Kermes & Cudbear (and Scottish rain?)

Cudbear and Kermes -- these are not a comedy partnership or a firm of Dickensian lawyers, but associated nevertheless, as these were both once widely used red textile dyes.

Kermes is an very ancient dyestuff, probably known at least since the bronze age, using scale insects, producing a rich scarlet,  so costly only the richest could afford it, until it was replaced by cochineal from Spanish Mexico in the late 1500s.

Roman Catholic cardinals in red robes, illumination from the Tres Riches Heures de Duc de Berry, France 1500s

Kermes dye was  much coveted by the Romans, who called it 'grana' ,  hence "dyed in the grain", without realising that the berry-like granules were the bodies of the female kermes vermilio insect, found on the branches of  the Mediterranean oak (quercus coccifera).
"Kermes is of the bigness of a pea, and of a brownish red colour, covered when most perfect, with a purplish grey dust.  It contains a multitude of soft granules, which, when crushed, yield a scarlet juice.  It is found adhering to a kind of holm oak. "  So Samuel Johnson in his Dictionary of 1755.

Traditionally it was harvested by women: in medieval France in the Languedoc there are accounts of the women going out with lanterns and baskets, as the best time to find the female kermes insects with their unhatched eggs was just before dawn.  At harvest time in May, the women would grow a fingernail extra long for scraping the granules from the branches.   The insects were needed in such large quantities that the scarlet dye cost ten times as much as other dyestuffs.

Coronation cloak of Roger II of Sicily, 1133-34

Equally ancient, but much less spectacular is cudbear, a plant dye. Cudbear comes from lichens, particularly  ochrolecia tartarea, known as crottle in Scotland, but orchil or archil in England.

Ochrolecia tartarea lichen, i.e. Scottish 'crottle', archil or orchil.

 Samples have been found in neolithic caves in France and it was used by the Egyptians to make rich red and purple dye colours  (recorded in the Stockholm Papyrus circa 3rd or 4th century AD).   

The lichen was dried, pounded and then soaked in a urine solution to ferment for two weeks, producing a range of shades.

Archil was used for the rich reds of the finest Florentine silks, rediscovered and refined in Italy in the middle ages.  By the eighteenth century British dyers were importing costly red and purple dyestuffs from abroad - madder from Dutch East India  merchants, and archil (Spanish weed) from the Canaries and Cape Verde.  The demand for better and cheaper dyes and more variety continued into the nineteenth century.  

Cudbear Street in the Hunslet area of Leeds is a reminder of the Wood & Bedford dye works which was there in the nineteenth century, but the patent for commercial Cudbear dyestuffs begins in Scotland with one George Gordon, a coppersmith from the Highlands.  Repairing copper vessels in London, he noticed the dye-maker using a similar method to that of his granny who used native lichens.

George Gordon's comments intrigued his chemist nephew Cuthbert Gordon, who started researching and produced a commercial method for using native lichens, instead of expensive imported dyestuffs.  He and his uncle took out a patent in 1758  and found investors to help them set up a factory in Leith.  He called his dye "cudbear", after his family name Cuthbert. 

The Cudbear patent,   1758  © Scottish School Archives

By 1773 the factory was failing, and Cuthbert was imprisoned for debt, but was released in 1774 to revive the factory in order to repay the investors.  His patent method produced strong red and violet shades suitable for dyeing cotton, as well as wool, with less need for the mordants to help the dye 'bite' firmly onto the fibres.   He advertised with samples  "dyed in a saucepan" so not at full strength, to show his Cudbear could replace costly imported indigo and cochineal.

Cuthbert Gordon's sample advertising from his Leith Walk premises 1774 (from Scottish School Archives)

Cuthbert's efforts attracted a canny Glasgow merchant to invest in 1776 and the factory was moved from Edinburgh to Dunchatton in Glasgow.

Did this fuel the ambition of the merchant's 10 year old son Charles?, for in 1796 he left his clerking job and set up his own factory producing ammonium chloride.

