Teatime Tales From Dundee

by Maureen Reynolds

  Then there was the rumour that there was a terrible injury to the stoker who suffered a badly-burned face where he had hit the hot boiler and this gave credence to the theory of a derailed train.

  As the derailed carriage slammed into the rest of the train, the engine must have come to a halt with a severe jolt. What came out at the inquest was that the train hadn’t put on its brakes or that the steam hadn’t been shut off which led to the conclusion of the train coming to grief before the driver could do anything.

  Looking back, it’s all ‘perhaps’ or ‘if’. Perhaps if the broken tie bars had been noticed in time, and if the terrible storm had been taken into consideration, then maybe the train would not have entered the bridge. But it was dark outside and the damage went unnoticed, with the passengers riding on to their fateful ends.

  There were sixty passengers on board including seven children. Only forty-seven bodies were ever recovered. Thirteen were never found.

  The next day the full damage was seen. Thirteen girders were no more. They were lying on the bottom of the river and a huge gaping hole in the middle of the bridge was viewed with sorrow and consternation by crowds of people who thronged the Esplanade to see the carnage.

  Like every disaster there were stories of fortunate escapes; about people who should have been on the train but for some reason or another were not. A married couple who were on their honeymoon in Edinburgh were at a party on the Sunday afternoon but were persuaded to stay over because of the storm. Then there was Mr J. T. Chatterton Baxter and two friends who got off the train at St Fort. Because of the storm, the three men didn’t want to travel over the bridge and they stayed the night at Newport when they found out that no steamers were running.

  Another lucky escape was a soon-to-be bridegroom who was a carpenter in the Merchant Service, who had travelled over to Newport for a few drinks. This chap was very superstitious and always carried a baby’s caul or birth cap for good luck and protection.

  When he found out there were no steamers running because of the weather, he made his way to the St Fort station. He was almost on the train when the stationmaster stopped him going aboard because of his inebriation. He was carrying his caul as usual and it certainly looks as if it saved his life.

  As the days went on and the hardship of the families began to bite, a concert was organised for the Tay Bridge Disaster Fund. This was held in the Kinnaird Hall in Bank Street on Friday, 6 February 1880. It was an evening of Scotch music and Burns songs with sopranos, Mrs Hamilton Nimmo and Miss Nellie Wallace, contraltos, Miss Maggie Wallace and Mrs H. Crooks, tenors, Mr J. B. Macdonald and Mrs A. Swirles, baritones, Mr J. Addison Kidd and Mr A. E. Adams. Bass was Mr Robert Ferguson.

  Admission to the front seats and the gallery was four shillings, second seats two and sixpence, and the area one shilling. The concert began at 7.45 p.m. and as a measure of the well-to-do audience, carriages were to be at the door at 10 p.m. to take people home. I hope they raised lots of money for all the poor families left without a breadwinner. The grief must have been unbearable but to be also destitute would have been terrible.

  What made it even more poignant was the fact that it was almost the New Year holiday, a time when people were travelling to see friends and family and that was what the majority of the passengers were doing. Little did they know they were saying their last goodbyes.

  Of course, it’s all past history now, nearly 130 years ago and there have been numerous other disasters with bigger losses of life but this was Dundee’s disaster and as such it has seeped into the psyche of the Dundee people. They may not think about it very often but it lies in the background, a terribly sad catastrophe for the doomed souls on the train and the many deaths that resulted from building the rail and road bridges over the dangerous waters of the River Tay.

  22

  Happy Birthday Beano

  I was in a newsagent’s the other day and saw an advert for a paperboy or girl, morning only deliveries with the grand wage of twenty-seven pounds a week with a bonus. I mentioned to the owner that, should I have lived nearer the shop, I would have applied for the job. ‘If you did apply for the job I would employ you right away. I can’t get anyone to do the job and the vacancy has been in the window for weeks,’ she said.

