Linen industry loomed large across Mayo
By Tom Gillespie
SELF-SUFFICIENCY in making fabric was the norm in Mayo. The available materials and colour agents influenced local fabrics and styles, which took on regional variations.
Arthur Young (1741 to 1820), the English agriculturist and writer, noted on his visit to Mayo in 1776 that spinning was universal.
Richard Bairéad, ‘The Bard of Erris’, in his 18th century satirical poem ‘Eoghan Coir’, alluded to the importance of home-made cloth of frieze for the tenant farmer. The poem is about the avaricious Owen Conway, land agent for the local Erris landlord, who obtained the rent by any means, including taking the cloth from the loom.
He was pleasant in collecting the rent
A month or two until the cow was sold at the fair
Or the piece of cloth in the loom
Was readily agreed to.
According to ‘The Story of Mayo', by Rosa Meehan, and published by Mayo County Council in 2003, since World War II clothes are typically shop-bought, manufactured across the globe and influenced by international fashion trends.
But in the past, most people in Mayo wore home-spun clothes - coarse woollen yarn for the women and frieze for the men.
The playwright John Millington Synge (1871 to 1909), who travelled in Erris in 1905, was informed that most women spun their own wool in the area. After spinning, the wool was woven by a weaver for three pence a yard if it was a single weave and for sixpence a yard if it was double woven.
Synge was told by a young woman in Erris that ‘The women in this place have little time to be spinning, but the women back on the mountain mix colours through their wool till you’d never ask to take your eye from it.
‘They do be throwing in a bit of stone colour, and a bit of red madder, and a bit of crimson, and a bit of stone colour again’.
The novelist George Augustus Moore (1825 to 1933), in his book ‘Hail and Farewell’, recalling life at Moorehall, noted how men and women’s fashions changed at the end of the 19th century. The young men who were employed as labourers on the estate wore corduroy trousers and frieze coats, while the old men were still in knee breeches and tall hats.
Of the women, he said red petticoats hung to their knees and they wore a printed handkerchief around their heads.
Flax has been grown, spun and woven into linen cloth from ancient times. But from the 1720s, a number of factors influenced the growth of the linen industry in Mayo.
Sir Arthur Wellesley, Chief Secretary of Ireland during 1807/’08, encouraged the expansion of flax growing throughout the country to satisfy the demand for sail cloth during the Napoleonic War.
Landlords shrewdly supported Mayo’s linen industry, recognising that it would enable small tenant farmers to generate more income from their land and thus allow them to pay higher rates.
Newport, on the Medlycott Estate, and Manulla, on the Browne estate, were developed in part to support the linen industry .
Lord Lucan and the Marquis of Sligo built fine stone buildings, called Linen Halls, in Castlebar and Westport to attract drapers to their linen markets. Markets also developed in Claremorris, Newport and Ballina for the sale of yarn, in both brown and bleached states, to Belfast, Dublin and Cork.
In 1776, Arthur Young reported that 200 looms were employed in Castlebar and the surrounding area, and that 300 pieces of linen were sold in a week.
Large quantities of yarn were exported from the town. The weavers were housed in Tucker Street and Newantrim Street, adjoining the newly built Linen Hall (pictured), which became the heart of Castlebar’s linen industry.
The cloth produced in the region was graded, auctioned and baled for transport, its sale bringing a stable income to the town and surrounding countryside.
In the late 18th century, weavers and other textile workers came to Mayo from Ulster, where the linen industry was flourishing and had established an international reputation.
These migrant workers brought new skills and expertise to Mayo’s linen trade. The trickle of weavers into the county turned into a flood after the battle of Diamond in 1795, when an estimated 4,000 refugees came to Mayo, a significant population movement at the time. The names of many of the migrants have been preserved for posterity in the records of landlords, such as those on the Marquis of Sligo’s estate.
The linen trade in Mayo was in decline from the mid-19th century. In 1834, while visiting Westport, Henry D. Inglis noted that only 100 pieces of linen cloth were sold on a market day compared tom 900 pieces sold at the market eight years earlier.
The production of flax and its weaving into linen declined largely as a result of the introduction of large-scale, factory-based spinning and weaving in Ulster.
Flax continued to be grown on a small scale in Mayo in support of the Ulster industry. Gilmartin’s Store in Ardnaree, Ballina, for example, exported flax from Mayo up until the 1950s.
The woollen industry, with an even older history than linen, received a boost when the Congested Districts Boards assisted the introduction of fly-shuttle looms in the 1890s.
The board also supported the establishment of lace schools and the Irish Lace Depot and Irish Industries Association aided the distribution of their goods during this period. In addition, the board established a crochet school at Pullathomas, where local girls were induced by payment to attend classes.
Within a few years, those girls were making dresses that were exported to Paris and the crochet classes spread to other locations in Erris, including Belmullet, Bangor Erris and Glenamoy.