DARVEL ...

Industry:-

Darvel (The Lang Toon) began around 1792 although like the rest of the valley towns, history goes back much further.
The first inhabitants were nearly all farm people that had came from other areas, but the landowners started imposing land reforms so the inhabitants started to turn their focus to handloom weaving. The population went from a few people in cottages to 400 in 1791 and increased again to over 700 by 1819.
Alexander Morton Who was born in 1944 was to change everything, at the young age of 15 bought his first handloom and within the first few years was distributing looms to other people so that orders could be met. It was when in London securing one of these orders that he saw a powered loom and just knew that was the future. He purchased one and started his company A Morton & co. It wasn’t long until there were factories springing up all over the valley producing lace. The population had reached 3400 by this time where it has remained steady to the present day.
The trade flourished for many years, but in the 1960s because of stiff competition, the factories had to diverse with the introduction of manmade terylene instead of cotton, and factories started to produce yashmaks for the Arab market, terylene curtains and even tartan kilts in fact in one of the local factories designed and produced the famous Lady Di tartan skirt named after the late Princess of Wales.
The 80s and 90s brought about the biggest changes as the goal posts were moved so to speak as foreign Governments started to subsidy their own factories to make sure of keeping their people in employment, ours sat back and talked a good game, but did really nothing that was going to help one of our longest industries, producing fabrics that was famous all over the world, The foreign factories were flooding the UK with finished fabrics that was cheaper than our factories could buy the yarn to produce it. There was no competition and one by one they were all starting to close their gates.
2009 There is now no-one producing any materials, the trade has died. R I P.
The Future:-
Darvel has Max Flemich MBE in the town who works diligently to try and keep the town the way it should be, so that’s a great start.
There has always had a lot of people that are prepared to roll their sleeves up and work for the community and that is prevalent to-day with D I G, Music Festivals, Concerts, theme Saturdays in the square, Gala days, river clean ups to name a few, there still seems a lot of people that care, but like everywhere else with a lot of new people in town they don't always mix with the locals in the small close knit communities, also a lack of funding is becoming a problem.
There are a lot of shop keepers, publicans, hairdressers, takeaways, football committees, teachers and a local councilor all striving for a better future but they need everyone to help, it’s the children’s future we are talking about.