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ALISON, Jim, ‘Burns in School’

by

Laverock 3, 1997 |

Transcript of a talk given at the International Bicentenary Burns Conference, University of Strathclyde, 11–13 January 1996

The third cam up, hap-step-an’-loup 
As licht as onie lambie 
An’ wi a curchie low did stoop, 
As soon as e’er she saw me, 
Fu kind that day 
[…] 
My name is Fun – your cronie dear, 
The nearest friend ye hae …

These words, the arrival of Fun at the beginning of The Holy Fair, are my text for today; their application should emerge later.

1. WHY SHOULD WE BOTHER WITH BURNS IN SCHOOLS?

In the context of educational development in Scotland over the last 15 years … Standard Grade, SCOTVEC Communication, revision of Higher, the 5-14 programme, Higher Still … nothing in the curriculum can safely be taken for granted. For every component a case needs to be made. And that applies not just to Burns but, as we have been seeing recently, to the teaching of literature in general, and within that to the place of Scottish literature.

Briefly then before we come to Burns, I shall touch on two prior questions: 

  1. why bother with literature?
  2. why bother with Scottish literature?

Literature 
The Scottish educational system at both primary and secondary levels has viewed literature and language as intimately reinforcing each other within the subject English. Most of us would, I think justify the study of literature on grounds such as these:

  • it demonstrates the fullest, most precise use of language,
  • it gives young people access to vicarious experiences and promotes their imaginative, aesthetic and moral growth,
  • it gives students knowledge of their cultural milieu and heritage,
  • it yields reflective enjoyment – and so on.

These claims can seem high flown and they are horribly vulnerable to classroom realities, but they remain articles of faith to which most teachers of English will subscribe. They are being severely tested at the moment in the Higher Still debate.

Scottish Literature 
So also are the claims of Scottish literature, which has recently been gaining more official recognition within the curriculum. I believe that Scottish texts, generously defined, have important advantages which should recommend them for classroom use at all stages. They can give our students imaginative insights into episodes and experiences which are part of our country’s distinctive past, and may influence our present and future.

They help us all to understand what living hereabouts has meant to the folk who have gone before us; they give shape to ideas, casts of mind and ways of saying which have haunted Scots over the centuries and which are often with us still.

In practical terms some are likely to tap into the domestic and non-standard language that young children bring to school. Many will also draw upon shared experiences of teachers, students and their families or illuminate local events and places. Fascinatingly they link with our music and art, our political, social and economic history. Overall they can help us to gain a sense of our cultural identity in relation to our neighbours and other nations.

But only if we know about them.

Burns 
Assuming then that we have made positive answers to these two general questions, we turn to Burns. Why bother? Among all the competing claims what has Burns to offer schools today?

In what follows I shall be speaking mainly about Burns in the context of English/English language courses in school. It’s important, however, to urge that there ought to be a coherent pattern of Scottish contributions to other areas of the curriculum such as Environmental Studies and Expressive Arts in the primary school, and that within these the work and life of Burns has contributions to make at all stages – particularly in music and history but also in art and drama and possibly R.E.

National Poet 
What does he have to offer to the study of literature and language? Well we are still, on his bi-centenary, being told on all sides that he is our NATIONAL POET. Ian McIntyre, for example, starts the most recent major biography: ‘Scotland’s national poet was born in the same year as William Pitt, Schiller and Mary Wollstonecraft’. Virtually every reputable contemporary work of reference also offers that thought: ‘The national poet of Scotland’. But what does the phrase mean? … Scotland’s greatest poet? its most popular? the only poet most people have heard of?, the only one who can stand international comparison. You will remember the surrealist musings of Iain Crichton Smith’s Murdo upon the Muse and the mouse, with that embarrassing echo of the English teacher in it somewhere:Murdo: ‘What does the mouse do when he sees this ploughshare approaching? Well he did what was natural for a mouse in such circumstances. He ran away. Not only that, but he ran away with bickering brattle. A fine phrase in itself. Here is the mouse in the corn, as we might say, helpless and here is the great poet who has by this time written many great poems. It is not a minor poet that we have here but a major poet at the height of his powers, or pooers as I might say. What did this great poet, author of such famous poems as Death and Doctor Hornbook do? He addressed the mouse. Most great poets would not see in this tiny animal matter for speculation. But Rabbie Burns did. That is why he is our national poet. At this moment he would teach us a lesson.’

I am not sure where that definition or that lesson gets us – other than offering a terrible warning to teachers who pontificate on Burns!

Burns is obviously not our ‘national poet’ in the sense of writing the epic dealing with the national myth or story, like Vergil or Camoens. In that sense ‘the matter of Scotland’ had been treated by Barbour and Harry, as Burns acknowledged, and perhaps even by Ossian Macpherson. But he did see himself as speaking for Scotland and as being charged with a responsibility to do something for Scotia, ‘or sing a sang at least’; and many people in his own time accorded him that role, ‘Caledonia’s bard, brother Burns’.

We note also his disinterested commitment to collecting and editing ‘the poetry and music of Old Caledonia’ for Johnson and Thomson. He has a patriotic interest in Scottish history, ‘the patriot and the patriot bard’; and he sees himself in a long line of Scottish poets which include his immediate predecessors Ramsay and Fergusson.

Pivot 
Any point in history can of course be portrayed as a time of transition, but Burns writes at a pivotal time for Scotland when, as Tom Devine has already demonstrated during this conference, society was feeling the social pressures of really traumatic agricultural, industrial and cultural change. Remember Auld Glen, James Tennant of Glenconner, neighbouring farmer and close friend of the Burns family whose son ‘Wabster Charlie’ founded the great St Rollox chemical complex! Burns illustrates remarkably widely these forces in poems such as The Twa Dogs; the diptych of Love and Liberty and The Cotter’s Saturday Night: The Author’s Earnest Cry and Prayer, Address of Beelzebub, The Gallant Weaver, Why shouldna Poor Folk Mowe? and many more. His work embodies matters of history, politics, commerce, religion, sexual mores, the social classes, festivals, music, language, agriculture, the landscape, travel and other aspects of Scotland in what Smout called ‘the crucial decades of the 1780s and 1790s’. He is in fact the first of our poets to be sensitive to a reasonably broad sweep of contemporary Scottish culture and to bring to bear on it some kind of historical perspective.

Quality 
On the grounds then of his aspirations, and the scope and diversity of his materials and styles, we are justified in seeing him as a national poet, but it is the quality of work that entitles him to the rank of the national poet, and a consequent international status. Assessments of his quality and his position in the canon have swung between 19th century bardolatry and the fierce critique launched by MacDiarmid in the second ‘Burns Cult’ essay for the EIS in 1926; then partly back via the judicious, but warm reappraisals of Daiches, Crawford, McGuirk and others, many of whom, happily, are taking part in this conference. My own belief is that the present proceedings, though stopping this side of idolatry, will confirm once and for all the use of the definite article … the national poet. If we believe, as I have urged, that the schools have a duty to vivify and transmit our national literary heritage, then we must in a systematic way introduce students to Burns as the one writer at the very heart of our national culture. The rest of our literature can be shown to fall into place around him. But it should also be part of a significant body of Scottish Studies within the primary and secondary curriculum.

Qualities as a Writer 
Among the qualities of Burns’s writing which justify our attention are:

  • his humour: from high-spirited fun to fierce satire,
  • range of feelings: compassion, patriotism, indignation, melancholy, sexual excitement,
  • lyric power: sentiment to sexual (humorous and serious) 
  • dramatic presentation of character,
  • narrative skills,
  • technical agility with words, ryhythm and poetic forms,
  • control of Scots/English language resources,
  • sensitivity to literary traditions, 
  • folk song qualities, matching words and melody,
  • letter writing skills and personae.

Belatedly we need to do justice to the extraordinary diversity of his riches … in the letters and songs as well as the poems; and to take account of the great range of his appeal at different ages and stages of students. What other poet in the canon of English Literature can appeal from early primary to sixth year secondary? Chaucer? Donne? Pope? Keats? Browning? Tennyson? Yeats? … even Shakespeare?

I shall return in a moment to the important question of his use with younger children.

2. RECORD OF THE SCHOOLS

How have Scottish schools been treating Burns in the past? Drawing on my own experience of over 50 years as pupil, teacher, teacher trainer and HMI, I have to conclude that the pattern has remained remarkably constant across the years and across the country. In primary and secondary school alike Burns has seldom if ever been grossly neglected: in certain ways he keeps popping up, but on the other hand he has seldom figured in any planned fashion. A typical situation is revealed away back in 1912 in Glasgow where the Albany Burns Club minutes its thanks to the headteacher and staff of Provanside Higher Grade school:‘For the great trouble and time they devote from the ordinary curriculum in working up children for the competition.’

In other words Burns has tended to be an extra, sometimes admittedly a treat, but never fully part of the curriculum.

Within my own experiences the usual manifestations have been:In primary school:

  • telling the folk hero tale of the lad born in Kyle, learning, singing one or two songs e.g. Duncan Gray, perhaps a visit to the cottage (and new Tam o’ Shanter experience).
  • Some elements of Burns Supper … Haggis, etc., might involve singing, reciting, dramatizing …
  • working for Burns Federation award certificate.

