12 PORTS: DUNDEE – COMINGS AND GOINGS

Rowing back against the clock face, head north from the tattooists of Leith past the golf course and take your next left. As spring turns to summer and warming air cools on the North Sea waters, the cover of Haar brings you into the Tay estuary under a thick tumbling cloud. We will be waiting on the blurred north shoreline as you emerge. The people of Dundee will be further distracted by their June entertainment of Fife disappearing off the southern end of the earth while the sun bakes the slopes of the Law, warming the rasps on their canes and promising verdant afternoons of football in Balgay, Baxter, Caird and Lochee parks.

Dundee is ‘The Smiling School for Calvinists’, as per Bill Duncan’s joyful apocrypha. Duncan’s tale of the Inuit fisherman is a quintessential port town watching of the comers and the goers; those who arrived and never left, people who came, blazed brightly and disappeared by night or by Haar. Caught first in the wake of the city whaler, capsized and towed south to the Tay our Inuit friend is caught for a second time, and for years, by cellar cooled pints of heavy in the sweating pubs of the Sinderins. And then he was gone.

The whalers brought money and trade as well as massive fatty fish to the Dundee seaboard. Dundee learned to build fine wooden ships that would endure the harshest of climates. Steel ships would crack like rotten eggs in the winter ice of the far southern oceans. Dundee ships, whittled from pitch pine, English elm and Guyana greenheart, could breathe yet in the Antarctic’s ever tighter embrace. Yielding slowly, finding space within themselves and hunkering down for the thaw. The trade routes that mattered - more Whelks Road than Silk Roads - were easterly to Scandinavia and Europe.

The industrial revolution changed everything, everywhere. Still the ships came, few whales and less linen, but now ever bigger and laden with Jute for the looms. Trench warfare made for a booming sandbag market from Gettysburg to the Somme. The loose raw hemp of Indian fields flecked the air and lungs of the dockers and came with fabulous ballast; oranges, soul music, an elephant. We invented marmalade, begat the Average White Band and dissected Dumbo. The gold lettering of the shipping routes still adorn first floor windows. Calcutta. Kandahar. Bombay.

This hungry monoculture of jute mills drained the surrounding Angus glens of farmhands as the old city burgh boomed. The Irish walked barefoot in great numbers from famine in the west to loose their limbs in the looms. The beneficent Barons donated those fine parks in return. Compensation for pittance wages, regular maiming, child labour and an early death. A few green fields did not quite cut it. Us Irish organised.

All this while, across the long eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the British Isles were flipping upon their axis to face the Atlantic leaving Scandinavia at our back. The comings and goings that mattered for Dundonians were now North and South. Instead of being our lifeline our river became our obstacle, so we crossed it by building the longest bridge in the entire world. ‘A mighty long bridge for such a mighty little old town’, opined Ulysses S Grant as he arrived in 1876, perhaps to say thank you for the sandbags. Dundee marched away from the sea. Trains came and trains went.

The economic cycles of Dundee’s history define our relationship to the world. The latest phase is of a new cool, real tourism and PR fluff. Lonely Planet say we are one of the best places in Europe to visit. The Wall Street Journal calls us the coolest city in Scotland. You would do well to compare the zeitgeist to the lived reality of increasing poverty levels, massive economic inactivity and public services that are chronically mismanaged as well as increasingly underfunded. Puff pieces in magazines will put some bread on the table but the potential of the tourist economy is insufficient to make a dent in the stark statistics. The centrepiece of all of this is the V&A Dundee, opened in 2018, which gathers ever more awards, and rightly so. It is spectacular and well worth your time. The project idea was dreamt up a decade ago by Professor Georgina Follett, then Dean of the University of Dundee’s College of Art & Design. The knowledge economy of higher education was to be the first order beneficiary of the changed image of the city. The sense of post-industrial decline had long been a brake on the success of a University with justifiable global ambitions in the fields of design and life sciences.

The V&A’s summer exhibition for 2019 appropriately reflects on the design of videogames globally. Dundee produced the iconic ZX Spectrum personal computer in the Timex factory in the 1980s. The story goes that the availability of knock-off ‘speccies’ available in city pubs for a couple of pounds enabled a generation of programmers more effectively than the code-clubs and digital skills strategies of today. In any case the city brought forth ‘Lemmings’, ‘Grand Theft Auto’ and ‘Minecraft’. In movie terms that’s like a tiny studio in the welsh valleys knocking out James Bond, Star Wars and the Lord of the Rings. The skills nurtured in this sector by the University of Abertay typifies the new industries which pay the kind of wages that Dundee needs. It also says something of the great displacement of the physical trade routes in favour of the frictionless digital as the focus of policy and practice for government and businesses.

The North Sea renewable industry and the decommissioning of aged oil infrastructure should, theoretically, provide an economic opportunity for the kind of blue collar workers that still have little access to the knowledge economy. Dundee’s greatest statistical outlier is male economic inactivity for the over 40s. This is the human face and consequence of continued decline in Scottish manufacturing. Could a working river not provide opportunity as it once did? As long as turbines are manufactured thousands of miles away and on the way to the North Sea bypass rigs floating abroad to be broken up, the answer will be no. It is worth the fight though. Just Transition. Green New Deal. This is where the rubber hits the road. Or the prow cuts the breaking waves.

Claims that the constitutional twins of Brexit and another Scottish referendum can provide the ‘policy levers’ for economic renewal dominate policy debate. For a decade now they have been to the detriment of progress and are driving decline.

You will do well to be away while the Haar has abated. Do not suffer the fate of General Monk’s army and founder on the many shallow banks of the Tay’s estuary. The booty of a long sacked city rests in the silvery depths there. The real treasure was always our people and this place. Go slowly and take the sunset. Comings and goings. Leavers and remainers. Lost treasure to be found. Futures already written. Safe journey.

Michael Marra (writing in a personal capacity)

Deputy Director, Research

University of Dundee