Main content

How one of Scotland鈥檚 greatest exports helps women in Ghana

The Singer Story: Made in Clydebank explores how Singer sewing machines became one of Scotland’s biggest exports in the early to middle part of the twentieth century.

Singer’s Clydebank factory closed in 1980, but the sewing machines made there still serve a purpose to this day.

Each year, over 300 Singer sewing machines – some over 100 years old – are refurbished by a Southampton-based charity and sent 3000 miles away to Accra in Ghana where they’re used to help train young women to sew.

Singers in Ghana

Singer sewing machines resurrected and re-purposed in Ghana.

The charity Street Girls Aid uses the refurbished Singer sewing machines to teach young Ghanaian women to sew and how to design clothes from scratch.

Having a sewing machine is going to change my life, big time!
Gloria Boakyewaa Brumpog

Vida Amoako – Director of Street Girls Aid – says the machines being old is not a problem:

“The machines are very durable… we are very grateful for them.”

Students such as Edinam also believe that the machines’ basic features make them easier to learn on:

“At first, it was difficult because I didn’t know how to cut or use the machine. After training, I find it easy to do everything and I’m very happy.”

Street Girls Aid participant Gloria Boakyewaa Brumpog with her treasured Singer sewing machine.

Every year sees over 20 young women graduate from the training course, with each participant getting to take their sewing machine away with them in the hope it will offer them better opportunity of starting their own business.

Graduate Gloria Boakyewaa Brumpog sees completing the course as being hugely beneficial to her future:

“Having a sewing machine is going to change my life, big time!”

How Singer established a town

‘One of the world’s best-selling products’

Singer sewing machines were, at one point, one of the world’s best-selling products and the drive for more machines to be made meant that a huge work force – a high point of 13,000 workers – was required to cope with demand.

Opened in 1884, the Singer factory on the banks of the River Clyde was state of the art for its time and said to be the biggest factory of its kind in the world.

The creation of the factory transformed a sleepy village by the Clyde into an industrial powerhouse, with Dr Valerie Wright – Social and Economic History Research Associate at Glasgow University – seconding this idea:

“It literally changed the geography of the whole place.”

Another way the Singer factory changed the local landscape was with the imposing clock tower, which could be seen for miles around.

The Singer clock

Employees talk about the imposing presence of the Singer factory clock.

Latest features from 大象传媒 Scotland