The Town That Thread Built

At the turn of the 20th century, Scotland's largest town was booming.

It was a hive of industry where more than 10,000 people worked every day,

making a product used the world over.

We exported thread to the whole world.

At one stage, they produced 90% of the world's sewing thread.

For more than 100 years, the thread mills were the life and soul

of the town of Paisley.

Paisley was thread and thread was Paisley, you know?

There was hardly a house in Paisley

didn't have somebody that was employed by the mills.

Thread built the town and provided its people

with once-in-a-lifetime opportunities.

It is one of the very first

industrial multinational companies.

The company sent their workers far and wide.

You had Germany, Brazil, Asia,

India, Pakistan.

You heard of people going to these countries

that nobody would ever have dreamt they'd be able to go to.

Where they often witnessed life-changing events.

My father, he saw life under the Nazis in Germany.

We had two military coups while we were there.

But the glory days weren't to last

and eventually boom became bust.

It was just so sad.

It was devastating.

It was a sad, sad day for Paisley.

I think it devastated the town because what were you left with?

-NEWSREEL:

-100 years ago, Benjamin Disraeli came out

with the immortal phrase, "Keep your eye on Paisley."

Prime ministers knew what they were talking about in those days

for this is no ordinary town.

Until the 1980s, the town of Paisley had two huge mill complexes.

At their height they were the town's largest employer.

-NEWSREEL:

-It's the biggest town in Scotland

if you don't count the cities.

It was the thread capital of the world for 150 years.

The thread industry became immensely important to Paisley

because it employed 11,000-12,000 people,

which was a huge number for a town of about 70,000 inhabitants.

We used to run a book.

The bet was on what colour the river would be today.

Some days, it was bright yellow, some days it was purple,

some days it was black.

Every day it was a different colour.

It was quite a surprise when there was no colour at all.

The mills stopped here forever in 1993,

but the people who worked in them have long memories.

This stretch along here was Atlantic and Pacific, Clark's original mills.

And just at the trees here was a wee first aid station, which has gone.

You used to run in there for an orange drink when you got a cold.

Harry Green began his career in the thread mills

as an office boy in 1949 and ended up as an assistant manager.

We are looking at the Mile End finishing mill.

I ended my career in here in 1983

after having completed 34 years with J&P Coats.

That included starting at the head office in Glasgow

and finishing at the mills in Paisley, where it all began

many, many years ago.

Ooh, good grief!

What a change.

Well, from what I remember,

we used to come down West Road and go in the turning shop gate

along to my mill. And then I was up in the top flat in there

and that is the counting house.

This is the counting house at Ferguslie Mills

and this is where I started work when I was 15.

The last time I would be in the counting house

would probably be about 1973-ish.

Eleanor Clark worked in the mill for 39 years.

Her jobs included personnel manager and editing the company newspaper.

She began her career as an office junior in this building,

which has been converted into flats.

I can't believe this.

You know, it's quite unrecognisable.

So different.

These buildings are amongst a very few that remain

of what was once an enormous presence in the town.

Number eight - twisting.

And the gatehouse.

That was the main gatehouse, the north gatehouse.

The day I arrived, I came down,

I came through that arch and this girl came through

and said she would take me. She brought me up here.

Oh, there's the chimney. There's the chimney there.

From my office, I could see up to the top of the chimney

and there was a hawk nested up there for years.

MILL SIREN BLOWS

The mills provided jobs for the people of Paisley, known as Buddies,

for generations.

Everywhere you went, everybody you met,

"Oh, aye, you work in the mill.

"Oh, aye, I remember you. You work in the mill."

I mean, everybody knew

where you worked at that time.

I started in 1956 in the mills.

I was 15 years old

and I started in a department called the turning shop.

The turning shop made the wooden bobbin.

There was possibly about 80 boys all between the ages of 15 to 20.

You grew up quick there.

I had been told by my mother to apply

to get into Coats' office.

That was the thing to do.

It was my mum that put the idea into my head.

She says, "Well, we've all worked in the mill.

"What about you? Why not go into the mill?"

When I got interviewed,

I got sent for to say that as soon as I had left school,

I could start on the Monday.

So my mother said, "That's fine, you can start this Monday."

I started off as a management trainee with Coats

immediately after university

and there was definitely a feeling

that when you joined,

you were joining for life.

I remember a friend of my mum saying,

"Oh, Jean," she said,

"That's just set for life

"when you're in the counting house in the mill."

I joined Coats in 1974, straight out of university.

I am the great-great-great-grandson of James Coats Sr,

who was the original founder

of the first factory,

the father of J&P Coats.

The Paisley thread mills would ultimately be run

by one large company - J&P Coats.

