PAPER, SHELLS & DAFFODILS

Notes from PCAA's exhibition: Penicuik Looking Back, organised with Penicuik Historical Society and Midlothian Council in May 1997 at the Cowan Institute (Penicuik Town Hall)

From the day in 1779 that Charles Cowan took up the lease of the papermills and house at Valleyfield, six generations of the family were to be intimately connected with the fortunes of Penicuik. In those days Valleyfield House was beside the millpond at the riverside. Much loved by Charles' wife, Marjorie, it was to become the home of their younger son Alexander, founder of the great Penicuik papermaking company which bore his name and shell trademark worldwide for a hundred and fifty years. Alexander had studied Chemistry and Physics at Edinburgh in the 1790s. He married Elizabeth Hall in 1800 and they took up residence at Valleyfield, where the first of their many children were born. With the European War, trade declined badly and rags from the continent were hard to obtain. (Rags pounded until they disintegrated were the main ingredient of paper in those days) With papermaking at a standstill, the Government bought the mills and house and garden in 1810 to serve as a prison camp for captured sailors and kidnapped foreign civilians. They used the house as a prison hospital, and fitted up the rag sorting huts and paper stores as dormitories with double tiers of hammocks suspended from cast iron columns for the thousands of European sailors and other prisoners of war held there.

Overlooking the compound, the Navy Board of Transport who operated the camp commissioned the King's Architect, Robert Reid (who had just finished the Leith Custom House) to build two new houses for the prison chaplain and doctor on the brae next to the old St Mungo's Well and doocot. When the war was over, the prisoners left and the mills stood empty, though the Government had ideas to use them for making official paper. Cannily, Alexander Cowan had kept the water power rights and was able to negotiate repurchase, return to his beloved Penicuik and gradually restart papermaking with some of the original workforce after 1820. The mills were fitted out with new machinery by Bryan, Donkin & Company and the two Robert Reid houses were expanded to form a new Valleyfield House for Alexander and Elizabeth Cowan and their big family. Walter Scott (who gave Alexander his manuscript of The Heart of Midlothian and whose novels were printed on Cowan paper, like so much else in those days) was a regular visitor, and Alexander's friend and cousin Thomas Chalmers (later to lead the Disruption of the Church of Scotland) spent his holidays there every year. In the gardens Alexander Cowan commissioned the architect Thomas Hamilton (designer of the Edinburgh High School on Calton Hill) to design a monument to international brotherhood and the memory of over 300 of the prisoners who had died during their Penicuik captivity. Walter Scott helped to choose the inscription.

In 1828, Alexander left Valleyfield to live in Moray House, the firm's first Edinburgh headquarters. He was a generous man, reluctant to speak ill of any human being, and is said to have given away more than half his income in works of love and kindness. Walking down the Canongate, he was so struck by the poverty and cold of the houses with their cracked, broken and rag-stuffed windows that he gave his glazier instructions to repair every widow from the Castle Hill to Holyrood at his own expense. In the cholera outbreak of 1832 when the sick were shunned by their neighbours, he did all he could to help the folk in the Canongate. As soon as he heard of a case, he would visit the patient, and even lie down beside them to prove to their friends that there was nothing to fear. As early as 1796 he helped to set up a parish library in Penicuik. With his brother Duncan, he arranged a new water supply. In 1851 he started a Penicuik village museum at the mills with the help of his friends. [believed to have been removed more than a hundred years later when the mills were closed and demolished by the Reed Paper Group]. His high business standards demanded that all transactions must profit buyer and seller alike, no advantage must be taken of misfortune. Alexander Cowan's gardens at Valleyfield and Moray House were well known, and he was a regular contributor to the Royal Horticultural and Astronomical Societies, as well as to the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary. Like Scott he took an interest in gas supply. The Valleyfield Mills were lit by gas from 1830, and Messrs Cowan supplied the village of Penicuik from 1845 until new gasworks were built at Eastfield in 1877. On his death in 1859, Alexander left money for the common good of Penicuik people, from which the Cowan Institute (Town Hall) was later built and endowed with 5,000 books.

Charles Cowan, Alexander's eldest son, was the next to live at Valleyfield and supervise the papermaking end of the business. Charles had married Catharine Menzies, daughter of Lanark's minister, in 1824, and they both heard and saw much of Robert Owen, the disciple of co-operation. Catharine's household management at Valleyfield was described by Thomas Chalmers as a perfect example of what real housekeeping should be. Like many of his family before and since, Charles was fascinated by the technical aspects of papermaking and wrote the article on it for Encyclopaedia Britannica. Chambers' article also drew on Cowan experience and both encyclopaedias of course were printed on Cowan paper. In 1835, to get round a Post Office rule that letters be restricted to a single sheet of paper weighing less than an ounce, the Valleyfield Mills produced giant sheets four feet by three and a half feet within the weight limit. A curling enthusiast and keen free churchman, Charles in 1847 became a free-trade MP for Edinburgh. He left Penicuik for a new house at Westerlea, Murrayfield, in 1870, but was later to preside at a packed North Kirk addressed by William Gladstone when the Cowans and Lord Rosebery persuaded the old prime minister to stand for Midlothian in the 1880 election campaign. Charles Cowan died in 1889. His two brothers in the business, Sir John Cowan (who built Beeslack House) and James Cowan MP were equally politically active in the Liberal interest.

Charles William Cowan succeeded his father at Valleyfield. He married Margaret Craig of the Newbattle, Portobello and Caldercruix papermaking family in 1861. Provost of Penicuik for 30 years, he is remembered for his interest in the Royal Horticultural Society and his passion for daffodils. The unique Valleyfield plantings were developed and even after a century of losses still contain varieties of rare interest to national collections. William Hartland, the pioneering daffodil grower of Cork, dedicated his 1890 collection to "my sincere friend and patron, Charles William Cowan Esquire, Valleyfield, Penicuik, Mid-Lothian". Charles William left Penicuik before the turn of the century and moved to Dalhousie Castle, making room for a new generation (another Alexander) to supervise the business. The long established shell trademark had to be shared (but in reverse) with an up and coming oil company. Alexander Cowan first married in 1892. He was later to take a great interest in burgh administration and the musical theatre, bringing the young Evelyn Laye and Jessie Matthews to look over the mills (expanded by this time to cover the old lower walled gardens, curling pond, greenhouses and bandstand). Alexander Cowan's son David headed the last Cowan household at Valleyfield House before it was converted to become papermill laboratories in the early 1950s. David Cowan died in 1997.