On broadsides, pamphlets, and people’s printing
Erin Farley’s temporal loops unravel Dundee’s radical publishing history
Erin Farley is a storyteller, writer and local historian based in Dundee.
December 28, 2025
On the 28th of December 1879, the first Tay Bridge fell and never stopped falling. On the anniversary of the fall, railway lights blink code into the river. Seaweed swirls in the dark. The stumps of the old bridge could easily have been removed and were not. Tonight, the story goes, the dead will return from the river and be seen standing on them, receding towards the dark of the far shore.
Broadsides are single-sheet publications, usually with the words of a song or poem, sometimes a speech. They want to be performed, rather than read silently. They are voices half-stilled in print, produced quickly when a song comes into being and then sold cheaply. They are not the song itself.
Mark Fisher wrote of hauntology as a symbol of a culture haunted not by its past but by ‘all the lost futures the twentieth century taught us to anticipate.’1 The first time I read Fisher, I thought of the Tay Bridge Disaster. To Dundee, the first Tay Bridge spanned into a new world, the spirit of mechanical progress and enterprise, and it broke in front of the city’s eyes. In every future since which hasn't materialised, the disaster finds its presence. During the construction of the V&A museum, I heard someone remark that Kengo Kuma's design, through which the river emerges, frames the gap left by the old bridge. They appreciated that, the honouring of it. I doubt it crossed Kuma's mind for an instant.
In the moment of breaking, the failure of the future was met with a flood of song. A few moments from the riverside, the Overgate was lined with run-down tenements, pawn shops and grocers selling more whisky than groceries. Tucked between them, the hand-operated printing press in the back of the Poet's Box broadside shop was rarely still in the weeks after the disaster. One printed song laments:
ah! What is life? A fleeting breath —
A thread that's snatched away.
in midst of life we are in death,
is taught us day by day.
The Tay Bridge Disaster broadsides turn from mechanical progress in their descriptions of the disaster and reach back into shipwreck-metaphor in memory of the drowned. This immediate response splits into moments scattered through time. Songs are composed, printed, learned, re-printed, recorded from singers a century later almost word for word.
The folk-time broadsides hold calls the past ever-present into the future, but differently, hauntological time. Here, the past is not ambient. It kicks me repeatedly in the brain then drags me onto the dance floor. I feel it more visceral than spectral, the way ghosts in my tradition are physical revenant more than shimmering vision, lurching bloated and decomposing in tear-sodden shrouds into the world of the living.
Unknown date, 1794
It might have been early or late in the year—I imagine it darker than it gets here in summer. The numismatist* James Wright steps from his new house on Nethergate, bundle under his coat, and slips down the dark slope towards the bridgeless river. Wright is successful in his business, and has used some of this success to finance the printing of a ha’penny edition of Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man, a cheap, pocket-sized print, like the broadside. They say now that of every twenty-one households in Dundee, one has a copy of this book. Wright believes in setting the record straight, in metal or ink. His coins are messages as well as tokens, showing symbols of the work they circulate for—water-mills and post coaches—rather than the monarchs they flow to. The government had its eyes in Dundee trained on him, and Wright felt the balance tipping: that latest print-run is, he knows, sedition and he cannot un-trace it back to him. So the stack of pamphlets are given to the Tay, pages pulped, fragmented, dispersed in tide.
Wright maintained his freedom for the rest of his life. There were few years left ahead of him by then, but he lived to have a daughter, Frances, the following year. She became a renowned reformer, feminist and flawed anti-slavery campaigner. Print as material evidence is unstable, vulnerable to fire and flood, but even in destruction its traces linger.
10-13 December 2025
Amid university lecture-room bustle after a talk, Roger Illsley—biographer of James and Frances Wright—mentions to me we’re in a moment of rising interest in Dundee’s history, a revival unseen since the flurry of books and societies which sprung up around the 1870s. I try to imagine how that time felt for the self-taught artisans gathering in garrets and coffee shops and feel for its echoes now. A city shifting its boundaries and the layout of its streets, the clang of metal in mill and printing press, the exhilarating, oppressive sense that momentum is building, but what towards? Bridges built and destroyed.
