One of Britain's oldest crops is returning from irrelevance

Somerset's flax industry once helped grow clothes, boats, and warplanes. Could a similar localised textile economy soon return?

On the cusp of WW1, Britain’s newly-emergent Royal Flying Corps was in the market for a durable but lightweight material to use as a skin to cover its airframes. Fortunately, fewer than five years prior, the Government had started investigating whether it was worth reviving the much-neglected domestic flax industry. 

Putting two and two together, processed linen fibres from UK flax crops made an adequate if not ideal covering for the RFC’s aircraft. Later into the war, RFC pilots would be giving it to Fritz from the cockpits of their linen-lined Sopwith Camels.

Both World Wars gave the domestic flax industry – that had largely declined in the 19th century when nautical machinery no longer needed sail cloth or rope – a temporary boost. It’s almost inconceivable now that such a simple, renewable, crop relatively easily cultivated on local soil – in contrast to cotton – could and did provide the ideal fibre to be processed, shaped, or hardened, then fashioned into parachutes, uniforms, tents, tarps, and aircraft components, among other equipment. Even the venerable Hawker Hurricane relied on linen-skinned wings until 1939.

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Whether it liked it or not, Somerset was largely at the forefront of this sudden revitalisation. Flax mills already existed in Castle Cary, West Coker, and South Petherton, though Bunford Flax Factory (built in 1916 almost if not exclusively to produce aircraft material) in Yeovil is perhaps the most notable, what with the town being the nucleus of a local flax tradition stretching back to at least the 14th century. In 1795, agriculturalist John Billingsley wrote, “In the rich fertile country extending from Wincanton, through Yeovil to Crewkerne, flax and hemp are cultivated in great abundance.”