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

Sandleford Priory and Lady Montagu's bluestockings: "beauty blended with utility"

"The approach to the house is a fine lawn, with sheep feeding upon it.  This gives you the idea of beauty blended with utility, which always produces agreeable sensations in the mind."  

Memoirs of Mary Morgan 1791, A Tour to Milford Haven pub. 1795.

The Montagu family at Sandleford, Berkshire     Edward Haytley c. 1744

© the Huntington Library collection, San Marino California

These idyllic scenes of Georgian gentry amid pastoral pursuits on their country estates, were just as carefully contrived (by painters and patrons) as Capability Brown's landscapes.  Haymaking was a popular subject, as village women traditionally helped to bring in this all-important harvest, adding colour and interest to the scene.  Here we see Edward Montagu and his wife Elizabeth, married two years earlier, with her sister Sarah Scott, enjoying the prospect from Sandleford Priory south across the river Enborne to Newtown and Beacon Hill.  Haytley has included a telescope in this painting, just as in his picture of the Drake Brockman family at Beachborough House, Kent.

A mezzotint of 1776, after a lost portrait of Lady Montagu by Sir Joshua Reynolds 

© National Portrait Gallery London 

Elizabeth Montagu was left a wealthy widow in 1775 (Montagu's wealth came from Newcastle coal) and began updating the house and gardens.  She employed James Wyatt to link the house and the ancient Priory chapel.  He created a beautiful octagonal drawing-room with antechambers, linking the two buildings;  previously the old chapel had provided spare bedrooms if there was an overflow of guests, such as Hannah More and other members of Lady Montagu's "Bluestockings" circle. Sandleford would be a convenient stopover en route to Bath.

Lady Montagu was called "the Queen of the Bluestockings" by Samuel Johnson, for her literary salons held at Montagu House in Mayfair. Here there was no dancing, cards, or alcohol, but tea and lemonade to refresh the witty and intellectual conversation discussing the arts and ideas (but not scandal or politics) with women equal among men.  Fellow leading bluestockings were Mrs Elizabeth Vesey and Mrs Frances Boscawen, ladies of wealth and education, and guests at their salons included Edmund Burke, Mr and Mrs David Garrick,  Johnson, Fanny Burney and the Thrales, Horace Walpole, Reynolds and many women writers and philanthropists.  Promoting and supporting women's right to education, and to publish their work, was one of their leading concerns.

Capitalizing on their reputations, in this painting Richard Samuel has included Lady Montagu, "Queen of the Bluestockings" seated centre right, with Hannah More behind her, Angelica Kauffman at her easel, and Elizabeth Carter the poet and translator of Epictetus far left behind her.

Portraits in the characters of the Nine Muses in the Temple of Apollo   

Richard Samuel 1778  © National Portrait Gallery

It was Hannah More who wrote the comic "blue-stocking" poem The "Bas Bleu", or Conversation*, in praise of Mrs Vesey, published in 1784, but the name was probably begun by Mrs Vesey apropos of the retiring botanist, Dr. Benjamin Stillingfleet. He could not afford the black or white silk stockings expected for such social occasions, but was told by Mrs Vesey to turn up in his blue worsted hose, (blue being a cheap practical colour popular for servants, tradesmen and charity schoolchildren).
He "rendered himself so entertaining that the ladies used to delay their discussion until his arrival, declaring - 'We can do nothing without our blue stockings' - whence the bas bleu. "

Lady Montagu was herself celebrated in a poem by William Cowper,  in which he describes  her London salons as like a haven for exotic birds:
"The birds put off their feathery hue
To dress a room for Montagu……    

These were large rainbow-coloured woven feather screens "from gaudy peacock to solemn raven" astonishing even in her palatial Portland Square house, and Cowper compares her writers and intellectuals to the rare birds represented:

"All these to Montagu's repair,
Ambitious of a shelter there.
There Genius, Learning, Fancy, Wit,
Their ruffled plumage calm refit,
…
And in her eye, and by her aid
Shine safe without a fear to fade."
On Mrs Montagu's Feather Hangings*  William Cowper

Portman Square from Ackermann's Repository of Arts, c. 1831

The summers at Sandleford were spent in a simpler bucolic mode.  Philanthropic with her wealth in London and in the country,  Lady Montagu revived harvest suppers and entertainments for servants and tenants, and was a generous local benefactor. Yet she remained a lady of rank, enjoying from a distance the labours of others.  She writes to Mrs Vesey in July 1786:

 "I now inhabit [my new dressing room] with great pleasure: each window of the Bow presents a most delightful pastoral scene, which was yesterday rendered more gay by 33 Women and girls singing while they were weeding and picking up stones.   My heart….sympathised in their cheerfulness".

This is also Watership Down country.  One childhood exploration took us along a cart-track past haystacks and between the  fields of corn. Tiptoeing into shady coppices where Solomon's seal grew, it was so utterly silent that a startled wood pigeon  taking off would make us jump with fright.  Eventually we would see Sandleford Priory on the skyline.

 Sandleford Priory and High Wood, near Gorse Covert (Photo Rodolph@Wikimedia)

 It seems appropriate that Elizabeth Montagu's country home at Sandleford, where she supported women's learning, should have become a thriving girls' school.

*Both Hannah More's and Cowper's poems can be enjoyed on poemhunter.com.
For a fascinating study of women's lives, I recommend Behind Closed Doors, at home in Georgian England, by Amanda Vickery.

"History has its foreground and its background"

"Contemporary English historians, it seemed, were miserably neglecting the art of narration, yet the popularity of well-written biographies showed that it was possible to combine both truth and colour.  Such books as Boswell's  life of Johnson and Southey's account of Nelson were [according to Macaulay]
 'perused with delight by the most frivolous and indolent.  Whenever any tolerable book of the same description makes its appearance, the circulating libraries are mobbed; the book societies are in commotion; the new novel lies uncut; the magazines and newspapers fill their columns with extracts.  In the meantime histories of great empires, written by men of eminent ability, lie unread on the shelves of ostentatious libraries.' "

1828: Thomas Babington Macaulay on historians, quoted in Peter Rowland's  Introduction to Macaulay's The History of England  from 1485 to 1685