Day 3 In Dundee

We have mentioned the jute and will come back to it. Dundee is famous for journalism and particularly publishing The Dandy and The Beano, comics that entertained British children from 1937 to 2012. There is a statue of Desperate Dan in the town centre.

 

Today’s Dundee Courier is more concerned with the menace of CoVID than Dennis or Gnasher. Better yet is the Ayr Advertiser which yesterday ran the headline: Turnberry hotelier tests positive for coronavirus.

As for jam they claim a Spanish ship put into Dundee to weather a storm. Given the weather today: so far, so credible. A grocer’s wife saw the potential of the cargo of oranges and invented marmalade. Others claim marmalade was made in France as an invalid food: Marie est malade. Either way Keillor still make a lot of it and Sid had it wittily turned into a sorbet at the excellent Brasserie Ecosse last night.

And so again to jute. The second set of galleries look at the social side of the works. In New Lanark the mill owners built villages for their workers. That is not what happened in Dundee where there was very little new building as the town grew and several families would share a tenement flat. In the mid 19th century life expectancy for men in the surrounding country was about 60 and in Dundee around 35 with ready access to TB, cholera and malnutrition as well as factory-related ailments.

To make jute workable the factories used whale oil. The jute entrepreneurs went into whaling, which was not such a great leap as they were building their own ships to fetch jute from Calcutta anyway. Whaling ships have to be very strong to cope with the southern oceans, where whalers had gone to look for their catch having rather reduced the northern populations.

When in the 1890s the British National Antarctic Expedition needed a ship strong enough to get frozen into the ice for a couple of years they put the project out to tender and The Dundee Shipbuilders’ Company won. The Discovery was sponsored by the Royal Geographical Society, the Royal Society and the Royal Navy who appointed Robert Falcon Scott as Captain. The crew included Edmund Wilson and Ernest Shackleton. The ship was a 50m barque rigged three master with an auxiliary steam engine. So sturdy it was the ship for the British Australian and New Zealand Antarctic Research Expedition from 1929 to 1931.

The ship is now back in a dryish dock in Dundee in approximately the state it finished that Expedition. The attached museum is a fabulous bit of work and Sid and Doris nerded through at about half the pace of any other visitor. No exhibit went unread, no film unseen, no moustachioed gent unrevered. Those gents did serious science and exploring. Better, that time they nearly all came home. Of course Ernest did later get the crew of the Endurance home but sometimes they must have wondered. To round out the story the Discovery was sent to look for the crew of the Endurance only to reach Montevideo and be told that everyone was safe.  The tour of the ship itself was very satisfying and Doris is photographed touching the wheel that Scott Himself Touched.

Sid and Doris walk back with a quick admire of the Tay road and rail bridges, to work on Teal’s wetness and dodgy electrics. Sid has started sealing places that might be letting water in. Doris is sitting in the driver’s seat having removed part of the dash into her lap when another heavy shower comes through. Sid scarpers to the hotel and Doris stays aboard. What she sees is water running out of the screen rubbers. On the nav side it is enough to soak the carpet and on the driver’s side just enough is coming in behind the dash to rust out the failed switch. So Doris puts in the spare switch (another was bought at the factors next to the jute museum), tests it once she has an earth again and off we go. Next time it is dry we will do some more screen sealing.

So there we have an epic day of nerdy touristing, a car that may be drier and a working front screen heater. The Mini’s carpet is here in our hotel room drying out and smelling like wet beagle. But that’s enough about ships.