  I forgot to ask about the bonus but it brought back to mind my paper round about fifty-eight years ago. At the time I felt so fortunate to get this job as there was a great deal of competition around as youngsters scrambled to make some money.

  I worked for Mr Hynd who owned the shop on Strathmartine Road and dead on six-thirty every morning I was at the shop collecting my huge bag of papers. My round took me to the top of the Hilltown, up Hill Street and in a giant sweep around Byron Street, plus all the interconnecting streets in between. And it wasn’t the case of throwing the paper at the front door. I had to trudge up and down flights of stairs, often in the dark. Then I headed back homewards towards Moncur Crescent, pushing the last Courier through the letter box of the top floor flat in the close next to the Plough Bar.

  This routine went on for about a week or so until my final customer complained to the shop owner:

  Eh dinnie get meh paper until half past seven and eh’m on meh way tae work. Eh like tae read meh paper wi meh porridge and eh’m running doon the stairs when eh see the paper lassie swanning up the stairs as if she’s got the hale morning tae deliver it.

  Mr Hynd duly noted the complaint and told me not to ‘swan aroond’ and to make sure I started my round with the complainer. Now I don’t know what job this guy did but if he thought delivering a huge bag of newspapers was swanning around then he should have exchanged jobs with me. But I did as I was told and the customer who used to be first on the round was now the last. Thankfully he or she didn’t complain and I was extremely grateful to them, but maybe they didn’t like getting porridge on their paper.

  After school, it was the same laborious round with the Evening Telegraph, always making sure the grumpy guy got his ‘Tele’ with his tea.

  The weekends were really hard as there was another delivery on Saturday evening with the Sporting Post. This was usually a small bundle but the customers were as far flung which meant it still took as long to get around.

  Then there was Sunday morning. The bag was so heavy that I had to make three trips to the shop in order to deliver to all the extra customers I had. My round was further afield on a Sunday and I couldn’t understand it. Thankfully, in the 1950s the Sunday papers weren’t so thick as they are now, but the customer list seemed huge.

  The answer was soon solved when I overheard one of the other paper girls telling her friend that her mother wouldn’t let her work on a Sunday, but she still got the same money as before. I was so aggrieved at this unfairness because I was also still getting the same money as before, but was now doing a lot more for it. But my mother needed the money and there was nothing I could do about it except simmer with annoyance.

  I was good at simmering as I trudged through rain and snow that winter, my hands feeling numb from the cold or else getting soaked, my feet squelching in my waterlogged shoes as I climbed umpteen stairs and almost lost fingers with some of the snappy letter boxes.

  I often wondered if the letter boxes matched the owners, some being so large and generous that a bus could have slipped through, while others were so thin and mean-looking that it took all my expertise to push the paper through. If there was more than one paper going through, I had to feed them in one by one where they landed behind the door with a satisfying plop and hopefully not spreadeagled all over the lobby lino.

  Still there was one perk. I got to look at the comics before putting them through the door. Just a quick look as I hurried along the streets but how I enjoyed reading in the School Friend comic about the Four Marys who were in a boarding school and, dressed in hooded robes, had wonderful experiences with mysteries. It all seemed so marvellous and a thousand light years away from Rockwell Secondary where I was a pupil.

  Then there wer
e The Beano, The Dandy, The Hotspur and Adventure and I would lap up Lord Snooty and Desperate Dan but my all time favourite was Keyhole Kate. I loved her sharp nose which I imagined would always be twitching.

  Some customers also bought the Red Letter, True Romances and Secrets magazines and, if it was a sunny day and if I had time, I would read the first story in these romantic, forbidden papers. They were actually quite tame but I didn’t realise that at the time.

  Then there was Dixon Hawke in the Sporting Post; a detective in the police force who managed to solve a crime every week with no bother.

  I was always careful to make sure I didn’t damage or crease my reading matter because I couldn’t afford to have another grumpy customer running off to the shop to complain.

