The glass factory in Dundee has a tremendous history going back to the 1880s and a wonderful bank of memories and esprit de corps among the people who worked there - some their entire lives.
In the late 19th Century there is evidence of glass being made in the Dundee area. Talana Museum has an invoice for the supply of glass bottles in 1889.
However, this production became properly business orientated in 1917 when Mr Cook moved his factory from Durban to Dundee. He had four glassblowers producing glass, but needed to find a source for sand. Rather than cart the sand from Malonjeni very close to Dundee to Durban, it was decided to relocate the glass business to Dundee which could supply the sand as well as the coal for firing the furnaces.
First Union Glass Factory (Talana Museum)
By mid 1918 the Dundee Coal Company had agreed to lease its old buildings to Glass Ltd. The pot furnace and glass blowers were relocated and a semi-automatic bottle machine arrived from Britain.
In 1918, to raise capital, the syndicate floated the glassworks as a small public company, named “Union Glass” as a tribute to the new Union of South Africa. Broken glass and bottles (known as cullet) were added to the mix to melt the ingredients – this came...
