But they were Scots and the sun always shone, so they did what they always did best: wild parties. The bearers would be in their splendid turbans and cummerbunds, the cooks aflutter; the Scots fell upon the gin and whisky bottles; there would be tennis and swimming, and by the end of it, they would be drunk silly, in the pond, the mill tank, everywhere... I must correct the interpretation of The Jute Mill Song. It should read "I mon bide contented,dark days and fine. There's no much pleasure livin' af'n 10/9." That's ten shillings and nine pence. On one hand, jute gave people a whole new life, but at the same time it also reduced life for many people, and gave them a really tough time," he said.

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

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. 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. 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." Top) Brian Cox on the Scottish Cemetery premises. Picture by Aranya Sen. (below) The crew shoot at the Tollygunge ClubMost of the immigrants were from Ireland, poor and Catholic. The churches that stand there to this day owe much to the indigent Irish jute workers. Yet it wasn’t their religion or nationality that made them stand out. Three quarters of those who worked in the mills were women. And so Dundee became known as ‘She Town.’ Women and children could weave, and an entire matriarchal society was setup. Women became powerful in many ways. To this day, women’s church groups continue the tradition of autonomy and social power. The highlight of the day for Cox? Having freshly fried pakoras made with the jute plant! “They were delicious and I gobbled up quite a few of them,” he laughed. 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." Dundee is proud to have produced Hollywood star Brian Cox. The city is his life’s primary constant. He was raised in the midst of the bustle of the jute mills, where both of his parents got their start.

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

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? 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.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. 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.

Brian Cox: Jute Journey (BBC 4 Tuesday 6 June 2023)

The penultimate day saw the crew leave the hotel early, only to spend half the day crammed in their cars in the intense heat. “We got lost! And when we found our way out, there were endless traffic jams. It was really frustrating,” lamented Cox. Finally the crew proceeded to the banks of the Hooghly for a few hours of filming the barges filled with mounds of jute. “Like the other days, the heat sapped all our energy,” rued Archer. Despite now enjoying a life of luxury in NewYork, Brian can identify with the mixed fortunes of his city's forebears. The cemetery is in a terrible state. Many of the graves are broken, it’s overgrown with weeds and the entire place reeks of extreme neglect,” said Cox. In their search for the graves of fellow Scots, the crew was helped by Norman Hall, the caretaker of the cemetery for years now, and his wife Loretta. Cox and the crew were rewarded — “we discovered a good 10-15 graves of people from Dundee who had lived in Calcutta and worked in the jute mills in the vicinity,” said Archer. 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). Dundee was closely connected to Kolkata through the jute trade, which involved the production of hessian from India’s “golden” fibre. It’s already starting to fade from memory. Following the footsteps of the Dundee jute workers who emigrated to India, this documentary travels through Brian Cox’s childhood and then on to Kolkata.Next month, we'll see one of Dundee's most famous sons follow in their footsteps in a voyage of discovery. 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… The BJP leader's remarks came after some Opposition leaders, including Congress MP Karti Chidambaram, demanded that the parliamentary standing committee on communications and information technology take up the matter 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.