Life and death of Crombie's mill

February 2011

by Mark Chalmers

At the end of 2009, a small exhibition was staged in Provost Skene’s House about the life and death of a mill on the Don. Once, the river was lined with mills – making linen, oatmeal, wool, paper – but most of them fell silent decades ago. Recent victims were the paper mills at Donside and Mugiemoss, but the exhibition was devoted to an earlier casualty – Crombie – the firmwhich made the famous woollen overcoats. It was founded in 1805 and worked in the city for almost two centuries, until, having long since passed out of Scottish ownership, it was closed down.

Crombie’s owners, Illingworth Morris, called a halt to production in 1991, and production moved south. The mills on the River Don were locked up, and they lay empty for years afterwards: I took a chance to see inside before they were destroyed.

Little did I realise that years later I would get the opportunity to see inside another woollen mill, also owned by Illingworth Morris and similarly shut down, then unceremoniously flattened: Huddersfield Fine Weavers, at Kirkheaton near Huddersfield. Both were bought over many decades ago, when Illingworth Morris was owned by the American wife of the actor James Mason. Both have been destroyed, barring a token effort to save a small part of Grandholm.

I had more or less forgotten about Crombies until I saw a flyer for the exhibition: but it stirred up memories. Many folk will mind fine about woollen blankets made by Crombie (almost everything was locally made in those days, and without the need for any entreaty to ‘Buy British’). My mother’s cousin, who served in the Gordon Highlanders during the War, used to wear a Crombie greatcoat at Remembrance Day.

Crombie was once an integral part of Aberdeen’s identity, and although it latterly moved upmarket to become a luxury brand, many ordinary folk owned a suit or coat cut from a bolt of Crombie cloth. Surprisingly perhaps, in addition to well-heeled city gents, the Crombie coat also became a staple of the skinhead fraternity, in much the same way as Lyle & Scott sweaters became emblematic of football casuals in the 1980s.

The lower reach of the Don was first harnessed around 1696 when papermaking began on a small scale at Gordon Mills, but the city was perhaps better known for its fine woollens a century later when the first buildings were erected on the Haughs of Grandholm.

Grandholm Works flax spinning

Before Crombie’s time, Grandholm Works was the largest linen works in the country. It was set up as a flax spinning mill in 1792 by Leys, Still & Co. (who later became Leys Masson & Co.) The firm was among the largest flax spinners in Scotland, but went bankrupt in 1848, and apart from a brief period in 1849-50 when it was operated by Alexander Hadden of Hadden & Curtis, the mill lay empty.

It was a troubled era: Leys Masson’s neighbours, Gordon Barron & Co., went out of business as cotton spinners in 1851, partly due to a long-running litigation about water rights on the Don. Their opponents in the case were Leys Masson & Co. of Grandholm Mills…

Despite its period of inactivity, Grandholm was one of the few textile factories to survive the economic crisis of the 1840s and 1850s when Aberdeen’s textile industry collapsed – in 1859, J&J Crombie took over Grandholm from its receiver, Major Paton, and made a success of it.

Crombies were one of Aberdeen’s major employers, founded in 1805 at Cothal Mills near Fintray as wool spinners and weavers – Cothal is a hamlet a few miles upstream of Grandholm on the Don. Their dense woollen cloth was scoured and milled, then spun and woven so that it was proof against the Scottish winter, which was why it was later adopted by the army. To meet increasing demand, power looms were installed at Grandholm in the 1850s and a decade later the mill clothed the Confederate army in Rebel Grey during the American Civil War.

By 1890 the mill housed 17 carding engines, 12,000 spindles and over 200 power looms: but before the wool reached them, it passed through washing vats, dyeing machines and a wool drying department where the machines were heated by steam pipes laid under the floor.

Crombie’s success meant that they had outgrown the mills at Cothal, and after taking over Grandholm Works, they expanded relentlessly. Under James and John Crombie, Grandholm went from linen to woollen spinning and weaving, and became the largest woollen tweed mill in Scotland – which will surprise some, who expect tweed to come either from Harris, or the Scottish Borders. Similarly, the mill’s waterwheel was claimed to be the largest in the world when it was built in 1826 by Hewes & Wren of Manchester: at 25 feet in diameter, the wheel weighed 100 tons and generated 200hp.

Of course, the Victorians had a great appetite for facts, figures and one-upmanship, and Crombies pressed on with new technology, installing two Corliss steam engines after they took over, as well as a gas works and, in 1890, a pioneering electrical generator.

Once the steam engines were installed, the giant water wheel took on a life of its own. It was kept ‘in reserve’ at Grandholm until 1897, but rather than going for scrap, it was bought by Alex. Pirie & Sons, who owned Stoneywood Papermill. They earmarked it for their Woodside Works, where they carried out rag-breaking, so the wheel was taken apart and moved a few hundred yards upstream to Woodside, where it earned its keep until 1965.

