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Dundee has had a bad historical press. Lord Cockburn's description of early Victorian Dundee as a "sink of atrocity, which no moral flushing seems capable of cleansing", is well-known. But even in the twentieth century the image was further blackened by negative comment. A "grim monument" to man's inhumanity to man, was how the poet Hugh MacDiarmid depicted Dundee. More recently, a series of journalists have taken pot shots at the city, which has been compared to Murmansk and Gdansk, its inhabitants portrayed as sour-faced and miserable, with hard drinking the only solution to their sorry plight.
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Recent work by members of the University's department of history however is beginning to shed light on and expose a much more buoyant city in the nineteenth century. This is a timely development, and coincides with a new sense of purpose and prosperity which has been evident in Dundee from the 1980s. Dundee graduates who have not visited the University precincts recently, would be pleasantly surprised at the vitality of the Perth Road-Nethergate-Westport area, with its small specialist shops, an emphasis on the arts represented by the city's thriving repertory theatre, contemporary arts centre and galleries, and a range of pubs, cafes and eating places.
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Hitherto, the study of Dundee has largely been confined to jute, for which the period of ascendancy was relatively short. Although the fact that Dundee led the world in jute production and sales from the 1850s to the 1880s was a remarkable achievement. The town also housed the world's biggest linen and jute works. Less attention has been paid to medieval Dundee, when it was second only to Edinburgh in the Scottish urban league table, its skyline dominated by St Mary's church tower - now the tallest survivor from the medieval period in Scotland - rather than mill chimneys. Investigations being carried out by Charles McKean, the department's Professor of Scottish Architectural History, have uncovered previously unknown traces of pre-jute Dundee. These include closes, hidden frontages of buildings, and interiors. Some of the wynds and narrow closes running towards the Tay from Nethergate and High Street are reminiscent of Baltic seaport towns - Dundee's trading partners in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
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But it is the nineteenth century which has been most misunderstood. Overlooked is the fact that Dundee thrived until mid-century as Britain's leading centre for coarse linens, and at the European forefront in mechanised flax spinning. Even in the early decades of jute manufacturing, Dundee was a bustling metropolis, with the largest part of its inhabitants glorying in the town's manufacturing prowess and united in their attachment to the city, Scotland and the British Empire. Significantly, one of the primary sources upon which historians have relied in order to portray Dundee as a brutal and brutalising den of mills is James Myles' "autobiographical" Chapters in the Life of a Dundee Factory Boy (1850), with its accounts of beatings, immorality and masters who tampered with factory clocks in order to prolong the working day. Paradoxically, Myles, never a mill or factory worker but a stonemason with literary pretensions and political interests, was an ardent supporter of urban life in general and Dundee in particular, with its employment-creating steam engines, coffee houses, reading rooms, hotels, lodging houses, mechanics institutes, libraries, literary clubs, debating rooms, young men's societies, missionary societies, churches and chapels.
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Systematic study of the town's buildings, including the Custom House in Dock Street, the Exchange Coffee House in Shore Terrace, villas in Roseangle, terraces along Magdalen Green, and even mills, factories and warehouses, demonstrates that considerable investment, not a little of it for comfort and display, took place in the urban fabric of Dundee in the first half of the nineteenth century, prior to the jute era.
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Dens Works, which was continually expanded, redeveloped and continuously improved from the 1820s up to the 1860s, was not simply a utilitarian place of work, but a massive, integrated and virtually self-contained industrial village, with a school and church adjoining, workers' housing and an adjacent park.
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Architectural flourishes such as decorated gates, obelisks and Italianate bell tower and cupolas, captured both the pride of the Baxters in their commercial achievement and their hopes too of creating a harmonious community of workers.
