ABSTRACT
In May 1930, the Scottish nationalist and journalist William Power visited Dundee, where he had begun his journalistic career many years earlier. He was keen to see how much the city had changed, and was particularly impressed with the new wider roads, and ‘housing schemes, in stone, concrete, brick and rough cast, and steel, the homes in the last named materially being painted in various shades of yellow’. He also noted, however, that the ‘big profits’ had vanished from the city's staple trade and the wages of jute workers had been reduced. Dundee was largely living on ‘old money’ and had not been able to free itself from the overweening influence of jute. Power lamented that better ‘for her, probably had she never seen jute or the Irish’. 1
