George:

Thanks for your very interesting follow-up to mine.

Not being cotton-growers the British continued to produce and process hemp
rope long after the USA 1930s ban you tell us about until - surprise,
surprise! - UK manufacturers introduced nylon ropes in the late 1950s to
early 1960s.

Two personal memories:

- my first rock climbing fall after switching from secure hemp to
over-stretching nylon was my first experience of what today would be
called a bungee jump - though I used a much less polite name for it at the
time!

- moving to the West of England in the "flower power" year of 1968 I found
that the newly derelict sites of the former marine ropeworks in Plymouth
and Exeter (closed a few years earlier with the ban on hemp imports) were
growing enough naturalised cannabis plants to supply the needs of all the
region's pop festivals.  At the Exeter Museum we used to have at least
half a dozen people a day bringing in plants from the waterfront a few
hundred yards away to check the identification!

Patrick Boylan