The book Victorian Dundee tells of a city at the height of its prosperity, ten years after it was first published a revised and expanded edition has been published. History professor Christopher Whatley explains what the old Dundee tells us about the new.
The other new chapter, by Rob Duck and Charles McKean, looks at the impact the development of Dundee’s rail links and docks had on the city. Dundee’s railways gave a hint at how rail bosses would treat ancient towns: its tracks originally ran to Ward Road, at the heart of Dundee’s new industrial district.
Trains trundled just feet away from the western faade of the Church of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Dundee’s mother church at the time, and the tracks then blithely sliced across the Nethergate, causing enormous disruption and traffic jams. According to the chapter’s authors, a lack of vision in Dundee’s Town Council abetted the railway bosses, allowing them to put the needs of business ahead of civic amenities for the people.
Victorian Dundee also tells the story of James Thomson. ”He was a great city architect who was Dundee’s city engineer and director of housing during the early 20th century,” Chris says.
”He developed a visionary plan for Dundee, which included the Kingsway city bypass and a plan that the Caird Hall should back onto the water. Sadly, the opposite happened the approach roads and Tayside House took Caird Hall further from the waterfront.”
Chris’s own chapter looks at the curious tales behind the statues in Albert Square. ”I take the statues and try to explain what they tell us about who Dundonians’ heroes were.”
The statues, Chris explains, were largely erected with money donated by citizens, ”Most of the funding for the statues came from normal people who admired the figures that were being celebrated.”
The statues that occupy Albert Square are Queen Victoria, engineer James Carmichael, George Kinloch (the city’s first post-1832 Reform Act MP who died less than six months after taking office) and Robert Burns (pictured).
”Although money was first raised for a statue of Kinloch when he died in 1933, it took almost 40 years before it was erected,” Chris says. ”Part of the reason for the delay was the Tories didn’t want to have a statue of a radical in any public space in Dundee.”
‘Robert Burns was born in Ayr, and now he sits in Albert Square,’ runs an old piece of doggerel, and the story of how the poet’s stone likeness came to be in Dundee is the most interesting of the four statues.
”Burns wasn’t born here, he didn’t die here and he seems to have spent just one night here,” Chris explains. ”But when his statue was unveiled in 1880 the crowd was the biggest ever assembled in Dundee. Around 25,000 people crammed into Albert Square. Many more lined the surrounding streets. Burns was enormously important in terms of giving ordinary working people a sense of self respect through songs like A Man’s a Man.
”The statue was paid for by Dundonians but the statue they got wasn’t their idea, it was a replica of a Burns statue commissioned from Sir John Steell to be erected in New York’s Central Park. It shows a seated Burns in the act of creating a poem to Highland Mary.
”What Dundee got was a statue commissioned by New Yorkers for New York. And New York had wanted one that matched the statue of Sir Walter Scott in Princes Street Gardens. Andrew Carnegie was so appalled that he wrote from America and refused to fund any more statues of Burns seated.”
What Victorian Dundee shows us is that the popular impression of Dundee elsewhere in Scotland an unfashionable city whose fortunes have been on the wane for some time is based only on the most recent past.
”Many people and their mothers and fathers have lived through Dundee in a period of decline,” Chris concludes. ”The existence of buildings including McManus Galleries shows jute was a real success story. There was a long period when Dundee was an exciting and vibrant place to be.”
Victorian Dundee: Image and Realities is on sale now, published by Dundee University Press.
For much of the 19th century, Dundee was the world’s biggest producer of jute, but by the latter half of the 20th century, its star was on the wane. The jute industry was in terminal decline and many of the great buildings and monuments had fallen into disrepair.
Wrong-headed people ran the city. They fell in love with concrete and allegedly corruption, and they defaced or even destroyed some of the city’s wonders, including the fabulous Royal Arch, which was blown up to make way for the Tay Bridge off ramp because city planners couldn’t be bothered having it moved.
Now, after a long and painful labour, the city is poised for a rebirth of sorts. Its life sciences sector is home to some of the finest scientific minds in the world, its computer games sector employs some flourishing young talents, and the V&A in Dundee will complete a cultural revival that began with The Rep and expanded with the opening of the DCA in the year before we flipped the calendar onto a new millennium.
To understand the future, you need to understand the past, and the book Victorian Dundee takes us back to a time before living memory when the city was one of the most vibrant trading posts in the country and had perhaps Britain’s strongest links with India.
The book fits in alongside Jute No More: Transforming Dundee, and Dundee: Renaissance to Enlightenment to form a trilogy of volumes on the city’s history.
”I don’t think any other Scottish town or city is as well represented in terms of a very readable collection of history books,” says Professor Chris Whatley, Dundee University vice principal and professor of Scottish history, who is also one of Victorian Dundee’s three editors.
”Dundee’s moving closer to becoming a centre for culture and creativity topped off by the V&A and these books provide a very useful promotional tool.”
The second edition contains two new chapters, one of which was penned by Chris. He explains the need for a series of books covering Dundee’s wider history: ”When I came to Dundee I could read a lot about the jute industry, class struggle and all the social consequences of a city dependent on a single industry that was in decline. But Dundee has been around since the 12th century. There has been a lot of history before jute and since.”
Instead, Victorian Dundee tells stories that even lifelong Dundonians might not be too familiar with.
”We look at the way Dundee used its riverside location to its advantage by the construction of a remarkable docks stretching hundreds of metres along the waterfront,” Chris continues.
”There’s an important story to tell about Dundee being for so long a maritime city, and we’ve kind of forgotten that although we’re now rediscovering it.
”There was also the introduction of the railway, which had the unfortunate side effect of separating the city from the foreshore. And there’s the way the commercial centre of the town moved from down by the docks up to Albert Square and Reform Street.”