Additionally in secondary school:

  • S1-S3: some further poems, usually around January … Tam o’ Shanter, (tho also in primary) plus perhaps To a Mouse, To a Louse, Scots wha hae, etc. Also possibly the Burns Federation competitions.
  • S4-S6 some study of more demanding poems for exam purposes, such as The Twa Dogs and Holy Willie’s Prayer, and more recently pieces in the SEB designated lists for Higher or CSYS. Perhaps Burns Supper, School Burns Club, Writers’ Club etc.

The Scottish Examination Board 
It is worth registering by the way that SEB and its predecessors have always made it reasonably rewarding in examination terms to spend some time on Burns. Before the 1960s, when specific authors and texts were mentioned in examination papers, Burns turned up in some form or other as regularly as Shakespeare. The Leaving Certificate of 1930 for example asked for a comparison of the poetry of Burns and Pope, and that of 1931 asks ‘In what kinds of poetry do you think Burns is most successful? Illustrate your answers by quotations’. Hardly stimulating tasks, but typical of the time and no worse than any of the other questions in the papers.

The crucial new step in 1994 was the specification of 13 poems to be studied by anyone who chose the Burns option for the Higher Grade examination. I do not know how popular with students this option has been, but I believe that for the first time it encourages teachers to undertake a substantial study of Burns at Higher level. I realise that the specified text question has been unacceptable to some teachers but at least it has had the advantage of making it worth while to study some key Scottish poets at length ie. so far, MacCaig, Crichton Smith and Burns. One can only hope that whatever form of assessment replaces it in Higher Still is as beneficial in this respect. Personally I doubt it.

Variations 
The effectiveness with which Burns is presented across the school stages has always of course depended on the commitment of individual teachers. In the west there have been in the past some marvellously enthusiastic Burnsian primary headteachers who have made a rich and happy experience of their Burns topics; in other instances in some secondary departments it has meant little more than an annual dusting down of George Ogilvie’s Selected Poems or one of the Burns Federation Readers or the selection in John Blackburn’s Gallery. When studying Burns’s poems closely at the senior stages, teachers have of course used a variety of teaching techniques, from class exposition to open-ended group discussion. On the whole they have handled them much as they would the work of any non-Scottish poet, the main difference being the attention given where needed to Scots language forms.

What I have just described is the kind of mix I recall as a pupil; got involved in as a teacher in Glasgow and Aberdeen; and could still be pretty sure of encountering as I inspected primary and secondary school until two years ago. It is true of course that after the professional disputes of the mid ‘80s additional voluntary activities such as Burns Suppers and Burns Federation award preparations diminished markedly, and sometimes have not recovered. Additionally when teachers are under the administrative pressures of new syllabuses and assessment arrangements they can be excused for feeling that apparent add-on luxuries such as Burns activities may be jettisoned.

Evaluation 
On balance one could argue, and I think I would, that this admittedly patchy experience of the work of Burns over the primary and secondary stages was a more rewarding treatment than many other authors have received in Scottish schools. There has been, after all, some emphasis on enjoyment, and some chance that pupils would sing or perform and join in a group activity of some kind….. even if it was only making neeps and tatties in P5 or saying The Selkirk Grace. But it is worth stressing in this bi-centennial year that our school system can and should do better by the national poet.

3. THE BURNS FEDERATION

One cannot comment fairly on the way that Burns has been taught in Scottish schools without taking into account the promotional work of the Burns Federation over many years. I make no apology for giving due credit to it in this talk but, in preface, I should plead that I have never been a member of a Burns Club and am not engaged in a PR exercise for that excellent international organisation, the Federation. My observations are those of an outsider not privy to the inner councils. Tomorrow morning Mr. Murdo Morrison its president will have his say.

It has been common in the past for critics under the influence of MacDiarmid to denigrate the activities of the Federation, and of course it is an old Scots custom to be snide about enthusiasts. No doubt some of us also have unhappy memories of being dragooned into reciting by heart ‘To A Mountain Daisy’. Nonetheless I consider that its contribution to keeping Burns alive in our schools has been quite remarkable, if inadequately recognised.

Beginnings 
It is true that when founded in 1885 as a means of bringing together Burns associations of various kinds, it did not see itself as having any educational brief. Its first aim was social, to ‘consolidate the bond of friendship among members’. A reading of the early issues of its journal, the annual Chronicle (First published 1892), shows no articles on the potential of Burns in schools. Its contributors were mainly concerned with the biography of the poet and his family, the preservation of manuscripts and memorabilia, and the erection of monuments. An important purpose was to report the activities of the ever growing number of active clubs. It was only in 1911 that its formal objects were revised to include the aim:

‘To encourage and arrange school competitions in order to stimulate the teaching of Scottish history and literature.’ (Vol XXI, 1912)

This change in the constitution merely acknowledged however a movement to stimulate school competitions which was already well under way. The first formal reference to a school competition had come in the 1902 report of the Bridgeton Club, but the practice had started in 1878, originally only for the children of members and pupils of three east end schools, Hozier Street, Parkhead, and Martyr public schools. There is even evidence of the Greenock Club, arguably the oldest in the world, organising some kind of children’s prize as early as 1806.

In 1912 the Annual meeting of the Federation (in Carlisle!) heard a first report on the subject:

‘Mr. John Neilson, Thornliebank, submitted a report on the educational work conducted by Burns Clubs among school children. Ten years ago in the West of Scotland six clubs promoted competitions on the songs and poems of Burns: now no fewer than 42 clubs were engaged in this work, which had proved educationally and socially a great success. He advocated competitions being held every second year, and advised that the help of teachers should be requested in the work. Mr. Neilson promised to give preliminary hints to any clubs beginning School Competitions. In seconding the report, Mr. John Wilson, Glasgow, thought that the competitions should not be restricted to the songs and poems of Burns, but should embrace Scottish song and poetry generally. On behalf of the Scottish Song Society he offered to give hints to popularise the songs of Scotland.’

Some of the ingredients of these early competitions remain of great interest to us today, in particular their repeated emphasis on three key components:

  • music and song
  • recitation and performance
  • community involvement

The competitions usually resulted in a prize-giving linked to an annual children’s concert which was often a sell-out in the district. Such activities can at their best bring out the elements of celebration and carnival which are at the heart of Burns’s work.

Development 
Unfortunately the varied club events lost some of their individuality between the wars, when with the best of intentions the Federation took them over centrally in cooperation with the Education Authorities and, with greatly increased numbers, added something like a national examination syllabus in Scottish Literature, with texts prescribed for the session and written papers at different levels. These were taken each January, with certificates awarded to the best pupils in each class. Alas, for some older Scots today the only memory of Burns at school is a test plucked out of the air at short notice for no strong reason and thereafter quickly forgotten.

But these were the occasions when things went wrong! Overall the Federation has done its best to keep abreast of educational developments. It introduced personal projects and an Art award, encouraging the setting up of school Burns Clubs, and with the sponsorship of an oil company introduced a very popular one-day national festival for young competitors. I understand that some 140.000 young Scots from nearly 700 schools (mainly primary) are still entering for its competition annually. Happily this is not an assessment system which I was ever called upon to inspect, but I bumped into it periodically by accident and was impressed sometimes by the enthusiasm it could generate.

Larger Issues 
To its credit the Federation has often supported the larger educational cause of Scottish literature as a means of improving the expertise of teachers. From the first it insisted that Burns had to be seen in a wider context of Scottish studies. It had a large hand in creating the chair of Scottish History and Literature at Glasgow University. Its early Vernacular Circles, notably the London circle so much derided by MacDiarmid, did a great deal to raise consciousness of Scots language issues, and the Federation was a strong early backer of the Scottish National Dictionary.

Resources 
More closely relevant to schools, it has sponsored over the years a series of very useful anthologies in which Burns is imbedded in a range of other Scots poetry, prose and drama. In 1937 the first of these collections, I am proud to say, was edited by a former Senior Chief Inspector of Schools, J.C.Smith, and a former secretary of the EIS, Thomas Henderson. A more recent version, A Scots Kist, had the backing of Douglas Gifford. Among other materials produced by enthusiasts associated with the Federation have been the delightful bairnsangs of the three Ayrshire men who disguised themselves as Sandy Thomas Ross; the folk tale and nursery rhymes collected by Norah and William Montgomerie (he died a year ago but should not be forgotten on an occasion such as this.); the simple 24 page account of Burns’s life by James Veitch, a Burns Federation Song Book edited by John McVie and the anthology for younger children, A Scots Handsel, edited by J.K.Annand. I shall say something more about a current collection Burns for Bairns in a moment.

It is fair to say also that the Federation has acted as a catalyst for the introduction of a group of Burns poems into the present Higher Grade course (which I Persist in thinking is a GOOD THING).

