Calico & Shawl Printing in Kilmarnock
Over one thousand people, not including the eight hundred
boys and girls, were at one stage employed in the print fields and
the total weekly wage was about £850. Indeed, the father
of
Alexander Smith, the poet and essayist - John Smith, was
a pattern designer in the print fields of Kilmarnock, though a
native of Old Rome and though he moved to Paisley in 1834 he
returned some years later and Alexander worked as a "putter-on" in
a print work of Geddes & Matheson - Alexander (1829-67) later
became Secretary of Edinburgh University.
McKay says that "about the year 1832 [the worsted material]
began to give way to chemicals, and to a kind made of silk and
cotton, called in the trade 'quaders'. Later other types were
produced, including de-lines, silk stripes and checks, wool and
cotton. In 1838 the printing of mouseline-de-laine dresses was
introduced. By 1848 most of the work concerned this fabric, "plain
or twilled" and others including balzareens, barges, organdies,
etc. The cloth was mostly woven in the other
places.
McKay also gives some technical details comparing the
earlier methods, where a printers table was only six feet long and
about twenty seven inches broad and the shawl had to be lifted from
it every time a colour was put on. By 1848 the tables were "now of
such a size as take on the largest shawls, which are fixed down and
finished in printing before they are removed". Dresses were printed
on tables twenty seven feet long and between twenty seven and forty
inches broad and were "fixed when receiving the colour". New
apparatus in 1848 included a "large copper vessel thickly
perforated with small holes, called an extractor, into which the
goods streaming with water are laid. When the machinery is set in
motion, such is its rapidity that in five minutes every particle of
water is thrown out".
That the industry was one of the main ones in the town
during the 1830s is illustrated by the fact that between May 1830
and June 1831 1,128,814 shawls were produced - the value of these
being about £200,000. However, by the 1840s it was in decline
"being of a fancy nature" and subject to sudden alterations of
"pattern, style and colour". In fact, in 1849, it was a disused
printing works at the foot of Welbeck Street that was made into a
temporary hospital "for the poorer patients" suffering from cholera
and being treated by Dr John Borland.
From the late 1840s on the industry steadily declined until
it petered out altogether about 1900 when the last firm of Peter
Brown & Son of Welbeck Street closed. Most of the industry had
indeed concentrated around the area where it had started - roughly
south and east of Nethern Street and north of the River Irvine,
though there were minor outposts at various times in the Townhead
area and in King Street. Block-cutting locally does not appear to
have commenced much before 1868, though it survived longer than
calico and shawl printing.
