The Town House, King Street

Image: © Ian Dodds Taken: 9 Jun 2021

This is one of Dundee city centre's numerous listed buildings. It is currently a pub, but in the 1870s - and presumably for a while after that too, since Historic Scotland say that this was when the company paid for alterations to the 1815 building - it served as the office of a jute manufacturer. You don't have to read a great deal about Dundee before jute is mentioned. Jute is a coarse fibre, and is pretty much just a more refined version of hessian - both derive from the same plant. The plant comes from the East of India, a region with which Dundee did a great deal of trade back in the days of empire. There is what is described as probably being an urban myth mentioned on a couple of websites as the reason that for decades this city produced almost all of the world's jute. The story goes that the cloth manufacturers of the day couldn't figure out a profitable way to make fabric from the fibres due to them being so coarse. However, Dundee was heavily involved in the whaling industry at the time and at some point somebody spilt some whale oil onto the jute, which had the effect of softening it into a workable condition. Even when jute manufacturing began in India forty or so years after things took off here, Dundonian expertise was often required to streamline processes and maximize profits, so there was a steady flow of workers making the voyage across to India. At one point almost half the city's workforce was involved in the jute industry in some way. Women, who were always paid less than men for doing the same job back in the bad old days, were used in high numbers to keep costs down and apparently their unemployed husband's were often disparagingly called 'kettle boilers'!

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