Value of these Efforts 
I suggest then that we should be profoundly grateful for the Federations dogged efforts since the 1890s. It may have made mistakes in stressing the competitive motive so heavily and encouraging an elocution approach to the performance of party pieces, but we have to recognize that these features have been very popular with parents and children, and may account in part for the phenomenal survival of interest over the generations. In the face often of official indifference, the Federation has tried to understand and work with the school system. At its best it has maintained a generous vision of Burns as a great writer within a wider Scottish culture. It has seen the importance of the language issue. It has produced valuable materials for use in schools, and it has never forgotten what William Soutar affirmed … that if Scottish literature and language was to come back alive ‘It would come first on a cock horse.’ This is not surprising since many of its most committed members have been Scottish teachers … whom Christopher North, speaking of Burns’s many dominie cronies, characterised as that ‘meritorious and ill-rewarded class of men’.

4. BURNS FOR YOUNGER CHILDREN

I want to say something about Burns in our primary schools … on the assumption that our other contributors today will be dealing mainly with the secondary sector. What I take from the Federation’s best efforts over the years are, as I have mentioned earlier, the value of celebration and festival and simple fun in the education of young people. Burns’s poetry calls out today, particularly in the earlier stages, for music, song and dance; for performance, dramatisation and group involvement.

Burns, as far as I know never wrote consciously for young children, though he occasionally addresses them in his poems. Some of his songs and his smaller pieces, as well as extracts from the major poems, have however the genuine whigmaleerie touch … the humour, rhythm and linguistic playfulness with an occasional disturbing frisson that children love, particularly if there is also opportunity for music.

Burns himself said of one of them:‘Duncan Gray is that kind of light-horse gallop of an air, which precludes sentiment. – The ludicrous is its ruling feature.’

This is what Edwin Morgan has called the ‘madcap, inventive, quicksilver’ side of Burns. It is the manic dimension of his work; we have also to recognize that there is a powerful depressive side as well, and that the one is the obverse of the other. For the purposes of primary education however, we should make the most of this greatly underestimated resource of sheer fun in Burns.

Likely Items 
If we are setting out to choose Burns material for primary purposes, likely items include:Up in the Morning Early, Wee Willie Gray, Hey ca thro, We’re a Noddin, O Whistle and I’ll Come to ye my Lad, Duncan Gray, To A Haggis, To a Louse, Address to the Toothache, O Willie Brew’d a Peck o’ Maut, The Deil’s Awa wi the Exciseman, On Tam the Chapman, Killiecrankie, What will I do gin my Hoggie Die?, Poor Mailie’s Elegy, The Auld Man’s Mare’s Dead, On a Schoolmaster in Cleish Parish, The Kirkudbright Grace.

Nor should we forget the wonderfully lively Scots prose tale of The Marriage of Robin Redbreast and the Wren which according to Burns’s sister Isabella he made for the amusement of the younger members of the family. As a narrative of a desperate journey it’s an early preparation for Tam!

Materials 
How at the moment does a primary teacher get a convenient selection of Burns materials? Even in the bicentenary year the answer is, ‘not easily’. The Federation’s earlier publications, notably the excellent Scots Kist and Scots Handsel, are mostly out of print. It recently revised an anthology Burns for Bairns mainly for the purpose of its recitation competitions. This is quite a comprehensive selection, and crucially does not hesitate to make extracts from longer or more adult pieces.

Extracts 
I mention extracts for primary use because, as you are well aware, in Burns what starts as fun ‘may end in Houghmagandie’ (that is after all the plot line of The Holy Fair)! I first met ‘There was a lad …’ when I was twelve, and for years I did not realise it had a final verse about ‘the bonny lassies lying aspar.’ The school edition had simply dropped it off the end. I am not advocating bowdlerising Burns, simply saying that there are some poems that are eminently accessible in parts to younger pupils, and these opportunities should not be neglected. We should not through any fear of destroying the integrity of works of art hesitate to cull what we want for our pupils.

Burns for Bairns 
Unfortunately, as the title of the recent publication, Burns for Bairns, might suggest, its touch is uncertain: it contains feeble stuff such as The Banks of Nith and The Banks of Devon, and its advice on elocution and delivery is singularly unhelpful (eg. it says of The Gallant Weaver, ‘Treat this poem with a pleasant tone and tune, giving a good final cadence to the last line’). It is a pity that an opportunity has been lost here, particularly since the project was generously sponsored by one Burns Club with the intention of putting copies into all primary schools. There is still therefore place for a well packed primary kit (or Kist!) of Burns materials including selections of prose, background historical resources, tapes of music, a topographical video etc, in other words, a specialised version of SCC’s forthcoming 5-14 Kist. It may be that something of this kind has already been produced in Ayr division. If not, it is worth doing…perhaps by the new unitary authority or the Federation or the ASLS or the Saltire Society or SCCC. If we are in future to give Burns his key place at the centre of our teaching of literature and language from primary upwards, a well produced resource of this type is essential.

5. TEACHING METHODS

The teaching methods suited to presenting Burns in the 5-14 stages are in the main no different from those for any other imaginative writer: it should be possible to accommodate him within the programme for listening, talking, reading and writing, and find also room within Expressive Arts and Environmental Studies. One or two points, however, in no particular order:

i. Fun with Words 
It is worth exploiting every chance for language fun in Burns, particularly the crossing over between Scots and English forms. I remember, many years ago, two 12 year olds who had been learning and singing Duncan Gray coming to me with a painting they had done of the poem. This showed some kind of quadruped offering a bunch of flowers to what looked anatomically vaguely like a woman:

Me: explain please. 
Them: it’s a goat. 
Me: why the flowers? 
Them: it’s in love. 
Me: What’s the point? 
Them: it’s a wooing goat. Ha, ha, the wooing goat.

ii. Gender 
Even with primary children it is worth confronting the issue of Burns’s attitude to women. The song Sic a Wife as Willie had is a typical blend of linguistic nimbleness and grotesquerie. In a sense it is great fun, but is it right to laugh at a deformed woman? What do you think of the girl’s attitude in Whistle and I’ll Come to you my Lad? Write the dialogue between Kate and Tam on his homecoming. There are many opportunities for lively work in topics such as these.

iii. Winter 
In many Primary schools the curriculum rightly retains a quite primitive seasonal cycle. Summer excursions and holidays, autumn, harvest, Halloween, Christmas, Spring and Easter are all worked in somehow to class activities. We should not then devalue the annual January recourse to Burns. There is some fitness in his being established as the poet of the Scottish winter festival. Winter was his favourite season after all, and there are many vivid pictures of it in his poetry that can be extracted and enjoyed, and even sung. For example:

The wintry west extends his blast 
And hail and rain does blaw 
Or the stormy north sends driving forth 
The blinding sleet and snaw. 
Wild-tumbling brown the burn comes down 
And roars frae brae to brae, 
and bird and beast in covert rest 
and pass the heartless day.

This is the first verse of the unpromisingly titled song Winter: a Dirge. It’s good strong visual stuff which intriguingly anticipates Hopkins’s Inversnaid. I suppose it should have been called Winter: a Rant since it goes very well to Burns’s intended tune, MacPherson’s Rant. It can stand on its own, and does not need for our purpose its two following verses of Augustan Deism. Or take the extraordinary first five stanzas of A Winter’s Night describing the snow storm and the animals sheltering. Even the murderous fox wins the farmer’s pity. This latter piece has the added fascination of Scots and English rhymes. Which pronunciation to choose? A vote on it?

iv. Drama, Music and Dance 
There are also in Burns many chances for drama, music and dance, however modest your confidence and skills may be. Pieces such as The Deil’s Awa’ and Willie Brewed a Peck o Maut’ cry out for mime and movement. The Burns Federation, has a useful popular songbook with words and music and also a glossary by David Murison. Some schools now benefit from visiting tutors in traditional music, and children who can play fiddle or chanter. Happily moreover for schools that are not so endowed, there is now a lot of good Burns folk music on tape. I understand for example that Linn Records are releasing this week the first of a series which will cover the whole corpus of Burns’ songs. I had a chance to hear from it an irresistibly rhythmic version of Wee Willie Grayby Rod Paterson and Tony Cuffe. Some though certainly not all of the items in this first CD are likely to be very suitable for primary use. The revival of enthusiasm for country dancing among young folk is also worth exploiting, for Burns himself loved the dance. (‘The plooman laddie dancin’), though it was a cause of contention with his father.

Remember Fun in The Holy Fair:

The third cam up, hap-step-an’-loup 
as licht as onie lambie 
An wi a curchie low did stoup 
As soon as e’er she saw me.

His poems are full of such references and opportunities for ‘mirth and dancing’, and his songs make use of the old dance tunes. I should add that my own first war-time experiences of country dancing in primary school were a total, embarrassing disaster. I still blush to think of them.

v. Audio-visual Media 
There has always been a temptation to present Burns visually. When I started teaching I had one 35mm film strip of Tam o Shanter and one of Chaucer’s Pilgrims; neither was strikingly successful as a visual aid. However having recently fought my way through all the fudge, perfumes, tea trays and engraved crystal, I think I would recommend for any primary teacher a class visit to Alloway. The Tam o Shanter Experience, three-screen presentation in purpose-built auditorium, introduces a very convincing Meg and a less than diabolic Old Nick. Nanny is decent, just: not too abandoned. Her reverend grannie would not have been too shocked! This little show has a nice touch of comic, slightly homely terror which I believe Burns might have appreciated. I don’t think it diminishes the poem at all. In terms of the ‘horrible and aweful’ it is certainly no match for contemporary horror videos, but I am told that many of the primary classes who have already visited it have enjoyed it thoroughly. The recently refurbished Biggin is, for adults at least, a chilling, disturbing place, effectively and simply presented, but eerily empty. In the adjacent museum the new wall displays about Burns’s story and Ayrshire life are of very good quality. All in all, I think this is, with the adjacent brig and kirk, a worthwhile additional resource for primary classes provided they prepare for their visit in advance.

