DUNDEE & ANGUS
TEN FACTS ABOUT DUNDEE & ANGUS
Kirriemuir is the birthplace of Peter Pan’s creator, JM Barrie, and is considered to be the location of the first Wendy House.
A rare Pictish stone, later named the Dunnichen Stone, was found by a Forfar farmer ploughing his field in 1805.
By law, Arbroath Smokies must be smoked within five miles of the town.
The first wireless radio broadcast was sent from Dundee in 1832.
Dundee’s last jute mill closed in 1999.
According to legend, Dundee cake was first baked for Mary, Queen of Scots because she did not want cherries in her fruit cake.
Cortachy Castle in Airlie is reputedly haunted by the ghost of a drummer boy who foretold the deaths of the Ogilvy family.
Montrose has the widest High Street in Scotland.
The ‘Queen’s Well’ was constructed in Glen Esk to commemorate Queen Victoria’s visit in 1861.
The Declaration of Arbroath, devised in 1320 to secure Scottish independence, influenced the US Declaration of Independence.
the cinema at four in the morning, and then running along the high street. There used to be a Tardis there and this voice boomed out: ‘Where are you going laddie?’ I said: ‘I’m going home sir, I fell asleep in the pictures’. He took me home; I was only about nine. I joined the Old Rep on Nicholls Street and
got a job as assistant to Bunty Kidd at 15, and was there until I was 17. I started off shift- ing sets, putting up posters, washing the stage every evening, carrying the takings to the bank. Then I started getting small parts, which got to be bigger parts – such as the paper boy in Picnic and Joseph in Dover Road. I’d spend all my time in the theatre and often I’d sleep there because we’d hit bottom dollar in terms of poverty. My mother was out of Liff by now but she was a changed woman. Before the electric shock treatment she was quite a short, round, chubby woman, but when she came out she was down to about six stone and her short-term memory was shot: initially she couldn’t even remember me and couldn’t recall anything from before the trauma of dad’s death. Times were very tough then. Sometimes her
pension would be spent by Thursday so we had no money at all. I’d go to the chipper across the road and I’d get a bag of batter bits from the back of the chip pan and that would be our dinner until the Friday. In many ways the Rep was my home, and I’d
often sleep there. It was down by the old Over- gate, surrounded by the old buster stalls, the steeples and it was all quite medieval. There were these little alleyways and these fantastic Italian shops – there was a big Italian commu- nity here because they had come to do the filigree work on the ceilings of the big houses. Although there was real poverty in Dundee there were big houses because there was also real wealth: at one stage Strathearn Road in Broughty Ferry was the richest road in Europe because all the jute mill owners lived there. My mother was a spinner in a jute mill.
Like a lot of Dundonians, all my family were Catholic Irish immigrants. My paternal family came from Enniskillen in Northern Ireland and were itinerant tattie and berry pickers, but when the famine happened they came to work in the mills. Back then Dundee was known as ‘Shetown’ because in my great-granny’s gener- ation 70 per cent of the workers in the jute mills were women. Dundee is where the idea of the indolent Irish house husband comes from because the men were all farmers who suddenly didn’t have any land and nothing to do, so instead they would go to the boozer and pour gut-rot whisky down their necks. That’s one of the reasons why we had a Temperance MP in 1922 when the city elected
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prohibitionist Edwin Scrymegeour instead of Winston Churchill, who had been our MP. People here didn’t like the fact that he changed parties while he was our MP, which made him really unpopular. Churchill was a victim of the fact that Dundee was particularly affected by the ideas of the Scottish Enlightenment, such as the secular society and a resistance to deference; we’ve always been instinctively egal- itarian and fair-minded. Despite the popular idea of the indolent
Irish husband, there was relatively little sectar- ianism in Dundee, especially compared to Glasgow, where life was very hard indeed for Catholics. That said, Dundee United is a Cath- olic club, and even in Dundee there were some hangovers from that attitude, which saw the Irish as the blacks of Scotland. Generally, though, there’s a wonderful mixture of Irish and Scot in Dundee (there’s
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