Originally from Kilbarchan, he worked as a toolmaker in Glasgow before moving to the Isle of Arran in the 1970’s to recuperate from illness. After working for a while as a leather worker on Arran he got into basketmaking by working for a local basketmaker Henry Mellor who had a contract for making fish landing baskets for the docks at Grimsby.

According to Alisdair, Henry Mellor was a social worker who started making baskets to make money when he was on strike in Yorkshire. He liked the basketmaking so much that he gave the social work up and carried on making the baskets even after the strike was over. At this time he was working for the Rochdale Skip Company and when they closed he took over their contract for the fish landing baskets. He continued basketmaking when he moved to Arran in the early 80’s with his family and it was here that Alisdair met him. He needed help keeping up with the fish landing basket contract and taught Alisdair, who was living near his workshop at Corriegills Farm on Arran at the time, to make them so that he could help.

Quarter Cran size basket by Henry Mellor

Alisdair explained that these baskets are made of Kooboo cane and woven around a metal frame to keep them to the right size. The size was 12″ diameter at the base and 22″ diameter at the top,

 ‘they had to be this size because its to carry a cran..its that old cran thing……..its just a name really but also a measurement, and that’s what they were. If you were out by a couple of inches they would just send them back.’

Landing Baskets made by Alisdair Davidson and Henry Mellor

These baskets were used to lift the catch of fish off the boats at the docks in Grimsby, England. The dockers used to drag the baskets full of fish across the docks so they soon wore out, and only lasted a week. The contract was to make as many as possible, and they often made around fifty so plenty to keep Alisdair and Henry busy!

A couple of years later Henry gave up basketmaking and moved away but by then Alisdair was hooked and carried on with the basketmaking business until the price of importing kooboo cane from Indonesia went up coinciding with the rapid decline of fish landing at Grimsby. Alisdair then started using willow instead of cane and set up his own business Dundubh Baskets

By coincidence Alisdair ended up living and running this business from a place in Glen Cloy where a basketmaker lived between the wars. He described how he met the wife of this basketmaker standing on a bridge near the house looking distressed. It turned out that her husband had nearly drowned once in the burn under the bridge. After resting for a while in his workshop she came to and was able to recognise and name the baskets he was making.

Alisdair explained ‘She raised her kids here, in our house and he worked as a farm labourer, come shepherd. And in the off-season he made baskets. and she is the first woman who has not been involved in basketmaking, who has looked at one and given me it’s name and said ”are you still making them? My man used to make them”. It explains a lot because just by the house here, it was all willows and they were all multi limbed, so it was old coppice’.

 Its seemed that the farm labourer who lived there made a variety of baskets including line baskets and a type of seaweed carting basket for horses made with bits of wood and open willow work..

Alisdair’s interest in Scottish tradional basketry led him to apply for funding to do more research and in 1996 Alisdair got funding from the Scottish Arts Council that enabled him to travel the length and breadth of Scotland studying baskets in museums and photo archives. As part of this research he made replicas of traditional baskets and, in museums and schools, he demonstrated how they were made. This work led him to get a lot commissions from museums, including amongst other things making a replica of a 1,500 year old basket found in a peat bog in Shetland for the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh, replicas of several back creels and a chair for the Museum of Highland Life in Kingussie, and replicas of baskets used in the production of salt for Preston Grange Industrial Museum in East Lothian.

Alisdair also enjoyed the challenge of making replicas of traditional baskets just for the sake of it and has replicas of many other baskets around his home, including coiled baskets that are replicas of ones found in an archeological excavation of Perth High Street (which he made based on drawings as the original had gone missing), grain carrying sacks that he made also based on drawings this time in Dwelly’s gaelic dictionary and replicas of Orkney cubbies (see seperate articles about these baskets).

Today due to health reasons he does a lot less basketry but still retains a strong interest and has helped us considerably with this project.

by Julie Gurr

Donald lived in the house next door to Kath Potter-Irwin, where his son and family now live. Donald was a roadman in the 1960s and 70s looking after a twenty mile stretch of road. Working travellers, doing dry stone dyking, ditching and copping, often joined him. The Duke of Argyll was apparently encouraging of travellers journeying through his lands and working there.