6. CONCLUSION

In this talk I have stated a case for Scottish literature in our schools. I have argued that the time is ripe to place Burns’s work right at the centre of our teaching of literature and language, and within a framework of Scottish studies planned across Primary and Secondary. I have described what I think are the strengths as well as the weaknesses of our traditional handling of Burns in the schools. In so doing I have acknowledged the valuable contribution of the Burns Federation over almost a century. Finally I have offered some thoughts on approaches to Burns at the primary stages. Throughout I have dwelled on the potential for high spirits and simple ‘fun’ in Burns’s work… ‘the nearest friend ye hae’.

Copyright © Jim Alison 1997

ALISON, Jim, ‘Lummie’

by

Laverock 3, 1997 |

ASLS believes that teachers will increasingly want to explore and expand the corpus of literature in Scots for use in schools. For that reason we welcome the recent appearance of Scottish CCC’s resource ‘The Kist’. It is also for that reason that we are rediscovering in this issue the little-known poem Lummie by Alexander Taylor. We hope you will agree that in practical terms Lummie is a valuable addition to the range of texts that will ‘go’ in secondary courses today. Even if you do not, the attempt to extend the canon is surely justifiable.

Lummie appeared in four weekly instalments in the Aberdeen Herald from April to May 1857. In a footnote to the second episode the Herald’s editor James Adam commented ‘Since Burns wrote Captain Grose there have not many better things, in its style, appeared than Lummie.’ Thereafter the poem seems to have vanished from public view. As far as I know, it has never been reprinted in its entirety, though a small extract appeared in Poetry of Northeast Scotland (1976). Its quality was however appreciated by a few notable students of northeast lore. Professor Child’s ballad correspondent Will Walker recorded its existence, and supplied a few facts about its author in Bards of Bon Accord (1887). Alex Keith, agriculturalist and ballad editor, saw Lummie as ‘a tragedy related with gusto and superb effect’. (A Thousand Years of Aberdeen, 1972)

In the Herald the poem was attributed pseudonymously to Auld Style, but Walker and Keith identify the author as Alexander Taylor. The biographical details which they supply are scanty. Taylor seems to have been born in Fetteresso in the early 1800s and educated in Stonehaven parish school. He trained as a writer’s clerk in Stonehaven, the ‘Kilwhang’ of the poem, and moved later to Edinburgh. According to Keith he had some fame as an amateur astronomer. There are probably other items by him lurking in the newspaper archives. Alan Reid in Bards of Angus and the Mearns(1897) mentions one Taylor, a farmer at Fetteresso, who in 1856 published in an Aberdeen paper a very good rhyming piece Dogger and Bumperdescribed as ‘an ancient legend of Kilwhang’, about a legal case involving two liquor sellers. This sounds like our Taylor, or at least the same family. If any reader can supply further information about the author of Lummie, I shall be delighted to receive it.

The poem, which charts the downfall of a peasant farmer in the Mearns, is said to have some foundation in fact. Certainly the evocation of the rural background has a powerful ring of authenticity. The district of Lumgair is in the parish of Dunnotar just south of Stonehaven; a few miles further south lies Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s Bloomfield and to the west is the heartland of Burns’s forebears. In the first half of the nineteenth century this was classic improvers’ country in which the peasant economy was rapidly being displaced by the new capitalist farmers and their cost-efficient husbandry. The local Barclay lairds of Urie had forcefully promoted this agricultural change. Writing in 1842 Peter Christian, a Stonehaven solicitor, describes how under their all pervading influence, ‘land was cleaned, drained and limed; regular fields were formed; artificial grasses and turnips were introduced, and the system of convertible husbandry finally banished the antiquated and rude management by infield and outfield … In this way, within the last sixty years, the greater part of the land of Dunottar has, from the worst mode of management and comparative sterility, been advanced to a pitch of improvement not inferior to any district in this part of the country’ (New Statistical Account, Parish of Dunottar). In the same report Christian pronounces with evident satisfaction that ‘The people are in general attentive to their religious and moral duties. Indulgence in the use of intoxicating liquors is fast disappearing.’ It is against this kind of social background that Taylor traces the career of the elderly reprobate Lummie. 

The sociologist Ian Carter characterises such ‘ancient farmers’ in the Northeast: ‘These were old men, irascible and litigious, though also honest and sensible. They were simple in their manners and plain in their dress. Good judges of black cattle, they were indolent in their management of their farms, paying little attention to scientific husbandry. They drank heavily, relishing the crack and dram of market days, and continued to follow their fathers’ leisure pursuits – like shooting at the mark.’ (Farm Life in Northeast Scotland 1840-1914, 1979). Their way of life was evoked sympathetically in William Alexander’s near contemporary novel Johnny Gibb of Gushetneuk. In our poem Lummie lives and dies by his own lurid version of these obsolete, anarchic ways and values.

While Lummie may have some antiquarian interest as an item of local history, it does not necessarily command our attention as literature. For most of our readers, therefore, we are offering a critical challenge. Here is an unfamiliar work for which the present contributor is making large claims. Do you think these are justified? Do you judge it is good enough to use in some way with your students in the S4 to S6 stages?

The claim is firstly that Lummie is in its own right a considerable work of art with lasting human interest. Exploiting the constraints of the Standart Habbie, it is a deftly sustained narrative poem incorporating vigorous episodes – the minister’s visit, the wild ride from Aberdeen via Stonehaven to Lumgair, and the death of Lummie. Moreover the imagery of the squalor of Lummie’s ferm toun is extremely graphic. Above all there is the intriguingly ambivalent handling of the central character. On the one hand Lummie is presented with approval as embodying all the subversive carnivalesque virtues of the peasant farmer. He is fiercely proud of his wretched land:

‘… There’s only ae Lumgair
In a’ the warl’; 
And ae gudeman …’

He represents the good old Scotland that is being lost for ever. On the other hand the same gudeman stands defiantly isolated from his local community, a moral decadent whose audacious blasphemy and abuse of his long suffering wife deservedly ends in madness and suicide. What precisely is the authorial stance? The whole poem is managed with a fine feeling for the grotesque which culminates in the gothic horror of the corby:

‘O that grim bird there’s little said 
But muckle feared’

As Adam hinted in the Herald, no reader will be in any doubt about Taylor’s debt to Burns. In Lummie the influence is apparent at every level, from turns of phrase to stanza form; from rhetorical devices to choice of theme. But Taylor cannot be dismissed as a plagiarist; indeed he demonstrates that Burns’s influence on 19th century Scottish poetry was not as uniformly malign as is sometimes supposed. The largest claims made in this introductory note are that Lummie can stand comparison with Tam o’ Shanter, and that teachers and students will benefit from reading the two works in conjunction. Although the parallels and borrowings are undoubtedly there, Taylor is his own man on his own ground; the contrasts between the two works are as rewarding as their similarities. Consider for example the ways in which the two poems treat the supernatural, the notion of respectability or the hero’s womenfolk. Taylor moreover has absorbed influences other than that of Burns. Clearly, for example, the hilarious gallop homeward owes more to The Diverting History of John Gilpin than to Tam’s return to Shanter. The croaking raven which presides over Lummie’s end echoes the ill-omened birds of Poe and the traditional ballads.

Finally the language of Lummie is worth some exploration. Its rich mainstream Scots is not marked by many of the northeast forms that you find in Johnny Gibb of Gushetneuk, but there are some interesting farming terms that SND records as Mearns usage, eg ‘britchin-cleeks and cadden nails’.

Of Lummie and his like the poet says elegiacally:

‘Nor were they mannies made for show, 
That couldna gi’e or tak’ a blow. 
They spak’ braid Scots wi’ ready flow, 
          Like honest men; 
And what they thocht they werna slow 
          To let you ken.’

Braid Scots with ready flow is Alexander Taylor’s medium in Lummie, and his achievement.

Copyright © Jim Alison 1997

LUMMIE 
by Alexander Taylor (?)

Ye drunkards far and near attend! 
Nae mair your days in riot spend; 
Your ways, ye Sabbath-breakers, mend! 
          Swearers, gi’e heed! 
To ilka sinner be it ken’d 
          That Lummie’s dead.

Nane ever sair’d auld Nick sae leal, 
Yet gied puir fouk sic lifts o’ meal; 
Nane ever hame sae drunk could reel 
          Frae ilka fair; 
Nor crack a joke, nor curse sae weel 
          As auld Lumgair.

