Brian Cox's Jute Journey [DVD]

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Brian said: "In India, I sampled jute pakora. I had no idea you could eat it. It's actually very nice. They make soup from it too, but I didn't try that. 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... 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. This was the day that the crew in general, and Cox in particular, was looking forward to, as they were to shoot at the jute mills on the outskirts of the city. “We went to a number of mills, from one at Chapadanga to the famous mill at Howrah,” said Cox. 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.

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

A 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.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. India needs Congress, Rajasthan assembly polls is also about party's future: Gehlot to party workers

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

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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.

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

I use Stevenson's great saying: 'I travel not to go anywhere but instead to go, the great affair is to move...' 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. 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. Top) Brian Cox on the Scottish Cemetery premises. Picture by Aranya Sen. (below) The crew shoot at the Tollygunge Club

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Most 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.

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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." 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. 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. The evening was far more pleasant with the entire crew heading to the Tollygunge Club. “The idea of filming at the club was to capture what the social life of the Scots living in the city must have been like,” ventured Archer.

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Brian said: "In the Fifties, there were these people who left Dundee to go and invigorate the jute industry in India. 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. For many of them, the move to India paved the way for a lavish lifestyle of parties and luxurious living. For others, it was the end of the road. 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. 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.