Dens Street

Image: © kim traynor Taken: 22 May 2011

Dense Street might just be an appropriate name for this stone canyon between the Dens Street Mill and St Roque's Mill. "Jute is the fibre of plants of the cochorus order, which are common in almost every part of India. In the end of last century [c.1800] the East India Company caused inquiry to be made throughout their vast territory with the view of discovering a substitute for hemp. (...) Subsequently, about the year 1824 a bale or two of jute was sent to Dundee, to Mr Anderson, a linen manufacturer. (...) The effect of the introduction of jute on the linen trade of Dundee is shown in the following passage from a paper read before the Social Science Association at Edinburgh in 1863, by Mr Robert Sturrock, Secretary of the Dundee Chamber of Commerce:- "By the introduction of jute into the linen trade great changes have been brought about. In place of sackcloth, bagging and other coarse fabrics being made from hemp, hemp codilla, flax codilla, and coarse tows, they are all now entirely made of jute, and some of these materials are not now known in the trade. (...) The jute trade has increased so rapidly, and the goods made from the fibre are now so highly appreciated over the whole world, that, looking to the future, one is entitled to say that in extent it will probably only be rivalled by the cotton manufacture. The packsheet, baggings, sackings, sacks, and woolpacks of Dundee, are used in almost every quarter of the globe. (...) The reporters appointed by the jury on jute goods at the International Exhibition last year, remarked, 'it is in Scotland exclusively where goods made from jute represent a large branch of industry. This very cheap raw material is employed there - either pure or mixed - to make ordinary brown cloth, but more especially sacking, packing-cloth, and carpets*."" -- David Bremner, The Industries Of Scotland, Their Rise, Progress And Present Condition, 1869 * he might have added door-mats The Dundee work-force was mainly female, including many Irish, constituting cheap labour that allowed the mills to compete against their Indian competitors. "It was a city described by the women's male contemporaries as filled with 'over-dressed, loud, bold-eyed girls', and 'tousled loud-voiced lassies with the light of battle in their defiant eyes discussing with animation and candour the grievances that had constrained them to leave their work'. At the beginning of the twentieth century, there were almost three women to every two men in the city between the ages of twenty and forty-five, and a third of all heads of household (as defined in the census) were women. In 1921, 24 per cent of Dundee married women were working, compared to 6 per cent of married women in Glasgow and 5.6 per cent in Edinburgh. It was a situation considered scandalous by people of many shades of opinion. Glasgow's ILP* 'Forward' newspaper regarded it as a wicked example of capitalism's propensity to destroy the home: 'The husbands stay at home dry nursing: the woman goes out to earn wages: what an inversion of civilization.' The middle-class Dundee Social Union prescribed not better housing or higher wages, but 'more occupation for men' as the 'crying need for Dundee'. For the women themselves it was just a fact of life; they elaborated their own culture of proletarian female independence, and the husband or son who could not get a job did indeed stay at home to do the housework: 'He used to hae the hoose spotless when she come in, she says, an ma' denner a' made.'" -- T.C.Smout, A Century Of The Scottish People, 1830-1950, 1986 * Independent Labour Party

Images are licensed for reuse under creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0