For fifty years he held the grip, 
And never let a mornin’ slip; 
The foremost aye his coat to strip, 
          And curse the idle; 
The last at nicht to hang the whip 
          Aside the bridle.

But sic a farm as Lummie staid on – 
Sic brutes o’ horse his billies rade on – 
Sic loons to wark as Lummie led on – 
          Sic pleughs and harrows – 
And sic a way his farmin’ gaed on 
          Had never marrows.

Owre a’ his fields, gang whare ye micht, 
On dyke or drain ye couldna licht; 
His houses stood upon a heicht, 
          Ricket thegither; 
He didna fash to haud them ticht 
          Against the weather.

Auld broken trams and barrow wheels, 
Graip-shafts, auld axes, rotten creels, 
Moth-eaten presses, rocks and reels, 
          Sacks, torn and thrummy, 
Lay thick to trip the stranger’s heels 
          That ca’d for Lummie.

Auld buckets wi’ the bottoms out, 
Kettles that tinklers michtna clout, 
Thrawn couple-legs, inch-deep wi’ soot, 
          Tethers and tubs 
Rottin’, wi’ sticks and strae, thereout, 
          Lay i’ the dubs.

Haims wantin’ cleeks, auld doors and shutters, 
Pleuch-stilts, torn brechams, turnip cutters, 
Auld crackit harness worn to tatters 
          Ropes, spades and thack, 
Trampit by nowte amang the gutters 
          Lay roun’ like wrack.

To judge his dwellin’ by the shape – 
Some hurriet chield had seized a graip – 
Flung divots, clay, stanes, thack, and rape, 
          In heaps thegither, 
And made a shelter to escape 
          Frae stress o’ weather.

The gavel-ends were thrawn and sklentit, 
The sides were bulged, the roof indentit; 
Ye could hae sworn, if placed anent it, 
          The auld clay wa’ 
Had thrice wi’ sudden jerk repentit 
          When bent to fa’.

A hole to let the reek gang out 
Was fitted wi’ a timmer spout; 
But when the thick peat-reek grew stout 
          It filled the bore, 
Syne thro’ the house it took the route, 
          And socht the door.

The floor o’ clay was never sweepit; 
Black draps frae sooty kebars dreepit; 
Whare hens in rows their places keepit, 
          Wi’ cocks to guard them; 
When frae the thack o’ ratton creepit 
          Loud cacklin’ scared him.

For ilka hen there was a cock, 
And ane was king o’ a’ the flock; 
He answered to the name o’ “Jock” – 
          A strong game bird; 
He would hae torn the e’en frae folk 
          At Lummie’s word.

Thro’ a’ the house the poultry trippit; 
In ilka dish their heads they dippit, 
And ilka crumb that fell was nippit 
          Ere it could licht; 
Whiles on the tables whare folk suppit 
          The cocks would fecht.

A sad gudewife sat I’ the neuk, 
And muckle wrang she had to brook; 
When Lummie gied a glower she shook, 
          And leukit douce 
Afore a limmer ca’d the cuik, 
          That ruled the house.

She was a muckle, heesin’ soo, 
Wi’ flabby cheeks and sulky broo; 
A snuffy nose hang owre her mou’ 
          Set on asklent; 
Her thick, short neck o’ greasy hue, 
          Was sidelins bent.

But Lummie lo’ed the towzie quean, 
And scandal spread that wouldna screen; 
His ain kind wife, wha lang had seen 
          Her troubles comin’, 
Got usage sic as ne’er was gi’en 
          To decent woman.

When autumn winds made branches bare, 
She hurried frae the guilty pair, 
And socht a hame whare her despair 
          By few was seen; 
When spring returned she wasna there – 
          Her grave was green.

To Lummie’s door the parson rade, 
And knockit like a man weel-bred; 
The cuik appeared, took guilt and fled, 
          But Lummie sat, 
Dumb glowerin’ while the parson said – 
          “What woman’s that?”

To hear that question thrice repeatit, 
Wi’ five grim words gart Lummie meet it; 
The parson, terrifiet, retreatit 
          Wi’ hands upliftit; 
But Lummie, by the fireside seatit. 
          His place ne’er shiftit.

The fast-day cam’ – refused a token, 
And warned to mind whase heart he’d broken; 
At first he thocht the Session jokin’, 
          But saw his error, 
And cursed them till their knees were knockin’ 
          Wi’ sudden terror.

In winter days when frost was keen, 
And nae green hillock to be seen, 
The house was ‘maist o’ hens made clean – 
          He weel could spare 
To drive a load to Aberdeen, 
          And sell them there.

Ae day, when at the Plainstanes sellin’, 
The cover o’ the auld cart fell in; 
The air grew darken’d wi’ the skellin’ 
          O’ scraichin’ chuckies; 
And Lummie, dancin mad, ran yellin’ – 
          “Ye devil’s buckies!”

At dizzens hungry tykes were snappin’; 
Thro’ windows, flocks their heads were rappin’; 
On ilka roof his cocks were clappin’ 
          Their wings and crawin’; 
Frae dizzy heichts his hens were drappin’, 
          And killed wi’ fa’in.

He rung’d the dogs and gart them cower; 
And wi’ a spring o’ sudden power, 
He made a noble claucht at four, 
          But miss’d them a’; 
And, in his hurry, tummlin’ ower, 
          Row’d like a ba’.

He paid the skaith for windows craved; 
Around his head his purse he waved – 
“Let Lummie ken – send word!” he raved; 
          “Send him a line 
Whene’er ye wis’ your Plainstanes paved 
          W’’ sterlin’ coin.”

His mare stood harnessed I’ the street, 
Snortin’, and scrapin’ wi’ her feet; 
He loupit lichtly to the seat, 
          And aff she flew – 
“My lass,” quo he, “their hides will heat 
          That rin wi’ you.”

He soon was oot o’ sicht and hearin’ 
Alang the Brig o’ Dee careerin’; 
The road got never sic a clearin’ – 
          Policemen chased, 
And ilka crowd they passed was jeerin’ 
          Their pithless haste.

Alang the turnpike road he ca’d; 
Whaever met him thocht him mad! 
The hair his bonnet wouldna haud 
          In streams was flyin’; 
“Commaather! weesh! there, there, ye jaud!” 
          He keepit cryin’.

Heich ower her head the dubs gaed splashin’; 
Her muckle shoon the flintstanes thrashin’; 
Frae ilka hoof the fire was flashin’; 
          The strong cart-mare 
Sprang furious wi’ her driver’s passion 
          To reach Lumgair.

The milestanes, dykes, and palin’ rails 
A’ backlins fled; she passed the mails; 
The trams gaed up and down like flails, 
          The linch-pins jumpit, 
The breechin-cleeks and caddan-nails 
          Like hammers thumpit.

To ilka door the folk cam’ flockin’; 
Frae side to side they saw him rockin; 
But spy the colour o’ his stockin’ 
          They never micht; 
And wheels, that seemed to hae nae spoke in, 
          Flash’t out o’ sicht.

He cleared the Den – he viewed the bay; 
And fair atween him and the Brae, 
Kilwhang in peerless beauty lay – 
          “Kilwhang’s bewitchin’,” 
Quo’ he, “but this is nae a day 
          To slack the britchin’.”

(Kilwhang, that’s doomed to watery ruin, 
If Tammas Rhymer’s weird’s a true ane – 
Kilwhang – the auld toun and the new ane, 
          Whare, if ye dwell, 
Your neebours ilka thing ye’re doin’ 
          Maun ken and tell.

Kilwhang, whare mony a gowkit loon 
Disdains to benefit the toun 
By makin’ breeks, or mendin’ shoon, 
          Scorns honest wark; 
And flunkey-daft, maun hunker doun 
          To grow a clerk!

Kilwhang, whare lawyers thrive sae rare, 
And proudly pace the Market Square – 
For lawyers black was Lummie’s prayer – 
          Grim deil pursue, 
And hurl them hame, and dinna spare, 
          Till hell be fu’.

He rummel’t through Kilwhang like thunder; 
Lugs, mous, and e’en, grew wide wi’ wonder; 
The natives ran, till, by the hunder, 
          Their tongues hung out; 
He left them gaspin’, miles asunder, 
          In vain pursuit.

As sune’s he to Lumgair drew near, 
The cuik ran out the news to speir; 
The news that Lummie gart her hear, 
          We daurna speak; 
It made her shortly disappear 
          Wi’ burnin’ cheek.

That nicht – sic swearin’ he took pride in – 
Folk fand the house owre hot to bide in, 
And, blythe of ony hole to hide in, 
          Lay waukrife, hearin’ 
The roarin’ carle, past mortal guidin’, 
          Dementit swearin’.

The curse, his latest word at nicht; 
The curse, his first to hail day-licht; 
He slippit cursin’ out o’ sicht, 
          Cam cursin back, 
And cursin’ gaed frae howe to heicht 
          Owre a’ his tack.

At ilka market whare he stumpit 
An eager mob around him jumpit; 
In vain the show-folk twanged the trumpet, 
          And beat the drum; 
For Lummie wi’ his cudgel thumpit 
          And sang them dumb.

