Brian Cox's Jute Journey [DVD]

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You see that in the people who went out there - they were up for an adventure. For me it was to go south and become an actor. Dundee had one of the best theatres in the country but I didn't properly appreciate that at the time." 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. This will not be Cox’s first encounter with Kolkata and West Bengal. In fact, the area has a very personal pull for the Dundee-born actor. His parents worked in the jute mills by the River Tay, processing tonnes of the yarn shipped from the subcontinent. Cox recently made a BBC documentary, Brian Cox’s Jute Journey, about Dundee’s and his own links with West Bengal. 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."My ancestors came from Fermanagh to Dundee to work in the jute mills. So many people in the mills were Scottish crofters or Irish farmers who came to Dundee for work. It is about the disparate nature of Scotland, it’s two faces: the romantic and the realistic,” he said. “I was very interested in the ‘spin’ that Sir Walter Scott gave Scotland in the 1800s. I’m interested in how this is something we’re caught up in, the false history, the romantic extreme. And then there is the other part, the grim, gritty reality, like in Trainspotting and the drug life of Edinburgh.” 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.

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. This week, Hollywood actor Brian Cox recalls his time growing up near jute mills where his parents began their working lives. Cox is endlessly forgiving of the Irish, “a people who have not been served particularly well”. The Celtic Tiger saw people “on the fiddle, but then everybody was on the fiddle”, while the economic crisis it left behind “was not their fault, it was not their fault”, he insists. You have been so subjugated. You have had such a bad rap for so long. It is very hard to know what the Irish model themselves on, because they don’t want to model themselves on their previous generations. I don’t like that very much. So who do they model themselves on?”

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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. 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. Brian said: "In the Fifties, there were these people who left Dundee to go and invigorate the jute industry in India. can be accessed using this link: https://www.churchservices.tv/thorntonheath Committal: 2.15 pm at Croydon They were among hundreds of manual workers who left Scotland to establish what they hoped would be a better life, taking their knowledge of jute weaving to India.

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. 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 industry endured a steady decline from the 1870s onwards, prompting many workers to migrate from the east coast of Scotland to the south of Asia. 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.

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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. 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. Despite now enjoying a life of luxury in NewYork, Brian can identify with the mixed fortunes of his city's forebears. Next month, we'll see one of Dundee's most famous sons follow in their footsteps in a voyage of discovery.

In this fascinating film, Brian journeys into his past and travels to Calcutta, following in the footsteps of the Dundee jute workers who left the city to seek fortunes in India. Brian says: "The 'jute wallahs' left Dundee for what they hoped would be a better life. 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). The image is not inappropriate, since Brian Cox, one of the stars of Conor Mc- Pherson's The Weir , sees the theatre in quasi-religious terms. Two hours earlier, a full matinee audience on a wet, dreary day had hung on every word as the actors explored the aching nature of loss, ghosts and memory. messages and online donations to Parkinson's UK, please visit https://antoniogonsalves.muchloved.com/ There was something very familiar about Kolkata,” he said. “The roughness of it and the Victorian architecture, it was very much still a city of empire. I remember seeing the barges on the Hooghly River in Kolkata with piles and piles of jute, with names of these mills in Dundee. I found that weird.”It is the best way to build bridges,” he said. “I don’t know if there is any better way to do it. Using culture is the best way to engage with any nation. There is an appetite for film and there is a great appetite for cultural exchange. Something is telling me it is ripe for it again. There is so much political crap around, especially between east and west, there is a real need for something else. This can cut through that.” 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… Top) Brian Cox on the Scottish Cemetery premises. Picture by Aranya Sen. (below) The crew shoot at the Tollygunge Club