Mary Brooksbank

Early life and background

Mary Brooksbank (born Mary Soutar) was born on 15 December 1897 in Shiprow, Aberdeen, Scotland. Biographical accounts describe her as one of ten children in a working-class family, and later recollections emphasize the poverty of the urban setting in which she grew up. Her childhood was shaped by the conditions of industrial Scotland at the turn of the twentieth century, when many families relied on low-paid, physically demanding work and when women’s labor was often both essential and undervalued.

Brooksbank moved to Dundee as a girl, a city strongly associated with the jute industry and with the hard realities of mill labor. Dundee’s mills employed large numbers of women and girls, and the rhythm of factory work, social deprivation, and labor organization formed the background to Brooksbank’s life. Family tradition, neighborhood culture, and the musical environment of her home all helped shape her later gifts as a songwriter and poet. She would later be remembered not simply as a political activist, but as a writer who turned the speech, songs, and experiences of working people into lasting cultural expression.

Her early education was limited, as was common for children in poor industrial families of the period. Like many working-class girls in Scotland, she entered paid labor very young. That experience became central to everything she later wrote and sang. Her biography is therefore not only a personal story but also a record of the wider social conditions faced by women workers in early twentieth-century Scotland.

Mill work and political awakening

Brooksbank began working in the mills at the age of twelve. The work was exhausting, repetitive, and characteristic of the industrial economy that dominated Dundee. For girls of her generation, mill work was not unusual, but it exposed them to long hours, low wages, and the constant threat of injury and unemployment. Brooksbank’s later politics were grounded in that experience. She did not approach labor activism as an outsider or intellectual observer; she lived the conditions she later criticized.

By the age of fourteen, she was already taking part in a march with fellow workers seeking a pay rise. That early act of collective action marked the beginning of a lifetime of agitation on behalf of working people. It also shows how young women workers in the textile trades were drawn into labor struggles well before they reached adulthood. Brooksbank’s development as a socialist and trade unionist was therefore closely tied to her practical experience of exploitation and to the solidarities of the mill floor.

Her politics developed in the context of broader labor unrest in Britain and the rise of socialist and communist movements that promised an alternative to poverty wages and industrial discipline. Brooksbank eventually became a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain between 1920 and 1933. In later biographical summaries, she is described as having been active, outspoken, and unafraid to challenge authority. Her activism brought consequences: she spent three periods in prison as a result of her agitation. Those imprisonments underline the seriousness with which state and local authorities treated labor militancy in this period, especially when it was led by a woman from the working class.

Songwriting, poetry, and cultural work

Brooksbank is best remembered today for the way she fused activism with art. She became known as a songwriter, poet, and writer whose work emerged directly from the world of labor. Her songs are rooted in the experiences of mill workers, tenants, and political organizers, and they preserve dialect, memory, and perspective that might otherwise have been lost. In this respect, Brooksbank belongs to a strong Scottish tradition of working-class cultural expression in which song served as both testimony and organizing tool.

Her best-known song is “The Jute Mill Song”, also known by the opening line “Oh, dear me, the jute mill’s burnin’”. It is often associated with the hardships and rhythms of industrial life in Dundee. The song has endured because it conveys the atmosphere of mill work with a mix of wit, realism, and solidarity. Rather than romanticizing industrial labor, it captures the bleakness and intensity of the work while preserving the voice of the people who endured it. In that sense, it became both a cultural artifact and an act of remembrance.

Brooksbank also wrote poetry. A volume titled Sidlaw Breezes was published in 1952. Her autobiography, No Sae Lang Syne: a tale of this City, appeared in 1971. The autobiography helped secure her place not only as a singer and activist but as an author whose life story illuminated the social history of Dundee. By writing about her own experience, she contributed to a wider historical recovery of women’s working lives, family life, and political militancy.

Trade unionism and Communist politics

Brooksbank’s political identity was shaped by labor activism and by her commitment to collective organization. She was active in the Communist Party of Great Britain from 1920 to 1933. Within that movement, she combined propaganda, organizing, and public speaking with her artistic work. Her politics were rooted in the belief that workers, and especially women workers, should not simply endure industrial society but challenge it.

She was also associated with tenants’ and women’s organizing in Dundee. Later accounts note her role in the Dundee Working Women’s Guild, founded in 1930, which provided another platform for campaigning on issues affecting women in working-class communities. Her activism extended beyond the mills to questions of housing, poverty, and social justice. In that sense, Brooksbank’s politics were practical and local as well as ideological.

Her imprisonment for agitation reflects both the risks of political dissent in the interwar period and the gendered barriers faced by women activists. Women who entered public political life were often dismissed or punished more harshly because they disrupted expectations of domesticity and silence. Brooksbank challenged those expectations through her campaigning, her writing, and the public force of her voice.

Personal life

Brooksbank married and became known as Mary Brooksbank after taking her married name, although many biographical references preserve her maiden name, Soutar, because of her public life and family origins. Her personal life, as presented in available biographical sources, is less documented than her labor and political work. What is clear is that her identity remained closely tied to family, community, and the working-class environment of Dundee.

Her songs and memoir suggest a life lived in close contact with local people, neighborhood institutions, and the everyday struggles of workers’ households. Rather than separating private life from public life, Brooksbank’s story demonstrates how domestic, cultural, and political roles overlapped for working women of her generation. Her legacy was shaped not by a conventional path to public office or literary celebrity, but by the accumulation of lived experience, collective struggle, and creative expression.

Recognition and later reputation

Brooksbank’s reputation grew after her lifetime as historians, musicians, and local cultural organizations began to recognize the importance of women like her to Scotland’s labor history. References to her appear in local heritage work, political commentary, and cultural projects concerned with the lives of working women. She is remembered as a Dundee songwriter whose words captured the reality of mill life, and as a political activist whose life exemplified the link between class struggle and culture.

Her name has also continued to circulate through commemorative and educational contexts. The survival of The Jute Mill Song in repertoires, along with historical writing about Dundee’s labor movement, has ensured that she remains part of the public memory of Scottish working-class life. She is frequently cited as a woman whose creativity was inseparable from politics and whose political commitments were grounded in direct experience.

Brooksbank’s significance lies in the combination of all these roles. She was not only a singer or only an activist, but a figure who made the history of women’s industrial labor audible and memorable. Her work preserves a perspective often absent from formal archives: the voice of a woman who knew the mills from the inside and transformed that knowledge into song, poetry, and protest.

Death and legacy

Mary Brooksbank died on 16 March 1978 in Dundee. By then, she had become part of the city’s labor and cultural memory. Her death marked the end of a life that had spanned the era of heavy industrial labor, the rise of communist and trade union politics, and the later efforts to recover women’s history through local scholarship and cultural commemoration.

Her legacy endures because she gave voice to a world that was often ignored. In her songs and writings, the experience of the jute mills, the struggles of tenants and workers, and the political consciousness of working women are preserved with directness and feeling. She stands as an example of how ordinary working lives can become historically significant when they are translated into art and political action. For historians of Scotland, women’s labor, and socialist culture, Brooksbank remains an indispensable figure.