At ilka stride his mill he rappit; 
His breeks for want o’ buttons flappit; 
His bonnet blue wi’ red was tappit, 
          But auld and bare; 
Doun frae the palsied head it happit 
          Streamed lang red hair.

When drouthie farmers, blin wi’ drink, 
Aside their seats began to sink, 
At ilka waucht, without a wink, 
          He toomed a stoup; 
Syne doun the table, wi’ a clink, 
          He gart it loup.

His richt neive steekit owre his head, 
He gied his husky throat a redd – 
Syne on the left loof, level spread, 
          Cam eident strokes, 
As ben the deafest lugs he gaed 
          Wi’ roarin’ jokes.

And yet for a’ the spates he took, 
A torn-down hash he didna look; 
He ne’er was fashed wi’ cankert plook 
          Or nose or broo; 
And ne’er when lauchin’ had to crook 
          A blistert mou’.

In Lummie’s days men werena shams – 
They hadna shanks like barrow-trams; 
Their faces werena wizzent hams – 
          Their blood was fresh; 
They didna dee wi’ drinkin’ drams, 
          Nor tine their flesh;

Nor were they mannies made for show, 
That couldna gi’e or tak’ a blow. 
They spak’ braid Scots wi’ ready flow, 
          Like honest men; 
And what they thocht they werena slow 
          To let ye ken.

His marrow Lummie never met 
At drinkin whisky, cauld or het; 
And owre his dram to see him set, 
          And hear him yell, 
Was something ane may ne’er forget, 
          Nor hope to tell.

He jokit fouk that spak’ o’ death; – 
“Gie lawyers wark!” quo’ he, “Gude faith! 
It doesna save the saul frae skaith 
          Though wills be written; 
It’s time aneuch when scant o’ breath 
          To think o’ flittin’.”

If near Lochgair, or miles aroun it, 
Unearthly noises whiles resoundit, 
Nae man would start and look confoundit, 
          Or stand a dummie – 
The lug was deaf that ne’er was woundit 
          Wi’ yells frae Lummie.

When thunder broke wi’ startlin’ hurl, 
And made the verra earth to dirl, 
He answered wi’ a mockin’ skirl 
          The loudest crash, 
And gart his auld blue bonnet whirl 
          To meet the flash.

Whether at hame, at kirk, or fair, 
He never tint the swaggerin’ air 
That said – “There’s only ae Lumgair 
          In a’ the warl’; 
And ae gudeman – what wad ye mair? 
          Ye see the carle!”

Wi’ cauld sweat on their gloomy broos, 
Auld wives would gasp to hear the news 
O’ Lummie’s deeds, while roun’ their mous 
          Dumb terror wrocht, 
Till Mercy tremblit to jaloose 
          Their secret thocht.

Afore their judgment-bar they ca’d him – 
Prophetic groans frae bliss outlawed him; 
“Him! waur than a’ the sons o’ Adam – 
          Fie, bar the door! 
And wag upo’ the deil to scaud him 
          For evermore.

Him? Lummie! – fire and brimstone streamin’, 
Till hell’s black squad frae heat rin screamin’ – 
The auld grim deil, wi’ visage gleamin’, 
          Glowers doun the trap, 
Whare Lummie, sooner than he’s deemin’, 
          Is doomed to drap.’

But, strange eneuch, this fearsome chiel’ – 
While auld wives sent him to the deil – 
By younger folk was likit weel; 
          In his auld biggin’, 
They aye got scouth to rant and reel 
          Up to the riggin’.

As keen as ony beardless boy, 
He joined them I’ their daftest ploy; 
And never grudged to mak’ their joy 
          His hale nicht’s wark; 
Nor failed them o’ a Scots convoy, 
          When skies were dark.

When neebours, at their hairst, would spare 
Green corn in patches here and there, 
The daurin’ carle that farmed Lumgair 
          Through ripe and green 
Gaed hackin’ – whether foul or fair – 
          Frae morn to e’en.

And when the last scythe-stroke was gi’en, 
He, victor-like, was heard and seen 
Rejoicin’ on a hillock green 
          Owre his auld gun; 
And a’ his loons attendit, keen 
          To share the fun.

His gun was oak, wi’ iron braced 
(Nae man had e’er sae thick a waist) 
Upon its timmer carriage placed, 
          Frae mony a shot 
It backlins ran, wi’ red-het haste, 
          And reekin’ throat.

Its girth and length led louns to doubt 
That – handle aff, and box ta’en out – 
‘Twas but some ship’s auld pump, grown stout 
          Wi’ iron hoopit – 
They saw the touch-hole whare the spout 
          Had first been scoopit.

The pouther flashed at ilka roar 
On divots dancin’ by the score; 
Lummie stood gleg to spunge the bore, 
          And eager herds 
Rammed, primed, and fired, until they tore 
          The rustit girds.

But Lummie’s day at length grows dark; 
A croud, wi’ auctioneer and clark, 
Gang on as if his verra sark 
          They aff would rive, 
And leave him neither dog to bark, 
          Nor beast to drive.

The roarin carle grew dowff and dumb, 
As if his hindmost hour had come; 
The wind that soughed about the lum 
          O’ his new bield 
Concerned him mair than a’ the sum 
          His roup would yield.

At Fancy’s ca’, when Reason fled, 
His auld companions, lang syne dead, 
Cam’ back and flockit round his bed – 
          He sat and spak’, 
While baith his hands a-glampin’ gaed 
          Wi’ theirs to shak’.

“Come nearer, sirs,” he cried, “it’s me! 
Guid faith, we’se hae a muckle spree – 
Fie! licht the lamp and let them see, 
          In case they fa’; 
And here gangs Lummie’s last bawbee 
          To treat them a’.”

He threapit that they werena drinkin’; 
He swore that he could see them jinkin’; 
At length he spak o’ something blinki’’ 
          Wi’ unco licht; 
And, ane by ane, he mourned them sinkin’ 
          Fast out o’ sicht.

He seized, wi’ strength that wouldna cowe, 
A fathom o’ guid thick tow; 
Round baith his neives he gart it row – 
          His arms he streekit – 
Neist moment I’ the ingle-lowe 
          Twa pieces reekit.

They brunt awa’ by slow degrees; 
He bent his head atween his knees, 
And cried, that out o’ ilka bleeze 
          The fiends were springin’; 
And mutter’t about leafless trees, 
          And dead men hingin’.

A freen that whisper’t laigh but clear – 
“It’s time the minister were here” 
Was answered wi’ a bitter sneer, 
          And scornfu’ glower – 
“Think ye that Lummie’s gaun to fear, 
          What gars ye cower?”

His steekit neive, in fury raised, 
Fell canny doun; the een that blazed 
Grew motionless and horror-glazed; 
          He held his breath; 
And thankfu’ folk said “Guid be praised 
          For sendin’ death!”

But, gaspin deep, he gied a yell, 
Till frae his face the sweat-draps fell. 
“She mocks me noo,” he cried, “hersel” 
          “See, see she’s comin! 
I’m chokin wi’ the brimstane smell – 
          Drive oot that woman!”

In vain frae place to place they flaw 
To scare the phantom that he saw; 
In vain the pins alang the wa’ 
          Were cleared o’ claes; 
In vain clear-burnin’ candles twa 
          Shed forth their rays; –

Wi’ claspit hands and bristlin’ hair, 
He hirsled backlins wi’ his chair; 
The warnin’ wraith that nane could scare 
          Was nearer seen, 
And the grim glances o’ despair 
          Shot frae his een.

Neist mornin’, when nae mortal saw, 
He took a tow and hied awa; 
A muckle corby near him flaw 
          To watch him chokin’; 
In vain he cursed to scare the craw – 
          It keepit croakin’.

It spied him wi’ a glancin e’e – 
It skirled his auld hard hands to see 
First gird the tow about the tree, 
          Syne climb the timmer; 
Neist noose his craig, and glower a wee 
          Wi’ ghastly glimmer.

He heard it croakin’ – “Mercy never!” 
And, glowerin’ mad, began to shiver; 
Thrice in his lug – “Ye’re mine for ever!” 
          It screighed, and flappit; 
“Then tak’ me, Deevil, and be clever!” 
          He screamed, and drappit.

It sat to watch the timmer shak’, 
And hear the rotten branches crack; 
It flew and fasten’t in his back, 
          Syne in his breist, 
And croakit when, wi’ visage black 
          His warstle ceased.

Wi’ black, unchancy wings outspread, 
Three times it circled round the dead; 
A wild unearthly sough it made, 
          And disappeared. 
O that grim bird there’s little said 
          But muckle feared.

ALISON, Jim, ‘A Passage to Treasure Islands’

by

ScotLit 29, 2003 |

‘But there were still some nights when he would gaze out into the etherium and see the wink of Silver’s cyborg eye and hear his hearty laugh. Jim would smile softly at the memory of the old pirate who helped him find treasure — the treasure inside himself.’ 
Disney’s Treasure Planet, The Junior Novelisation
Adapted by Kiki Thorpe, Designed by Disney’s Global Design Group, Puffin Books, 2003.