Three days later, I attended the weekly Palestine solidarity demonstration in the city centre. Against a backdrop of Christmas lights, protestors hand out printed articles about the Prisoners for Palestine hunger strikers. They are held in remand without trial and cut off from communication, their thoughts proscribed as a danger to the state. Sharing information in speech beyond the filtered scraps which make it into mainstream news has become an important part of these gatherings, but this is new. The internet is everywhere and in everything but it no longer feels like a public forum, its corporate eyes and ears trained on us for anything slipping too close to sedition.
I often recall a guest lecture from the traditional cosmologist Emily Lyle I heard at university. Time, Lyle told our small class, is best envisaged as a slinky—neither fully linear nor fully cyclic, it demands extra dimensions. We go around, returning to the same points in the shape, but never quite in the same place twice. I feel it now hurtling down the stairs, tangling its loops. I am afraid for the living and the dead.
July 1793
Fellow citizens—the time is now come when you must either gather round the fabric of Liberty to support it, or, to your eternal infamy, let it fall to the ground…
You are plunged into a war by a wicked Ministry and a compliant Parliament, who seem careless and unconcerned for your interest, the end and design of which is almost too horrid to relate, the destruction of A WHOLE PEOPLE MERELY BECAUSE THEY WOULD BE FREE.
At the Beacon Meeting House, weaver George Mealmaker addresses the Dundee Friends of Liberty with a speech containing these words. After the meeting, the group arrange for its anonymous printing and circulation. Mealmaker's fellow organiser, the Unitarian minister Thomas Fyshe Palmer, is arrested for circulating seditious literature and—despite Mealmaker testifying the words are his own—is sentenced to seven years' transportation.
Four years later, Mealmaker will be tried for sedition himself, sentenced to fourteen years. His own trial cites his pamphlet The Moral and Political Catechism of Man, a dialogue between a benighted Briton and a Citizen of the World, for whom universal suffrage, freedom from oppression and civil and political liberty are realities. In its catechism* form, it calls back to Scotland's 16th century religious radicals, a vision of Reformed faith as a call to independent thought, rather than to individualism. These texts are not dangerous because of what they are but because of what they become. They are speech in print, a discussion or a chant, a call to action. They must be passed quietly, slipped into pockets, barely traceable, but they require interaction.
November 1906
In the 1890s, self-exiled Dundonian John MacArthy returns to the city after a printers’ apprenticeship in America, under the name Lowden MacArtney. If he’s hiding, he does it by going into his past, adopting his mother's maiden name as his first. He and Jemima Greig have a daughter, Annie Lowden MacArtney. With the future no longer an abstract concept, Lowden leaves his job as an oiler in a jute mill. The Poet's Box shop, which he remembers from the city of his boyhood—the ink-smell, the stacks of songs on flimsy paper, the endless possibilities of them all—has been closed. Lowden finds a shop space near his home in one of the Overgate's crumbling tenements, a printing press is bought or cadged from somewhere, adverts placed, word put out.
He is preoccupied with songs of the past, and with the future of songs. The Poet's Box under his ownership prints both local songs and old songs, not as refusal of the future but to negotiate it as it emerges. This broadside-history faces the local past through spontaneous resonance and points of echo.
In 1912, Keir Hardie half-recalls a song from his youth about the 1820s Radical War, which John Baird and Andrew Hardie were executed for their part in. MacArtney knows it instantly as 'Dark Bonnymuir’, and sends the lyrics to the anarchist newspaper Forward, which his Poet's Box stocks.2 It stands in solidarity with the dead. Although the moment it returns to is one of defeat, something in the act of returning to it pulls us from the inevitability of the movement’s failure. The time it takes to sing the song is time out of the linear, time in a parallel world where possibility still flows.
Though freedom has bled on the field sorely wounded,
Shall liberty perish and die in its bloom?
Shall tyranny triumph? though freedom has grounded
The arms of the heroes that lie in the tomb.
