Linen Industry in Dunfermline, Scotland

Linen is one of the oldest and most versatile textiles in the world. It provides rugged canvas for sails and fire-hoses as well as elegant fabrics for fashion goods.  Perhaps its most pleasing form is linen damask: a shimmering, white-on-white patterned cloth almost
exclusively used for table-coverings.

Around the turn of this century one of the largest linen factories in the world was the St Leonard's works of Erskine Beveridge in Dunfermline, and within the burgh boundaries there were ten other factories producing the same quality of material. At least six thousand people were employed by the town's linen manufacturers and their product was exported all over the world. This was the peak of the industry's achievement: when a bride's trousseau was incomplete without its chest of Dunfermline linen.

This pre-eminence had not been reached overnight.  Linen had been produced in Dunfermline, as well as in the rest of Fife, at least since the 15th century, although the trade was at first small in scale and the goods inferior in quality. At that time Fife's numerous little trading ports were carrying on a bustling trade in the Baltic and with the Low Countries, and one of the most popular of the imported goods was fine quality Continental linen. The demand may well have come first from Fife's royal palaces, Falkland and Dunfermline, and soon Fifers were producing fine cloths in imitation. The names of these, Hollands, Osnaburgs and Silesias, reveal their places of origin.

With the union of Scotland and England in 1707 the English markets were opened to Scottish linen. Trade expanded and Dunfermline became a noted weaving centre. The growing of flax, however, was virtually abandoned after the 1850s and yarn-spinning was declining by about the same period, so that the Dunfermline trade was dependent on imported raw materials: flax from Russia and spun yarn from Belgium and, latterly, from Ireland.

When world trade in cotton was disrupted by the American Civil War (1861-5), the Dunfermline factories found themselves working at full capacity. Elderly hand-loom weavers were brought out of retirement to cope with the increased demand for linen.

By 1872 Dunfermline's North American trade was so important that a United States' consul was appointed in the town. The railway companies, steamship lines
and grand hotels of the Victorian heyday all generated a demand for napkins, table-covers and other crested linen goods. The Dunfermline weavers could be forgiven for believing that it would go on for ever.

The First World War shattered their dreams. During the war the mills switched to making aircraft fabric, and when peace came there was no return to business-as-before. Protectionist trade-barriers blocked off the United States' market, the world plunged into recession and tastes changed: all combined to push the over-specialised trade into decline. Today there is no linen damask produced in Dunfermline at all. Factory sheds have been flattened and built over. The only looms that remain are those preserved as museum exhibits.