Initially built to transport tea
Commissioned by the Scotsman John Willis to transport tea from China to London, a little known fact is that the Cutty Sark only completed eight tea voyages. Over its active lifetime, the ship transported many goods, actually spending 12 years shipping wool from Australia to London, which is one of the reasons why we are taking an interest: most of the wool in our blankets and picnic rugs is shipped from Australia.
The opening of the Suez Canal transformed the tea trade
The reasons for the Cutty Sark's owners swapping cargos was down to a number of factors ranging from improvements in engineering, economics and trade between countries.
Such was the pace of change even in those days that the Cutty Sark's days as a tea clipper were numbered just five days after it launched. On the 17th November 1869, the Suez Canal opened, cutting 3,300 miles off the journey from Shanghai to London and ten to twelve days off the journey times, which tipped the balance in favour of the steamer ships which had a much larger cargo capacity.
Cutty Sark became the fastest wool clipper
Failing to find enough tea to fill the ship's hold, John Willis repurposed the Cutty Sark to carry Merino wool from Australia to London. The speed of the cutter's was a significant advantage, allowing their owners to ship wool from the Newcastle New South Wales, Sydney and Brisbane in time for the London sales in the first three months of the new year.
On her first voyage the Cutty Sark made it back to London in 84 days, notching up the fastest trip by any ship that year and arriving 25 days ahead of any of the other ships. Over the next twelve years between 1883 and 1895, she established herself as the fastest of the wool clippers, putting in trips of 70 days or less. In fact she spent more of her life shipping wool than the seven years she shipped tea, arguably the cargo that she is best known for carrying.
The cargo hold of the Cutty Sark was able to carry an impressive 5,000 bales of wool, which, by our calculation, is enough wool to weave around 555,000 of our pure new wool picnic blankets.
Some facts about the Cutty Sark and the Australian wool trade
We've put together a few facts about the Cutty Sark and its links to the Australian wool trade.
This is not the first time we've written about a humble bale of wool. Indeed, there is a scarlet bale of wool in the House of Lords, called the wool sack, and in Tetbury every year, competitors compete in the Tetbury woolsack race, carrying sacks of wool between pubs along a 240 yard course.
If the history of the Cutty Sark has caught your imagination, you may also be interested in our blog about how wool has played an integral part in Britain's history: British wool: a tale of war, taxes and trade with Europe.
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We've promised to keep you up to date with all our woolly facts and discoveries as we travel the country in search of wool blankets for our store. The Tetbury woolsack races are definitely worth a mention. Taking place on the last bank holiday weekend in May, they are not for the faint hearted.
This uniquely British affair attracts up to 5,000 people to the famous Cotswold village of Tetbury in Gloucestershire. Once one of the most important wool and yarn markets in Britian, Tetbury is a picturesque Cotswold village, well worth a visit. Famed for its beer as much as for its wool, the village puts on a show each year, coupling beer drinking in the local pubs with running up a 1 in 4 gradient hill carrying a sack of wool. Yes, not everyone's cup of tea, but definitely worth a look.
With its origins in the 17th century, the official race has been running for more than 30 years and is even listed in the Guiness Book of Records.
Weighing 60lb (27 kg) for the men's race and 35lb (16 kg) for the women's race, the woolsacks are carried by competitors 240 yds up and down a 1 in 4 gradient from the the Royal Oak pub to the Crown.
On the day of the races, the village puts on a street fair with a variety of stalls, a funfair, music and roving entertainers. As well as keeping an important British tradition alive, the day raises much needed money for local causes.
We wonder if the woolsacks featured in this race are the same specification as the woolsack that Edward III installed in the House of Lords for the Lord High Chancellor to sit on in the fourteenth century. Maybe someone who knows can answer in the comments below.
]]>A little-known fact is that wool was once considered to be such an important part of the British economy that Edward III, the ruling monarch between 1327 – 1377, forced the Lord Chancellor to sit on a sack of wool in the House of Lords, thus ensuring the rulers of the land never lost sight of how important the wool trade was to the country.
No doubt, he also had the huge tax revenue wool produced in mind when coming up with the idea! Edward and his predecessors were in the habit of fighting some pretty expensive military campaigns during their reigns.
To this day, the woolsack as it is known, retains a prominent place in the House of Lords, overseeing the Lords as they debate some of the most important issue of our time.
Resembling a large red square cushion, the it is the place where the Lord Chancellor, now the Lord Speaker, presides over debates in the House of Lords.
Sitting in front of the Woolsack is an even larger cushion known as the Judge’s Woolsack. This is used on ceremonial occasions like the State Opening of Parliament to seat various members of the judiciary including the Lord Chief Justice and the Attorney General.
