Barbara Millar
The lady journalists
In 2000 it was voted Dundee’s favourite building but, for the past four years, it has been firmly under wraps, undergoing an £11.8 million face-lift prior to its recent re-opening.
The building is The McManus, formerly the grandly named Albert Institute of Science, Literature and the Arts, but re-named in 1984 after Lord Provost Maurice McManus, who championed works to stabilise the building in the late 1970s. And the new incarnation of this celebrated museum and art gallery certainly has, in the parlance de jour, the ‘wow-factor’.
Dundee’s own ‘Albert Hall’, one of the original galleries, traces the city’s history through the strands of merchants (including jute baron James Caird, a principal financer of one of Sir Ernest Shackleton’s intrepid explorations of the Antarctic); the military; mystery and missionaries (the Scottish missionary who worked and died in Nigeria, Mary Slessor, was brought up in Dundee and worked in the jute mills).
There are three art galleries, embracing 21st-century, 20th-century and 19th-century art and including works by the Glasgow Boys, the Scottish Colourists, Henry Raeburn, Sir William McTaggart and Alexander Nasmyth. The 19th-century gallery has been able to increase the number of paintings on show as it has reverted to the ‘high Victorian hang’, displaying many of its paintings well above head height, a structurally-demanding effort as the walls of the room are slightly curved.
Yet another space is devoted entirely to Dundee, including an impressive early model of the city, a brief history of jute manufacture (a more comprehensive history is already available in the city’s Verdant Works), a history of whaling, including the skeleton of the great Tay whale, the first time it has been exhibited in an industrial, rather than natural history, context, and a section devoted to ‘Winkie’, a valiant pigeon who was awarded the Dickin medal, the animals’ VC.
In 1942, Winkie was on board a Bristol Beaufort bomber returning to its base at RAF Leuchars, across the Tay from Dundee, having been on a mission to Norway. Badly damaged by enemy fire and having to ditch into the sea, 120 miles off the coast of Scotland, the crew released Winkie, whose feathers were badly contaminated by oil as she flew off.
The homing pigeon returned to base, exhausted and bedraggled, but it was then possible to determine where the crew had ditched, taking into account the time of last contact with the crew, the time Winkie arrived back at Leuchars and the wind speed, which meant a rescue vessel could be dispatched within 15 minutes and the crew were saved. Winkie – stuffed, of course – now has pride of place alongside her well-deserved medal.
But the exhibit which entranced me most – being one of that ilk – was the story of the lady journalists of Dundee and their exciting round-the-world adventure. Elizabeth (Bessie) Maxwell and (Franziska) Marie Imandt worked for newspaper and magazine publisher D C Thomson back in the 1890s.
Marie, born in 1861, was the daughter of Peter Imandt, a friend of Karl Marx and a Prussian radical, who settled in Dundee after the German uprisings of the late 1840s, becoming a school-teacher in the city. Marie had studied languages at St Andrews University and was one of the first women to receive an LLA (a Lady Literate in Arts) qualification, a decade before women were allowed to graduate from that university in the same way as men.
Bessie, also born in Dundee, was the daughter of Charles Maxwell, a partner in the jam manufacturing firm of Keillers, who had retired early in order to become an author.
On 16 February 1894, the two women were sent around the world by Thomsons, in order to file regular reports for the Courier and the Weekly News. An announcement at the time read: ‘The latest example of newspaper enterprise is of a scale so vast that it is not to be wondered at that it should prove the engrossing subject of the hour.
‘The proprietors of the Dundee Courier and Dundee Weekly News, who last year sent twelve working men on a tour through America, are sending two young ladies on a tour round the world. The travellers – Miss F Marie Imandt and Miss Bessie Maxwell – left Dundee on Thursday last week and will proceed across the Continent to Brindisi.
‘In addition to European countries, they will visit Egypt, Arabia, India, China, Japan, Canada and the United States. The object of their journey is to obtain full and accurate information as to woman’s position in the world. The conditions of female labour will engage special attention, but all social or religious matters in which the sex are interested will come within the scope of inquiry.’
Bessie’s father had thought the idea a splendid one. He believed female reporters would be able to ‘wheedle’ information out of people, giving them a great advantage over their male counterparts, particularly as interviewing was ‘the great thing now in modern journalism’. While someone could ‘order out a male reporter if they did not wish to be interviewed, they could never do that to a lady’, Charles Maxwell opined.
At a reception held at the Albert Institute (now The McManus), the ladies were told they ‘were about to enter upon an enterprise that will stand unique and unparalleled among the greatest in journalism’.
Marie and Bessie visited 10 countries in a year and covered over 26,000 miles, recording a fascinating documentary of 19th-century travel and the lives of the women they met. Although round-the-world travel was not new – Thomas Cook had been offering 212-day world trips since 1872 – it was still a fraught undertaking, full of difficulties and uncertainties. But the ladies’ mission – to learn about their sisters in other countries – was a huge success. Now their story has been documented in The McManus and their daring adventures can be savoured once more.
Barbara Millar is a lady journalist. If any organ wishes to sponsor her on a round-the-world trip she will undoubtedly make herself available.
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