‘Brigitte Bardot’ basket by Donald Crawford, Ard Fern

Through meeting these travellers, Donald learned how to make the ‘hen’ frame basket. Apparently this basket also became known as the ‘Brigitte Bardot’ basket because the French actor was renowned and photographed carrying one. So the basket became fashionable.

He apparently harvested all his willow himself from the road edge, which he would have been coppicing anyway. He also planted quite a bit of willow that he liked to work with to increase his supply. He used to tie bits of wool to ‘his’ willows so that passing travellers would know not to take it.

He stripped all of his willow by buffing it in a cooking pot. Donald was very secretive about his basket making and would not teach or even let anyone watch him at work. He was a keen contributor to the local agricultural shows but always seems to have entered the same type of basket, with variations on the handle wrapping.

He made his hoops by fitting rods on to a piece of plywood with nails on it.

From and interview with Kath Potter-Irwin 25.2.13

I visited him in April 2009. He showed me his willow beds where he had been harvesting willow for fifty years. His stools were about 18 inches high. I didnt ask him why but I wonder if it was to protect the new growth from rabbits. He said that the creels should be made so that the majority of the weight carried would rest on the top part of the creel and the shoulders of the wearer. He showed me an old coil of probably sisal rope of the type that was used as a strap or iris for the creels. He had bought the rope from Charlie Morrisons which used to be the Stornoway chandlers and only closed in the last 15 years.

I was interested to see if he knew how to make frame baskets and took one of mine to show him. But he did not and didnt remember anyone else making them either.

He made and preferred the 7 x 7 creel rather than the 6 x 6 ones. He felt these were stronger. He reckoned it took him all day to make a creel, about 5 hours in all, and his father too. He had recently decided that he had made his last creel(the previous winter) and so he gave me his latest willow harvest and some old templates(ceaps). Since his death I continue to harvest his willow beds with the permission of his daughter, Catherine MacDonald who continues to live at the house.

Jimmy has made hundreds of them, he doesn’t know how many, and they have been sent to all parts of the world – he is a one man industry. His hobby, for that is what it is, has created a tradition and people come from all over to film him, talk to him and buy his baskets. Jimmy sells everything he makes and selling them is very important to him, he has little time for people that visit and do not buy! Most of his working life he spent painting and decorating for a building contractor, with his basket making almost a second job. He worked at it for an hour in the morning prior to the day job and several hours in the evening on his return home after a long day with the paint brush.

Jimmy says he can always recognise his baskets because he makes them without adding extra lines of stitching on the sides. There is the same number of stitches at the edge of the base as at the top edge regardless of any outward flow of the form. They are beautifully crafted, sturdy, functional and elegant baskets. He has never had any desire to alter his technique or his materials and it is probably because he has always made them the same way that they are so good.

I asked Jimmy if he had ever taught anyone else to make them. I had heard whispers on the wind that he had refused to teach a woman who had offered to pay him for tuition. Apparently he told her that a woman would never have the strength to do it. I didn’t ask him if it was true, nor did I dare tell him I make baskets but I am very glad to hear that he is now passing on his precious knowledge to a couple of people – both male!  By Lois Walpole.

The National Museum of Scotland has a representative collection of baskets illustrating domestic and working life in rural and coastal Scotland. This collection was substantially enhanced in 1961 when a private collection was donated in memory of 2 remarkable women, Dr. Evelyn Baxter and her friend and colleague, Leonora Rintoul.

Evelyn Baxter was born in 1879 in Largoward, Fife and died in1959.

She  was awarded an MBE in 1945 and an honorary degree from Glasgow University in 1955.

Leonora Rintoul was born in 1875 in Largo and died in 1953.

Both ladies became leading authorities on birdlife in Scotland and contributed many papers to various journals over 50 years or so, culminating in a highly regarded 2 volume work on the subject published in 1953.

Although their main interest was in ornithology, they also had many other skills and interests. They  participated in, and organised voluntary activities in both world wars including the Women’s Land Army.