Despite the name, it wasn’t until 1938 when the woolsack was refurbished that we discovered it had originally been stuffed with horse hair. Perhaps wool was considered too valuable a commodity at the time. Since 1938, though, the Lord Speaker has been sitting on a Woolsack stuffed with a blend of wool gathered from Britain and the Commonwealth nations.
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With all of the hubris going on around Britain’s future relationship with Europe post Brexit, one could be forgiven for forgetting that we have been trading with our European partners for hundreds of years.
]]>With all of the hubris going on around Britain’s future relationship with Europe post Brexit, one could be forgiven for forgetting that we have been trading with our European partners for hundreds of years.
The wool industry is one of the oldest examples of Britain’s trading relationship with Europe, way before the European Union came into being! The production of wool cloth for clothing and blankets really took off in medieval times when everyone from peasant farmers to landowners were involved in the industry, mainly raising sheep.
At the time, rather than producing woollen goods here, British wool was sold to mills in Flanders, present day Belgium, where some of the most skilled weavers worked in towns like Ypres, Bruges and Ghent.
Between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries, wool became such a driving force behind the British economy that people started to count their wealth in terms of sheep.
To this day, the Lord Speaker in the house of Lords still sits on a large square cushion called the Woolsack, which was introduced in the fourteenth century to reflect the importance of the trade to England. Apparently, the cushion was re-stuffed in 1938 with wool sourced from Britain and some of the Common Wealth nations.
Several monarchs at the time, not shy of taking the opportunity to raise funds from others’ prosperity, started to levy taxes on wool, using the proceeds to fund military and political ends. Realising how reliant they had become on the wool taxes, Edward III even went to war with France in the Hundred Years War, partly in an attempt to protect the trade.
As is so often the case, the level of taxing become unsustainable – see the problems that retailers are experiencing with business rates for a present-day comparison – and the wool trade started to suffer.
Some of the highly skilled Flemish weavers fled to Britain seeking solace from the horrors of war and French rule, settling initially in Norfolk and Suffolk and then moving to the Cotswolds, the Yorkshire Dales and Cumberland. A nice historic example of highly skilled European workers being required in Britain!
All the while more wool cloth was being produced in England. By the fifteenth century, not only was enough wool cloth being produced in England to satisfy domestic consumption, but wool cloth was being exported abroad.
In a historic example of government interfering with the natural ebb and flow of commercial markets, a law was passed in the 1570’s to 1590’s decreeing that all Englishmen except nobles had to wear a woollen cap to church on Sundays. The idea being that it would support demand for wool.
The ensuing years saw the woollen industry in Britain move through a cycle of boom and eventual decline through to a present-day renaissance, more of which we will cover in future articles.
At Ambunti Warehouse, we have clearly stated our mission to support British manufacturing by sourcing our wool blankets from weavers located in the British Isles. We neither support nor abhor the Brexit process, rather live in the present, cognisant that whatever the outcome of the current negotiations, Britain and its trading partners need to continue trading.
While the wool used in our blankets mostly comes from the Commonwealth countries of Australia and New Zealand, the weaving is all done in Britain.
We have also undertaken to donate a proportion of our profits to fund a sustainable project in the Sepik region of Papua New Guinea, where the village called Ambunti is located. More about this to follow in our news section. We hope you have enjoyed this article and look forward to keeping you up to date with future posts.
]]>Wool’s first recorded use by humans can be traced back to ancient Mesopotamia – present day Iraq, Kuwait, and parts of Syria and Turkey – where it was used in various types of apparel and blankets.
Wool provides an incredible connection between our present way of living and how our ancestors used to live: rearing sheep for food and using the wool to make clothing to wear and to trade.
Every so often, this relationship is brought to life when archeologists discover evidence of how our ancestors used to live with wool. In some cases, the level of preservation is so good that it is possible to see clearly how the wool was produced and used.
The discovery of the ‘Cherchen man’, a 3,000-year-old 6 ft Bronze-age European of Celtic origin buried in Turkestan, western China, is one such example.
He was discovered fully dressed and next to a pile of wool blankets on the Silk Road. His body and clothing are so well preserved that you can clearly see his red twill tunic and tartan leggings, which are thought to be the earliest exisiting example of tartan. The colours in the man’s stockings are so vivid that they could easily have been woven yesterday, let alone thousands of years ago.
Follow these links to find out more about the Cherchen Man.
If you enjoyed this article keep an eye out on our blog as we hope to bring you more interesting facts about wool.
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