Harris Tweed jackets

are under threat? They can't be!

I was sent an article about Harris Tweed yesterday. I can't work out how to put a link here but it was in the National Scot. "Thought you might find this interesting Cat. I still have the jacket your grandfather made for me," was the comment which accompanied it.

And I was interested. I was still a mere kitten when Grandpa explained the importance of Harris Tweed to me. He was the one who told me how it was so important that it actually had an act of parliament relating to it. He told me how it was always woven by hand. He actually held a magnifying glass over it so I could see it in more detail.

I remember that length of tweed even now. It was brown. I didn't think it was very "pretty" but Grandpa told me it was something special and I believed him. Now I know even more about it and I know it was made by people who worked from home. To be Harris Tweed it must be woven by hand and finished in the Outer Hebrides.

Being a weaver was hard physical work, hard on the neck, back, shoulders in particular. The cloth was made in "single width"  eighteen inch strips on wooden looms until 1921. Following that they were allowed to make it on a more type of loom but it was still done by hand. To be marked with the "orb" or trademark it must still be made by hand. 

I tell you all of this because, like everything else, the traditional way of doing it is under threat. There will still be Harris Tweed but it won't be made from cloth woven by independent weavers. It will be cloth woven in mills. It will all still be done by hand because the Act of Parliament demands that but it will now all be twice the width. Tailors like my grandfather might welcome that but it won't be the traditional tweed in quite the same way.

Grandpa made the Senior Cat a tweed jacket in 1947. It was the year the Senior Cat was married. That jacket lasted him until his death in 2022. He was still wearing it in 2021 and would have worn it in the winter of 2022 had he lived into the winter.  

Yes, it did look rather worse for wear by then. It had been relined three times - on the second and third occasions there were little "adjustments" made to the lining which were suitable for someone who enjoyed conjuring tricks. One of the buttons had been replaced. (Oh the fun we had finding a suitable worn looking button!) The last tailor shook his head over the cloth and the workmanship and said, "Magnificent!"

And it was and is. It can still be worn seventy something years later. The Senior Cat had a second one made sometime in the late seventies from cloth that Grandpa had put aside for some reason. Perhaps the person who had ordered the jacket decided against it for some reason. It would have been too expensive to have there "just in case" someone wanted it. 

Brother Cat cannot wear them. He is bigger and taller than the Senior Cat but his son can wear them and does. If they look "daggy" to his children he just smiles. "My great-grandfather made this and it is something to be proud of," he tells them.

It is something to be proud of too. Good Harris Tweed is almost indestructible and they need to keep on making them.