They also became leading lights in the Scottish Women’s Rural Institute from its earliest days, visiting its branches through-out Scotland lecturing on a wide range of subjects, but also teaching and judging handicrafts.

As they travelled in Scotland they must have become aware that life on farms and in fishing communities was changing. There is not much information in the National Museum’s files on why they started to collect baskets but we have to be grateful that they did so.

The Baxter/Rintoul group comprises of about 30 baskets relating to farming and fishing from around the country.

For example –

QP 36 – heather cassie from Orkney

QP 39 – basket from Skye for prepared wool for spinning.

QP 53 – creel, drawn in the middle and with carrying band, probably from Fife.

As for the rest of the Museum’s  collection of Scottish basketry, the earliest basket is in the Archaeological displays in Chambers Street. It is from Eshaness in Shetland approximately 1600 years old.

There is also an object possibly a hat found in the excavations at the Roman fort of Newstead near Melrose.

The Museum’s collection consists not only of baskets used in working life but it also has examples of Orkney chairs and smaller domestic items.

There was a short lived straw plaiting industry in Orkney in the 18^th   and19^th centuries and this is represented in the collection by examples of the actual straw used, as well as examples of plaiting and the tools used by the  girls and women in  making bonnets and hats before the industry declined there and became more established in Luton in Bedfordshire.

QP1-7 – bonnet making

The Scottish collection illustrates the various methods, materials and tools from Orkney and Shetland to Dumfries and Galloway.

Sandison selection with saut cudddie

Sandison Peat pony harness

PVC 13 – whelk pot from Dumfries and Galloway

and even the frivolous occasions!

Guizar’s hat from Shetland made of out straw.

The reserve collection and further information comprising photographs, notes and diagrams are in the care of the Department of Scottish History and Archaeology  in the National Museum of Scotland may be visited by appointment.

Irene Mackay, August 29th 2012

Catherine Gillies

The Hope MacDougall Collection was gathered in the latter half of the 20^th century with the specific purpose of recording the working and domestic life of Argyll and the Highlands and Islands, with comparative material from elsewhere.

Daughter, sister and aunt to successive Chiefs of the Clan MacDougall at Dunollie in Oban, Argyll, Hope MacDougall fell into the category of ‘women of certain means’ who devoted their lives to creating a record of their chosen field: among them Evelyn Baxter and Leonora Rintoul whose natural history collection went to the National Museum of Scotland; and Dr Isobel Grant of Am Fasgadh/Highland Folk Museum.

These women collectors are now clearly seen as a critically important group in terms of the 20^th century record in rural Scotland, and are worthy of detailed study.

Hope’s collection was mentored in its early stages by Isobel Grant who was a family friend, and then supported by Dr Alexander Fenton and Professor Hugh Cheape who emphasised the need to make it comparative and well provenanced, both of which were put into play.

With a core purpose of amassing objects and archive which preserved knowledge of ways of life, crafts, skills and usage, Hope drew baskets into the collection entirely based on function rather than form. They occur throughout the collection in context of activity, and only appear as a discrete basket collection when we draw them together retrospectively.

Her collecting was systematic and linear in the subject areas she pursued, a good example of which was peat: locations, users, cutting, drying, transporting, and burning. Her collecting method involved all means of recording the information. She was a superb photographer, producing outstanding   images of people working peat banks in the Western Isles. She gathered peat spades from Shetland, Western Isles, Argyll and Ireland for comparison of type, with samples of peat cut by each one. She drew examples of methods of stacking peat, and photographed the stages. Critically, she acquired her understanding of peat creels by commissioning one to be woven by ‘Mr Morrison, Quignish, Harris’.

This is a key point in the examination of a collection which seeks to inform about skills and modus operandi, as opposed to a social history collection gathered purely for the preservation of objects. Several of the baskets in the Hope MacDougall Collection are ‘modern’ and commissioned, the principle being that if the recording of function is to be taken to its conclusion, then the method of its achievement is as large a part of the story as the object itself.

The peat creel was never used; at least, not in real time. It contains traces of peat dust from when it hung containing peats in her private museum in Ganavan House, Oban, where she lived from 1966 until her death in 1998. She photographed the creel being made, recording the maker as well as the method. She exhibited it in her private collection, and created a full explanation in her archive. It completed a circle in the story which arguably the simple keeping of an old peat creel could not have done, sacrificing the patina and kudos of age in favour of information.