But their origins lay in a decades-long rivalry

between two prominent Paisley families - the Coats and the Clarks.

They were fierce rivals,

one at one end of Paisley and one at the other end.

Paisley had long been a textile town and the area's weavers had risen

to prominence making intricate silk shawls

with that unique pattern which came to bear the town's name.

Paisley pattern was the predominant motif on the Paisley shawls

and the Paisley shawl was internationally famous.

It was a very complex cloth,

so it required a very high level of skill and Paisley,

because it already had a well-established weaving industry,

they were able to take on this industry.

Both the Coats and the Clarks worked in the weaving trade

and although ultimately it would be the Coats family

who came out on top,

in the early days, the Clarks were the innovators.

Many people tried to make a cotton sewing thread,

but with no success for years and years and years and the Clarks,

who were the brilliant family,

although, as a Coats, I'm reluctant to say this, but it's true,

they happened upon it

because of Napoleon's blockade of the UK in 1806.

The Napoleonic Wars had shut down trade between Britain and France,

leaving the weavers of Paisley

without their most crucial raw material - silk.

The Clarks made their living providing silk twine to weavers.

The blockade threatened their livelihood,

but it also presented them with an opportunity.

There was no way for them to continue providing this product

cos it wasn't available anywhere within the UK.

So they tried to make a substitute.

It was the early days of the Industrial Revolution

and the textile industry was reaping the benefits of new machinery.

And the way of making cotton yarn had been revolutionised.

So, then, a huge abundance of very fine cotton yarn

became available to the weavers.

In spite of the blockade,

Britain was managing to import some raw cotton from the colonies.

The Clarks realised that this was a solution to their problem.

So they were able to happen upon a stronger, smoother product,

no different, really, from sewing thread.

So they logically started selling some cotton sewing thread

just to what they called their more adventurous customers.

Within a decade of the Clarks

creating the first cotton sewing thread,

more than 20 thread-making companies had sprung up in the town.

The thread had initially been a producer industry

to be turned into something else.

It became the end product, a consumer business.

The invention of cotton sewing thread coincided with the arrival

of one of the most significant domestic innovations

of the 19th century.

Bingo, the sewing machine appears and, hallelujah,

it's all time to get rich and happy and indeed,

both the Clarks and the Coats prospered enormously

from the invention of the sewing machine.

The advent of the sewing machine

meant the demand for thread was huge and growing.

The thread business just got bigger and bigger

and bigger and bigger and bigger.

The rival families were quick to establish their positions in town.

To the east, the Clarks built their first mill in 1817, known as Anchor.

The Coats family followed suit in 1826,

constructing their first mill south-west of town at Ferguslie.

At their height, both sites grew to more than 50 acres each.

It looked like a whole town.

I mean, Ferguslie Mill was massive.

You'd probably get about ten football pitches in there.

And I used to think,

"It's massive, absolutely massive".

You were a wee dot compared to all these people.

Each site had multiple buildings with different functions,

such as dyeing and spinning.

In the largest mills, whole floors, or flats, as they were known,

were dedicated to winding, twisting, packaging and polishing.

And there was a healthy rivalry

between the workers at either end of town.

Ferguslie started off with the bales of cotton,

right through till the twisted thread,

and then Anchor finished off.

And the ladies in the Anchor used to think

that they were a wee bit upper than the ladies from Ferguslie.

They were the toffs in Anchor.

We were the plebs.

It's true, yes, it's true.

-NEWSREEL:

-This is now the biggest thread-making concern

in the United Kingdom.

Over 4,000 people are employed in this Paisley mill.

I'd never heard noise like it in my life.

Smelly, dirty, oily, greasy.

And it was, like, as if the whole war had started on the one building

with the noise of these machines.

Really noisy, clackety-clack.

Just think of the clack, clack, clack clack, clack...

THEY MIMIC LOUD INDUSTRIAL NOISES

I think because of the noise,

you were more inclined to watch people's mouths.

They lip-read, you know?

You were here with this thing going round like a windmill

and the girl in front of you, she'd mouth...

-SHE MOUTHS:

-I'm going to the toilet.

And they always talked with their back to the supervisor

because some of them used to lip-read, too, you know?

I was only in the job about a month and I heard a scream.

And you could hear it above the machines.

And it was this girl that had got her hair caught in the thing and...

It took her scalp off the side.

So all the machines stopped then.

You didn't want to know about it

because the next time, it could be you.

-NEWSREEL:

-People are not very conscious of thread.

They think about fashion,

but this is only one of the industries we serve

and in any case, who notices the thread in a gorgeous dress?

We often forget how important thread is

because we don't see it.

-NEWSREEL:

-The fibres go through a number of processes.

They're opened, carded, drawn and spun.

People never think about thread.

It just holds your clothes together.