  With hindsight, I realise now that I was the willing horse who was always being asked by the owner of the shop to do the extra runs and maybe in some eyes that smacked of exploitation, but quite honestly I didn’t know the meaning of the word away back then, so ignorance was bliss. And at the end of the week I had my few shillings. I can’t remember the exact amount, I think it was three and sixpence or it may have been just under five shillings. Now this may sound a lot but not when all the miles I walked was taken into account plus the heavy bags to carry.

  One Christmas I remember vividly was when our Uncle Charlie arrived with a present for my brother and me. He also had a big pile of Film Fun and Girl’s Crystal comics. To this day I can’t recall what the gift was but I’ve never forgotten the comics. We pounced on them with such glee that it could have been treasure from some secret locked room investigated by the Four Marys.

  Such was the power of comics and although some are no longer in existence, The Dandy and The Beano are still going strong. The Dandy was seventy years old in 2007 while The Beano celebrated its seventieth birthday on 30 July 2008. Although I never knew it away back in 1938, I almost have the same birthday. Just one day out.

  During all these years, both comics have given children so much pleasure. From Big Eggo to Biffo the Bear. Korky the Cat to Desperate Dan with his gigantic cow pie complete with a pair of horns, and Lord Snooty and his pals.

  So Happy Birthday Beano.

  I wish I had aged as well as you have.

  23

  The Tattie Gatherers

  After the war, getting the potato harvests gathered in was a priority and schoolchildren were drafted in every autumn to do the picking. Aged thirteen and in my second year at Rockwell, the entire class was asked to put their names down for this three-week harvest. We got the impression the teachers weren’t happy with this arrangement but it was a case of ‘Your Country Needs You’.

  I don’t think it was compulsory but the majority of us were eager to be out of the classroom and I think there were only one or two pupils who didn’t go.

  The ones who did go from all the classes would gather in the assembly hall of the school and be allocated a place on a bus before being whisked away to the country; that unknown place, at least as far as I was concerned.

  I always thought we were going to the middle of nowhere as the bus drove along miles of rural roads with hardly any houses to be seen and, more importantly, no shops, but after what seemed hours on the bus we would pull in at a secluded field and we would all troop off.

  My first year at the tatties coincided with sharp frosts and lovely sunny days but the sight of rows of tattie shaws stretching for miles certainly lowered our high spirits. All the way there, we would all chat about the remote possibility of finding a dwarfish grieve with tiny legs but when the said grieve appeared, he was always over six feet in height with huge long legs encased with twine bindings around his trousers.

  We stood in a huddle as he strode over the frost-encrusted field, marking out our ‘bit’, either placing a twig or marking the ground with his huge heel, his feet gouging the earth. He said, ‘Noo that’s yer bittie and mind and pick aw the tatties an no leave ony.’

  Sheila, my schoolfriend and I would look in dismay, as the ‘bittie’ seemed to stretch to eternity, but we waited dutifully with our wire baskets for the tractor to appear. A murmur would go round. ‘Eh hope it’s a digger wiv got and no a scatterer,’ but it was always a scatterer attached to the tractor and a groan would be heard.

  The scatterer was self-explanatory; it scattered the tatties over a wide area while the digger left them in a neat row. It was a case of zigzagging from side to side as well as picking the tatties in front of you, and there were always some that were shy, hiding in mounds of cold frosty earth with just the tips showing.

  Running back and forth gathering these hidden tatties took time and there was hardly any time to straighten up before the tractor was chugging up behind us with the bogie ready to hold the gathered tatties.

  Sometimes some of the boys were wicked and pushed these half hidden tatties back into the earth with their feet but comeuppance time would surely come around at harrowing time, when we would walk behind the harrower like animals in Noah’s Ark.

  We trailed around the field two by two, carrying a wire basket between us, this machine uncovering all the tatties left behind by the pickers.

