteers in the debate over the question of Union with England. Unionists stressed the existing value of the English market and held out the prospect of much greater sales to the colonies in North America and the West Indies once these markets were laid open to the Scots. Quite how much weight their arguments carried is difficult to assess, but certainly some appear to have been influenced: the merchants of Edinburgh asserted in 1710 that ‘it may well be remembered that the great inducement made use of to engage Scotland in this Union was the prospect of improving 1 AJ. Durie, The Scottish Linen Industry in the Eighteenth Century (Edinburgh, 1979). See also R.H. Campbell (ed.). States of the Progress of linen Manufacture in Scotland, 1727-1754 (Edinburgh, 1973). 2 Durie, linen Industry, 147-55, argues the case for a very substantial export market by the 1770s, taking some 30 per cent of output; others, such as R.H. Campbell, Scotland since 1707 (2nd edn., Edinburgh, 1985), 38, are more cautious. 2 THE BRITISH LINEN COMPANY and vending our linen in Manufactories by a direct exportation as well to the west of Germania as to the West Indies’.1 The reality, however, was that the Union offered no immediate transfor- mation. Indeed, if anything, the evidence of the first twenty years after 1707 is one of difficulty for many manufacturers and depression in several areas, particularly in the finer and medium fabrics, with Dutch, German and French linen making substantial inroads. Only the east-coast coarse linens seem to have held their own and even they had their periods of difficulty: it was reported in November 1727 that Perth linen at London had seriously fallen in price as against three years previously, and that ‘Dundee and Montrose linens go off very ill’.2 Given this experience, the subsequent performance of the Scottish industry was all the more gratifying. Production grew slowly in the 1730s but began to accelerate in the following decades; the commercial output of linen doubled from an annual average of 3.5 million yards in 1728-32 to 7.8 million by 1748-52, and had reached 12.6 million by 1773-7. It was not uniformly uninterrupted expansion as there were periods of depression, as in the mid 1750s and the early 1770s, but it was overall an impressive progression which fully justified the hopes of the industry’s supporters, such as Patrick Lindsay, whose pamphlet The Interest of Scotland Considered had argued firmly in 1733 that the Scottish linen trade would turn ‘to a very great account’.3 In the development of this Scottish manufacture, three factors have been held to have been of major significance in improving the industry’s structure and performance.