But, yes, there are special threads

like the thread you put into baseballs,

meat-tying thread, tampon thread, tea bag thread,

things you never think about.

-NEWSREEL:

-Look! Eight fibres are drawn into this machine to make one

and to even out differences between them.

There was a great slogan that the Coats did at one time which was,

"Imagine a world without thread".

Now, look!

-WOMAN SCREAMS

-Oh, no, what's going on?

My apron and tea towels just disappeared!

Oh!

Yes, it is an important product

which everybody takes for granted.

-NEWSREEL:

-Modern spinning and winding machines

are mostly looked after by girls.

The Paisley mills were built and owned by eminent men,

but from their very beginnings,

they were powered by the women and girls of Paisley.

At one time, the town was said to have seven women for every man.

Well, initially,

the people who produced and worked on the machines were all ladies,

and the men were, like, engineering associates like that, service men,

as I was doing.

You wouldn't have men spinning,

for example. That was a woman's job.

Children did the sort of ancillary services,

the sort of support services,

mending threads and things like that.

But women were the main workforce by the early 20th century

and the men primarily were overseers.

The foreman was always a man, yeah,

and that was basically it. The foreman was a man.

It was kind of a macho company because women only got so far.

But thread would not be made without women,

because it was all women that made it.

MILL SIREN BLOWS

Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries,

the sound of the mill siren would send thousands of mill girls

onto the streets. Today, the last of them are long since retired.

Well, I actually started with the intention

of only working for three months to buy a bigger caravan.

LAUGHTER

Joyce, Josephine, Gina and Ellen all worked together in Ferguslie Mills

and have been friends for more than 40 years.

It was the size of everything when I walked in to it.

It was massive and I felt tiny.

And I thought, "Gosh, am I to work in here? Will they find me again?"

But this nice man came up and said to me, "Start here".

And there I was and I felt as tall as they beams.

-I felt great.

-We made our own wages.

We were doffers, so we were on piecework.

A doffer's job was to remove the spools of thread from spindles

once they were fully wound.

Speed was essential, but so was your tension

because if your tension wasn't accurate,

then all the ends went up in the air and you were in trouble.

This group of women worked the twilight shift.

What they earned was based solely on the amount of thread they processed.

Piecework was where, if your machines were running,

so was your pay.

Women who were married that were on piecework

because they could make more than their husbands

in the jobs they were outside.

In the past, women had to leave their jobs to marry,

with only single women allowed to work in the mills,

giving us the word spinster.

It was only later that some jobs

were deemed appropriate for married women.

Well, we know that, you know, just after the First World War,

half of all women working in Paisley are working in textiles,

which gives you a sense of how large an employer it was

and how crucial it was to the economy of Paisley in that time.

You would have had high unemployment among men

and especially in the 1930s after the Depression.

So, you know, women's employment was important

in keeping families afloat.

I enjoyed my independence,

the mill gave me that.

I was so excited at the thought that I could go out to work.

And I loved the independence it gave me,

of having my money instead of my husband's money in my hand.

Your wage from the mill was a lifeline at times.

-Aye, that's right.

-Actually, your wages from the mill built Paisley.

I mean, we got hospitals and we

Look at the buildings that they built because...

That was Coats, but Coats had nothing else but money.

They earned money because we worked.

In the 19th century, as the Paisley thread industry grew,

so the rivalry between the two family businesses intensified.

The Coatses, because they were managerially more adept

and more dedicated to quality than the Clarks,

simply took over and dominated the trade very quickly.

So that by 1840,

they were the largest manufacturer of cotton thread in Paisley.

Although successful, the Clark family were known

to be a fractious bunch, giving the far more unified Coatses the edge.

James and Peter, the J&P of the company name,

looked after logistics and accounting respectively,

but two of their younger brothers

also took key roles within the company.

Thomas, who was my great-great-grandfather,

was an engineer and Andrew was an entrepreneur and a lawyer.

He didn't really join the company business at all,

but he was the engine that made it work.

Andrew Coats was absolutely indispensable.

Andrew Coats sailed to America in 1839 to seek his fortune.

The family business had already begun selling

to the American market, but it would be his intervention

which would be the making of J&P Coats.

There were people who tried to copy their product,

pretending it was theirs and Andrew Coats fought these cases

in the law courts of the United States.

He took the company from a point

where they were selling 45% of their product in the USA,

which was with their agents, to ten years later,

selling up to 85%.

In the 1850s, the Americans introduced high import taxes.

The time had come for Coats to begin making thread abroad.

Their Paisley rivals, the Clarks, beat them to it,

building mills in New Jersey in 1866,

but Coats weren't far behind and, soon after,

established what would be the first of many foreign mills

in the state of Rhode Island.

