At its peak in 1911, 30,000 Dundonians were working in the city’s jute industry

THE history of Dundee is inextricably woven into the fortunes of the city’s once-dominant textile industry.

From the rise of flax production in the 18th Century, to the final decline of the jute industry in the 20th, textiles give a fascinating insight into the economic lifeblood which forged Dundee.

Dundee University’s archive services holds the largest collection – several thousand records – of historic materials relating to the city’s textile industry.

For generations the words jute and Dundee went hand in hand.

“Juteopolis” became its nickname as it became internationally known for the industry, and the economy was dominated by the textile for more than a century.

However, Dundee’s textile industry was well established before the arrival of jute as the city had long been a port that traded with the Baltic countries, including the import of flax which was sold for spinning and weaving. As the Industrial Revolution swept Britain at the end of the 18th Century, Dundee’s first flax mills were established, and by the 1830s Dundee was Britain’s leading centre for linen production.

However, while l ocal firm Baxter Brothers remained a major linen producer well into the following century, after the 1840s the jute industry became Dundee’s economic lifeblood.

When raw jute first arrived from India in the 1830s, it was discovered that treatment with whale oil, readily available thanks to Dundee being a whaling port, allowed jute to be spun in much the same way as flax.

As a tough fabric with many applications, including as sack cloth, jute products were very marketable.

By 1911 the industry employed more than 30,000 people in Dundee, the majority of whom were women, and dozens of jute mills operated across the city and in surrounding towns.

The names of Dundee jute firms like Cox Brothers, Cairds, Gilroy Sons & Co, Harry Walker &

Sons and J & AD Grimond were known throughout Britain and beyond.

Dundee firms’ formidable business reputations were echoed in their impressive mill complexes.

The largest of these textile works were of a scale unlike anything seen in the city before or since.

Camperdown Works in Lochee, owned by Cox Brothers, was for a long time Europe’s largest jute mill and had its own railway line.

Baxter Brothers’ Dens Works was similarly one of the largest linen factories in the world.

Meanwhile, Gilroy’s Tay Works on North Tay Street included one of the longest mills in Great Britain.

Some of the architecture of these textile complexes was stunning and served to illustrate the firms’ prosperity and importance.

Dens Works, for instance, was famed for its chimneys which closely resembled Egyptian obelisks and its Bell Mill featured renaissance-inspired towers.

Camperdown Works included similarly impressive buildings such as the Italianate High Mill, but its outstanding feature was its ornate 280ft chimney known to generations of Dundonians as Cox’s stack.

Visible for miles around, it was a powerful symbol of the firm’s standing as Dundee’s premier textile business.

By the end of the 19th Century Dundee mills were facing serious competition from Indian counterparts.

This, combined with changing global economic and political conditions, and many other factors, meant the 20th century would lead to the slow and painful decline of the textile industry in Dundee.

However, a few of the great industrial structures – like Cox’s Stack – survive.

Together with the archives they act as a reminder of the days when jute and flax dominated the city.