In the 120-year-old Rosemount Factory, the third floor is abuzz again with the sound of sewing machines.
As sunlight streams through the tall windows overlooking Derry city, Amach streetwear designer Liam McDaid and his team are putting the finishing touches on a new denim collection. At the other end of the studio, Shauna Shiels of Doire Dress is working on a bespoke frock for a young Irish dancer.
Until McDaid moved Amach into the space in 2020, the building hadn’t been used to produce garments since the 1990s, when Derry’s reputation as a shirt-making capital of Europe was in decline, and firms were moving manufacturing overseas.
There are still some reminders of the Rosemount Factory’s former heyday, however, when hundreds of workers – most of them women, or “factory girls” – passed through its doors daily.
“You can still see the imprints of the factory girls’ feet on the concrete stairs,” says McDaid, a self-taught designer whose grandmothers and parents worked in the factories. “There’s something about this place; it just felt important to be in here. Everybody has a connection to the factories in Derry. It’s part of your DNA.”
The local linen industry in the 19th century gave rise to shirt-making, with a ready supply of skilled female labour to call on. Tillie and Henderson, once the largest shirt factory in the world, was even referenced by Karl Marx in Das Kapital. At its peak during the 1920s, there were about 40 shirt factories in Derry, employing 18,000 people.
The majority of workers, both on the factory floor and “outworkers” sewing at home, were women. Known for their skill, camaraderie and resilience, the factory girls were the first unionised group of female workers in Ireland and, with high male unemployment in Derry, often the main breadwinners in their families.
The shirts they crafted were sent out across the world, ending up everywhere from Savile Row to the battlefields of the second World War, when uniforms were produced for the armed forces. There are tales of factory girls, many of whom began working there in their mid-teens, tucking notes into shirt collars and cuffs, hoping for a pen pal or a sweetheart.
The women were also celebrated in poetry, songs and theatre – from musician Phil Coulter’s ode to his hometown, The Town I Loved So Well, to Buncrana writer Frank McGuinness’s 1982 play The Factory Girls.
Derry’s traditional shirt factories are long gone. Desmond’s, the last major clothing manufacturer in the city, closed in 2003. The famous Tillie and Henderson building was demolished the same year after a fire.
In recent years, grassroots group Friends of the Factories has installed plaques outside former factories – most now converted into offices or apartments – in honour of the people who once worked there.
And last month, after decades of campaigning by former factory workers, a new sculpture in the city’s Harbour Square was unwrapped, recognising their contribution to the city.
Their skills and stories have also encouraged a new generation of local fashion talent – from McDaid (whose Amach label has been worn by Derry Girls actors Jamie Lee O’Donnell and Saoirse-Monica Jackson) to Factory Ireland designer Jill Hyndman.
Factory Ireland’s statement collars, using organic and deadstock fabrics, were inspired by an image of collar prototypes that Hyndman discovered in a shirt factory exhibition at Derry’s Fashion and Textile Design Centre.
Her new streetwear range includes a mock-up graphic of an archive shirt factory invoice on an organic cotton T-shirt, while another T-shirt features a digital illustration of an old black-and-white photo of shirt factory workers, overlaid with a surrealist stained-glass design.
“I love history, and storytelling, and things with meaning behind them,” says Hyndman, from the border town of Castlederg.
“I always say I was part of the factories when I was in the womb, as my mum worked in the Herdman linen mill [in Sion Mills, which stopped spinning linen in 2004] when she was pregnant. My dad worked there too, and I remember visiting him in there when I was small and being amazed seeing all the machines creating the linen. I knew I wanted to be part of it some day.”
[ Dirty Linen: a personal history of Northern IrelandOpens in new window ]
Derry designer Rachel Gallagher, who runs the artisan jewellery and handbag brand Nómada, grew up surrounded by skilled seamstresses.
“My granny, aunties and my mammy Yvonne all worked in factories, and my granda was a sewing machine technician,” she says. “Then my mammy would have worked for interior designers, making curtains on a sewing machine in the garage. I’d be playing around out there, and seeing her creativity.”
