DUNDEE - In the Old Days

A look at Dundee today and back in the 1870s when James Valentine took a series of photographs of the city. Has much survived from those old days? Starting in The Howff burial ground we pause awhile to consider all the ship masters buried here, and how the Dundee of today won't have just so many ship masters; probably because there aren't just as many ships in Dundee's docks as there once were, and even if there were they wouldn't all fit in because around half of Dundee's docks have been filled in and transformed into gardens, like Slessor Gardens. Passing Slessor Gardens we then board the oldest warship in Scotland, one of the sixth oldest in the world: HMS Unicorn. We spend a while on the gun-deck and introduce James Valentine, a Dundee-based photographer who went on to create the Valentine series of postcards, and who captured many street scenes and images of the now-vanished docks before they were later filled in and later swept away to make way for approach roads to and from the Tay Road Bridge. In The McManus, Dundee's Art Gallery & Museum, we then talk briefly about the Tay railway bridge disaster in 1879 when 75 passengers lost their lives. And in that museum they have a window from one of the train carriages that plunged into the icy waters of the Firth of Tay on that fateful day. Hard to imagine a more moving object in any museum in the world. We then look at the city's many surviving mill buildings where Jute imported in the docks was transformed into sacking cloth and other useful items. Valentine's 1870s images of Dundee are never far from our mind and we look at old photographs taken all over the city, from the Wishart Arch to the High Street and the lost Trades Hall building, and surviving buildings by Reform Street and the statue of the Beano comic character Desperate Dan. With views taken from the top of The Law all over Dundee and the Firth of Tay, we pause for one last photo by Dunhope Castle, once a military barracks, then end with a pint in The Speedwell Bar, a perfectly-preserved Edwardian pub also known affectionately as Mennie's after a landlady who worked there for around 50 years.