A Study in Turkey Red

A Study in Turkey Red

What links this Turkey Red quilt with Charles Dickens, West Cumbrian history and the history of the dyeing industry in Scotland?

 In 2010, I acquired four quilts from Mrs. Oxtoby, of Wigton, West Cumbria. Mrs. Oxtoby and her family have lived in Wigton for many generations and the quilts had belonged to her mother, Mrs. Smith, née Sharp, who had died earlier that year. The quilts were found in a trunk in the attic when Mrs Oxtoby was clearing her mother’s house to put it on the market. (Reassuring to know that, even in the 21^st century, there are still attics which have not been ransacked for items to sell on Ebay!)

 Although the quilts are in various states of wear and condition, I was delighted to be able to add such excellent examples of quilts with local provenance, displaying all the characteristics of quilts made in this region of the UK, to my collection.

  All four quilts are pieced entirely in cotton and contain cotton wadding. The hand-quilting is competent without being outstanding, and appears to be uniform over the four quilts. There are no labels or identifying marks on any of the quilts, but they are typical of those produced in the late nineteenth/early twentieth century.

 Even if local provenance hadn't been available, I would have felt confident in saying that they had been made locally, for two reasons: the four quilts are quilted in the particular pattern traditionally associated with the quilts of West Cumbria and found also in geographically associated regions, which is to say South-West Scotland, Northern Ireland and the Isle of Man; the pattern is known as ‘All over Wave pattern’ and takes the form of a series of chevrons covering the entire surface. The second clue is in the use of a particular red fabric, known as Turkey red, in one of the quilts. This fabric is ubiquitous in quilts of our region for reasons connected to the dyeing industry in Scotland.

Mrs. Oxtoby was able to tell me that other members of the family remembered the quilts and believed that they had been made by two sisters, Sara and Mary Eliza McMechan, whose family had a close friendship with Mrs. Oxtoby’s mother’s family, the Sharps. It is believed that the quilts were given to the Sharp family as a gift.

The two sisters, neither of whom married, were the daughters of Thomas McMechan, the founder of the Wigton Advertiser.  He had premises in King Street, where he also ran the printing works. He rose to become one of Wigton’s leading citizens and, among other civic roles, had the distinction of leading the deputation which welcomed Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins on their visit to Wigton during their walking tour of Cumberland in 1857.

 After Thomas’s death in 1914, the Wigton Advertiser was published by his two daughters and, on their retirement, by the Wilson brothers, two long-term employees. It ran until 1941, when the Second World War brought paper shortages and severe restrictions on publishing.

 Evidence of the close friendship between the family of Mrs. Oxtoby’s mother, the Sharps, and the McMechans is in the Will of Mary Eliza McMechan, in which she bequeathed legacies to Mr. Henry Sharp and his two daughters, one of whom was Mrs. Oxtoby’s mother.

All over Wave quilting

 What, one might wonder, were Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins doing in Wigton? On 7th September 1857 they had embarked on a walking tour in the north of England. They left London for Carlisle by train, then travelled another 14 miles to the village of Hesketh Newmarket. Here they stayed at the Queen’s Head Inn, close to Carrock Fell. Despite the adverse weather, Dickens insisted on climbing the mountain; their compass broke and they became hopelessly lost in thick mist. Collins, a reluctant participant in this venture, badly sprained his ankle on the descent so they travelled to nearby Wigton, where he saw a doctor. We must assume that this was when they were met and greeted by the town dignitaries, including Thomas McMechan, the father of the quiltmaking daughters. Wilkie, presumably would have been limping badly!

 Their stay in Wigton was brief, because on 9^th September they travelled on to Allonby. Arriving there in time for lunch, they stopped for two nights at The Ship, described by Dickens as ‘a capital little homely inn looking out upon the sea – a clean, nice place in a rough wild country.’ The landlord was Benjamin Partridge whose ‘immensely fat’ wife was ‘very obliging and comfortable.’ The Ship Inn is still there and a wall-plaque commemorates the famous visit.

  So, there’s the Dickens link - tenuous, I admit! But what links this Turkey red and white quilt to the history of the dyeing industry in Scotland?

  Before the introduction of synthetic dyes, the colour red was mainly derived from the use of the dried roots of the madder plant: Rubia tinctorum. But until the C17th no method had been discovered in Europe whereby cotton fabrics could be dyed red which would be fast to light and water - in other words, they would not fade or bleed. So when vividly-coloured, painted and printed cotton textiles, which would withstand washing and sunlight, began to be imported by the East India Company, European producers were keen to learn the dyeing processes by which they were produced. The existing producers, mainly in parts of  the Turkish Empire like Greece and the Levant, hence the ‘Turkey red’ description, were understandably secretive about their processes, but in the 1740s determined efforts were made by Europeans to discover those secrets. Britain’s efforts to succeed in this C18th version of industrial espionage were a failure and it was a Frenchman who eventually found the method of creating the fabulous red dye. The method, it should be said, was complex and involved many stages, some of them noisome: soaking the fabric in ox blood and then in urine, for example!

  Pierre Jacques Papillon was first wooed by the Manchester textile producers but, for various reasons, he settled in Glasgow. Long before the advent of Turkey red there were major dyeing and bleaching works in and around Glasgow, many of which were moved out to the Vale of Leven because of its great resource of clean, unpolluted water. The industry grew to be the major source of employment and industrial output in that area, but the production of Turkey red fabric became the dominant industry, turning regional firms into multinationals, owners into millionaires and giving the Vale of Leven a world-wide reputation for production of superior Turkey red goods. Under the auspices of the United Turkey Red Co. Ltd. an alliance of three major companies formed during the 1890s, the production of Turkey red textiles continued there until the 1960s, when advances in dyeing technology and competition from Japan and India led to the decline and ultimate collapse of the textile industry in the Vale of Levens.

  So there’s the link: my Turkey red quilt reflects the fact that proximity to the centre of production of Turkey red fabric meant that it was easily available to fabric retailers in the North of England, hence the ubiquity of its use in quilts made in our region. Not, of course, that Turkey red quilts aren’t found in other parts of the country, but there are an awful lot of them up North!

 The history of Turkey red dyeing is long and complex and the above is a very brief, and far from scholarly, introduction to the subject. There's lots more information available on-line and it's the subject of several books and academic publications.

©CME 2017