In May 1999 Elaine Petrie organised for the Annual General Meeting of ASLS a one-day conference at Falkirk College on the general theme of Children’s Literature. This was a challenging new venture for the Association, which had the effect of extending the range of its interests and commitments. ASLS has always taken pride in the breadth of its involvement in literature and language, and its series of Scotnotes and Schools Conferences have been evidence of its support for English teaching. But the Falkirk meeting was the first time that it had looked closely at the issues surrounding writing for much younger readers in Scotland. Some may recall that the day’s programme combined scholarly papers, contributions from writers Julie Bertagna, Theresa Breslin, Mairi Hedderwick and Sheila Douglas; evidence from a children’s publisher; traditional story telling; a statement on policy from Jenny Brown of the Scottish Arts Council and lively parallel workshops for local primary school children. Subsequently in that autumn’s Schools Conference Maureen Farrell followed up with a helpful review of Scottish fiction for early secondary students. 

Encouraged by the success of these events, the Association’s Schools/FE committee discussed further possible developments and identified three projects, all of which have subsequently borne fruit. The first of these, a writing competition for 12–14 year olds, resulted in cooperation with the Burns Federation in annual awards which have now been presented for the third time. Our second venture, the commissioning of new writing for young readers, produced My Mum’s A Punk edited by Theresa Breslin, James McGonigal and Hamish Whyte. This was published last year by Scottish Children’s Press, along with suggested teaching activities.

Beth Dickson in her editorial in issue 28 of this Newsletter has drawn vigorously on her personal experience to reaffirm the value of imaginative reading for young people living in Scotland today. It was for reasons such as hers that we decided in 1990 to tackle as a third task a practical guide to the resources of Scottish children’s fiction. Our good intention, much debated and modified, has now finally emerged as Treasure Islands. From the first it has been a group undertaking by 9 members of the Committee. At a very early stage we agreed to concentrate on novels, short stories and traditional tales, and to aim at a particular age range. Hence the subtitle, a guide to Scottish fiction for young readers aged 10–14. The thinking behind our efforts is summarised in the Introduction to that volume. I want however to say something further about the issues that confronted us as we worked. I have to add that my own impression of our deliberations may not reflect the exact views of everyone involved. 

It did not take the committee long to conclude that a large-scale encyclopaedia such as the Oxford or Cambridge works of reference was out of the question. That was beyond our resources and would anyway have been premature since the necessary scholarly research had not, as far as we knew, been undertaken. The more we thought about it, however, the more we became convinced that there was an urgent need for some rudimentary exploration of a potential corpus of writing for young people in Scotland. We recalled Edwin Morgan’s clarion which had served as epigraph to Scottish Literature in the Secondary School, published in 1976 by the Scottish Education Department:‘There comes a time when out of respect for itself a country must collect its resources and look at its assets and shortcomings with an eye that is both sharp and warm; see what is there, what is not there, what could be there.’ (TLS, 28 July 1972).

After considering several ambitious options we settled more realistically on the idea of a collection of brief reviews of Scottish fiction, drawing on our combined personal experiences as teachers, parents and readers. We had the precedent of Morgan’s own stylish little guide to adult literature, Twentieth Century Scottish Classics (1987). Our efforts at a booklet of this type might prove to be partial in both scope and preferences. Without being arrogant however, we felt that we could at least do some ground clearing for a more authoritative treatment in the future. 

Writing also in issue 28 of ScotLit, Professor Ian Duncan from his viewpoint in California recently expressed surprise that it should be necessary to speak up for Scottish literature in contemporary Scottish schools and universities (‘The Study of Scottish Literature’). In a similar vein it is at least worth speculating why children’s literature in Scotland has not merited any evaluation as a distinctive resource. After all, most countries in the English-speaking world have such surveys. Ireland, for example, produces the Big Guide to Irish Children’s Books, (with the blessing of Mary Robinson, then President of the Republic.) The standard Oxford, Cambridge and Rough Guides are of high quality but their coverage of Scottish material is at best sporadic. One wonders why researchers have not investigated this area of cultural studies. Perhaps they have been deterred by assumptions such as the following:

  • children’s fiction is a feeble literary form not worth bothering about;
  • it is too difficult to define the criteria of Scottishness in children’s fiction; 
  • it is chauvinist, or in some way politically insensitive, to think of anything as being culturally ‘Scottish’; 
  • the texts are mostly out of print and therefore not easily accessible;
  • nothing significant is likely to be to be found.

Early in our discussions we encountered these objections and, directly or implicitly, rejected all of them. 

As the compilers began to accumulate first lists of suggested titles, and as duplicates were eliminated, we had to adopt a working definition of our material. It suited us to take a generous view of what was ‘Scottish’ since we did not want fuss about ethnic qualifications. This is the approach advocated in Teaching Scottish Literature (1997) edited by Alan MacGillivray, in which many of us had been involved. We tended to think in terms of texts rather than authors. A Scottish text was simply one that used Scottish content in story, characters or setting or was written by someone who had lived in Scotland. This definition accommodated a rich and diverse mix. To take some borderline examples, we were free to lay claim to novels as varied as The Coral Island, Emma Tupper’s Diary, Great Northern?, Greyfriars Bobby, The Herring Girls and Madame Doubtfire. Would we have been able to annex the recent Disney’s Treasure Planet — a publication fortunately not known to us at the time? This curious, easily readable ‘tie-in’ boasts a Silver with a mechanical arm and a tricky Tinkerbell-ish sprite called Morph. It offers not a single word of credit to Stevenson or Barrie. 

It is worth recording that in trawling for titles we greatly appreciated the exploratory work done by Canongate Press in the 1980s when it was publishing its Kelpie children’s classics. That series had not proved viable in the longer run, but fortunately the Floris imprint has recently been reissuing some of its more popular volumes. We were delighted also to have the enterprising list of high quality fiction for less confident readers built up by the Edinburgh imprint Barrington Stoke, about which see Anna Shipman’s article in ScotLit, issue 27. Mary S Moffat’s enthusiastic online bibliography Historical Fiction for Children yielded a valuable personal selection of Scottish texts. When we saw how our personal choices were shaping, it seemed important to give chronological depths via some early writers such as R M Ballantyne and George MacDonald. The list finally closed at a technically convenient total of 160 texts but since then we have kept discovering additional possible authors. At the moment we have some 30 further names worth exploring. Happily moreover good books continue to be published, by both established and new authors. How we follow up the project, in print or online, is still to be decided. One welcome development would be to secure feedback from young readers on what they thought of our recommendations. So far, in the hallowed tradition of dominies, we have simply assumed we know what is best. For that reason we have invited readers of all ages to e-mail their own suggestions on children’s novels to ASLS.

But what is a children’s novel? This ominous question could well have lured us off into thickets of critical theory about readership. You will recall the Matilda dilemma. In Roald Dahl’s mischievous fable that tiny tot hungrily consumes from her local library a high protein diet of classics such as The Old Man and the Sea, The Sound and the Fury, The Grapes of Wrath, Brighton Rock and Animal Farm. If a children’s novel is simply regarded as any extended fiction which young people choose to read, we might perhaps have found ourselves having to include for the benefit of 14-year-olds Ian Rankin, Alan Warner, Matthew Fitt, Denise Mina, Janice Galloway, or Val McDermid. For sure, there are adventurous youngsters who savour red meat of this kind. While our final selection welcomes Buchan, Broster and Conan Doyle as children’s authors by long adoption, we have preferred on the whole to avoid adult fiction and concentrate on the often grossly underestimated writers who have, in one way or another, signalled that they are writing mainly with young people in mind. Whereas Ballantyne, Henty and Lang addressed their readers frontally, others have operated indirectly through choice of main characters, topics, and language register. Many have spoken through a young narrator. A complication is that in several fine classic texts the identity of the intended audience remains extremely puzzling. As we have suggested in our reviews, The Wind in the Willows and Peter and Wendy are notorious examples of this uncertainty.

In drafting our own text, Treasure Islands, we were strongly tempted to cultivate a cheerful, simple, child-friendly register. We realised however that we would have difficulty in pitching our recommendations effectively across a range of ages and reading levels, and composing anything more than unconvincingly breezy blurbs. We could not afford the glossy production values that such an approach would need. The priority had to be to offer at a modest price succinct guidance to interested adults who could influence the books that young people read. 

Our intended market naturally includes teachers but we are also targeting parents, relatives, teachers, students and librarians, with the hope that interested youngsters may additionally come within range. Having had varied involvement in secondary and primary teaching, members of the group endorse the Scottish Executive’s National Guidelines on English Language 5–14 in identifying Reading for Enjoyment as valuable in its own right. On the other hand we know from experience that the private, personal pleasures of reading can be killed dead by over-zealous instruction. We are aware also that the writers themselves often like classroom contacts, but can be deeply ambivalent about the ways that schools exploit their books as instruments of of the language curriculum. Indeed one of our chosen texts, Alison Prince’s The Sherwood Heroillustrates the predicament of pupils in a Glasgow comprehensive who get caught up with a children’s writer in a well-intentioned fiction project. We have therefore tried to strike a balance: Treasure Islands is designed to be helpful to teachers in training, and to their more experienced colleagues; but at the same time we do not see the volume as primarily a manual for English teaching professionals. Our hope is that it will interest any one who wants to find good books for young people. We have offered guidance on levels of difficulty, age range and interest, but deliberately have made no recommendations about whether titles may be more or less suited to boys or girls (there are 48 women writers and 46 men in our selection).

