“After I graduated from Glasgow School Of Art, I went on holiday to Australia and ended up staying there 20 years working in textile design for commercial interiors – planes, trains, offices, pubs, clubs etc. All quite technical, because it was upholstery and interiors.
I came back to Scotland, and worked doing anything from design work to setting up and running training courses for Harris Tweed weavers. I made connections over there in the Hebrides and learnt about these little looms they’ve got. Because of my manufacturing background I thought “Oh my god, you can have you own little mill with these little machines that you can run on your own!”
This firm Hattersley had been building huge looms all over the British Empire since the Industrial revolution. You remember the Luddites? It was actually a Hattersley loom that they smashed up in protest! They shipped these huge looms all over the world, before they introduced these small domestic looms that were basically little mini versions of their big industrial power looms. This meant people in more remote areas could become self-sufficient weaving commercial-grade cloth. So for the Harris Tweed makers, these were the machines that grew with the industry to the high point in the 1960s when they would weave 6,000,000 yards a year on 900 looms, until the downfall of the British textile industry in the 1980s.