Statistical Accounts tell us that in the early part of the 19th century, the inhabitants of Carmunnock consisted of millers, masons, labourers, servants, gardeners, shoemakers, a smith, a cooper, a carrier, and of course of weavers. There were many weavers as in all villages in the early days, especially in districts where the air was damp enough to keep the yarn in good condition.
Before winter began, sacks of raw wool or cotton were carried for many miles to be stored in the stone lean-tos that typified weavers’ cottages. Then, throughout the cold dark months the whole family or household worked: women spending many long hours spinning enough yarn for the year’s work, children winding it on to pirns or bobbins, and then the menfolk stretching the warp threads on to the frames ready for setting up the looms in their tiny ill-lit, low-ceilinged homes.
To keep a handloom in constant work from springtime onwards meant months of labour and planning. Perhaps a few Carmunnock weavers joined to buy their raw material, or manufacturing merchant masters found it for them, handing it out to be woven on cottage looms as piece-work. The whole family depended for its food and shelter on a ready supply to work on, especially if the master was paying the rent.
It is said that Pathhead Cottages were weavers’ houses, and so was the Cottage (Bishops’) on the little street Rowan Bank. Weaving was done upstairs in the lands south of the church (at no. 32), in those beside the church gate (nos. 22 and 24), in both the 1790s cottage tenements on Kirk Road (nos. 2 to 6B), in the ones at Ashtree, in the 1828 tenement on Greenside and probably in several other houses in the village.
When the new Jacquard mechanism was installed in, it is thought, one of the Pathhead Cottages, there was great excitement. Everyone in the village came to see this new-fangled machine. The Jacquard loom, invented in France, was brought to this part of Scotland in the 1800s, but only gradually came into use as workers learnt how to operate it. With its complicated system using punched cards, patterns and curved designs could be woven - a skill that was almost impossible on the simple handloom mainly used in Carmunnock, best suited to working in straight lines.
First having some of the yarn dyed, the recipes for the various shades traditionally kept secret, a handloom could weave shawls, scarves, pieces of fabric or lengths of tweed and lent itself well to weaving tartan material.
From very early they would weave wool. Then as overseas trade increased, the weavers here probably worked in cotton and made muslin, cambric, lawn or linen as many other villagers did in the 18th century. Or they may have used silk. Latterly perhaps a few even became skilful enough to wind a silk thread round woollen yarn for greater thickness and bulk, a method which came to be used as fashion dictated.
It was hard, constant work for little return. But there was a radical movement in the weavers’ trade fighting against poor wages and conditions. Strathaven’s Radical Rising of 1820 demanded that all weavers throughout this area strike. Men marched to the Cathkin Braes, but the uprising failed and the leader James “Pearlie” Wilson and two other martyrs were hanged. See the John Hastie Museum at Strathaven.
According to the Rev Adam Forman’s Statistical Account of 1796, there were 15 weavers in Carmunnock. Then in Census Returns for 1841 there were at least five times as many Cotton HLWs (Handloom Weavers) listed. Perhaps the term “weaver” in the statistical report accounted for the number of households doing weaving and referred to the head weaver in each, thereby showing the number of looms in the village.
It is thought that as time went on, Carmunnock weavers ran a co-operative, meaning in all likelihood that several male and female workers had a small part in the output of one of the 15 looms, doubtlessly earning only a tiny share.
But inevitably in this new industrial era, the old village occupation of handloom weaving began to die. In the late 18th century, lint mills a mile away at Busby on the forceful waters of the White Cart started to improve their methods of production. Soon new lint or cotton mills were built there. They were equipped with machinery for spinning, waulking, bleaching and printing, and the cloth was laid out on the mills’ own bleachfields all round their village. See Busby and its Neighbourhood (1883) by the Rev William Ross. See also the National Trust for Scotland’s Weavers’ Cottage at Kilbarchan, Renfrewshire.
Gradually finding themselves unable to make a living from their own labours here, and attracted by new opportunity, many Carmunnock weavers began to leave home and walked down to Busby - a village which, while Clarkston was still a mere toll-house, the writers say, was fast becoming a thriving industrial centre. This brought the railway to Busby in 1866 and fine villas were built as people moved out from Glasgow. More traffic to the mills - and to the fine villas - meant that at last the road from Carmunnock had to be improved.
No doubt a few of Carmunnock’s weavers still worked at home either as out-workers for the mills or for their own merchant masters, or perhaps for private customers. But clearly, a new local livelihood was needed. Before the middle of the century, another industry thrived in Carmunnock. Whereas down in Glasgow the air was often thick with smoke, grit and fog, Carmunnock on the braes in the clear freshness and with its good clean water supply from the springs and wells, became a busy laundering community. Now the lean-tos which had stored raw cotton or wool became washing-houses instead and two or three others lined the Tammy Linn behind School Loan.
Every week the washerwomen or their menfolk walked the long way downhill into the city to collect their customers’ heavy load of soiled linen, woollens and blankets. The following week they trudged the long road down again to deliver the clean, carefully ironed laundry neatly folded in huge baskets carried either on their backs or tied securely to push-carts. By evening they were climbing the weary way up the hill again with the next load to be done.
Endless pails of water had to be carried from pumps at springs in some gardens, the open stretches of the Burn or from the four public wells in the village. These were as follows:
• the Well at the foot of the Low Green
• the Doo Well (the only one still in existence) in the plantain on Waterside Road opposite the Manse’s back gate (where the entrance to Sycamore Way is now)
• Mattha’s Well, which also became known as Jackson’s Well, halfway down the south side of Wellside (at the bottom corner of Wellside Cottage’s garden, 31 Kirk Road)
• and the Holy or Hallow Well known best as the Halla’ Well on the church side of Busby Road just outside The Beeches’ garden (its position probably out beyond the kerb-edge near the top of the present-day footpath in front of the churchyard wall)
Little washing-houses, a fire beneath the iron boiler to heat the water, stood independently in gardens or were attached as lean-tos at the side or at the back of almost every cottage or block of houses. In these and at the Low Green Well or the Burn-side, the clothes, sheets, bed-covers and table-linen were scrubbed and rinsed. After it was dry, ironing the piles of laundry or carefully goffering (or gophering) the frilly starched edges of blouses, dresses, caps or bonnets, was just as much of a long hard labour. But on good days it must have been a rewarding and uplifting sight to see the clean washing laid out everywhere on the grass to bleach or hanging up to dry. Propped up by highsers (clothes-line props) the length and breadth of the High and Low Greens near the two crosses that were still there then, and wherever there was room in the gardens, it blew in the clean air, sweet and fresh as it could never be in the smoky, grimy atmosphere of industrial Glasgow.