November 2018
In an empty shop unit in the Wellgate Centre, we briefly revive the Poet's Box. It is part of the Being Human festival, whose theme this year is water, and Dundee stars as 'The Aquatic City.' Our imaginary Poet's Box may or may not be located at the bottom of the Tay. Our hand-operated printing press is a friend's Epsom that keeps refusing to talk to my laptop, but you can wander by, print any poem you want and add it to the chaotic piles of ephemera for others to find. I photocopy broadsides and stick them to the windows. My collaborator, playwright James Barrowman, prints copies of Walter Benjamin's 'The Railway Disaster on the Firth of Tay'.3
This essay is itself a transcription of a 1932 radio broadcast, sound slipping sideways into print. To Benjamin, viewing Dundee from afar, the Tay Bridge Disaster is a minor episode in the great struggle of mechanical progress, in which we are all caught but can rarely see our own part. The first Tay Bridge was iron, Benjamin writes, but in form it still echoes the wooden bridges which preceded it, and so it fails. He invokes the Eiffel Tower as the inverse of this, a spectacularly conceptualised feat of iron engineering with no specific purpose, until the invention of telegraphy designated it a radio transmitter.
And so songs find new forms. A radio broadcast is fleeting, compared to a lyric-sheet returned to over and over, but it catches in other ways.
Unknown date, 1930s
MacArtney prints songs no one else has, songs on the brink of disappearing from memory. Between the wars, as Benjamin broadcasts on Berlin radio, MacArtney reprints an old ballad about the Tay Bridge Disaster on lilac paper. It echoes Benjamin’s image of the bridge as wood-form built in iron. Or maybe the broadcast echoes the song, which Benjamin could never have heard:
Though large and strong the mighty beams
That Tay's wide valley spanned
Let but the tempest breathe, and lo!
The iron yields like wand.
This joins MacArtney's acidic satires on local politicians, bothy ballads, and the words to big hits of the day. It joins countless laments for the dead of the first war, flimsy transparent paper with lines left blank to fill your father's, brother's, lover's name.
I imagine MacArtney despairing of the passivity of listening to the wax cylinders and shellac records which proliferate during his time running the Poet's Box—as if a song can be contained in a recording, replayed the same each time, reduced to a number in a record company's catalogue! At least the wireless has the decency to exist in time, connects you to fellow listeners even when unseen.
When she grows up his daughter Annie helps him run the shop, alongside her mill work, and no doubt housework. She has left little trace in ink under her own name. I wonder whether they see the future differently, if they argue about the potential of sound recordings, or if some of the anonymous songs are hers. The Poet's Box closes for good in the 1940s, and both Lowden and Annie die in November 1951, barely a fortnight apart.
Most broadsides are just songs waiting to happen, rather than uprisings, but even so they demand your input. Through them, the past insists on becoming un-spectral. The power of folk-time is that memory and voice themselves cannot be commodified—we will always have recourse to our own minds and the power to re-create, as long as we insist on it. And so the past MacArtney is singing for is also the future. Around the same time, he prints Ferdinand Freiligrath’s ‘Revolution’:
Oh, no! the song those waters hear is not of sorrow, nor dismay.
‘Tis triumph-song–victorious song–the paean of the future’s day
The future–distant now no more–her prophet voice is sounding free,
As well as once your Godhead spake: I was, I am, and I will be!
Photo: Erin Farley
1. Mark Fisher, ‘What is Hauntology’, Film Quarterly Vol. 66, No. 1 (Fall 2012), p. 16
2. Michael Shaw, ‘Dark Bonnymuir,’ in The People’s Voice: Scottish Political Poetry, Song and the Franchise (https://thepeoplesvoice.glasgow.ac.uk/anthology/), p. 5
3. ‘The Railway Disaster on the Firth of Tay,’ in Walter Benjamin - Selected Writings Volume 2 ed. by Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland and Gary Smith (London: The Belknap Press, 1999) (https://modernity.io/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Railway-Disaster-Benjamin.pdf)
I write here in a personal capacity and the views expressed do not represent my employers. I am grateful to those mentioned in this essay for the thoughts they sparked, and to the Diderot Gesselschaft group for reintroducing me to Walter Benjamin, but all misinterpretations, wild leaps and hubris are my own.