R.H. Lindsay Company has been around for nearly 90 years and this correspondent has been involved with the company for over 50 years. During the 1980’s we started reporting for The Commercial Bulletin which was an ancient weekly commodity reporting newspaper founded by innovator Curtis Guild who was astute enough to set up his new office across the hall from the Overseas telegraph office. What had taken 3+ weeks to learn about the UK’s Bradford wool market was suddenly on the street by Saturday after the Thursday sale. Talk about speeding up communications…
Anyway, we eventually spun off and set up our own lap top newsletter (very hot in the 80’s n 90’s) we dubbed The Commercial Bulletin’s Wool Page.Sadly the Wool Page ended its run in 1999 when Phil broke his leg and he claimed that gave him writer’s block. Meanwhile, taking another full time job outside of wool was the real reason there was less time for reporting on wool.
The late February 1995 editions (30 years ago) reported on a run up in the Australian wool market with the Australian Wool Market Indicator reaching 837 A/KG clean up from the 1994 February level of 567. The market was showing its first signs of actually mattering as the AWC’s massive stockpile slowly got sold off. Wooly stocks were trading well as the Dow Jones hit 4,000. American apparel wool consumption for 1994 was down 2.5% from 1993 at over 153 million clean pounds of wool which reflected the end of a 15 year period of slow growth in U.S. wool consumption.
American wool growers were consolidating after the collapse of the Australian support program drove down wool prices with little prospect of a rebound. Production was down for the 6th. year in a row after that event. Al Gore’s efforts to modernize the bloated market support programs hadn’t wiped out the Wool Incentive program, which was a near fatal blow to American wool production.
Our handcraft warehouse at our 16 Mather Street got moved a few years before down to Philadelphia where it kept us in business for the next 20 years or so before we opened the current Draper Lane warehouse. We’d been selling to the two largest mill entities that bought wool in the U.S. and we were in the middle of a staggering run of selling tons of cashmere, camel hair angora and super fine Australian lambs wool to New Hampshire-based L.W. Packard who for a short time was THE leading mill in luxury fabrics.
Later in 1995 Phil hosted a 39th Birthday party with a clam bake for 75, kegs of beer and a band! Everyone had some confidence the wool industry would find a way, but looking back 1995 was a harbinger of a massive nearly total decimation of the wool textile industry in the Untied States… hmmmm I wonder what today’s situation is boding???