Built By the Johnstons, Kept By the Urquharts: Inside Scotland’s Last Vertical Mill

ART & CULTURE · ELGIN

Reading time: 9 min

Johnstons of Elgin has carried the same family name on its labels since 1797, but no Johnston has owned the business for more than a century. The mill on the River Lossie still does something almost nobody else in Scotland does anymore, dyeing, spinning, weaving and finishing cloth on one site, and most of what it makes each year leaves without its own name on it at all. Both facts explain the mill better than any account of its scarves.

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Introduction

Johnstons of Elgin was founded in 1797 by Alexander Johnston, who set up on the banks of the River Lossie in Elgin, on Scotland’s Moray coast, at a former corn mill known as Newmill. The company has operated from that same site for more than two centuries, and by 1811 it had brought carding, dyeing, spinning, weaving and finishing under one roof, a level of vertical integration it has never given up. It remains, on its own account, the only vertically integrated weaving mill still operating in Scotland. A second mill, Eastfield in Hawick, joined the business in 1980 and now handles knitwear. The company employed 1,092 people in 2025, returned to a pre-tax profit of £4.1 million that year after a loss the year before, and is led by chief executive Chris Gaffney, with Jenny Urquhart as co-chair alongside her brother Neil Urquhart. Their family, not the Johnstons, has owned the business since 1920.

A name that outlived the family that gave it

Alexander Johnston ran the mill until his death in 1864, and his son James Johnston, who joined the business in 1835, spent the following decades turning a regional weaving concern into an internationally recognised name. What the Johnston family did not do was keep the company. In 1920, ownership passed to Edward Stroud Harrison (1879 to 1979), and the business has stayed in his family ever since. Today’s co-chairs, Neil and Jenny Urquhart, are his great-grandchildren.

That is a genuinely unusual continuity. Most heritage textile names that change hands get absorbed into a larger group, renamed, or reduced to a badge licensed onto goods made somewhere else entirely. Johnstons kept the founder’s name on the label, kept the mill on the founder’s site, and kept the business in a single family, just not the family the name refers to. It is the kind of detail that gets lost the longer a company trades under its founding name, and it is worth stating plainly: the Urquharts have now run Johnstons of Elgin for more than a century longer than the Johnstons themselves managed.

What “vertical” actually means on the factory floor

The word vertical gets used loosely in manufacturing, so it is worth being specific about what it means inside the Elgin mill. Raw fibre, cashmere from Inner Mongolia and merino from Australia, arrives undyed and is coloured in large pressure vessels before being dried in industrial dryers that fluff the fibre back up with warm air rather than flattening it. From there it passes through a blending bin and into roving, the process of spinning and twisting loose fibre into a workable strand, before it reaches the mill’s spinning frames, some of them decades old, which give the yarn its elasticity.

Weaving interlaces warp and weft, the two sets of yarn running in opposite directions, with each warp thread individually set onto the loom before a piece of cloth even begins. Finishing is where a lot of the actual craft sits: cloth is washed in warm Scottish water, then teaselled, a process that still uses the dried, spiky seed heads of the teasel plant mounted in a revolving drum to raise the nap of the cloth, a technique with no real mechanical substitute. Fringed ends are purled, finished by hand, and every finished piece is checked individually and re-darned by hand if a thread has slipped. None of these stages is unique to Johnstons on its own. What is unusual is doing all of them, from raw fibre to finished, checked cloth, inside one set of buildings on one river, which is what “vertical” is actually describing.

The date a Scottish mill changed what Britain wore

James Johnston’s contribution to the business is usually summarised as introducing new fibres, which undersells how specific and early that record actually is. He brought Australian merino into the business in 1847 and vicuña in 1849, and on 30 October 1851 he imported the first bale of cashmere to reach Britain, bought from the London merchants Buxtons. The same year, the mill won a medal at the Great Exhibition in London for its vicuña shawls, and in 1853 it wove the first Balmoral tweed for Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, a pattern developed for the royal estate that gave its name to an entire category of tweed still used today.

Put those dates together and the sequence is not a mill following fashion. It is a mill importing three fibres new to the British market inside six years and being awarded internationally for the results within the same window. Most of what the industry now treats as settled, that cashmere and vicuña belong in fine Scottish weaving, was still being established when Johnstons brought the raw material into the country.

