Series 5 > British Linen Company, 1745-1775

10
THE BRITISH LINEN COMPANY
Colonies. Its loss had been anticipated and agonised over in the previous year,
but there was no easy response for such an export-orientated company as the
British Linen. Production had to be cut back sharply, and a determined drive
was made to clear the Company’s hands of all linens in the category which had
been eligible for subsidy. Quite exceptional and sometimes commercially risky
tactics were employed to shift the Company’s linen on hand, and one way and
another substantial sales were made, which was just as well because over the
next eighteen months sales were at a very low ebb indeed, falling from £37,000
in 1754 to a mere £14,000 the next year and even less in the following.
Moreover, some of the sales were to little or no profit. The much reduced
demand for manufacturing meant that yam from the North began to accumu¬
late at Edinburgh, dead stock which did not improve with keeping. The
Company’s finances were not assisted either by the number ofbad debts which
the rush to make sales had almost inevitably generated. In partial compensation
for the loss of the bounty, Parliament had set up a Highland Fund to establish
the manufacture of linen in the Highlands, and the British Linen Company
became heavily involved in its application, but that did litde to offset the
depression in the Company’s affairs.
Negotiations at London, in which Tod played a prominent part, did
eventually secure a return of the bounty in June 1756. The Company’s
prospects brightened, the more so as war promised to disrupt German com¬
petition. What also helped was that Tod took up permanent residence at
London, and took charge of sales there, the warehouse keeper being dismissed.
Sales began to revive, though it took several yean before they regained their
former levels. It proved no easy task to rebuild the manufacturing after the
depression of the years without any export subsidy: in McCulloch’s vivid
image, ‘the national manufactures were by discontinuing the bounty almost
lost; by losing our hands we lost our trade; like a great ship run aground there
is more labour and disagreeable trouble to refloat her than originally to launch
her to sea.’1
The physical separation of the Managers, Tod at London and McCulloch
at Edinburgh, also caused problems. Two central and related issues came to
divide them. The first was how best the Company could manufacture its
linens—^whether by using its own factories or not. The other was the even
more fundamental question as to whether the Company should produce linens
on its own account, or be involved only in joint-ventures for the sale of linen
with selected manufacturers. On the manufacturing front, the Company had
P. 85 below.