Wickerwork industry

The wickerwork industry, or the making of osier goods, chiefly pieces of furniture, has its main centre of production in the parish (freguesia) of Camacha. We have already given a brief account of it on pp. 195 ff. of volume I, in the article devoted to that parish.

In 1912 the head of the section of technical industrial services in Funchal wrote:

“

The manufacture of wickerwork is at present making great progress, both through the expansion and improvement of the corresponding crops and through the value of exports of wicker and of finished goods, which is growing and gaining in worth thanks also to more careful workmanship and better taste in design.

Work of good taste and careful finish in this speciality is now frequently to be found. All that the Madeiran worker achieves with a complete lack of vocational training leaves us with the vivid impression of how much better he would be able to produce if guided by artistic instruction.

Given the way this industry operates here, almost exclusively located in the parish of Camacha, from which it has not been possible to move it, it is easy to see that only vocational teaching given in a school in that same locality could be put to proper use.

The Funchal Industrial School (Escola Industrial do Funchal) could contribute to the education of this worker, but he does not attend it because he lives too far away. Moreover, the conditions of the industry, long bound up with local customs and working habits, do not in most cases offer enough pay for someone who would have to live away from home and from the other small interests he needs in order to make a living.

The price of labour has fallen recently. As with embroidery, it is certainly also owing to a certain home-industry character that the payment for labour can be reduced to rates that would be utterly unacceptable in workshop employment.

Exports of wicker in 1911 may be assumed to have been 900 tonnes, and it is no exaggeration to suppose that as much again was consumed in local manufacture.

The commercial value of exports should be reckoned at no less than 180 contos (one million réis) de réis a year, in osier goods alone.

This industry may be assumed at present to occupy more than 600 people, including over 300 men, 200 women and 100 minors.’

From the same source we obtained the following information in 1921: ‘This industry is in decline today, while it is expanding in other countries, and above all in South Africa, to which the island exports its wicker. The rising cost of the raw material, which prevents some manufacturers who are short of capital from buying it at the right season; the departure abroad of many workers formerly employed in the industry, while others on the island turn to other, more profitable work; the heavier freight charges on finished wicker goods, because they take up more space in ships’ holds; and the local duties and taxes, which weigh more heavily on wickerwork articles than on the raw material: these, in the view of that enlightened manufacturer, are the main reasons why the industry has lost a large part of its former importance.

Madeira produces 700 to 800 tonnes of wicker a year, perhaps half of which is shipped off the island. At the Cape of Good Hope, once an important market for Madeira’s wickerwork, many of the same articles are now made with wicker imported from our island, and the same is happening in Brazil. England is at present the country that imports the largest quantities of wickerwork made in Madeira, and, we are told, it also receives large amounts of raw wicker.’

We have been unable to gather any further information for the years after that, but we believe that the industry long ago entered a phase of steep decline, owing to the causes set out above and particularly to the competition from other centres of production that have since emerged.