A fibre once reserved for Incan nobility, still never dyed

Vicuña has been part of the mill’s work for 175 years, and it remains the rarest fibre it handles. The animal is a wild, slender relative of the llama and alpaca, native to the high Andes, with a coarse outer coat protecting an exceptionally fine inner layer that can only be shorn every two to three years. In Inca society, vicuña fibre was reserved for royalty, worn by nobility and considered too precious for general use, a restriction that has shaped how the fibre is still talked about today.

Johnstons treats vicuña differently from every other material it works with in one specific way: it is never dyed or bleached. The fibre’s natural colour, a warm, honeyed caramel, is left exactly as it comes off the animal, which means every piece of pure vicuña the mill produces carries the same undisguised colour its wearers have worn for centuries. It is one of the few fibres in contemporary luxury manufacturing where the finished product is, in this specific sense, unaltered from the raw material.

Most of what leaves the mill each year does not say Johnstons of Elgin

For a company whose own name is well known, a large share of what the mill actually produces is anonymous. By outside accounts from the mid-2010s, somewhere between two thirds and four fifths of Johnstons’ output left the mill under other companies’ labels rather than its own, supplying Savile Row tailors among other clients with woven and knitted cloth finished to the same standard as anything sold under the Johnstons name. That work rarely gets attributed publicly, because private label manufacturing depends on discretion, but it is a substantial part of what the vertical mill actually exists to do.

It is also, in a quiet way, the clearest evidence of what the mill’s integration is worth commercially. A business does not get repeat, high-value private label work from discerning tailoring houses by being merely competent at one stage of production. It gets that work by controlling every stage, from dyed fibre to finished, checked cloth, well enough that a client can put its own name on the result with confidence. The scarves and knitwear that carry the Johnstons name are the visible fraction of a much larger, largely invisible business built on the same looms.

A flood, an apprenticeship scheme, and the people who kept it running

In 1997, a flood on the River Lossie went through the Elgin mill and destroyed its looms and much of its production equipment, machinery worth millions of pounds that had to be replaced before weaving could resume on site. The mill’s response was to rebuild in place rather than relocate or consolidate production elsewhere, keeping the same buildings that had stood since 1797 and the same integrated process that flood had just interrupted.

That commitment to place extends to the workforce. Johnstons has employees who have worked at the mill for forty and fifty years, and the company has run a modern apprenticeship scheme with a dedicated training school in Hawick, aiming to have more than a hundred apprenticeship graduates in place by the end of 2015 alone. A vertically integrated mill depends on skills that do not transfer easily between sites, teaselling, hand purling, judging a dye batch by eye, and the apprenticeship investment is what keeps that knowledge inside the business rather than ageing out of it.

The same continuity shows up in how the mill has been recognised more formally. Johnstons holds three royal warrants, for estate tweeds, knitwear and woven accessories. The first was granted in 2013 by the then Prince of Wales, now King Charles III, and two further warrants followed directly from him as monarch in 2024 and February 2025, meaning the same royal household has now endorsed the mill both before and after a change of reign. Johnstons was also one of three founding members of the Sustainable Fibre Alliance in 2015, an industry body set up to certify responsible cashmere sourcing, won a Queen’s Award for Enterprise in Sustainability in 2021, and became a certified B Corporation in 2023. None of that is a new direction for the business. It is the same site, the same integrated process and, since 1920, the same family, being measured against standards that did not exist when Alexander Johnston set up on the River Lossie in 1797.

Frequently asked questions

Final thoughts

Johnstons of Elgin is easiest to describe by its own products, the scarves, the knitwear, the tweed with a royal warrant attached. What actually explains the mill is less visible than any of that. It is a business whose founding name has outlasted the family that gave it by more than a hundred years, run today by the descendants of the man who bought it from them, still doing every stage of production on the site where it started in 1797. Most of what it makes in a given year never carries its own name at all.

Neither fact diminishes the other. A mill that survived a flood, kept its teaselling by hand, trained a new generation of apprentices and still supplies cloth good enough for other houses to put their own names on it has not been coasting on heritage. It has been doing, continuously, on one stretch of the River Lossie, the specific, integrated work that heritage textile brands are usually only assumed to still be doing.