Tell me all about your days working in Paisley’s mills
Thomas would love to hear from former workers
A university student is on the lookout for former mill workers.
Thomas Collins, a fourthyear student at the University of Strathclyde is writing a dissertation, and wants to recruit between eight and 12 people for a project that uses oral history to study the effect that the de-industrialisation of Paisley’ s famous textile industry had on the lives of the thousands of people who worked there.
The 21- year- old history and politics student, from Glenburn, said: “I am looking for people who worked in the Paisley mills for at least a couple of years, between the 1970s and the final closure in 1993.
“I imagine the Paisley Daily Express will have a number of readers who worked in the mills during this period, hopefully some of those would be willing to participate in my project.”
“There are some theories over old industrial jobs that say de- industrialisation had a dehumanising and degrading effect on the working lives of people, and also on their social lives,” he said.
“And I would like to think that with the type of work that was involved in the mills and the philanthropy that was involved as well that it may well have had a dehumanising and degrading effect on people’s lives.
“Well, maybe I wouldn’t like to think that but I would imagine that is the case.
“I would like to bring that history out, especially with the recent revival around the town with the City of Culture and stuff like that.
“I think it would fit in well with my work and also into stuff that’s been going on in the town.”
An example of the dehumanising effect that Thomas is researching involves the type of jobs that former mill workers did when they moved on to other work.
“Say you were a skilled labourer within the mills, a weaver or something like that, and you left that work and there wasn’t any other skilled job in Paisley to go to,” he said.
“I know for a fact that my gran had a sort of semi-skilled job within the mills and she ended up working in B&Q on the tills.
“So I can imagine that was a lot less fulfilling for her – she told me it was – than working in the mills.
“But also there was a good sense of community within the mills that I’ve gathered from documentaries and archives of newspapers.
“I don’t think you would have got that as such in other workplaces around the town, especially within retail or catering or those types of jobs that people usually went into.”
Thomas’s dissertation will stretch to 12,000 words and has to be completed by the end January.
He will need to talk to former workers, who can also include bosses and trade union reps and even members of the mill-owning families, by the end of October. If you are a former mill worker and would like to help Thomas with his research, please phone Kenneth Speirs at the Paisley Daily Express on 0141 309 3004 and we will pass on your details.
There was a good sense of community within the mills Thomas Collins