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 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.

Dundee - Blogger JOST A MON: The Jutewallahs of Dundee - Blogger

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 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. After spending the entire morning on the church premises, the crew took a lunch break and then proceeded to the Scottish Cemetery in Park Circus in the hope of finding the graves of Scots who had lived in Calcutta, made it their home for over a hundred years, and were buried in the city.

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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."

Calcutta (Louis Malle) - DocuWiki

Despite now enjoying a life of luxury in NewYork, Brian can identify with the mixed fortunes of his city's forebears. 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. 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. But of course that social power was exclusively within their own milieus. As far as the bosses of the mills, the rich upper-class were concerned, the mill-hands were so much cattle. The mills were incredibly noisy and many workers went deaf; the dust and fibre in the air destroyed their lungs. Still generation followed generation into the mills, entire families occupied in creating wealth for Dundee. 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.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. 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... Brian said: "In the Fifties, there were these people who left Dundee to go and invigorate the jute industry in India.

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

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. He also gives the voice to one of the farmers in the much-anticipated reimagining of Roald Dahl's Fantastic Mr Fox with Meryl Streep and George Clooney. 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? 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). 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.

can be accessed using this link: https://www.churchservices.tv/thorntonheath Committal: 2.15 pm at Croydon Mastermind: Sir Isaac Newton, Red Dwarf, Mary Queen of Scots, Billy Bragg (BBC Two Monday 6 November 2023) I use Stevenson's great saying: 'I travel not to go anywhere but instead to go, the great affair is to move...'