WORK. SKILL. COMMUNITY.
The Women Who Kept the Borders Mills Running
Behind the famous textile names were generations of women. Explore their skills, wages, friendships and family lives in the mills of Hawick, Galashiels and Tweeddale.
The names above the factory gates were usually men's names. The names on the boxes, the advertisements and the finished garments belonged to companies. But inside the mills of the Scottish Borders, generations of women helped turn wool and yarn into the goods on which whole communities depended.
Their work might leave no signature. A carefully joined seam disappeared into a jumper. A repaired flaw became almost impossible to see. A checked, folded and packed garment left the town with the manufacturer's label attached. The person who had made it ready for sale remained behind, beginning the next piece.
This story follows the women of the Borders textile industry, chiefly from the nineteenth century through the twentieth and into the working mills that survive. It concerns wages and skill, growing up and growing older, the factory floor and the home waiting at the end of a shift. It also asks why the people who made an industry possible are so easily overshadowed by its buildings.
We cannot recover every woman's experience from a photograph or a company history. Nor should one remembered workplace stand for them all. Hawick knitwear, Galashiels weaving and the mills of Tweeddale offered different kinds of employment, changing across generations. What connects those experiences is the importance of work that was too often treated as ordinary because women did it every day.
A Workforce Behind the Famous Names
The Borders' textile towns grew through the work of many people: manufacturers, engineers, dyers, spinners, weavers, knitters, clerks and finishers. Women belonged within that history, rather than at its edges. Yet an account organised around founders and factory openings can pass over them surprisingly quickly.
Industrialisation changed where work happened and how it was organised. Domestic production and small workshops gave way, unevenly, to larger manufacturing premises. Paid employment increasingly brought people into workplaces governed by machines, supervision, production schedules and the demands of distant customers.
Women's participation also changed. Historical research describes a factory workforce that became increasingly female during the nineteenth century. Allen J. Scott's study of the Borders industry records women forming more than 60 per cent by the 1890s. That regional picture does not establish the balance in every mill or department, but it overturns any suggestion that women were a minor supporting presence.
The industrial landscape itself is explored in Galashiels' journey from monastic fields to textile mills. For this story, the next step is to look past the impressive windows and ask who stood behind them.
More Than One Kind of Mill
A mill was not a single occupation. The word covered places making yarn, weaving cloth, producing hosiery or manufacturing knitwear, sometimes combining processes and sometimes relying on other businesses. A woman's working day depended on the department, the machinery, the product and the period.
Broadly, Hawick developed a strong association with hosiery and knitwear, while Galashiels became particularly important for woven fabrics. Selkirk, Innerleithen, Walkerburn and Peebles belonged to the wider industrial geography. These distinctions help explain why workers from neighbouring towns might remember very different tasks.
In one workplace the challenge might be maintaining the supply and condition of yarn. In another it might be examining cloth or joining knitted panels. Some women worked directly with machines; others carried out finishing, inspection, packing or office duties. The boundaries between men's and women's work were shaped by custom as well as technology and did not remain fixed for all time.
Our account of Laidlaw and Fairgrieve follows one manufacturer's changing fortunes. Set beside the lives of its workers, a company history becomes a story about many different kinds of knowledge assembled in one place.
Learning What the Hands Had to Know
The finished garment conceals its own making. That is one reason textile skill can be undervalued. A neat join does not announce the concentration needed to produce it; it simply allows the wearer to enjoy the result.
Consider linking in knitwear manufacture. Separate knitted parts must be joined accurately, respecting the loops and the shape of the garment. The work demands attention and coordination. A mistake can compromise appearance, comfort or strength. Finishing and checking likewise require an understanding of what the product should be and the ability to recognise when it falls short.
Such knowledge was not necessarily expressed through a formal qualification. It could be acquired through instruction, repeated practice and watching an experienced worker. A newcomer needed time to understand the materials, find a reliable rhythm and learn the small judgements that experienced hands made almost automatically.
The training relationship matters. The person who showed a young colleague how to handle a difficult piece was contributing to the mill's future. Skills survived through people, not simply through ownership of machinery. When the experienced worker left, something important could leave with her.
The First Wage and the Limits Around It
For a young woman, entering textile employment could mean gaining an income and joining a social world beyond school and home. A wage might support personal independence, contribute to the household or do both. Its meaning cannot be reduced to a single story of liberation or hardship.
Family circumstances made an enormous difference. A daughter earning money while living with her parents faced different demands from a widowed mother supporting children. A single worker's choices could change after marriage, bereavement or the illness of a relative. Employment histories need to be read alongside those changes.
Women's earnings were often discussed as an addition to a household income. That language can hide how essential they were. Food, rent, clothing and other necessities still had to be paid for, whatever assumptions employers or society made about a woman's position within her family.
Exact comparisons of pay require evidence from the relevant factory and date. We should not invent a universal Borders wage or assume that every woman was paid in the same way. Time rates, output expectations, grades and opportunities for advancement all shaped what a job offered. The surviving records can reveal those arrangements more clearly than nostalgia alone.
The Working Day Had a Physical Cost
Pride in making something well should not make us forget the effort involved. Textile employment could require prolonged standing, repetitive movement, close visual attention or sustained concentration. Conditions varied, but production work was work: it occupied bodies as well as time.
Noise could make conversation difficult in machinery-filled departments. Fibres and dust belonged to parts of the process; heat, lighting and ventilation affected the experience of particular rooms. Factory safety, working hours and welfare provision changed across the long history of the industry. A twentieth-century memory cannot simply be projected backwards into a Victorian mill.
