Today’s auction house artefact is this measuring and conversion gauge for ropes and wires issued by the Edinburgh Roperie & Sailcloth Co., Leith.

Ropemaking was an established craft in North Leith and Newhaven, having been established in the latter village in the early 16th century in conjunction with King James IV’s naval expansion plans. Flodden may have killed the King and his nautical dreams in 1513 but ropemaking was a necessary and useful trade and persisted. Needing room to expand beyond the confines of those settlements, it had made the shift across the river to the Links of South Leith in 1710 when John Gilmour and Thomas Mayo took a site near the present day Salamander Street. This was the beginning of the industrial expansion of Leith beyond its medieval confines, with the glass works also expanding along the foreshore. Ropemaking in Leith and Newhaven was then consolidated under the ownership of a Captain David Deas or Daies before he and partners reconstituted the firm in 1742, changing its name to the Leith Roperie Company in 1750.

Within months, the adjoining plot to the south was occupied by a competitor, the Edinburgh New Roperie Company. At least three other rope makers joined them and rope-making became the principle industry of South Leith after seafaring in the middle of the 18th century. In 1793 the rope and sail products of Leith were described as “among the best produced in Britain” by George Robertson. The principal customer of these ropeworks was the Leith whaling fleet, and when the Greenland whaling was wound down and abandoned the businesses faltered. The Leith Roperie had borrowed heavily and was wound up due to a lack of capital in 1848 leaving what was by now the Edinburgh Roperie & Sailcloth Company as the principal rope and sail maker in Leith.

The site of the Leith Roperie would be swallowed up by the railway not long after it closed, and the Edinburgh Roperie came to acquire the sites of its adjacent neighbours in the 19th century.

The business survived into the age of steam on account of its reputation for quality products. Indeed such was the esteem with which Leith ropes and canvas were held that the company had to fight off the threat of poor quality imitations and take out newspaper adverts to this effect.

It was possibly for this reason that the Roperie adopted a distinctive trademark. The list of offices around Britain and beyond gives an indication of the company’s success and reach at this time.

At the time of this publication in 1906, the company advertised itself as having the “sixth longest rope walk in the world“, these rope walks were where the individual cords that made up the rope were gathered and twisted together in a technique that hadn’t evolved much over the centuries.

A 1958 advertisement used the words of the poet Henry Longfellow to convey “some of the atmosphere of our ancient craft, which has existed since the world was young“:

In that building, long and low,
With its windows all a-row,
Like the port-holes of a hulk,
Human spiders spin and spin,
Backward down their threads so thin
Dropping, each a hempen bulk.

The Ropewalk, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, 1858

The company carried out most of the stages of rope and cloth making for itself, from processing the raw ingredients through to spinning, weaving, binding and packaging of the end product. This included the bleaching, dying and waterproofing of fibres and it had an enormous drying green on the site. The fertiliser works on Salamander Street can be seen in the background.

It was not just maritime ropes and sails that were produced, general waterproofed natural fabrics known as “duck” were made for any sort of purpose;

And ropes for power transmission and winding;

Through to agricultural binder twine. Here the company’s steam lorry is seen heading out of the works with a full load of 5lb balls of twine.

At its peak it employed over 1,000 people in Leith, including a lot of women (as spinning and weaving mills often did). It was heavy and dangerous work, with unguarded, rapidly spinning, cable-powered machinery everywhere and the ever-present silent danger of a work atmosphere laden with fibres.

The Roperie became part of the British Ropes conglomerate in 1925, which was formed with the purpose of consolidating the British industry into a larger, more efficient concern following a huge loss of business during and after WW1. It continued to trade under its own name as part of this parent organisation.

On Saturday 25th April 1936, the Leith works suffered a disastrous fire which engulfed most of the site, the Dundee Courier reporting that there was a “quarter mile of flames” and that it was “one of the most disastrous which had occurred in that city for many years“. The fire broke out at the western end of the works and was fanned by the wind, quickly consuming the whole length within a period of just 20 minutes. Around £75,000 of damage (c. £6 million in 2022) was done to the works, but within days the company had 100 of its 500 strong workforce back on site. Its survival after this critical episode was attributed to it being part of the larger conglomerate. The management vowed to rebuild and the Minister of Labour opened the reconstructed works on November 16th 1937; this time the factory was entirely fireproof. It was now “the most up to date ropeworks in Scotland” and “one of the most important factories” in the British Ropes group.

The company moved into production of synthetic ropes and celebrated its bicentennial in Leith in 1950 with the opening of a plant for the production of nylon sailcloth. However, this was not enough to guarantee the long term survival of the works, which still depended on jute and soft fibre-based production for much of its business. On Friday November 18th 1960, British Ropes announced it was simultaneously closing its Leith works and exiting the soft fibre and jute business altogether. Synthetic rope and cloth production was transferred to company sites in Tyneside and South Wales. Of the 400 workers in Leith, 60% were women and there would be redundancy of between £17,000 and £20,000 paid out in total. The works finally closed 9 months later after a winding down process.

The site was then taken over by the company of Macdonald & Muir, whisky bottlers and blenders known for their Highland Queen bonded warehouse along Commercial Street, blends such as Baillie Nicol Jarvie and their ownership of John Crabbie & Co.’s green ginger wine business in Leith. They are probably best known as the parent company of the Glenmorangie Distillery, which they bought in 1918. Bath Road, by now known as Salamander Place, became the HQ, bottling and distribution plant for the company now known simply as Glenmorangie. They left in stages between 1993 and 1996, headed for Livingston where they are still going as part of the the Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton empire.

The site lay vacant before being snapped up by property speculators who demolished everything and then went bust in 2008 during the financial crisis. It then took the best part of another 10 years for things to get moving again and the final phase of redevelopment is imminently coming to a conclusion.

You will notice that one of the developers has branded its block The Ropeworks (a name under which it never traded) and the street names include the Ropemaker Street, Sailmaker Road and Chandler Crescent. Fans of the film Trainspotting T2 may recognise Sailmaker Road…

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