MILL SIREN BLOWS

Today, almost all of Coats' former mills

in the town of Pawtucket are still standing.

Oh, my goodness, me.

This is huge.

Brian Coats, the great-great-great-grandson

of the company's founder, has never seen them before.

On this side, we have the first phase,

with mills two, three and four.

Industrial historian Matt Kierstead has agreed to give him a tour.

We are on about a 50 acre, yeah,

I would call it a campus or even a small industrial city.

That's... That's close to the size

-of the original Ferguslie Mill in Scotland.

-OK.

-At its height.

-Yeah, yeah.

-Yeah. Erm, this is an illustrated brochure

which I pulled out of the archives

and I have got a map that they did...

-Wow!

-When they originally built it.

So number one mill must have been

where that extension has been built there,

which must have been built at a later time.

Although the American site quickly grew

to be as large as the one at Ferguslie,

production here started small,

with just one building spooling thread imported from Paisley.

And you can start to see now on the back side of these buildings,

the attached engine room.

The boilers and the steam engine would have been in there.

And then in that little connecting building

would have been belt drive or shafts.

It is... I mean, I now see, this is...

It's similar in size to Ferguslie.

In those early years,

these vast buildings were mostly staffed

with skilled workers from the UK,

with adverts placed in newspapers in Paisley,

promising a new life in a new country.

I mean, my first impression of this is that it is...

It is a taller roof

and it's lighter than anything I saw in Paisley.

So each of these now empty bays would just be full of machines

with little aisles for the operatives to...

-Correct.

-Service them and...

-Yeah.

-Yeah.

-So these were roving frames

and they would run in that direction

and the shafts that drove them would be up,

going that way across the roof.

But that's what it would've looked like

and it would be extremely noisy.

-Yes.

-Extremely noisy.

MACHINERY WHIRS AND RATTLES LOUDLY

Just got a glimpse of Ferguslie before it was all knocked down

and I always wanted to go back and look at it with a little bit more

of the wisdom of age, let's put it that way.

It's nice to be able to see buildings that look...

They're not the same, but they're similar

and the scale is very similar.

MILL SIREN BLOWS

You start to imagine what it must've been like

when there were people in them and the machines were all running

and I would've enjoyed being a fly on the wall

and just seeing what it looked like.

So, yeah, it gives me kind of goose bumps.

Within 20 years of being built, Coats' American mills had become

one of the largest manufacturing plants in the United States.

Basically, the United States was a kind of cash register

for the wider organisation.

The success of the American enterprise

was a huge turning point for the company.

Expansion into Europe came next and manufacturing abroad

set them on the path to world domination.

A lot of the money that was made in that way was invested in Paisley.

The Coats and Clark families became very rich out of this,

but they were also very public spirited.

A lot of their money went into civic buildings

and the community in Paisley.

It was the making of the town.

You just cannot deny the scale and scope of Coats' generosity.

Everywhere you look in Paisley, it's there.

It's there in the Clark Memorial Town Hall, it's in the mills,

it's there in Coats Memorial Church.

What a wonderful edifice that is to elevate the minds

of the people of Paisley in the town in which they lived.

Sir Peter Coats, he built the Paisley Museum and the library.

Thomas, his brother, my great-great-grandfather,

built the observatory.

The building we're sitting in, the observatory,

which is the major feature

of the skyline at Paisley coming from the north.

The individual buildings are, at lowest, good-quality,

at the best, of exceptional quality,

and they're designed to fit in with each other.

The Coats and the Clarks were socially minded employers,

known for their paternalism,

and it wasn't just buildings they invested in -

it was people, too.

Way back, their welfare was incredible.

They even had penny baths for people

in the days when people wouldn't have baths in their house, you know?

Both mills had first aid centres,

which was very good for tea and sympathy

and if you wanted to know the local news,

you went to the first aid centre.

I applied to join the auxiliary fire service that J&P Coats had

and they supplied you with a house.

So for a young 21-year-old

like myself and my wife

to get something like this

for the princely sum of £5 a month rent...

Both in Ferguslie and Anchor's, they had day sports grounds.

I played hockey there.

I played hockey until I was 37.

They had very successful cricket teams, football teams.

There were two thriving bowls clubs.

They had sewing classes and they had keep fit classes.

There was a thriving drama club.

They put on a show every year.

That was fun.

Every year, they would have an annual outing,

which was a fantastic undertaking.

10,000 people moving.

They would hire whole trains to take people off to places like Braemar

or Arbroath or wherever it might be.

They had bands and there's a fabulous photograph of them all,

you know, with their moustaches and whatnot.

It was the central focus of Paisley social life.

Well, your night outs, you know, we used to go to the Anchor Rec.

That was a good place.