He went on to achieve fame as an industrial chemist and his invention of rubberised cloth made his family name a household word around the globe.  He was, of course, Charles Macintosh (1766-1843).

From the Mackintosh catalogue, 1893  By now the variant K had become standard spelling
 © Mackintosh.com

And skilled fingers, like the insect harvesters', are still part of the manufacturing process:

A special glue is applied by finger, to seal the sewn pieces together. © Mackintosh.com

May beginnings: "I'm to be Queen of the May,…*

"Long ago in 1945 all the nice people in England were poor, allowing for exceptions. The streets of the cities were lined with buildings in bad repair or in no repair at all, bomb-sites piled with stony rubble, houses like giant teeth in which decay had been drilled out, leaving only the cavity.  Some bomb-ripped buildings looked like the ruins of ancient castles until, at a closer view, the wallpapers of various quite normal rooms would be visible, room above room, exposed, as on a stage, with one wall missing; sometimes a lavatory chain would dangle over nothing from a fourth- or fifth-floor ceiling; most of all the staircases survived, like a new art-form, leading up and up to an unspecified destination that made unusual demands on the mind's eye.  All the nice people were poor; at least, that was a general axiom, the best of the rich being poor in spirit.

The Albert Memorial, Kensington Gardens (photo R. Harding)

"There was absolutely no point in feeling depressed about the scene, it would have been like feeling depressed about the Grand Canyon or some event of the earth outside everybody's scope.  People continued to exchange assurances of depressed feelings about the weather or the news, or the Albert Memorial which had not been hit, not even shaken, by any bomb from first to last.
The May of Teck Club stood obliquely opposite the site of the Memorial, in a row of tall houses which had endured, but barely; …. the Club had been three times window-shattered since 1940, but never directly hit.   There the windows of the upper bedrooms overlooked the dip and rise of treetops in Kensington Gardens across the street, with the Albert Memorial to be seen by means of a slight craning and twist of the neck.

Queen Alexandra House, Kensington, built in 1884 (photo Historic England) 

"….All the nice people were poor and few were nicer, as nice people come, than these girls at Kensington…  The first of the Rules of Constitution, drawn up at some remote and innocent Edwardian date, still applied more or less to them:

 The May of Teck Club exists for the Pecuniary Convenience and Social Protection of Ladies of Slender Means below the age of Thirty Years, who are obliged to reside apart from their Families in order to follow an Occupation in London.

 As they realised themselves in varying degrees, few people alive at the time were more delightful, more ingenious, more movingly lovely, and, as it might happen, more savage, than the girls of slender means."

The Girls of Slender Means   Muriel Spark, 1963

Muriel Spark drew on her time at a similar ladies' hostel in 1944 (the Helena Club on the north side of the park) for the May of Teck Club*.  The story unfolds in flashbacks to 1945, from VE Day in May to  VJ Day in August.  Amid wartime rationing and victory celebrations, the girls pursue their individual dreams of careers and marriage:   among them Joanna, the elocution teacher reciting The Wreck of the Deutschland,  Jane, the embryo gossip columnist, Dorothy with her debutante chatter, mad Pauline, and the ever elegant and heartless Selina.
They barter ration coupons, exchange suitors and borrow clothes; a much-prized pre-war Schiaparelli evening dress is a key element in the novel's shattering climax.  Fascinated by their lives is Jane's friend, the anarchist poet Nicholas Farringdon;  "I think he was in love with us all, poor fellow".

Elsa Schiaparelli evening dress, 1938

"They call me cruel hearted, but I care not what they say,

For I'm to be Queen of the May, mother, I'm to be Queen of the May."   Alfred, Lord Tennyson

*The Helena Club was set up by Princess Helena, daughter of Queen Victoria, Queen Alexandra House was established as a ladies' hostel by the wife of Edward VII, and Princess May of Teck involved in many charities, became Queen Mary, consort of George V.