All part of life's rich fabric

By the early 1820s the various owners, works, and growing infrastructure were in place, poised to take advantage of the next development - Turkey Red. This was the strikingly beautiful dye which did not run or fade, and which in 1827 was to start to turn regional firms into multinationals, owners into millionaires, and give the Vale of Leven an enviable, global reputation among textile producers.

Turkey Red - even the name had a ring of confidence and prosperity - came from the root of the madder plant, initially very popular and widely used in garments worn by the Greeks, Romans, Libyans, and the Moors. By 1886, the nine main works employed 7000 people. They dyed and printed a staggering 165 million yards of cloth and 20 million lbs of cotton yarn in the same year and dominated world production with orders for India, China, West Africa, South America, and the Philippines. Although production went on from before the Industrial Revolution right up to 1960, the phenomenal success of the Vale of Leven operations were, remarkably, largely unknown in Scotland - due in part, perhaps, to the works' owners who guarded the secrets of their processes.

As early as 1715, when the first bleach fields were set up at Renton, the pace of life along the banks of the Leven, the second fastest-flowing river in Scotland, pipped only by the mighty Spey, began to quicken to match industrial demands.

Yet the workers from the booming

factories rarely failed to find the time to worship, the village of Renton alone had five churches, including a gaelic-speaking church which became the centre for much of the community activity. Now, sadly, one of the few surviving relics of a remarkable era, Millburn Church, may be heading for a second term of community use.

It was the condition of this now-derelict building, whose designer is something of a mystery, that prompted the formation of the Trust earlier this year. On account of the spire which has a passing resemblance to the Scott Monument in Edinburgh, the building was attributed to George Meikle Kemp. The Statutory list now suggests, however, that the architect was John T Rockhead, designer of the Wallace Monument.

The Trust's 12 members are urgently trying to raise #145,000 to replace the collapsed roof structure, the first of three planned phases to breathe life into the

A-listed building. The grass in the gutters, and trees growing out of the building are testimony to the lack of any repair and maintenance programme in the past 20 years while in the ownership of the former Dumbarton District Council and, more recently, West Dunbartonshire authority, who blame a lack of resources.

Nevertheless, the charitable, non-profitmaking Trust is working to a timetable that will hopefully see the building opening around the year 2001 as a museum and community facility, displaying the area's wealth of industrial and social history which is rapidly being forgotten.

It accepts that the intention to establish a museum of the local textile industry may take some people by surprise. However, talks are on-going with government agencies and the Heritage Lottery Fund to explore opportunities to raise the estimated #686,000 required to fund the venture. It does not see the endeavour as a stand-alone project. It is viewed as a link in the chain that starts with the Drumkinnon Bay project, the Antartex and Loch Lomond retail outlets, Denny Tank Museum, Dumbarton Castle and Bowling Basin.

Innovative facilities to maintain visitor flow through the building are planned, an audio-visual presentation of the textile industry, exhibition of the industrial processes involved with ample opportunity for hands-on activities, including an area where children could be left under supervision to print, dye, and design their own textile classics, genealogy base and a community education facility.

Trust chairman Stephen Singer says: ''Our business plan indicated that Millburn would complement rather than compete with other developments in the area. The attraction's subject matter - the Turkey Red industry and the bleaching, dyeing, and printing processes - lends itself to the involvement of, and activity by visitors. Given that the nearest similar museum dealing entirely with this subject is in France, the initial visitor attraction figures are healthy with 12,000 people - a target after only the third year of opening. The majority of visitors are expected to be day trippers, accounting for 65%, holiday tourists 22%, schools 10%, and specialist groups 3%.''

With this level of support, the Turkey Red Trust, the voluntary management committee for the museum, hopes in time to employ full and part-time staff. Already, an oral history project has been completed, with 15 former employees of the Turkey Red recording their experiences. One recalls the press of workers as they paraded along the riverside to and from the Craft, the last factory to close. ''I always remember the waterside from Bonhill Bridge, it was a seething mass of humanity. People walking four and five across, to and from the work. You could even smell the Craft when it closed at night, from the people walking by.''

With some of the secret ingredients of the 38-stage process said to include rancid olive oil, sheep droppings, horse manure, and bull's blood, a powerful odour was hardly surprising! For many people born in the Vale of Leven after the last of the textile works closed in 1960, it may be difficult to visualise the quiet stretch of the river from Balloch to Renton as one of the world's leading producers of bleached, dyed, and printed cloth.

It is certain, however, that without more than 250 years of continuous textile processing on the Leven, the urbanised, industrialised communities which make up the Vale of Leven, would not be there today.

Cloth processing came to the Leven long before the Industrial Revolution. The bleach fields at Dalquhurn were the first established in Scotland in what was for many years a summer-only activity, with seasonal workers drawn down from Argyll, a source of cheaper labour.

By 1728, Walter Stirling and Archibald Buchannan had established the Dalquhurn Bleaching Company which, with government subsidy had extended the bleach fields - a mass of narrow canals of water, and beach hedges for shelter - to more than 12 acres. Over 40 years, while there were advancements in technique, not least the use of Sulphuric Acid as a bleaching agent, bleaching of cloth stopped being an end in itself and became the first step in a process that involved dyeing and printing.

While the first printworks in the Vale was established by Todd, Shortridge and Company at Levenfield, the real impact came two years later. In l770, William Stirling, nephew of Walter Stirling, moved his printworks from Dawsholm on the Kelvin at Maryhill to Renton. The attraction of clean air, pure, fast water, and cheap labour were too good to miss for a man whose family were well-respected Glasgow merchants. Through expansion and feuing William Stirling built Cordale Print works, and the Works at Dalquhurn and later Croftengea. Todd and Shortridge also expanded and, by 1778, had built the Milton Works at lower Levenbank which now bleached the new material - cotton, the two works connected by a ferry.

Prior to 1783 all the printing that took place was block printing. Designs were hand-carved in wood and the printer would place the block on the cloth and repeat the process until a complete pattern was produced. In 1783 Thomas Bell devised a method of using a copper cylinder with the pattern engraved. By the middle of the next century this method had almost completely replaced block printing, although it was 1846 before the first five-coloured printing machine was erected at Cordale Works. Despite its slowness, block printing overlapped the new system for many years and unlike the roller method, is still used today on expensive, exclusive, short-run orders.

The next 40 years saw expansion of factories on both sides of the Leven, including those at Ferryfield, Levenbank, and Dalmonach. Scotland's first Pyroligenous works at Millburn, Renton, was also opened in 1793 by John Turnbull, one of the partners in William Stirling & Co. Its output of acid from timber was a major ingredient of the textile works.

Despite their market share, the firms were not immune to global events and the American Civil War dramatically reduced cloth supplies to Scotland. The worst blow, the introduction of cheaper, organic dyes like Naptha red, was yet to come.

The Scottish owners in the Vale of Leven tried to diversify and modernise, and amalgamated to join the Turkey Red Company Limited to fight off growing competition, but it was too little too late. The granting of independence to India finally brought down the curtain on the textile industry in the Vale of Leven.

When the Craft closed, its then owners, the Manchester-based Calico Printers' Association, removed what useful machinery they could to their factories

in Lancashire.