The Anchor Recreation Club was the hub

of the mill workers' social life.

And they had dances every Saturday night

and my brother and I started a band and called it Maverick,

and we played over there.

And the guys were talking about going to London

to try and get famous, if you like,

and... I stopped it and that,

and a certain guy called Gerry Rafferty took my place.

I personally didn't like him.

I didn't think he was very good.

Shows you how much I know!

This is the Anchor Recreation Club.

I met my wife-to-be here.

Her brothers and the rest of our friends always had to make her

dance in the first half, and there were six of us,

so she got 12 dances in a night, at least.

And it was teetotal in those days,

so as you go into the main reception,

the bar was across there,

and it was all fizzy drinks.

You could get crisps later on at night,

but not to start with at 7.30.

And then ten o'clock, you know, all out, the doors are shut.

Great memories. Great place.

Those were the days.

Right from the start, the Coats family were known as good employers,

who valued the wellbeing of their workers.

In 1887, Coats built a school for their young female employees.

It was known as the Half-Time School.

Basically, what this was all about

is if you've got a healthy workforce,

they'll work harder.

So it's couched in terms of, you know, employee...

employee welfare,

but, really, it's to improve the efficiency of the business.

I mean, they were very clear that they were doing well

because they had good people, and the more they looked after people,

the more return they got for their businesses.

At that time, young children who were working, 12, 13, 14-year-olds,

had to spend time at school.

Most of them would walk, and so rather than lose that time,

Coats thought it would be a good idea to have a school

on the premises where people could go and they had full-time teachers,

they had nursing facilities.

Today, the once magnificent Half-Time School building

lies in ruins, but from the time it opened in 1887

until the introduction of compulsory full-time education,

thousands of young mill girls passed through its doors.

Both Coats and Clarks had continued to expand,

but the late 19th century was a time of great turmoil.

Faced with strikes and recession, merger became inevitable.

In 1896, the two great Paisley rivals

finally agreed to join forces.

The new company, now known as J&P Coats,

was the largest thread manufacturer in the world.

I would maintain that it is one

of the very first industrial multinational companies.

Yes, the East India Company and so on,

which are essentially trading companies,

but Coats was manufacturing overseas from a very early stage.

By 1910, Paisley was home to the third-largest company on the planet,

second only to US Steel and Standard Oil,

with factories in around 40 countries.

People travelled all over the world, literally, for Coats.

They were dominant in Russia.

They were becoming dominant in Europe.

And by about the middle 1930s,

they had 35,000 employees worldwide.

When Coats started to manufacture overseas,

what was done in Paisley was copied by everybody else,

so that Paisley remained the engine that drove everything.

With mills in locations as far-flung as El Salvador, Japan,

India and Russia,

Coats' employees were travelling far and wide

to train foreign workers long before the advent of aviation.

If you were wanting to see the world, the two quickest options,

if you were a Paisley Buddy, were to join the army or join Coats.

A large number of Paisley people went out there

from the mills in Paisley,

right down to mill girl level,

because nobody had worked in a thread mill before.

That changed their lives quite dramatically,

I would think, you know?

Because they saw a totally different world.

We were, kind of, put in the sausage machine for being sent somewhere,

and "somewhere" could be anywhere,

and I was eventually sent to Brazil.

Three and a half years after I started,

I headed off to my first job, which was in Peru.

My first real job was in Colombia, South America.

I got sent to Personnel, and they said,

"Would you like to go to Peru?"

The biggest change was the food.

You don't ask what it is - you just eat it and enjoy it.

We arrived just at the start of the 1970 World Cup

and we were billeted in a hotel downtown, and, of course,

Brazil were sensational in that World Cup and won it,

and the whole city erupted into a three-day carnival.

You would go Glasgow-London, London-Madrid,...

Madrid to Lisbon, Lisbon to Dakar...

Caracas, Bogota...

Cartagena to Quito.

Quito-Guayaquil, Guayaquil-Lima.

So that it was a real hoppity-hop kind of journey.

34 and a half hours.

Every time we landed, we were given a wee ticket

to go and get a drink.

It was an interesting culture,

because they still spoke elements of Paisley

on the mill floor, and words survived into the local argot,

like "umnyaffee" turns out to be a foreman, as a wee nyaff.

Working abroad,

Coats employees often got caught up in life-changing world events.

Working in South America was an interesting experience.

In Venezuela, we had two military coups while we were there.

I can remember the personnel manager

calling me up at four o'clock in the morning

and saying, "Don't be alarmed,

"but there is a coup going on at the moment.

"Stay at home and wait till I call you."

My grandfather had worked in the mill.

He was a foreman.

At the turn of the century, he was actually sent to Russia.

They were opening a mill there.

