FOR a man who has spent a lifetime designing carpets, Ronnie Wilkie was walking on air after one commission went down well with a client.

He was tasked with coming up with rugs to match an old piece of fabric but this was no ordinary customer - the carpets were for Balmoral Castle and the woman ordering them was the Queen.

The former design director of legendary Glasgow carpet manufacturers Stoddard Templeton said he couldn't believe it when he was told she wanted to meet him.

"I just remember thinking, I hope she likes it," he laughs.

"I heard her say to her equerry, oh, that's beautiful. It turned out it was a one-to-one meeting. I had 15 minutes with her and we just walked round and discussed the palace, the decor, how the design had evolved and talked about the company's archive."

There cannot be a better example of the importance of maintaining the archive of the firm that closed in 2005.

From the great halls of an Indian maharajah's palace to the luxurious lounges of the Queen Mary and the aisles of Westminster Abbey on the Queen's coronation day, all have been carpeted by Stoddard Templeton.

When the firm went into receivership, Glasgow School of Art (GSA), Glasgow Univer-sity and Glasgow Life got together to buy the archive.

GSA has the design library and the collection is going on show in an exhibition that weaves the story of carpet-making in the west of Scotland from 1843.

Each one a mini work of art, the designs were intricately detailed and the colours in those from the 1940s are as bright as if painted yesterday.

Ronnie started working as a trainee designer in 1976 at the Templeton Carpet Factory in Bridgeton.

There was a studio with 20 designers, all male, and a separate room of 10 women copyists who traced designs because they weren't considered creative enough to come up with their own ideas.

"It was a couple of years after I joined they started to realise that girls were creative and shouldn't just be copy-ing," he says. "In those days you had to grind your paint and mix it to get the colours to match the tufts. We got all our inspiration from the archives."

He remembers that each Friday during training he visited the archive with a senior designer.

"We went to drawing, painting and textile design classes at Glasgow School of Art but once a week we also went into the archive where we were trained in drawing from the archive. You would get an old chintz design and draw it, until you got the movement right. Then you had to draw it freehand and put it on to squared paper so it could go into manufacturing."

The archive was invaluable when Ronnie worked on a commission for director James Cameron's film Titanic.

Stoddard designed the carpets that sank with the ship in 1912. When filmmakers needed to recreate the sumpt-uous decor, they asked Ronnie to source the original designs.

"I must be the only guy who watches the film and looks at the carpet instead of what's going on in the scene," he says.

Ronnie was in good comp-any at Stoddard Templeton. Over the years designers from Charles Voysey and Charles Rennie Mackintosh to Mary Quant designed carpets for the two companies. Artist and writer John Byrne worked at the Elderslie factory and wrote his Slab Boys plays based on experiences there. And painter John Lowrie Morrison did a three-month work placement at Stoddard.

GSA lecturer Dr Helena Britt has curated the exhibition and was intrigued by how the archive was used in the studio by designers.

Alongside hand-painted designs there are books and limited edition portfolios collected by company direct-ors on foreign trips dating back to the 1800s, all brought back to Glasgow to fire the imagination of designers in Bridgeton and keep them up to date with key trends. They take visitors to the exhibition on a trip from India and Afghanistan to Hungary, Japan and China.

Stoddard Templeton published catalogues and books as a record of its work and in one book Helena leafs through, we later discover many of the photographs were taken by Hugh F Gibson, the father of Evening Times photographer Mark Gibson.

"There isn't a carpet design or carpet industry really in the west of Scotland now so it's important we document it. They were massive inter-national firms and undertook prestigious commissions," says Helena. "There isn't another collection of this type of material in existence. It's phenomenal. For it to have stayed in Glasgow is really important so that these stories can be told."

If you worked in a Stoddard Templeton design studio and can contribute to the project, contact h.britt@gsa.ac.uk.

l Interwoven Connections: The Stoddard Templeton Design Studio & Design Library is at the Mackintosh Museum, Glasgow School of Art, from tomorrow to January 11.

angela.mcmanus@eveningtimes.co.uk