In other circumstances there was real impetus to find original items, and Hope made inroads into collecting the material culture of travelling people at exactly the same time that Hamish Henderson and others at the School of Scottish Studies were gathering their oral traditions. She often spoke of the barriers to be overcome, and used her idiosyncratic lifestyle to gain some acceptance: famously responding to a question as to whether she had ever ‘lived outside’, by answering ‘yes’; remembering the four years she spent sleeping on a balcony while nursing in Angus, rather than endure what she regarded as a stuffy dormitory. She gathered such objects as she could from the travellers in their benders; horn offcuts, tins and tools, and some of the finest baskets in the collection. This was not an occasion for commissions when much of the material was hard won.

There is a clear distinction between collecting and accidental gathering, but both can end up as collections and exist side by side at Dunollie House. Hope MacDougall was a targeted collector, but grew up in an atmosphere of belongings which accrued over 800 years of family history. The old kitchen was full of stacked baskets; gathered, not collected, but a marvellous collection nonetheless, reflective of social structure and life in an estate community. It includes commercially made Victorian travelling baskets of all shapes and sizes, an Edwardian picnic basket, many locally made baskets, and a mysterious round basket with a slender plaited handle which was found in a box of old fireplace paraphernalia in the servants’ quarter’s Boot Hall.

The Woven Communities Symposium provided the beginning of the answer: Carlos Fontales identified it as made of Esparto grass, with clear provenance to Southern Spain. The only other basket he had seen of this curious shape was larger, and for silkworm cocoons. How such a basket might have arrived at Dunollie is not too much of an enigma. It could have been any of the two generations of men who served in the Navy and Army, but the Peninsular Wars loomed large, and Captain John MacDougall had a raft of fashionable sisters. We will never know, but it is quite possible that a basket of cocoons was a fun and useful souvenir; the basket to be discarded for use by servants.

Hope MacDougall’s collection found its way from Ganavan House to storage at Dunollie, which in 2012 opened its doors for public access for the first time; the Servants’ Quarters transformed into The 1745 House with the old kitchen still festooned with baskets.

Catherine Gillies

10.10.2012

Interview with Liz Balfour 18 feb 13 by Dawn Susan

What brought you into basketmaking?

I first did basketmaking at school, like everyone in my generation. Think 1950s south of England girls’ convent school – I remember my entire childhood in black and white.  We used the wood bases and wove with cane.

I took it up again when I was teaching special needs children in South Africa in 1980. At the back of the cupboard were a load of those wooden bases and some old cane, so I got them out for the children and got into doing it myself.

Then in 1982 I had come back to Scotland and was teaching young adults with learning difficulties and wanted to do a practical workshop with them. I went to a workshop with Bernard Graves at the Camphill School in Aberdeen to learn willow basket making. After that I bought books and went to lots of courses to learn more plus of course trial and error, more of the error actually!

What do you most like about the craft?

I like the endless variety of techniques and baskets. Yes the variety is the big appeal. I find such beauty in the plain simplicity of baskets. I also like that what we use to make baskets with, other people would probably just throw away. It is so satisfying to be able to make functional objects.

How did you start to be interested in the historical side of basket making?

I used to do a lot of demonstrating at shows and fairs. People would always come up and tell me stories. I also would be interested in what museums and stately homes had in their collections. At that stage you could still ‘touch’ that knowledge. But that’s almost gone now.

My particular interest is in the fishing baskets of the East coast. I do love the shape of those frame baskets. I’ve done recreations of the Arbroath scull, rip and marlin and also the back creel of the Musselborough fishwives.

Basket making has definitely enhanced my life.

What is your favourite material to work with?

Rush. The English river rush is a beautiful material.

Is there anything you would still like to do in basketry?

I love to learn a new technique and would like to make every kind of basket in the world!

Liz Balfour was one of the founders of the Scottish Basketmakers Circle in 1988 and has come back to the committee in 2011. In 2013 she was the chair.