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Rather more surprising to the research team was the evidence they uncovered which challenged traditional portrayals of Dundee's workers as female "she-devils" - untamed incomers to a "frontier town" - with a workforce constantly at war with Gradgrind-like millowners. Instead, they found a city in which masters and their employees shared values and enthusiasms. Works outings for instance were commonplace, with over 1,000 "well-dressed" workers from Cox's Camperdown Works marching through Dundee in June 1859 accompanied by four bands on their way for a day of races, playing and dancing in St Andrews. The opening of Baxter Park in 1863 saw an immense gathering of as many as 80,000 of the town's inhabitants gathering for the occasion, watching and cheering as a procession of some 7,500 wound its way to the park, passed by mills and other buildings decked with "great walls of verdure", as wells as flags and placards. Among those celebrated in this manner were Queen Victoria, leading employers, Dundee's prosperity, James Watt, Robert Burns and Lord Byron, while artisans in the column proudly displayed the products of their industries, model steam engines, looms and ships. But there were other events and issues which revealed a set of common beliefs - Scottish patriotism (William Wallace was the most popular national hero), anti-papacy, Italian nationalism, anti-landlordism and other planks of nineteenth-century Liberalism in Scotland.
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This included female mill workers, some of whom were reported during the General Election campaign of 1868 to have been parading arm-in-arm, singing abusive songs about the Conservative candidate while displaying "Vote for Armistead" (Liberal) tickets. Whatever characteristics had marked them out when they first began to arrive in larger numbers from Ireland and rural Angus, there were (even male) observers in the 1850s and 1860s who were prepared to concede that compared to shopgirls and domestic servants, Dundee's female textile workers "were not so bad after all", and commended them for the way in which some of them "gloried" in their work. Reports of wide-eyed women and girls, enjoying to the full the spending power that regular (if low) wages gave them to shop, and attend circuses and fairs, contrast with some of the more usual descriptions of Dundee's raucous, loud and drink-besotted millgirls.
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This is not to deny the evidence of glaring differences in wealth and income and social status - although it is interesting that, contrary to long-held opinion, the move out of the old burgh to the suburbs of Broughty Ferry and Newport took place after 1850 rather than earlier. Prior to mid-century Dundee was more socially integrated than, say, Glasgow at the same period. Much of this would change from the mid-1870s, as competitive pressures from India and the continent forced employers to look even more closely at wage costs, and drove them to drop their paternalist industrial relations strategy in favour of a much more aggressive, anti-labour stance (although they had never felt comfortable with worker organisations or socialist ideology).
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The research for this investigation into Dundee's history, the most concentrated and wide-ranging undertaken, has been carried out under the auspices of the History of Dundee project headed by myself. Helped at first by funding from the University's Strategic Initiatives Fund, a Research Fellow, Dr Louise Miskell, was appointed in 1997. The project has also involved several members of staff who have joined the department since 1992, along with postgraduate research students. As well as academic articles, a highly readable book which reveals all the new findings, has been written and published. Victorian Dundee: Image and Realities, a richly illustrated text, edited by Louise Miskell, myself and Bob Harris, is now available from Tuckwell Press and in bookshops.
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Graduates of the University who read history when they were in Dundee will be interested to learn that the department of history is now larger than it has ever been, with seventeen staff and over 500 students taking its courses. It has taken the lead in developing distance learning in Scottish history, and boasts a vigorous and growing postgraduate community, now strengthened by a taught MPhil in history. The department has maintained its traditional strengths in modern British, European and American history, but has also expanded into Scottish history which, like European, is now taught from the sixteenth century onwards. The History of Dundee project continues the department's long-standing interest in and commitment to the city's history, as exemplified by the work of scholars such as Enid Gauldie, Bruce Lenman and Charlotte Lythe, the late William Walker (Juteopolis) and, more recently Annette Smith, David Swinfen and myself with our Life and Times of Dundee (1922).
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It is hoped in the future, funding permitting, to explore in depth the much neglected seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Hitherto, Dundee has not featured in the history of the Scottish Enlightenment. Project workers like Dr Bob Harris however are convinced that this is not the whole story and that Dundee too shared in the great cultural renaissance which is presently mainly associated with Edinburgh, Glasgow and Aberdeen. Watch this space.
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