1 10 3 https://www.artisansinscotland.shca.ed.ac.uk/files/original/763c535c233ca86370d19258428c8529.jpg f33226a1d1fb81978948173b21a78f8b Exhibition Item Category Wood Image copyright National Museums Scotland Item Location National Museums Scotland Description This wheelwright’s workshop in the hamlet of Fala Dam in a rich agricultural area about twelve miles south of Edinburgh, is a stone-built, pan-tiled structure on two floors with a cottage at one end. It is part of a terrace of cottages, shops and workshops. The roof tiles suggest it was constructed in the later eighteenth century. The wide central entrance and opening above reveal the building’s specialist functions for storing the wood and components of carts and other related goods (such as wheel barrows), with the yard in front given over to the construction or repair, as here, of large wheeled vehicles. There would have been a forge nearby for making the iron components and tyres. Three men are visible in this image, which seems to have been taken in high summer. Another photograph of the same workshop a few years earlier has four men posing outside holding their wood working tools, with rolled-up sleeves and aprons. A great deal of the work undertaken was probably out-of-doors. Indeed, the dismantled cart that dominates this image is so large it could only have been built in a yard. The range of skills practiced in the Fala Dam workshop were the subject of one of the most famous accounts of the life of a late nineteenth-century rural artisan. This was George Sturt’s The Wheelwright’s Shop, published in 1923 but referring to the years from 1884-91 when George and his brother ran a wheelwright business in Farnham in Surrey that had been in family ownership since 1810. In an elegiac account, influenced by Ruskin’s ideas of the moral authority of craftwork, Sturt detailed the techniques employed in making wheels before mechanisation, from the curing of the wood to the selection of the right timbers for strength and durability, to sawing with hand tools and the making and fitting of iron tyres. This is one of several photographs of the workshop that was taken in the late nineteenth century, with variations in the extent of the foliage growing on the building and on the wooden railings suggesting a wide span of years. A photographic postcard from the 1930s also shows the same row of quaint cottages, with the workshop still visible, in a hamlet that was clearly attractive to tourists. Some of the contents of the joiner’s house were donated to the National Museums of Scotland in the 1960s. The buildings still exist today, though are now all converted into smart houses. Though only a small hamlet, the local Post Office directory records that Fala accommodated a range of craft workers in the 1890s, including a cobbler, joiner, builder, thatcher, blacksmith and wright, Walter Stoddart, who is probably one of the men depicted in this photograph. There was also a dressmaker, two grocers, a baker and a butcher, along with a photographer, Robert Lothian, who may have taken this image. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Wheelwright’s Workshop, Fala Dam, Midlothian, ca. 1890 blacksmiths Edinburgh iron joiners photographers postcard tools tourist industry Wheelwright wood https://www.artisansinscotland.shca.ed.ac.uk/files/original/a0a1347cf48b264037a9e95c3d194a7f.jpg 5edd986f19dbf08a0ca05ff4774fd0a4 Exhibition Item Category Textiles Image copyright The Royal Burgh of Lanark Museum Trust Item Location The Royal Burgh of Lanark Museum Description The small royal burgh of Lanark, with a population of c.5,000 in the mid-nineteenth century, was long associated with the handloom weaving industry, that most iconic of the skilled craft trades whose demise in the face of mechanisation and the rise of factory production is often used as a metaphor for the death of the craft economy. At its height, the skilled handloom weaver, processing mainly fine wool or wool and linen mixes, was well-paid, proud of his skill and creativity and independent minded. In Scotland as a whole they were the largest single craft group of the first half of the nineteenth century, with high concentrations in west-central Scotland in Glasgow and Paisley and in smaller towns like Lanark. They were celebrated for their rich cultural life, which extended into poetry and song, natural history and gardening. They were also famed for a sense of community and capacity to engage in collective organization to protect their rights and market position. The connection between handloom weaving and the Paisley shawl was famous, but most nineteenth-century weavers made other textiles including wool tartan in Perthshire and linens for home wares in Fife. This photograph shows one of the last handloom weavers still practising his trade in Lanark. Taken in 1900, it was reported that only five weavers remained in the town. Just twenty years before there were 140 weavers in Lanark. The last to survive, Mr Thomas Chalmers, died in 1938 aged 84. The passing of the age of the handloom weaver generated much commentary in the early twentieth century with frequent images such as this to represent the idea of simpler times when work and home occupied the same space. The photograph, showing an elderly man at his weaving frame in a cottage or small workshop, is artfully posed. To the left is a hearth and cooking range and in the right foreground is a spinning wheel to suggest the relationship between women’s work and men’s work in a domestic or family setting. The latter has been placed for its narrative effect as it is unlikely that the weaver here processed wool generated within his household. Another version of this photograph showing a second elderly man sat smoking by the fireside on the far left of the image, was published as a commercial postcard for tourists. Those few handloom weavers who did survive the coming of the factories made highly specialised textiles for the elite fashion industry, much as they do today. In the highlands and islands of Scotland they focused on fine tweeds, with marketing support from bodies like the Highland Home Industries Association. In the village of Stonehouse near Lanark, there were a few specialised silk scarf and handkerchief weavers working on jacquard looms into the 1930s. In numerous villages and small towns in Scotland there are streets of terraced weaver cottages to remind us of the once flourishing state of the craft and its communities. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Workshop of a Handloom Weaver, Lanark ca. 1900 Fife Glasgow Highlands Lanark linen Paisley postcard silk spinning wheel tourist industry weavers wool https://www.artisansinscotland.shca.ed.ac.uk/files/original/05256bf4a27a7e08826cffcdaef21f56.jpg fc545bd80b7d531344c19733bc14bc65 Exhibition Item Category Wood Image copyright Orkney Islands Council Item Location Orkney Museum Description This is a photograph of Robert Foubister, a crofter, and his daughter making a straw backed Orkney Chair. They are pictured preparing oat straw into coils that are then stitched into the wooden frame. Foubister appears frequently in the D. M. Kirkness Orkney Chair order book for the 1890s alongside other chair backers including John Coupland of Kirkwall. A typical entry for 1891 was for two chairs, one mid sized and one small, both backed by Foubister, who was paid 5s and 3s6d respectively, as ordered by Miss Spead ‘while on a visit at Berstane House’, with the chairs and bills sent to Wm H. Longbottom, Cavendish Road, East the Park, Nottingham, who Miss Spead was about to marry. Miss Maud Balfour of Berstane House was one of the first to place an order with Kirkness. Foubister is a common name in Orkney. A fellow craftsman ca.1860 was Thomas Foubister, a taxidermist in Kirkwall, but most of that name were crofters and fishermen. Few trees grow on Orkney and the chair evolved for local home industry using drift wood and locally-grown straw. By the time this photograph was taken, the commercially made Orkney chair was made using imported wood, mostly shipped from Aberdeen. This portrait is the subject of a commercial postcard, which was published in the Kent’s Series and aimed at the tourist market. It is unusual for this genre of images that we know the names of the sitters, who are photographed in an artist’s studio, probably in Kirkwall, and not their usual place of work on a croft about six miles away. The photographer was Tom Kent, locally born in 1863 but trained in America. He contributed to magazines such as Country Life and sold postcard images of Orkney views and traditional life. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Robert Foubister and his daughter Lizzie, Orkney ca. 1920 chair Kirkness Kirkwall Orkney photographers postcard straw tourist industry wood