Somewhere in our past, a lone kilted figure looks out over a herd of Highland cattle, knee deep in heather and thistles. Through the mist, the pipes skirl, a towerhouse glowers and a burn tumbles, brown with peaty water running off the moors. This is the heritage which Walter Scott invented for us in the 1820’s, and which the Victorians assiduously set to work, marketing their engineering might by pretending that its forges and steel mills were in Brigadoon, not Bridgeton. Which, I guess, is why the spring clips we use to clamp paper to a board are stamped “WAVERLEY”.
The bulldog clip is a seemingly simple gadget of tempered spring steel. It comes in many varieties, yet all consist of a barrel spring with two lever-shaped handles. Every home has several, tucked away in the back of a drawer. I first relied on it when I was a schoolboy: several clips clamped a large sheet of Fabriano paper to a board, and that allowed me to go outside to sketch. Through its life, the bulldog clip evolved, and its highest evolution is the Waverley Clip.
The bulldog clip was reputedly invented at the end of the 19th Century in Birmingham, where metallurgists developed spring steel, and where the British stationery industry grew up, centred on dip pen nib manufacturing. The technology quickly spread. MacNiven & Cameron was a firm of printers and stationers, originally founded as Nisbet MacNiven, a paper maker in 1770 at Balerno. They developed as a stationery wholesaler after moving into Edinburgh in 1788, and for many years they had a printing works at 23 Blair Street in the heart of the Old Town. The brothers John and Donald Cameron became involved in 1840, and the firm’s name changed to MacNiven & Cameron in 1845.
Duncan Cameron, another brother, invented the Waverley nib: its narrow waist, with an upturned point rather than a convex point, took the extreme point of the pen off the paper and made writing smoother. It was first manufactured for the company by Gillott in 1864, and later by others. In 1881, the company diversified and the Oban Times newspaper was acquired then run for a time by Duncan, then his son Waverley Cameron – the boy being named after the pen, rather than vice versa!
As their business grew, MacNiven & Cameron expanded their “Waverley” brand to include the Waverley Clip. Premier Grip, which has been in production for a century, claims to be “the original bulldog clip”, but Myers make their Foldback clip, Rexel their Boston clip, and Perry their Victoria clip… all of which are variations on the same theme, yet the Waverley clip is perhaps the highest evolution. It bears no ornamentation, nor decorative tooling, just a simple fluting of the handles for strength. Its name, in chunky moderne lettering, is pressed into the steel lips of the clip. It’s appealing simply because it’s the ultimate in unregarded objects.
The clip’s trade name and trade dress recalls the powerful reach of Walter Scott, author of the famous “Waverley novels”, the first of which was published in 1814; his portrait was combined with the McNiven & Cameron’s slogan on product packaging: “They come as a Boon and a Blessing to men: The Pickwick, the Owl, and the Waverley Pen”. Scott is shown complete with bangs of flowing hair and a high collar, but he didn’t endorse the nib or the clip, because he died long before they went into production.
Brands like Waverley are strong simply because we know that their reputation grew from quality and longevity, and they emerged before the onset of corporatism and the relentless cost-cutting which is really the destruction of value. If the clip was launched today, it would be injection moulded from plastic in a sweatshop, then packaged to sell on price rather than quality.
Eventually MacNiven & Cameron bought a factory at Watery Lane, Bordesley, Birmingham and manufactured clips, nibs and other things for themselves, from 1900 to 1964. By the 1960’s, the stock-in-trade of their factory was the barrel spring-type paper clip, although some nib manufacturing continued to the end, mainly for the Indian market. After that, the company moved to the Waverley Works in Edinburgh: thus, earlier Waverley Clips are stamped “Made in England”, and later ones “Made in Scotland”.
More recently the remnants of the company relocated again, still making stationery under the Waverley Cameron name, to Dunkeld Road in Blairgowrie. That too became the Waverley Works, which is where the Waverley clip ended its days.
MacNiven & Cameron’s progress follows a familiar trend: a slow decline from Victorian times, firstly they closed an old factory in the Black Country, then their offices in the heart of Edinburgh were shut because the buildings were worth more than the business they contained. Finally they moved to a modern industrial unit in a small provincial town, always moving further north, to lower overheads and the margins of the industrial belt. The business shrank, Walter Scott fell spectacularly out of fashion, but the Waverley Clips are still going strong.
Image from Maynard's Wine Gums advert – copyright Aardman Animation, used with permission.
