MORTON SUNDOUR FABRICS
Reversible Eitherways cotton furnishing fabric from Morton Sundour sample book, 1930s. Museum of the Home.
Morton Sundour Fabrics was a British textile firm that spanned one century and three generations of the Morton family. Three enterprising men lie at the heart of its legacy - Alexander Morton (b.1844), his son James (b.1867) and grandson Alastair (b.1910). Luckily, design excellence was paramount to each of them; from 1860 to 1963, they served consumers with a wealth of attractive furnishing fabrics of the highest quality.
MSF grew from humble beginnings - Alexander Morton, a young weaver from the Scottish village of Darvel wove muslins on his handloom as part of the local cottage industry. Realising that weaving must be mechanised to meet demand, he grew this small artisan workshop into a prosperous industrial concern. In 1870 Alexander Morton & Co was formed and by the end of the century had 600 employees creating tapestry weaves, carpets, lace and printed cottons.
Duleek furnishing cotton muslin gauze, designed by Voysey for Alexander Morton & Co., 1896. Image © V&A.
James Morton, 1939. Image © Carlisle Library
His son James became partner in 1895, leading the firm in an exciting new direction. A great admirer of William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement, he commissioned notable artists including C.F.A. Voysey, Lewis F Day and Lindsay Butterfield to design decorative fabrics; Voysey’s wonderfully whimsical Alice in Wonderland print is still popular today. The cloths were a success and endorsed by Liberty in London, allowing the family to expand operations to Carlisle, as well as Donegal where tufted carpets were made.
A wonderful anecdote recounted by James Morton in a lecture for The Royal Society of Arts explains his keen interest in colour fastness. Whilst strolling down Regent Street in 1900, perusing Liberty’s window display, he was aghast to find fabrics of his own design faded almost beyond recognition. After discovering the fabrics had only been in the shop window for one week, he exclaimed “What was the good, I argued, of using valuable materials … if in practice everything was to be upset by a week’s exposure to ordinary sunshine, the very purpose for which the goods were made?” Good point. Before leaving London he gathered a mass of fabric samples from different suppliers and once home in Penrith, commandeered the garden greenhouse, replacing his tomato plants with the many hanging fabric samples (what a sight). Finding that it wasn’t just his fabrics - hardly any withstood the sun’s rays - he made it his mission to develop fadeless dyestuffs.
Through collaboration and scientific research, he did just that. After releasing their first (and bestselling) range of Sundour ‘guaranteed unfadable’ fabrics in 1906, the firm was renamed Morton Sundour Fabrics in 1914. Before long, ‘Sundour’ (dour meaning ‘water’ in Gaelic and ‘stubborn’ in Scots) became a household name synonymous with fadelessness. Women were largely responsible for domestic labour at this time and practical concerns were equally, if not more, important than aesthetic ones.
Folder of Sundour dyed wool samples, 1930. Image © Science Museum
Roller printed cotton furnishing fabric by Ronald Simpson for MSF, 1912. Image © V&A Museum
Although stylistically MSF’s output was varied, I feel that the unifying quality was ‘charm’. Charm was an elusive trait regularly touted in women’s magazines, which fused cheerfulness, homeliness and nostalgia. The fabrics in these 1930s Eitherways sample books are pretty and bright - the simple florals on white grounds feel clean and contemporary compared with fussy traditional chintzes still popular at the time. During the 30s, women were encouraged to strike a delicate balance between charm and modernity in their homes, which these prints achieve. Judging by the colour vibrancy almost a century later, they weren’t lying about the fadelessness either.
‘Going modern’ was still financially risky in the 1930s and this is precisely why Edinburgh Weavers was set up as a sister company to MSF - to produce modern artist-designed fabrics for the cosmopolitan customer. But as textile historian Valerie Mendes says: “most manufacturers ensured their survival by producing ‘bread and butter’ lines of popular period reproductions, stripes, checks and plains.” There are over 2,500 MSF fabrics held in the V&A archives and the vast majority fall into this category. Florals in particular were their stock in trade thanks to their perennial appeal.
Reversible Eitherways cotton furnishing fabrics from Morton Sundour sample book, 1930s. Museum of the Home.
James Morton (knighted in 1936 for his contribution to the dyeing industry) was a tirelessly ambitious man interested in all aspects of textiles. Under the MSF umbrella he formed many subsidiary initiatives - Scottish Dyes and Standfast Dyers and Printers; Donegal Carpets making wool rugs; Scottish Folk Fabrics, a craft enterprise led by Ronald Simpson; and Edinburgh Weavers run by his son Alastair.
The Mortons maintained good connections across the British design scene. In 1923 commercial artist Charles Paine was hired to design their marketing material, which portrayed quaint, pastoral imagery in a boxy graphic style, reminiscent of cross-stitch. As well as designing adverts, letterheads and calendars for the firm, Paine illustrated a booklet To Young Weavers, containing a talk given by James Morton to a group of weaving students in Lancashire and printed by the Baynard Press. Later in the 1930s the brilliant Ashley Havinden was employed to design adverts, positioning MSF as expressly forward-looking.
Although James died in 1943, MSF continued producing fabrics, weathering the choppy waters of both World Wars. After his son Alastair’s untimely death 20 years later, the firm was bought by Courtaulds, who led it through various mergers and name changes. The Sundour name continued trading until 1996, but without the Morton family at the helm its spirit was lost. Though not well-known, this firm quietly shaped the textile landscape of its time, particularly through innovations in dyeing. The collection now held at the V&A speaks to the significance of Morton Sundour’s contribution to the decorative arts.
Illustrated page from To Young Weavers, a talk given by James Morton in 1927, illustrated by Charles Paine
Colour lithograph poster designed for MSF by Charles Paine, 1928
FURTHER READING
Alastair Morton and Edinburgh Weavers: Visionary Textiles and Modern Art by Lesley Jackson, 2012
Three Generations in a Family Textile Firm by Jocelyn Morton, 1971
Twentieth Century Pattern Design by Lesley Jackson, 2002