By then, the 140-year-old wheel was the largest of its kind left in Europe – a remarkable survivor from the earliest days of the Industrial Revolution – and the Royal Scottish Museum was determined to save it. The wheel was painstakingly dismantled for a second time, and loaded onto lorries which took it south to Chambers Street in Edinburgh, where it is still on display.

During the 20th century, senior spooks in the KGB wore Crombie coats styled the ‘Russian Army Greatcoat’ and during several wars, Crombie turned out khaki cloth for army blankets, uniforms and greatcoats – perhaps some remain yet, tucked away in Aberdeen’s lofts. The famous British Warm overcoat was created by Crombie for the British Army during the Great War, and apparently it is still made today – just not in Aberdeen. In the 1920s, thanks to growth during the Great War, there were 320 power looms at Grandholm, and over 1000 employees.

Again in WW2, Grandholm Works was turned over to production for the military, and the mill turned out almost 500 miles of cloth each year. By the 1950s, when my mother visited J&J Crombie as a schoolgirl, Grandholm Mills was Scotland’s largest woollen mill, at over 400,000 sq. ft. At that time, Aberdeen was proud of Crombie and the feeling was mutual. The family bequeathed money to the university, and an impressive hall of residence was built in their name.

In its day, Grandholm was like a walled city; surrounded by a high barrier of granite rubble. I do remember it was a cold place, sitting in the hollow of the River Don’s flood plain. The mills had their own canteen, engine houses, a mile-long mill lade, and a power station with water turbines as a back-up.

Unlike the red brick buildings of Broadford Works, Grandholm Mills were built entirely from the native silver-grey granite. The weaving sheds were low, single storey ranges with slate on one pitch and north light glazing on the other. The newest sheds were built in the 1930s, and were used for weaving and carding as well as spinning. The Old Mill towered over them, with its clocktower being the best vantage point over the flat site. It also contained a Victorian lift, and the engine house still had a belt drive, painted pillar box red, which was originally powered by the water wheel, but later connected to the Boulton Corliss steam engines.

Yorkshire empire takeover

Yet soon after the company’s high point during the 1920s, the last of the Crombies retired from the business, and the remaining shareholders decided to sell out to Titus Salt’s company, part of a Yorkshire woollens empire. By 1958, Illingworth Morris had taken over Salt’s company, and at that time they inherited Crombie, which was still a profitable business employing around 800 people at Grandholm.

The increasing cost of producing woollen cloth using labour-intensive methods meant that new machinery was installed in the 1980s, including Sulzer rapier looms and Macart spinning frames, the latter made by one of the few British textile machinery makers still in existence. Investment brought fundamental change to Crombie’s operations: employee numbers dropped from 700 at the start of the decade, to 500 in 1987, and less than 200 in 1991. During this era, Crombie began styling and making ‘designer’ clothes to take advantage of the strength of their brand: until then most of its cloth production had gone elsewhere, to be made into clothes by tailoring companies on Saville Row.

Sometimes reputation and goodwill count for little: increasing costs (and increasing land values which inevitably made the site worth redeveloping) meant that Grandholm Works shut its doors in June 1991, when Illingworth Morris moved production to Yorkshire. A few years later the site was bought by Cala Homes.

Today there is almost nothing of the textile industry left in Aberdeen: the development company Cala Grandholm kept the Grandholm Mill shop open for a few more years, until someone decided to burn it down. That severed Aberdeen’s final link to the woollen trade. A few years later, swathes of the site were cleared, leaving only the Old Mill and lade as reminders of what once was.

The masterplan for the site lacks the scale or character of Grandholm Works: today’s circles of noddy houses look totally alien, when perhaps there could have been a series of courtyard houses built inside the perimeter of the spinning and weaving sheds, using their walls for privacy and shelter, and to acknowledge what went before.

The fate of Illingworth Morris’s mills in both Huddersfield and Aberdeen illustrates the strange way in which our post-industrial economy works. When land is worth more as a site for postage-stamp housing than as the location of a mill which generates work for hundreds of people – and profits for its owners – then something is badly wrong. It’s not only the economics of the short term, but the death of entrepreneurial spirit, and the destruction of our capital base. James Crombie would have had a tartan fit were he still alive.

These days, one company buys a competitor, takes its brands, then shuts down its mills and centralises production elsewhere, allowing it to redevelop the site. Appropriately for a woollens company, Illingworth Morris appears like a sheep, but underneath that clothing it’s really a wolf, in the form of a property developer – and developers often display a lupine instinct for ruthlessness.

Crombie’s legacy has been lost to Aberdeen – but perhaps the conversion of that other great mill, Broadford Works, will be different – since all of it is listed, whereas only the Old Mill at Grandholm was protected.

Mark Chalmers trained as an architect, but now turns his hand to writing, drawing and photography, as well as designing buildings. His current diversion is finding out about the city that never was – Aberdeen’s unbuilt architecture.

This is an article from the February 2011 edition of Leopard Magazine. To read much more like this every month, subscribe to Leopard Magazine.