They have a cemetery in Calcutta which is full of people from Scotland, and actually has a whole section of people from Dundee who were all buried there." Mastermind: Sir Isaac Newton, Red Dwarf, Mary Queen of Scots, Billy Bragg (BBC Two Monday 6 November 2023) The actor remembers the last days of the jute industry, and considers the pioneering spirit of the jute emigrants to be something he has in common with them. The crew was overwhelmed by the welcome at each mill. “Everyone was very hospitable and so keen to let us film them and their lives,” smiled Archer. For Cox, this was an extremely emotional experience. “A couple of hours spent in these mills made me realise what hard work it was for my parents and all the others who laboured for years in the jute industry,” said Cox. The workers at each mill were interviewed, with Cox spending some personal time — off-camera — with them.

Hollywood star Brian Cox follows the trail of the Dundee jute Hollywood star Brian Cox follows the trail of the Dundee jute

It was exhilarating to see Hindus and Muslims working together in such harmony. In fact, jute for me is a metaphor for binding. We even discovered a mosque and a temple standing side by side in the vicinity of one mill,” said Cox. The budding actor headed to London in the 1960s, and has gone on to forge himself a career that has led to him being regarded as one of the best in the country. The film also touches on the taboo, as it was at the time, of Anglo-Indian relationships - and Dundee's dual status as the UK's whaling capital as well as having one of the country's biggest populations of females per capita. The workers in these mills will find maximum footage in the hour-long documentary. “It was wonderful to see the women working so tirelessly. I was taken in by the amazing grace of Indian women who can take on the most menial tasks and impart such respectability to it,” marvelled Cox. The 63-year-old travelled to Calcutta to make the film, along the way sampling some of the less-obvious uses for the vegetable fibre which kept Dundee working for years.

There are still some unanswered questions for me. One of the questions that the programme only touches on is how did these people - most of whom were men - learn to spin and weave? Life for the peasants who grew the jute was, inevitably, much much tougher. From planting to maturation was ninety to hundred days, by which time the jute had grown over seven feet high. In intense humid heat, the farmers worked day after day to harvest their golden fibre. When jute prices began to fall, they had to supplement their incomes by growing other crops. Even today, Bengal’s farmers are unable to participate in the rise in demand for the ecologically green crop. They scarcely earn 40 pence a day from it. But still, today, nearly four million families owe their livelihoods to jute. With India’s partition in 1947, the best quality jute-growing areas fell into East Pakistan (later Bangladesh), tantalisingly out of reach for Calcutta’s jute mills. In the orgy of violence that befell the countries in the wake of that great sundering, the Dundonian Jutewallahs found themselves protected behind their compound walls, defended by stalwart Gurkhas. Shortly thereafter, the Indian government issued directives that more and more locals should be employed in positions that were held by Europeans. Many Jutewallahs thought that the mills would collapse once they left and the Indians took over; the know-how, after all, was with them and not the natives. There was a mass exodus of expatriates out of Bengal, and by the early 1950s, most of Calcutta’s mills had passed into Indian ownership. messages and online donations to Parkinson's UK, please visit https://antoniogonsalves.muchloved.com/ Next month, we'll see one of Dundee's most famous sons follow in their footsteps in a voyage of discovery.

Goan Voice Newsletter: Thursday 01 Jun. 2023

Calcutta’s first mill opened in 1855; seventy-five years later, the city was producing 70% of the world’s jute products. With a never-ending supply of raw materials right on its doorstep, it made far more economical sense to concentrate the industry in Bengal, rather than half-way around the world in Scotland.Today there are Scottish veterans forming the Calcutta and Mofussil Society: veterans of the Indian jute industry who like to congregate in places like the Monifieth Golf Club, to partake of Indian food, speak Hindi, and reminisce about their days in the East. The majority of Calcutta’s mills were owned by expatriate British businessmen, but they were run by Dundonians. Ambitious jute workers moved from Dundee to Calcutta in the 1850s, and they ran the industry there for the best part of a century. The last ones returned to Scotland in the late sixties, having been made to feel rather uncomfortable and unwelcome in independent India. They joke about it now, of course, but they heard the labourers keeping the rhythm while loading and unloading jute, singing what sounded like ‘hey-ho, the sahib’s a saala’ (meaning, pretty much, that the boss is a bloody bastard). Half and ten and nineBy the time she wrote these lines, the time of jute in Dundee was already passing. The jute barons strove to outdo each other in the grandeur of their mills, playing ‘my chimney is bigger than your chimney’. They failed to see that their industry was nearing its end. The balance of power in the world of jute had shifted to Calcutta. It's easy to laugh at that thought but these people had a real go and had interesting lives, and I admire them for that." But more entrenched was the social divisions among the colonials. The Establishment of the Colonial masters and their descendants, members of the Tollygunge club (which only admitted, for instance, its first Indian member thirty years after Independence!), looked down upon the Jutewallahs as mere labourers, bottom of the social heap. The bankers in Calcutta considered themselves higher than the jute mill office managers; naturally, the latter had to find people in the mills to look down upon as well, people like the assistant mill managers and their flunkies. These various hierarchies very rarely mixed socially. Those raucous parties were always among Jutewallahs of a particular social stratum. May: Herald. 12 properties changed from orchard to settlement within a month of notifying amendment to Section 17 (2) of TCP Act. As many as 12 properties, including six in Morjim village, were changed from orchard to settlement within a month of notification… What has surprised Goans is that all the applicants are non-Goans and have questioned how can the experts made such glaring errors at the time of preparing a comprehensive plan? “Where is city planner Vinayak Bharne, who was supposed to guide TCP on the development plan as per TCP Minister Vishwajit Rane?”…He added: "The Scots organised the Empire and organised it very well. But you can still feel the shadow of the Empire in Calcutta all these years later.