My mother had an aunt, and she was a...

what they called a mistress, but that's a teacher, you know?

And she was in the Russian mills out there

and she had to...

They had all to pack very quickly when the revolution started.

They lost the Russian mills in the revolution.

They lost Poland, Estonia, Latvia,

France, Germany, Italy, Spain because of the Civil War...

During the war, they lost complete contact

with all the mills in Eastern Europe and in Germany and Austria

and a lot of them were actually converted

to making product for the German army.

Well, these are the prewar passports of my father,

covering the year 1935 to 1948.

Ken's father, William Matheson, worked for Coats all his life.

Starting as an office junior at the age of 13,

he worked his way up through the ranks

and ended up travelling the world as a cost accountant,

visiting around 30 countries in his career.

In those days, you went in or out of a country

and you got your passport stamped.

He was hardly in any one location

or any one country for more than three weeks.

In the mid-1930s,

William Matheson was sent to install a standard costing system

in the mills of Eastern Europe.

My father was based near Vienna, where the Austrian mills were,

and he was doing the installation of the system in Austria,

Czechoslovakia, Bratislava...

So my father was in and out of Germany a lot.

So he saw life in...

under the Nazis in Germany.

On the 12th of March 1938, German tanks rolled into Vienna.

The day that he was told to get out of Bratislava and Vienna

and come home was the day that Hitler actually arrived in Vienna.

-CHANTING:

-Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil!

Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil!

Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil!

My father got a taxi to the street where they lived,

and it was a little cul-de-sac of flats,

and there were swastika banners hanging off all of the balconies,

except their flat, which was hanging with my brother's nappies.

So it was, "Get those down right away and pack what you can get,"

and they left everything else.

-CHANTING:

-Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil!

They drove through the streets ahead of Hitler's procession

and the streets were thronged with thousands,

hundreds of thousands of people,

and they were driving down the route of the motorcade

just in time to get away with it.

That's what they saw coming out of Austria that day.

Operating abroad was challenging,

particularly during times of conflict,

but Coats had been smart

and, although they lost mills during the Second World War,

they managed to get back on their feet pretty quickly.

Coats had been really brilliant

at looking after their proprietorial rights, you know,

their trademarks, their patents, their title deeds,

everything that proved their ownership of property

in a particular country.

By a lot of judicious hiding of things,

they actually managed to get back up and running quite quickly.

They got out of Hungary and Czechoslovakia, for instance,

with all of their title deeds, all of their property things.

They actually got themselves back in the game in a lot of countries

where they had basically written it all off.

That hour before you started was crucial,

because the kids to be home prompt.

They were changed out their school uniforms,

their homework was started...

Well, you had outside stairs to scrub as well

and you had to put your chalk down the side of your close.

What year was that, the year dot?

She's older than us.

# I am 16, going on... #

Look, I'm 84. Come on, I...

But there was a good social side to working in the mill

because there was always somebody had a catalogue going,

an Avon book...

And menages, there was menages running.

It was... It was quite a good social scene.

In a strict working environment where men ruled the roost,

there was one place where the women were in charge.

On a Friday especially was a different day for the ladies,

because that was the day, the weekend was looming,

so they disappeared,

and when I first started, I used to wonder where are they all went,

but they were all in the toilets getting their hair done.

The atmosphere in the place was brilliant.

When it came to the weekend, we were all ready to go out,

finish on a Friday.

We went out into the cloakroom.

We were getting our hair done.

We were getting our eyebrows plucked already, and our rollers in,

all ready for the weekend,

the dancing and all that, I mean, it was great.

You could get your hair cut in the toilet.

There was this girl on this particular day, going out,

everybody's shouting. The machines went off,

and they went, "Good night, Willie!"

And he said, "Aye, you forgot to get the rest of your hair cut."

She'd forgot when she was walking out, she'd got the right side cut,

which was into the machines, but when she came out, it was the...

She'd forgot the opposite side.

That's where we got our education.

I couldn't believe the things that folks spoke about.

Unbelievable. Absolutely unbelievable.

And these women that bravely walked into the toilets

with a potato and a needle and got their ears pierced.

Oh, yes, their ears pierced.

So you'd be in the toilets and you'd say,

"Are you going to Barrowland this week?"

"Yes, I am." "Do us a favour. Gonnae show us how to do the Creep?

And this was, you did two steps to that side, two steps to that side,

and then you dragged your right leg.

So it looked as if you had a bad leg, so it was called the Creep.

So this was you in the toilets,

and you were dancing and showing them the new thing about the Creep,

or else it was the Twist and whatever it was.

They had such a lot of dance halls in Paisley,

so it didn't matter where you went in Paisley,

there was always a mill girl.

The town was buzzing with all these people working

and they had a lot of money to spend.