That creative spark is passing down the generations. Today, Yvonne helps sew Nómada‘s handmade Donegal tweed bucket bags – often with Nóra, Gallagher’s three-year-old daughter, on her lap. Nóra will watch Gallagher make the brand’s coastal-inspired jewellery, with freshwater pearls and hand-sculpted porcelain clay flowers. “You should see her with a pair of cutting pliers,” says Gallagher, who keeps a close eye on proceedings.
Staff at the Tower Museum, tucked just inside the city’s 400-year-old walls, are about to start cataloguing hundreds of photographs, ledgers and artefacts, and holding engagement events, having received almost £40,000 (€47,000) of grant funding through the UK-based National Archives.
“It’s really lovely to see all the new designers springing up across the city, and a focus on that creative profession. I think the shirt factories were potentially neglected a bit in the history of the city,” says Bernadette Walsh, archivist at the Tower Museum.
“When people think about Derry they tend to think about conflict, and the Troubles, but this is something that really got into everyone’s lives. Virtually everyone you talk to will have a mother or grandmother or aunt who worked in the factory, and a story to tell. Not even just Derry City itself – reaching out to Strabane, and Donegal. These women played such a big role in the development of the city financially and how the city built up over those years.”
It was in the Tower Museum’s archive that Una Carlin, designer and goldsmith at Derry’s Faller the Jeweller, spotted a black-and-white photo of an elegant young woman working in the City Factory. The image led to a new sterling silver piece, available as a pendant or brooch, in honour of the workers.
Former factory workers were able to connect Carlin with the woman sewing a shirt collar in the featured photograph: 86-year-old Margaret McCourt (then Olphert), who started in the factory aged just 14.
McCourt took a bus every morning from her home in rural county Derry to work as a bander, sewing collars on to shirts. She worked in the factory for 10 years, and estimates the photo was taken around 1959 or 1960. Still a good sewer, McCourt is enjoying the “hullabaloo” about the photo resurfacing. “My family are very excited about it,” she adds. “I’m glad I’m still alive to enjoy it too.”
Back in the Rosemount Factory, Liam McDaid is busy with orders, and has just opened a retail space in the city centre. “Growing my brand is my main focus,” he says. “But I also want this factory to be an incubator space for young designers coming through. That is the ultimate goal. It would be a true legacy for the factory.”
Clare Moore was 15 years old when she left school and got a job in the City Factory in 1960. The eldest daughter in a family of eight children in the Bogside, Moore’s two older brothers had already gone to England for better work prospects. “I was pretty good at school, but I just couldn’t wait to get out that door,” she says. “There was an army of women going to work in the morning, from every corner of the city. Women kept the city afloat financially.”
After a few weeks as a factory message girl, Moore trained as a “cuffer”, attaching cuffs to shirts. “It was hard work, and I was one of the slower workers,” she admits. “But I was able to hand a pay packet to my mother each week – though it got a bit lighter on the walk home, after we’d stopped in the shops or bought fish and chips.”
In a divided city, it was also Moore’s first experience of mixing with Protestants. “It was mind-broadening, being able to chat to them and socialise with them.”
After seven years in the City Factory, Moore left to get married and start a family. She later returned to education, gaining a degree in business. Now 80, she is still close friends with women she met there in her youth, and campaigns for the women’s contribution to be recognised. “We’re at an age where every day is a bonus,” says Moore. “We would love to enhance that legacy while we’re here, and pass it on to the younger generations.”
Mary White was also 15, from a family of 10 children, when she started in the Rosemount Factory. “I was really quiet then. Afraid of everybody,” she recalls. “When I opened the door, oh my God, the noise was awful. There were so many machines.”
The older women, including Agnes Hume, (sister of future Nobel Peace Prize winner John), and my own grandmother, Maisie Craig, took girls such as White under their wing – even showing them how to make toast on the large “smoother” irons. “They were really, really good to us. Everyone looked out for each other,” says White, a fast worker who, by 19, had become a union shop steward in another local factory.
It wasn’t all hard slog, either. “We linked arms on the walk there, and sang as we worked. I learnt to jive in the parlour [ladies’ toilets]. We plucked each other’s eyebrows and backcombed our hair before dances. I learnt to smoke in the factory too – though my mammy would have killed me. You went in as an innocent wee girl and came out a woman.”
