But all this evidence tends to prove that the nature of the soil which produced the proper straw for plaitting caused the trade to localize around Dunstable. This ancient borough, practically in the centre of the plaitting districts, situated on the Watling Street, along which passed all the traffic between London and the north-west of England and Northern Wales, at the junction of the Icknield way (another ancient Roman road crossing the Watling Street towards the east and west), was in the middle of the fifteenth century alive all day with the hum of people and merchandise travelling to and fro. Sitting astride of the trunk roads leading everywhere in Great Britain, it is small wonder that this little town, of vast ecclesiastical importance in the Middle Ages, but much decayed since the time of Henry VIII, became the place from whence all the products of the neighbourhood could be dispatched.
And, therefore, the name of “Dunstable,” another of the now world-known local names, was given to the plait, hats and bonnets which emanated from the whole vicinity.
The great preponderance of coarse straws, combined with the increasing demands for hats made of fine plaits, caused straw workers to endeavour to make the straws smaller by splitting the “pipes” (as the whole straw is called) into narrower portions called “splints.” This was done at first with a knife, but the result was generally unsatisfactory, although some skilled workers managed to acquire really wonderful deftness in the operation. It was plait called “Patent Dunstable” made of these split straws that gave this plaitting area its first textile claim to distinction. Some one, now unknown, found out that two fine splints of straw laid together, inside to inside, produced when plaitted an effect equal to that of the whole straw, and yet enabled plaitters to make the finest and narrowest widths of plait. The clumsy method of cutting with a knife was apparently the only possible way of making splints until the time of the Napoleonic Wars.
The French prisoners at Yaxley Barracks, near Stilton, produced “pretty and useful articles such as baskets, workboxes, mats, etc.” (Mr. Alfred Tansley Soc. Art., 1860). These were decorated with “laid work,” a kind of mosaic pattern made of coloured straw splints, cut to various sizes and pasted on suitable foundations. “For the purpose of making these splints, they used a straw splitter made of bone, about two inches long, brought to a point behind which a set of cutters was arranged in a circle, the point entered the straw pipe separating it into so many equal sized splints” (Tansley). This instrument was soon copied by a Dunstable blacksmith named Janes (some authorities say Norman) who made some in iron and turned the cutting parts at right angles to an elongated stem, which could be used as a handle. These were subsequently also made in brass, and in 1815 other varieties, in the form of metal wheels set in wooden frames, appeared. Mr. Tansley says, “To this invention may be attributed the success which in after times has attended the manufacture of straw plait in England.”
The two methods of working straws, either whole or split, opened up a wide field for diversity of plaitting, and quickly novelties began to appear. From 1815 to the present day, at intervals sometimes short and sometimes very long, new designs of plait have been put on the market, and now there is no style of shape that cannot be suitably fitted up with one or more plaits.
British plaitters have not been content to use only the straws grown in the five counties. They have ransacked the world for materials, wood cut into fine shavings or splints, Manila grasses or hemp, manufactured splints of cotton, silk, or similar fibres, stuck together in a flat ribbon called a “lame,” horsehair, bamboo, raffia, and many other articles have been used for the purpose. At one time 30,000 persons were engaged in the plaitting industry, but by 1890 the number had dwindled to under 3,000. The reasons for this decline were manifold. Although the district had produced, and was still producing, straws better than any other continental centre, yet about 1855 the demand for something different from the plaits made solely of straw induced foreign plaitting communities to plait fancy materials which before had been used for other purposes. Switzerland and France began to make pretty and delicate patterns of plait or braid, woven both by hand and by machinery, of all kinds of fancy fibres such as silk, horsehair (or crinoline as termed by milliners), fine ribbons, etc., in various combinations of one or two or more of the above articles either with or without straws. Further attempts in the way of decoration were made by intermixtures of glass beads and bugles.
These very fanciful braids had a wonderful success, for they were especially adaptable for bonnets, which to about 1865 were much more in demand for fashionable wear than hats.
This invasion of a large quantity of displacing material adversely affected the volume of plaitting in England, and still further damage was done when Italy began to send over plain and fancy plaits made of willow shavings, as well as fine straw punta and pedale plaits similar to Twist, which was by then the mainstay of the fine plait trade. (Twist was a 7 end straw with a twisted beadhead made of fine splints, two of which laid inside to inside formed one strand for plaitting.) In 1867 the “last nail in the coffin” of British straw plaitting was driven by the first import of plait from China, and in that same year the distress in and around Dunstable was so great that the then Mayor, Mr. Joseph Gutteridge, called a public meeting to discuss methods for its alleviation.
As the far eastern countries of China and Japan now play such an important part in the world’s straw hat trade, it will be of interest to note how British traders first came in contact with their goods. Doubtless from time immemorial the deft “Chinee” had been accustomed to the weaving of grasses, etc., into hats and mats, and it is stated that the attention of Luton hat makers was first drawn to the possibility of getting plait from China, by seeing some “hats (mats?) which had been used for lining chests of tea.”
Whatever the cause, in 1867, from plaitted samples sent to them, the Chinese were able to imitate, in their native grown straws, the products of England in such an excellent manner and at such a low price, that the fiercest competition was at once created. People engaged in the trade were so exasperated at the circumstance, that they made an effigy of the importer and burned it in the Luton Market Place. The competition of the increasing bulk of China straw plait imports, together with the Italian imitation of Dunstable twist (called at first “Milan,” and now generally known as “7 ends Pedal”) made the plaitting trade in the five counties to decrease rapidly.