Time to appreciate wonder of woollies

Is there a way back for wool? A development in the home furnishing department encourages Bridgwater and West Somerset MP Ian Liddell-Grainger to hope there could be, as he says in an open letter to Defra Secretary and Camborne and Redruth MP George Eustic

DEAR George, Whatever your opinion of Jeremy Clarkson, I think you must agree – if you had a chance to catch any of the programmes, that is – that his recent television series featuring his life as a farmer would have proved a real eye-opener to large sections of the populace.

Particularly when it came to the matter of actually making a living off the land, the net receipts in return for his first year’s labour amounting merely to some £144.

It may also have startled many viewers to learn that modern economics have even turned wool into a liability rather than an asset, in that the price that can be obtained for a fleece no longer even covers the cost of shearing.

Having grown up in an era when wool was still highly prized, I find this totally insane. Here is a wonderfully versatile, totally natural commodity which has become completely devalued.

The reasons for it are well known, of course. Few of us march around any longer attired in natty Harris Tweed three-pieces on a daily basis. Cheaper, synthetic materials now predominate in clothing manufacture, and the move to lighter-gauge togs – which is only likely to gain momentum as the world warms up – has really put wool on the skids in the textile market.

And in the short term there has been the additional problem of the pandemic bringing the shutters down on our export trade to China.

There is, sadly, the other issue in that the official marketing of British wool has hardly been the most dynamic or imaginative and that, I would suggest, has been partly to blame for its steady fall from popularity.

But I really believe British shoppers would collectively be brought to a halt in their tracks if they were to learn that hundreds of tons of wool are being routinely buried or burned on farms every year because there is simply no viable market for it.

So I was heartened to read of the initiative announced by John Lewis, which is launching a new range of mattresses containing wool produced on farms that supply its Waitrose subsidiary.

A small initiative, perhaps, but at least a step on the road to raising the profile of British wool and restoring its lost status – to the eventual benefit, potentially, of all who produce it.

On the other hand, this is a particularly apposite move in that both company founder John Lewis and Wallace Waite, one of the co-founders of Waitrose, both hailed from Shepton Mallet, once a great centre of the wool and weaving trades. And not many people know that.

I hope the new range is a success. I hope most sincerely it provides a useful platform for returning wool to fashion. And given the fact that wool doesn’t degrade into microplastics, I hope the eco-warriors will start to clothe themselves in it more widely.

Of course, the vegans won’t have anything to do with it, but given their previous that should surprise no one.

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Ian Liddell-Grainger would like to see a resurgence in the popularity of woollen clothing and products which, as this shot of models posing for the 1969 Wool Trends International Show suggests, were once the height of fashion