Series 5 > British Linen Company, 1745-1775

146
THE BRITISH LINEN COMPANY
To John Anderson & Son, Perth
27 April 1761
I return you thanks for your obliging letter of the 27th advising me of the
malevolent intentions of some people with regard to the Company on the
melancholy event of the death of the Duke of Argyll.1 It is true, and ought
ever to be remembered with gratitude that his Grace had a principal hand in
the formation of this Company, but it does not thence follow that by his or
any other proprietor’s death the stock or trade of this Company are to be at a
stand. If Court interest or influence is any how necessary, I can assure you (and
that from the best authority) that the same will not be wanting; as my Lord
Bute has desired my Lord Milton to signify to all his uncle’s friends that his
(the late Duke’s) friends and measures are to be adopted by him and protected
the same as when their patron was living. I this day showed your letter to Lord
Milton who returns you thanks for your friendship to this Company and desires
me to communicate the above to you.
To Tod & Anderson, London
9 May 1761
The Company wants an insurance against fire to be made on linen goods to
the amount of £4000 say four thousand pounds sterling that may be lodged
or housed occasionally in one or other of the following houses at their
bleachfield near Salton in the county of Haddington.2 There is no fixing a
precise value that may be lodged in any one place at a time as you know these
goods in the course of bleaching may be carried from house to house to be
boiled, bucked, sowered, rubbed, dried or beetled and that (save the last
operation) frequently repeated. And supposing the above value at any one time
in the bleacher’s hands, they will be divided into layers or courses of cloth of
four or five different situations of that property at the same time for which
cause I think the insurance should not be so high, where the situation of
property fluctuates and shifts so much as when it is lodged in one fixed place.
It is true it might happen to be lodged all at one place, but that by accident and
what could very rarely happen, if at all. It might for instance happen at the
beginning of the season when lodged in a warehouse (over the head ofjames
1 The 79-year-old duke had died ‘sitting in his chair at dinner in London, at five in the afternoon’ on 15
Apr. 1761. J.B. Paul (ed.). The Scots Peerage, 9 vols. (Edinburgh, 1904-14), i, 380.
2 The risk of fire to textile undertakings was very real. Flemming’s linen factory at Kirkliston was burnt
to the ground on 8 Sept. 1768, with the loss of all his flax, yam and other goods which ‘we hear are
insured in the London Sun Fire Office’: Edinburgh Advertiser, 9 Sept. 1768.