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HISTORY OF SACK MAKERS
J&HM Dickson Ltd are the oldest remaining sack maker in the United Kingdom

1915 to 1945
Sack makers J&HM Dickson Limited were founded in 1915 in Glasgow, Scotland by John and Hugh Dickson to make hessian and jute sandbags for the first world war. Originally operating from a shed near Wardlaw Avenue, Rutherglen - the Dickson Brothers soon took on a three storey warehouse previously used as a Bleachworks in Millerfield Road, Dalmarnock. Both the directors and their workforce of 10 sewing machinists had reserved occupations and therefore were not required to sign up for military service during the great war.

Activities
The company bought Jute and Hessian fabrics from Dundee merchants such as Low & Bonar which was cut on table mounted circular knives powered by a system of pulleys and belts connected to a large electric motor. The pieces of material were then sewn together using Union Special sewing machines or stitched by hand - sack reclaimers like Dickson also recycled used hessian,jute,twill & sisal sacks which came into the UK from Australia,Cuba,Turkey,Colombia,Argentina,Uganda,Uruguay & China containing a variety of coffee beans,flour,tea,cocoa,dried food,pulses,nuts,fishmeal,rices,malts & bonemeal. The empty sacks were sourced from local mills such as Moorhead McGavin on the Broomielaw & were often described not by size but by their appearance, origin or previous purpose. Stock lists dating back to the 1950's describe dozens of different sacks such as "Three blue stripe twill" "Botany Bagging" and "Peanut & Australian Hessians". These sacks were cleaned out using enormous ceiling mounted suction machines called "Blowers" which turned the sacks inside out and blew the residue in large collection bags to sell on for various purposes such as animal feed. These large sacks would then be mended on Singer darning machines before being sold on or, in many cases, the bigger bags would be cut up and made into a number of smaller sacks for rivets, nuts, bolts & nails. These industries were flourishing in the middle of last century due to the amount of shipbuilding, car making, heavy engineering & coal mining in the UK and sacks to be exported would often be filled with fastners and dipped in oil which absorbed into the hessian material and prevented the contents from rusting at sea. J&HM Dickson recycled rolls of painted hessian fabric which had been used as endless conveyor belting by the Royal Mint to print banknotes, the green, blue and purple coloured material being converted into sandbags. Dickson also recovered and repaired old botany bales which had brought wool from Australia and made them into large ham sheets for the meat market in the Gallowgate. Reject Rayon material from tyre manufacturers was even converted into bags, hessian was tarred and supplied to waterproof roofs, ships decks and railway coaches & 4 ply misprinted paper sacks were bought, split into two 2 ply sacks, resewn & sold on. This was not looked upon by sackmakers as recycling but rather a way to make money from reclaimed materials.

Other Noteable Sack Merchants
Such were the quantities of sacks being imported into the UK between the wars there were around fifty sack merchants, manufacturers & reclaimers advertising in the Scottish Register in 1939 including William Watson (Glasgow) Ltd and Levy Brothers & Knowles. Only J&HM Dickson Ltd and Levy Brothers (Now LBK Packaging)remain selling sacks from the original list.

Sack Factory
The sack factory in Dalmarnock was divided up into 3 storeys or "flats" and relied heavily on barrows, slings, ropes, sharp bale hooks, muscle & gravity to move the heavy hessian bales and sacks around. A single internal hoist which operated through wooden trap doors on each floor lifted all the raw materials up to the top flat in cargo nets where the processes of sorting, cleaning, darning, sewing and printing began. The sacks were printed on large, hand fed, Sphinx bag printing machines made by Thomas Keay in Dundee which used hand cut canvas backed rubber printing plates or had customers names assembled from individual rubber cletters stapled onto the wooden printing drum. Eventually all the finished bags found their way down to the first floor where they were then loaded out of doors onto waiting trucks below.

John Dickson died in the early Forties and Hugh's son Bill joined the company straight from school in 1945 near the end of World War 2. Bill became a permanent member of staff after he finished his National Service and took on the role of salesman to help the company find enough work for its 20 largely female staff. Dickson's main customers around this time were local Coal & Potato Merchants, rivet suppliers to Clyde Shipbuilders, nut & bolt manufacturers such as The Lanarkshire Bolt Company in Hamilton, GKN Atlas Bolts in Birmingham, British Leyland in Bathgate and the Glasgow Steel Nail Company in Bishopbriggs who purchased "double twill bags" for their dog spike nails. Their competitors were companies such as William Burns & Co in Ibrox and Thomas Boag in Geenock.

Post War Activities
With the war over, Dickson continued to supply sacks into the industrial and agricultural markets but there were too many sack makers chasing business and consequently all were sufferring from increasingly low margins. Manufacturing industry in the UK was starting to decline in the 60's with the advent of cheaper products being imported from abroad and many of the core sack customers were simply going out of business or relocating oversea. However, help was on hand with the invention of Woven Polypropylene Material (WPP) providing an opportunity to bring a new type of sack to customers in the early 70's. This woven plastic material was cheaper & lighter than hessian but much stronger, rot proof and easier to print. New heat cutting machines were purchased to handle the revolutionary fabric and J&HM Dickson became one of the first manufacturers of WPP sacks in the UK. Their Union Special sewing machines & Sphinx sack printers were easily adapted to handle the new fabric as customers replaced old heavy hessian sacks with the new versions.

