From Flax to Fluff: The Decline of the Handkerchief

Reflections on a sectarian grandmother and the rise of paper napkins

Those were the days. Linen mill in Belfast. Public Record Office of Northern Ireland

“Never use paper tissues,” my grandmother would say to me. “They’ll cut your nose to ribbons.”

She used the same voice-of-foreboding when warning me of the pope. “He’s the devil, so he is, and so’s his baldy old nuns.”

Most of her life, my grandmother worked in a linen mill in Belfast — one of the mills that processed the cotton coming from America until the Civil War halted the import of cotton and brought flax to the fore.

Even in the twentieth century, with linen replacing cotton, the working practices changed little since the cotton heyday.

Flax was passed through hot water to make it finer for spinning, which meant the floor of the factory was always wet. Warm, damp conditions inflicted workers with a host of chest ailments: pulmonary and tubercular consumption, byssinosis (lung disease caused by inhalation of textile dust) and bronchitis, as well as rotted feet. And there was the ever-present danger of losing a limb in a loom.

Every morning my grandmother would lap her ‘piece,’ a slice of bread and butter and carry it to the mill for her lunch. Washed down with tea, this elaborate meal sustained her for years…