The discipline of the workplace mattered too. Someone else determined when production began, what standard was acceptable and how much needed to be completed. A worker's judgement existed inside a system of supervision, orders and deadlines. Being skilled did not necessarily mean having control over the pace or organisation of the day.
Former workers may remember both difficult conditions and affection for their colleagues. Those feelings are compatible. Missing the people and the sense of purpose does not mean wishing every workplace rule, discomfort or inequality had survived unchanged.
Another Shift Waiting at Home
A factory gate marked the end of paid work, but not necessarily the end of labour. Cooking, washing, cleaning and caring still waited in many households. Where those responsibilities fell largely on women, a mill wage came with another working day attached.
The practical arrangements deserve attention. Who looked after children? How did people manage when a relative was ill? Was a family member nearby, and what happened if she also had a job? Answers changed between households and generations, but they help explain why employment choices were never made in isolation.
Distance mattered. A workplace within walking reach offered different possibilities from one requiring a bus journey. So did the availability of shops, schools and other everyday services. The industrial town and the surrounding village were part of the same practical landscape.
It is easy to call this resilience and move on. A fuller history asks what resilience cost. The time spent keeping a household functioning was real work, even when it appeared nowhere in the manufacturer's accounts. The textile economy drew on that unpaid effort as well as the labour carried out inside its walls.
Friendship on the Factory Floor
Shared work could create strong relationships. People learned one another's habits, helped newcomers and spent years within the same department. The mill connected neighbours and relatives, but it could also introduce colleagues whose lives otherwise followed different paths.
Those relationships were not automatically harmonious. Workplaces could contain disagreements, favouritism, pressure and differences of age or status. Remembering friendship should leave room for the complicated experience of being employed alongside other people every day.
Even so, the social side helps explain why a former worker may begin her story with names rather than machinery. A department was a collection of personalities. The person who taught the job, the colleague who made a difficult day easier and the friend met outside work could matter more in memory than a production total.
Local leisure belonged to that wider world. Our story of the Borders dance halls explores another place where communities met. Work and recreation were connected through the people who moved between them, carrying friendships beyond the mill door.
War, New Products and Changing Expectations
The industry's twentieth century was marked by war, economic uncertainty and changes in fashion and manufacturing. Women's working lives crossed those turning points, though the effects depended on their age, family situation and employer.
A company could change the goods it made or the customers it supplied. Machinery and fibres could alter tasks that had once seemed familiar. Fashion knitwear demanded different responses from a business producing established everyday articles. Workers had to learn within an industry that was repeatedly adjusting to markets beyond the Borders.
The history of Peter Scott's Hawick mill shows how long a manufacturer's story can be. Inside such a history were successive generations of women, each entering a workplace shaped partly by the experience of the generation before.
We should be cautious about turning wartime service into a claim that women entered mills only when men went away. Many were already there. Their contribution before, during and after the wars belongs in the same account. The extraordinary years rested on skills developed in ordinary ones.
When the Work Disappeared
Late twentieth-century contraction changed the options available to textile workers. A closure could end a wage, interrupt a family tradition and break up a group of colleagues. Redundancy was an economic event with a social life attached.
An experienced woman might possess considerable expertise without finding another employer who needed precisely that skill nearby. Her circumstances could limit how far she could travel or which hours she could work. The practical question was not simply whether another job existed somewhere, but whether it could fit the life she had to manage.
The consequences also reached future workers. If a factory closed, a young person lost the possibility of learning there. A local chain of instruction was broken. Buildings might be adapted or demolished while knowledge dispersed much less visibly.
When the mills fell silent follows the regional decline. The women's history within it reminds us that an employment total contains individual working lives. A statistical loss might also be the disappearance of someone's confidence, routine and place among familiar people.
Skills That Have Not Become History
Borders textile manufacture has survived, although on a much smaller scale than in its great industrial decades. Hawick remains a place where knitwear is made, and hand skills continue alongside sophisticated machinery. This story therefore has living practitioners as well as retired witnesses.
Johnstons of Elgin's account of its Hawick production describes yarn preparation, knitting, linking, washing and hand finishing. That sequence helps make visible the many stages between raw material and a garment ready for sale. A machine-produced component still belongs to a larger process involving human judgement.
The survival of manufacture raises a question about how skills are passed on. A technique preserved only as a museum demonstration has a different future from one used daily in paid employment. Both have historical value, but working knowledge needs opportunities for people to acquire it and make a living from it.
Recognising women's contribution means taking that expertise seriously in the present as well as the past. It should not be treated merely as a picturesque detail behind a desirable Scottish label.
Putting Names Back into the Picture
Oral history offers a way to recover experiences that company records often miss. Ian MacDougall's interviews with Peeblesshire textile workers, recorded between 1996 and 2004 and developed into the book Border Mills, demonstrate the value of listening to the people who knew the workplaces from within.
Those recordings should not be treated as evidence that every Borders mill was identical. Their strength lies in the specificity of individual lives. Used alongside photographs, wage records, directories and factory documents, recollections can show both what a workplace did and what it meant.
Family photographs can help, especially when someone identifies the people, department, mill and approximate date. A row of unnamed faces is already valuable. Add those details and it becomes a record of a working community, with possibilities for further connections and research.
Did your mother, grandmother or another relative work in a Borders mill? Did you learn linking, mending, spinning, finishing or a job that outsiders rarely understood? Share the mill's name, the years and the task you remember. The most useful detail may be something that once seemed too ordinary to write down. It is how we begin putting the workers back into their own history.
Your memories and comments
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