Britain at Work
A Pictorial Description of Our National Industries

BRITAIN AT WORK. 20 CUTTING SHIRTS AND COLLARS. centre of a field of growing flax. It is brilliant July weather, and the noonday sun beams clown on a scene of transcendent beauty ; for if you have never seen an Ulster flax field in blossom you have missed one of Nature’s prettiest panoramas. Around us the modest flax plant, with its exquisite green stems crowned with daintily small bright blue flowers, reaches knee height. Three weeks hence the blossoms will have given place to the seed pods—the linseed of com- merce—but it is the sinewy stems we have to do with. Some fine morning will come a band of happy harvesters, lads and lassies, who will proceed in an extended line, pulling up the stems with their naked hands right and left as they go. The flax is then made up into small sheaves or bundles, tied loosely to permit the air to freely pass through them, and afterwards set up in stocks with the roots downwards for three or four days (accord- ing to the weather) to ripen and firm. Bound with rushes, these little sheaves are next taken to a convenient watering pool—known to the initiated as the flax-hole—where it is submerged under the weight of large stones. This process, in the Ulster dialect known as “ retting,” consists in a putrefactive fermentation lasting about a fortnight, by which the woody straw of the stem softens and disunites from the firmer stringy fibre. And now, sufficiently retted, the wet flax is carefully taken from its bath and thinly spread over grass lawns to undergo a few days’ exposure to the air, which helps to complete the step begun in the fermentation process. The firm dry stems are now gathered up, the fibres being carefully ranged lengthwise, and transported to the scutch mill. It is not a very intricate opera- tion, this scutching, consisting as it does in the flax being first bruised, so that, when afterwards exposed to the blades of a revolving shaft, the rough fluffy portion is peeled away as tow, leaving the long fibres, which are here for the first time flax in the strictest sense of the word. In the spinning mill the flax, freed from its foreign substances, is “ heckled.” In other words, it undergoes a remarkable toilet opera- tion, since its hair is combed by a multitude of mechanical barbers till not one fibre is awry. In earlier days hand combs sufficed. Now the combs are a set of rollers covered with teeth of fine steel wire. Six or seven AN ULSTER BLEACH GREEN.