BBC Four - Schedules, Sunday 11 June 2023 BBC Four - Schedules, Sunday 11 June 2023

Brian said: "My family history is bound up in jute. My parents followed their parents into the mills but the closest I got was as a wee boy, peering through the open doors of the Eagle JuteWorks on a hot summer's day. IIT'S a long way to go to die - but that's exactly what happened to many of the women of Dundee who "disappeared" after travelling to India to cash in on the jute industry of Calcutta. The Hooghly was the centrepiece of the world of jute, providing berthing for ships bound for Dundee as well points of disembarkation for the Jutewallahs arriving to take up their new jobs and accommodations along the river banks. Top) Brian Cox on the Scottish Cemetery premises. Picture by Aranya Sen. (below) The crew shoot at the Tollygunge ClubA Dundonian himself, Cox was visibly moved. “To uncover the history of my fellow Dundonians who travelled all the way to India to work under extreme conditions and died in an alien land is extremely emotional.” The shooting went off smoothly, with the crew having little to complain about. Except the sweltering heat. “The sun is a scorcher and the heat is killing. I have been through three shirts already,” laughed Cox. I use Stevenson's great saying: 'I travel not to go anywhere but instead to go, the great affair is to move...' Despite now enjoying a life of luxury in NewYork, Brian can identify with the mixed fortunes of his city's forebears. In a revealing documentary from BBC Scotland, Hollywood star Brian Cox, whose films include X-Men 2, The Bourne Identity and Braveheart, traces the history and varied fortunes of the city's jute emigrants. This was Brian Cox’s first day on the shoot and the actual start to the filming of the documentary. The crew started their day early with a visit to St Andrews Church at Dalhousie Square. “Seeing the church was overwhelming. Not only did we have an opportunity to attend a beautiful Palm Sunday service, we also managed to meet with some of the congregation, chat and film them,” said Cox.

Brian Coxs Jute Journey - video Dailymotion BBC Brian Coxs Jute Journey - video Dailymotion

Dundee’s population had shot up by 30,000 during the jute boom in the 19th century, yet only a few hundred new houses were built. The cramped quarters ruined the health of the residents; by the time of the Great War, most of Dundee men were considered too weak to fight. The jute barons meanwhile built their own large houses away from the grime of industrial Dundee, in a district called Broughty Ferry. So posh was it that the area by Strathern Road was for a time the richest square mile on the planet, until it was superseded by Hollywood in the early 20th century. The Marwaris, business-oriented clans from Rajasthan, became the new kings of jute. They had been involved in India’s jute industry from the very beginning, but they continued to employ Dundonians as managers. Interaction between the Scots and the Indians increased substantially. The Jutewallahs trained up Indian colleagues; in some conservative mills, however, there were still lines that could not be crossed. Several of them who fell in love with Indian women found themselves fired from their jobs. In their prime, though, walking about Chowringhee was like ambling about Dundee High Street, what with all the accents of home they heard at every turn. The Jutewallahs left Dundee for India in search of better lives, a fortune perhaps. They imprinted themselves in Calcutta’s being. Even in the 1980s, long after they had returned home, the jute barges on the Hooghly River still bore marks of Dundee’s great mills – Eagle Works, Baxters… May: Times of India. Startups, tourism to figure in June G20 meets… The third meeting of the Startup Engagement Group is planned for June 3-4… The third meeting of the International Financial Architecture Working Group (IFAWG) of the G20 is scheduled from June 5-7 … Supreme Audit Institutions will take place from June 12-14 … 4th tourism Working Group Meeting from June 19-20 … The labour of the Indian workmen was far harder. Day in and day out they toiled in torrid heat and corrosive dust. Discipline was harsh in the mills. As long as they worked hard and were punctual, they had jobs. If not, well, there were millions others desperate for a job, any job. Just as in Dundee decades earlier, the conditions and support for Indian workers in Calcutta were dire. There were no tribunals, no unions, no reprieve.He said: "When you're born in Dundee, the thing you're very much aware of is the River Tay and the water. Being so close to water you get that sense of journey, of travelling to go somewhere. The jute barons made a fortune out of these people. They gave them work, which allowed them to have houses and so on, but Dundee still had the worst child poverty in history at the time - and these people were living half a mile away from some of the richest people in the world."