The weavers of Kilbarchan
How John Cameron came from Perthshire into the silk-weaving cottages of Kilbarchan, and the industry they joined.
John Cameron — weaver
The river Cart (also called the Black Cart) runs beside the village of Kilbarchan, a centre for the weaving of ‘Paisley’ silk, a true cottage industry. The Cart eventually flows into the Clyde. Kilbarchan is located a few miles south-east of Paisley, near the town of Johnstone.
These were the palmy days of weaving — a weaver would be a good ‘catch’. The Cameron family of John and Janet, who married in 1821, lived in Kilbarchan after Burns’ day. John, who was not born in Kilbarchan but far away in Perthshire, must have met young Janet Mitchell in Kilbarchan, and married her when she was 23 and he around 29. What brought him to Kilbarchan is not known, but it is likely that he was an ambitious lad, keen to get on and learn the skill of silk hand-loom weaving, a pursuit that would pay well in those days.
After marriage, the need for help in the preparing of the silk threads, and of setting up the loom (a prodigious task), encouraged the production of a large family. In 1841 there were four children between 12 and 15 years old recorded in the Census of that year as silk hand-loom weaver apprentices. There were also three younger children. All the children seem to have survived infancy.
The third child, John, was born in 1828/29 in Kilbarchan. At the age of 23 he married Elizabeth Murphy, who was a similar age, and born in County Antrim, Northern Ireland. Over the next 25 years they had twelve children, three of whom did not survive infancy and five did not reach adulthood. It is probable that the three oldest surviving children were also apprenticed as weavers.
The seventh child (fourth surviving) was Duncan, my grandfather.
The weaving industry
Quotations from The Lion in the North, by John Prebble.
After 1752 [p.311]:
’… linen spinners and weavers at last flourished in the towns about Glasgow, forming their own company to market their product in Africa and America, and a bank for the extension of credit. In the last quarter of the [18th] century, the cotton industry of Lanarkshire and Renfrewshire was revolutionised by the inventions of the Englishmen James Hargreaves, Richard Arkwright and Samuel Crompton, by the building of mills and by the employment of dispossessed Highlanders.’
From 1792 [p.313]:
‘The liberal-minded section of the [Scottish] middle class, anxious for reforms that would give it political rights equal to the economic burden it carried, was sympathetic to the principles of the French Revolution and encouraged by their success. More passionate, more desperate and more in need, was the anger of the new worker class, cottage operatives, spinners and weavers, colliers and ironworkers upon whose labour the county’s prosperity fundamentally rested …’
[p.317]:
’… the zealots [of the reform movement] … now formed themselves into societies of United Scotsmen … Once more the leaders were young advocates, small merchants and skilled artisans, but a strong body of support came from the weavers, extraordinary men with firm radical and Calvinistic convictions. Many of them, particularly about Paisley, were lyric poets, and they had a joyous enthusiasm for the arts and sciences. They were also more prosperous than any other worker group.’
From 1820, after harsh suppression of the Reform Movement [p.320]:
’…Weavers, wrights and colliers had learnt a harsh but memorable lesson in unity, in the power of labour when it is withheld, for sixty thousand of them had answered the strike call, if not the summons to arms. But the nationalism, the heady dreams of political independence that had inspired the reformers since 1792, quickly faded, and the emerging working class of Scotland would soon look southward for solidarity with its English brothers.’