Very few hessian sacks were now being imported into the UK and legislation on manual handling demanded they be emptied by machines which ripped them apart, rendering them almost useless for refurbishment. The new lighter WPP sacks were clearly here to stay and although Sack Reclaimers could sell a few secondhand if they had been carefully emptied they were generally used as one trip sacks & it was not economical to recover them. Subsequently many of the old reclaimers vanished along with the heavy industry which had consumed so many nuts, bolts & rivets and the demand for small sacks fell away. Companies still making sacks like Dicksons began making bale covers for wool, yarn & synthetic fibre manufacturers such as Wellman International in Ireland, dried yeast sacks for DCL in Alloa, sacks for solid fuels, salts, sugars and diverse products such as pipeline cushion pads. These long woven pp tubes were hand packed with wood wool to make a protective collar which stopped the pipe coatings being damaged and were for British Pipe Coaters in Leith who used them to protect the subsea pipes supplied to the now booming offshore oil industry.

Third Generation
Bill Dickson's son, Alan, joined the company straight from school in 1980 and Hugh Dickson worked on up until the day before he died in 1981 - the three generations together for just 12 months. Hugh Dickson was a respected member of the Glasgow Southside community, played amateur soccer for Queens Park Football Club (The Spiders) and was involved in the Scottish Football Association. By this time there were less than half a dozen sack merchants and manufacturers left in the West of Scotland. By 1985 the company's ancient premises in Dalmarnock had become run down beyond repair, neighbours Calder Millerfield (Originally the Union Pie Company) had moved on & Ferrarfelt, Bonnyman Chemicals and Kennedy's cooperage who all shared the old bleachworks site on Millerfield road had ceased trading. Dickson now found itself last man standing in an increasingly deprived area of Glasgow and needed to move on. After working for a four years through the ranks as a sewing machine mechanic, truck driver & factory manager, Alan Dickson set about growing the business in the same way his father had and relocated the company to premises 2 miles away in Seath Road, Rutherglen Industrial Estate. The estate was modern with a more efficient factory all on one floor & the new unit sat on the banks of the Clyde near the boatyard where the famous Clyde paddle steamer Lucy Ashton was build and launched. The old Dalmarnock factory failed to sell and was soon raised to the ground by vandals who set it alight only months after it was vacated, the ground lying barren for almost 20 years until it was sold for redevelopment as a athletes village for the 2014 Commonwealth Games. Dickson started importing cheaper sacks from the Philippines, India & China to compliment it's range of manufactured bags & began making the new FIBC (Flexible Intermediate Bulk Container) bulk bags which could hold over a tonne of product and had becoming increasingly popular in the chemical and agricultural sectors. These one tonne sacks could carry over 1000 times their own weight and proved to be a revolution in the bulk packaging sector, especially favoured by fertilizer, chemical companies and builders merchants. Contracts were also secured with new customers such as Barton Abrasives (shot bags) & bespoke sacks manufactured using Dicksons sack making experience & knowledge such as pallet covers and meat bags to protect animal carcasses during blast freezing. The imported sacks were used for fertilizers,feeds,seeds and in industry for packing everything from wool to scrap metal, aggregates, chemicals, waste paper plus Post Office Sacks and sandbags.

The company was and is still involved in the brewing industry, making Hop Sacks for growers in Worcester & Kent, cork filled drop pads for draymen to drop beer barrels onto when unloading them from drays and more diverse products like home brewing sacks supplied to Brewing Products in Kirkliston near Edinburgh. The Brewsacks had a polythene liner fitted inside them (rather like a modern wine box) partly filled with a stick berwers wort mixture. One the bag had been filled with hot water through a valve in the top and a yeast sachet sprinkled in then it would ferment over 4 weeks to make about 20 pints of beer. The idea was marketed across the word and sold in the USA, New Zealand, Germany and in the UK by Boots.

Recent History
Meanwhile, more container loads of various woven pp sacks were arriving from overseas to satisfy growing demand for cheaper prices - some of these were printed on Dicksons machines & sold as pre pack sacks for coal and animal feed bags. Others would find their way into the laundry powder industry or be used for packing shells and shellfish. The advent of the Internet and the sudden ability to find specialised products in seconds proved a boon to the woven sack industry and in the early 90's Dickson found itself involved in the recycling movement - making kerbside recycling sacks for a local company called Target Zero who collected old newspapers door to door was the first step towards the development of Recykerbag sacks which were soon being used by local authorities to collect plastics, cans, newspapers and garden waste all over the UK. Dicksons Glasgow competitor William Burns retired and the company was now outgrowing its Rutherglen Factory so neighbouring premises were acquired in the late 90's from Catherwood builders merchants followed by the construction of a container unloading facility in 2006. Bill Dickson died aged 79 in 2006 and was still working part time as Chairman until just 10 days before his demise - he was a respected member of the sack trade and Clydesdale Cricket Club. Bill's son Alan Dickson continues to run the business with a staff of around 20 employees and they retain their sack making facility in Glasgow with the majority of sacks now manufactured in India and China.There are now less than a dozen Woven Sack Merchants left in the UK and only around three manufacturers including Dicksons who will mark their centenary in 2015.

--Sackmaker (talk) 18:47, 15 January 2013 (UTC)Alan Dickson Managing Director