Welcome demise of the brush shop

October 2006

by Robin Lattimore

With news of Glencraft, The Royal Aberdeen Workshops for the Blind and Disabled, having financial difficulties, my mind took me back to 1964, when as a 15-year-old I began work there as a brush maker. The world of disability was new to me; I had attended Banchory Academy, and come across men with varying handicaps, industrial accidents and war wounds, but a realization was growing that perhaps I, too, was disabled. I was registered blind on leaving school, and assessed at Alwyn House at Ceres.

The Huntly Street workshops were built in 1843 by money bequeathed by a Miss Christian Cruickshank in 1818, ‘for the benefit of such blind indigent persons born, or have been resident for three years, in the counties of Aberdeen, Kincardine and Banff’. The land had been bought from Marischal College, and with help from the estate of a Miss Jane Walker, the city architect John Smith designed the L-shaped building known as The Blind Asylum.

The original workers in the asylum consisted of 20 men and 20 women, all of whom lived on the premises. By all accounts they had a very long working day, only broken up by meals, religious services and scripture readings. They made baskets, sacks and sacking, nets for fishing, mats and knitted goods. There is little history of brush-making, but it was a common occupation for blind people during the 19th century.

The brush department was on the ground and upper floor of a long narrow building, set aside from the main factory. There were 14 of us in the workforce. In the upper floor were the non-disabled senior foreman, two blind women and two physically-disabled men.

The brushes were made by securing the bristles to the brush heads by wire, but the main brush-making took place down stairs. There there were four square tables, each with a hooded, steaming cauldron of boiling pitch at its centre. A light focused on this scary substance, and the smoke was partly sucked out of the building by a rattling, wheezing fan which struggled from 8am to 5.15pm five days a week.

I was issued with a pair of dungarees and a bibbed leather apron, I sat down at a bench next to the foreman, and my apprenticeship began. The first thing to alarm me was the constant high temperature from the gas ring, throwing out heat on to my knees; every time you blew your nose, black streaks of dust splattered the crisp whiteness of your handkerchief.

I was given a bunch of thrums, or strings, to insert into my apron cord; these were used to practise tying bunches of bristles to insert into holes in brush heads. The practice bristles were made of coco fibre, and had to fit as tightly as possible into examples of varying size. After several weeks of this practising, the time came to train with the scalding pitch.

A step had been inserted into the pitch as a safety measure, to try and ensure your fingers did not enter the boiling lava-like substance. After selecting the right size of bristle, you dipped it into the pan, wiping off the surplus on the edge, and then tied your string round it. You then dipping the bristles into the pitch and plunged them quickly into the brush head, twisting them to give a wider sweeping area. I mastered this skill after a year, and become a journeyman in about two years. We made small fire brushes, big rotary brushes for the council, those that were pulled behind vehicles to sweep sand and debris off the roads.

Pitch used to splash on to the brush heads and I became proficient at breaking sheets of glass against a table edge of a table, to create smaller pieces to scrape tar from the brush stocks. I only sliced my hand open once, and burned my fingers severely once, both incidents sending me off work for a couple of weeks.

My fellow workers and I had to wash our hands in paraffin to dissolve the pitch from our fingers and nails. I developed hard skin and calluses from the hard work, and wondered why a blind person’s valued sense of touch should be destroyed. I sweated in the summer time as the gas rings baked my legs through layers of clothing, and froze in the winter as the fan sucked warm air outside.

The steamer was a long box outside the building which was fed by steam from the nearby boiler house. This contraption was usually operated by the brush shop labourer, but I was given this task at times. Rotary brushes and scaffie brushes were returned to us from local councils for refilling. These were placed in the steam box and left until the heat melted the old pitch, then the old bristles could be plucked out by hand. This job needed great self preservation, as serious steam burns were a real possibility. The one consolation was that the steam helped rid the brushes of filth and dog mess before we handled them.

We frequently had groups of WRI members, pensioners and student nurses visiting the workshops. Not all visitors spoke to us, but stood a little distance away and spoke in loud voices about how wonderful we were, and what ‘puir craitures’ we all were. I suffered this initially, but as a teenager found it embarrassing and began to excuse myself to the outside toilets until the threat had passed.

The brush shop was regarded by most blind and disabled workers as the place not to be, and men were always seeking to move to the more pleasant working environments of upholstery or bedding.

I worked in the brush shop for nine years, before leaving to become a student, but the experience taught me a lot more than making brushes.

The Royal Aberdeen Workshops moved from Huntly Street to its present factory at Tullos in1973, and the death knell sounded for the brush shop. I helped the workshop engineer measure up the different manufacturing areas within the new factory, which was to be an open-plan unit. The brush department was laid out, and the benches with their gas rings were installed. I moved into the Tullos Workshops, but the open-plan design and falling orders sealed the doom of the ancient tradition of brush-making. Pitch fumes and tar on workers’ clothes and shoes did not fare well alongside the need to keep bedding and upholstery shops free from grime and smell.

The brush shop was closed and its workers were absorbed into different jobs in Glencraft. Their efforts should not be forgotten, part of the legacy of the blind and disabled in bygone days in Aberdeen and Aberdeenshire.

Robin Lattimore, MBE, was born in Banchory, and set up the Scolty Centre. Read sociology, psychology and history at Aberdeen University. Diagnosed as having Marfan Syndrome, affecting the eyes, heart and vascular system.

This is an article from the October 2006 edition of Leopard Magazine. To read much more like this every month, see our subscription details.