-NEWSREEL:

-Paisley has the second-lowest level

of unemployment in Scotland.

Only oil and fish-rich Aberdeen can employ more of its people.

In the 1960s, Paisley was thriving.

As well as the thread mills,

other big employers included the Hillman car factory at Linwood

and food producers Brown & Paulson.

Paisley was a good growing town at that time

because there was a lot of money.

Paisley girls were always well-dressed.

Oh, Paisley was great.

Paisley in the '60s and that was superb,

and it was just a place to be.

People would come on holiday Mondays from Glasgow to Paisley

because it was such a good place to shop.

Good-quality gents shops that a lot of my generation will remember.

There was John Collier's.

There was Hepworth's.

There was Burton's. There was Jackson's.

There'd be a furniture shop.

Maybe bicycles or...

There was that right along.

Industry had allowed the town to flourish.

But by the '70s, like the rest of industrial Scotland,

Paisley was in decline.

The car plant at Linwood had begun laying off thousands of workers

and would eventually close.

There were many more job losses on the horizon

and the mills were not immune.

Somewhere about the '50s into the '60s, there was a, kind of,

a personnel edict that top-level management

would be recruited from universities,

rather than through the traditional mill pattern

where the bright folk in the mill could actually progress.

That stifled people who actually knew how to make thread

from getting to the positions of managing a mill that makes thread.

I don't know who the managers in the top brass were in Coats, you know,

after a time.

Times had changed

and the family were no longer the major shareholders in the company.

Global capitalism had sent textiles in Britain into a downward spiral

and Paisley would be hit hard.

Through the '20s and '30s, Coats developed hugely in Europe.

Through the '50s and early '60s,

Coats developed hugely in Latin America.

So the potential for export from Paisley was being undermined.

So the ethos of the company had completely changed

from being about locations and loyalties, as well as profitability,

to being about the maximisation of profit.

Coats had been pioneers of globalised working,

manufacturing abroad long before it was the norm.

For their Paisley workforce,

the years of exporting their skills overseas was about to backfire.

That's just been the effects of, sort of, globalisation,

in the sense that it became cheaper to move production abroad,

and, I mean, the whole of Scotland suffered.

I always felt that's what killed them off,

because they were making it cheaper abroad.

Well, this is what I was thinking.

If they're taking the machines over to there,

instead of sending their cotton stuff to us,

we're not going to have a mill.

Coats had begun buying up other textile companies,

joining with familiar names such as Viyella and Patons,

in an attempt to maximise profits and, at the same time,

create work for the town which had made their fortune,

but it was to be in vain.

The actual mill buildings were 19th-century buildings.

Fast forward 100 years, and they're kind of not fit for purpose.

Because of the demise of the domestic business,

it became clear that this huge Paisley engine couldn't be fed.

It was imploding in on itself and it became obvious after a time

that something had to be closed,

and indeed Ferguslie was the first place to go.

In December 1983, the vast Ferguslie mills were closed for good,

and the once 10,000-strong workforce

had now shrunk to around a fifth of that size.

The workers who kept their jobs were moved to the mills at Anchor.

There was always a big meeting of the managers every year

to see how the company was doing,

and that was followed by a meeting of the assistant managers,

and I think there was about 18 of us all went to a meeting,

and this director, you know, "Good morning."

Nothing was said.

He went through all the figures.

No questions. Then we just walked out

and the following month, we got our redundancies.

-INTERVIEWER:

-How did you feel?

Rotten.

The worst moment of my life was the time when Ferguslie shut.

Ferguslie, I kind of grew up there from when I was 15 till I was 40.

And when we were told that the mill was closing down, I was crying.

You think your life's over when it closes down, you know what I mean?

You thought, "What am I going to do now?"

I was told I would be made redundant in 18 months

and I was literally kind of last in situ at Ferguslie Mills.

I was 38 when I was made redundant

and I felt demoralised, totally demoralised.

I actually did hand over the cheques to a lot of them, you know.

I mean, one day, I remember it was...

I think it was about 40 men went out at a dyeworks

and you knew a lot of them would never get a job for ages,

if at all, you know?

You went home and felt like hitting your head off the wall,

you know. It really, really got to you.

Everybody was a bag of nerves.

What happened was you would get a phone call

saying come in on a certain day and date and you'll know your fate.

And they took us in one at a time like an execution,

and they told us individually, "You've got a job.

"You've no' got a job."

And some took it really bad, kicking chairs and what have you,

so when I got called in, I was told, luckily, I had a job, you know?

Of course, they were asking me, and they're saying,

"Congratulations," but probably saying, "Oh, that's one less."

It was a sad, sad feeling.

I remember when I was leaving where I was

with some of the people that I worked with, it was quite emotional.