  There was a small break in the middle of the morning and we all flopped down between the dreels and had our snack. Mine was always a roll in jam and some lemonade which tasted ambrosial. It was also the time to try and get some feeling back in your hands as howking the tatties out of the cold earth always left your fingers numb with cold. I don’t know if many of the pickers wore gloves. I know I didn’t.

  At dinner time we were bussed to a local school or hall to have our hot dinner and all I can recall of these meals was that it always seemed to be mince and tatties, but no one was complaining as we were all starving.

  At one hall there was an outside tap to wash your hands and the water was freezing. Trying to get your hands clean was a job and a half, but no one was particularly worried about a few dirty fingernails.

  Except Dora. Her meal must have always been cold by the time she sat down because she would scrub her nails with a tiny brush and then take out a small manicure set and proceed to file them. She then continued with a vigorous brushing of her hair before tying a scarf around her head, gypsy fashion.

  Some of the girls wore woollen scarves under their jackets but I think she was the only one who wore a scarf over her hair. The rest of us were quite happy to shake the earth out of our tresses, and the little stones that had been thrown up by the scatterer. To say I was impressed by this beauty routine was an understatement and I made up my mind to save up for a manicure set.

  Later, as the sun began to go down, the grieve would walk up the length of the field and shout, ‘It’s lousing time.’ Not being acquainted with rural speak, I hadn’t a clue what he was saying but thank the Lord he was saying it was time to finish.

  Then we would all pile onto the bus for the homeward journey with some of the boys singing popular tunes with smutty lyrics. Without thinking one day, I was singing one of these songs and my mother almost choked on her biscuit that she was eating at the time.

  The lyrics were quite harmless really, especially when viewed in this more liberal time, but back in the 1950s, my mum thought it was terrible. I had to promise not to listen to the songs, but that would have been a hard task as the boys, being macho, always belted them out.

  The routine then began again the next morning and lasted for three weeks. If I loved the tattie picking then Mum was ecstatic with the wages of eleven and thruppence a day. It was almost a fortune in our house.

  Our class went back the following year and the same routine was carried out, travelling all over Angus and Perthshire to do our bit for the essential tattie gathering.

  I expect it was the same in the autumn of 1953 but I had departed the school by then to go on to pastures new. And I never did save up for a manicure set.

  24

  It Begins with a ‘B’ but it’s Not Butlins

  Mention the word holiday camp and people immediately
think of Butlins famous camps after the war. Billy Butlin catered for the growing army of people who longed for a bit of glamour after the war years and, from the late 1940s onwards, going to Butlins was the epitome of many holidaymakers’ dreams.

  Crammed with entertainment on a grand scale and scores of fun-packed days filled with knobbly knees and glamorous granny competitions, a fun time was promised to all. The happy campers had wonderful shows to see, posh dance halls and theme bars to drink and dance in, and the ever-present ‘Redcoats’ to oversee their every whim.

  I never went to Butlins but, in 1950, I did go to Belmont Camp at Meigle with the primary seven class of Rosebank School.

  We were taken by bus to this holiday camp and it was situated in the middle of a forest. At least that was where I think it was because as far as I was concerned it seemed to be in a clearing with a forest all around it.

  There were wooden type buildings with dormitories for the boys and girls, a dining hall and schoolrooms. We did our lessons in the morning and nature study and country pursuits in the afternoon. We were taken around the woods, identifying different trees and flowers, squirrels and beetles and general wildlife. Then there were the country walks. One teacher I recall was an ex-military man and he would take us on three-mile walks that took us up to the hotel by the railway bridge and back again.

  He didn’t allow any dawdling either. It was strict march-time the entire way and we were all tired by the time we got back to base. Well maybe not everyone but I know I was.

  Like in Butlins camp, we all ate in a large communal dining room and for some reason the meal I recall best was supper, when we all drank a big cup of cocoa and ate thick slices of buttered bread.