And I remember the last day I was there, I got to the top

and I opened the door and I stood and I looked back and I went away

and that was it, the beginning of the end.

MACHINERY WHIRS AND RATTLES LOUDLY

Those of us who were involved in the organisation of it, I think,

would say we did as much as we could.

I suppose they held on to hope that Anchor would still survive

and it always rang in my ears when we were told

we were getting a job in Anchor.

The guys in Ferguslie were saying, "Oh, you'll no' last ten years."

And that's exactly how long it did last, ten years.

Ferguslie's closure was to be a portent of things to come.

Ultimately, the decision had to be taken, you know, really,

there isn't a long-term future for Paisley.

Redundancies had continued,

and by the early 1990s, the workforce left at Anchor

had dwindled to just a few hundred people.

The decision was finally made

to close the last of the Paisley thread mills.

From being a 15-year-old coming out of school

and not really knowing what work was all about,

I ended up more or less putting out the lights in Anchor Mills.

It was such a big operation in Paisley.

The whole town, at that time, was kind of largely dependent on Coats.

A lot of the wee bleachworks and dyeworks up the road,

they all closed.

On a Friday, one of the girls would buy cream cookies,

and that was your Friday treat, so that wee...

They wee Williams bakers all shut.

I mean, Coats' name wasn't good then.

Today, Coats PLC is still the world's largest thread manufacturer

with huge, modern factories all over the world, but none in the UK.

The area of Ferguslie in Paisley,

once the engine that drove the world's third-largest company,

is now the poorest in Scotland.

The first demolition I ever saw in the mills was in Anchor

and it went down in the early '70s.

That was terrible because, at one point, I happened to pass this,

you know, when half of it was down, and it was just so sad.

As the organisation had shrunk, one by one, buildings had disappeared.

In 1982, the most iconic of them all,

the No 1 Spinning Mill at Ferguslie,

was scheduled for demolition.

Ferguslie Mill, to me, was absolutely stunning.

A stunning building.

We'll never see the likes of that again.

Ferguslie Mills, where I worked,

you're walking through there now and all you see is houses.

Now that's...

That a place where 3,000-4,000 people used to work -

3,000-4,000 families that depended on the income.

Everybody was standing crying.

With it all getting pulled down,

I think Paisley people felt pulled down.

And I remember standing there and my dad said, "Well, that's it.

"Life in Paisley is starting to go downhill."

I'd been coming to Paisley for nearly 30 years to work

and I get a very intense feeling of something old,

venerable and useful having gone.

I'm a Paisley person and I always will be, but I...

I can't say I'm proud of what the town has become.

But you just felt it was part of Paisley that had gone

and it had gone forever and it was never going to come back.

Well, you take it... Oh, look at how they've built all they houses

-where the mill used to be.

-Aye.

-I know.

They did abandon us, because I thought when my lassies grew up,

my lassies would be into the mill, and by the time they had grown up,

Ferguslie Mills was shut.

They should have kept that building.

They should have...

-Hi, Davie! How are you?

-Budge up.

-Hiya.

-You're kind of late.

-Budge up.

No' changed that much, have I?

I've not criticised you at all.

You've not? It's good to see you all.

David was a very popular mill foreman at Ferguslie for 25 years

and is remembered fondly by these workers.

Everybody got on great and we had our differences, of course,

you know, but you had your social life.

I get people sometimes come up to me

and say, "You played at my wedding."

I says, "Oh, did I?"

That's right. You played at my pal's.

"Did you no' remember me?"

I says, "Oh, aye, you were the one with the white dress, weren't you?"

But you had so many laughs and it was a way of life.

And I... I appreciate the fact that it was built in Paisley,

and gave us all work, and all sorts of jobs for lots of people,

cos, gosh, we miss them now.

Here, this is a cheery meeting today, isn't it(?)

You should have came down earlier!

You should have came down earlier and heard us talking about...

I was lucky. I stayed on in the mills

and I've had a great life in the mills

and I met a lot of great people in the mills.

It was very much a family sort of feel.

I've got friends still that I, you know,

I worked beside all these years ago.

I enjoyed the mill.

I had a good living from it and the mill was good to me.

The people in Paisley are still great descendants

of these mill workers and Coats people.

Paisley was the mills. It still is.

I wouldn't leave it.

-NEWSREEL:

-It's as well to remember our history, even the murkier bits.

Maybe it's not the stuff of kings and wars and high affairs of state.

Maybe it has more to do with bobbins and mill girls

and men standing for what they believed in.

And there can be pride in that, too,

for it is the history of the people of Paisley,

the people who made Paisley the town that it is -

one of the most uniquely independent and successful towns Scotland

has ever produced, the place to keep your eye on.