When we went to press in June 2003, 58 of our 160 titles were unfortunately out of print. Possibly some others have fallen off since then and a few may even have been reissued, such being the chronic condition of children’s publishing. You could argue that there was little point in our reviewing texts which were not going to be readily available to young readers. In this pioneering venture however we felt obliged to establish what could be brought back and kept in print given a little encouragement and rather more financial support. One of our aims has been to help publishers, booksellers and the media to take a greater interest in promoting Scottish texts. It is an irony of the undertaking that although our reviews run to only some 200–250 words they are probably the fullest critical attention that many of the chosen texts have ever received. 

Agreeing on an apt title for a new book can be a frustrating yet entertaining business. The guide’s provisional name had been a boldly assertive 100 Best Books until we found that our reviews exceeded this total, and that the Booktrust organisation based in London already published an annual survey with the same title. (As it happens, only two of the hundred titles reviewed in its 2002 issue could be considered Scottish even by by our generous definition.) We then played around with the phrase No Bad Books which attracted us by reason of its pun, containing both Scottish understatement and the implication that any text that attracts young readers must have some virtue. In our more pessimistic moments we might even have called our assembled wisdom The Hoose o Haivers, but our friends at Itchy Coo had got there first with their delightful Scots versions of Ovid. In the end however we borrowed Treasure Islands from a long-lost book programme on BBC Radio 4. We liked its iconic associations and saw its potential for a graphic cover. 

In embarking on the voyage to Treasure Islands our article of faith was that there did exist out there an appreciable territory of good fiction which could be annexed as distinctively Scottish and was worth colonising for young readers. A substantial claim for Scottish texts in schools had already been staked out in Teaching Scottish Literature (1997): 

‘They can give our students unique imaginative insights into episodes and experiences which are part of our country’s distinctive past, and may influence our present and future. They help us to understand what living hereabouts has meant to the folk who have gone before us; they give shape to casts of mind and ways of saying which have haunted Scots over the centuries and which are often with us still. In practical terms some are likely to tap into the domestic and non-standard language that young children bring to school. Many will also draw upon accessible shared experiences of teachers, students and their families or illuminate local events and places. Fascinatingly they link with our music and art, and our political, social and economic history. Overall they can help us gain a sense of our cultural identity in relation to our neighbours and other nations.’

Looking back, we are confident that our volume amply confirms that claim. Within the topic groupings in its admittedly subjective Keywords index there are titles which transmute into fiction aspects of life in Glasgow, Edinburgh, Skye and the Borders; social phenomena such as the treatment of outsiders and the poor; the experiences of girls and women; school life; growing up in Scottish communities; the impact of political strife and wars historic and recent; emigrations and displacement; historical episodes such as the persecution of witches; the Reformation and Jacobitism; fabled monsters and real animals, and many more. In the end however what really counts for readers, old as well as young ,is not so much the facts of the topics themselves as the author’s creative act of fictionalizing them, making them compelling and memorable stories. We believe that the new ASLS guide charts a rich archipelago of memorable Scottish fiction … even under the name of Junior Novelisations:

‘I remember him as if it were yesterday, as he came plodding to the inn door …’ 

Copyright © Jim Alison 2003

ALISON, Jim, ‘Thanks Courteous Wall’

by

ScotLit 33, 2005 |

On 15 October 2005 the late Enric Miralles’ controversial complex of buildings for the Scottish Parliament won the prestigious Stirling Prize of the Royal Institute of British Architects. 

For the next two or three centuries pedestrians who tramp down to the Holyrood end of Edinburgh’s Royal Mile will find themselves brushing past the Canongait Wall. Like the much older Flodden Wall off the Grassmarket this is a defensive work, designed as a blast-proof bulwark on the northern perimeter of the new Scottish Parliament complex. Originally the architect Miralles had conceived it also as a symbolic Constituency Wall to be assembled from stones gathered from every constituency in the country. As with many other design features of our award-winning parliament, first bright thoughts had to be modified and what was finally unveiled in 2004 was a collage of engraved concrete renderings of Miralles’ sketches, a puddingstone of geological specimens embedded like the legendary cannonball on the Castlehill, and a mosaic of inscribed stone slabs of varying shapes and textures.

The texts which have been beautifully cut into these panels are of great interest, but the casual passer-by is not likely to be able to pause long enough to read all the fine print, scan their totality or ponder what the purpose of this enduring lapidary anthology might be. Moreover in some conditions of Edinburgh light they are totally inscrutable.

At the time of writing there is no attractively produced explanatory pamphlet on sale to visitors – a missed opportunity, surely – but the Parliament’s Public Information Service will supply on line a bare list of the quotations which are published below.

THE TEXTS OFFICIALLY LISTED AS CARVED ON THE CANONGAIT WALL

 

From the lone sheiling of the misty island
Mountains divide us, and the waste of seas –
Yet still the blood is strong, the heart is Highland,
And we in dreams behold the Hebrides.

Anonymous: “Canadian Boat Song” (first appeared 1829)

* * *

O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us
To see oursels as others see us!
It wad frae monie a blunder free us
An’ foolish notion.

Robert Burns (1759–1796): “To a Louse”

* * *

Then let us pray that come it may
(As come it will for a’ that)
That Sense and Worth, o’er a’ the earth,
Shall bear the gree, an’ a’ that.
For a’ that, an’ a’ that,
It’s coming yet for a’ that,
That Man to Man the world o’er,
Shall brithers be for a’ that.

Robert Burns (1759–1796): “A Man’s A Man for A’ That”

* * *

Put all your eggs into one basket – and then watch that basket!

Andrew Carnegie (1835–1919)

* * *

(I knew a very wise man who believed that) if a man were permitted to make all the ballads, he need not care who should make the laws of a nation.

Andrew Fletcher (1655–1716)

* * *

Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation.

Alasdair Gray (1934–)

* * *

This is my country,
The land that begat me.
These windy spaces
Are surely my own.
And those who toil here
In the sweat of their faces
Are flesh of my flesh,
And bone of my bone.

Sir Alexander Gray (1882–1968): “Scotland”

* * *

Is i Alba nan Gall’s nan Gaidheal is gàire is blàth is beatha dhomh.
It is Scotland, Highland and Lowland that is laughter and warmth and life for me.

George Campbell Hay (1915–1984): “The Four Winds of Scotland”

* * *

So, cam’ all ye at hame wi’ freedom
Never heed whit the hoodies croak for doom
In your hoose a’ the bairns o’ Adam
Can find breid, barley bree an’ painted room.

Hamish Henderson (1919–2002): “The Freedom come all ye”

* * *

What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889): “Inversnaid”

* * *

“What a lovely, lovely moon.
And it’s in the constituency too.”

Alan Jackson (1938–): “The Young Politician Looks at the Moon”

* * *

The rose of all the world is not for me.
I want for my part
Only the little white rose of Scotland
That smells sharp and sweet – and breaks the heart.

Hugh MacDiarmid (1892–1978): “The Little White Rose”

* * *

Scotland small? Our multiform, our infinite Scotland small?

Hugh MacDiarmid (1892–1978): “Scotland Small?”

* * *

But Edinburgh is a mad god’s dream
Fitful and dark,
Unseizable in Leith
And wildered by the Forth,
But irresistibly at last
Cleaving to sombre heights
Of passionate imagining
Till stonily,
From soaring battlements,
Earth eyes Eternity.

Hugh MacDiarmid (1892–1978): “Edinburgh”

* * *

Sweet ghosts in a loving band
Roam through the houses that stand –
For the builders are not gone

George Macdonald (1824–1905): “Song”

* * *

There is hope in honest error;
None in the icy perfections of the mere stylist

Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1868–1928)

* * *

Chan e iadsan a bhàsaich
an àrdan Inbhir-chéitean
dhaindeoin gaisge is uabhair
ceann uachdrach ar sgeula;
ach esan bha ’n Glaschu,
ursann-chatha nam feumach,
Iain mór MacGill-Eain,
ceann is fèitheam ar sgeula.

Not they who died
in the hauteur of Inverkeithing
in spite of valour and pride
the high head of our story;
but he who was in Glasgow
the battlepost of the poor
great John MacLean
the top and hem of our story.

Somhairle MacGill-Eain (Sorley MacLean) (1911–1996): “The Clan MacLean”

* * *

tell us about last night.
well, we had a wee ferintosh and we lay on the quiraing. it was pure strontian!

Edwin Morgan (1920–2010): “Canedolia”

* * *

The battle for conservation will go on endlessly. It is part of the universal battle between right and wrong.

John Muir (1858–1914)

* * *

Abair ach beagan is abair gu math e.
Say but little and say it well.

Seannfhacal (Proverb)

* * *

Am fear as fheàrr a chuireas
’S e as fheàrr a bhuineas.
He who sowest best reapest best.

Seannfhacal (Proverb)

* * *

To promise is ae thing, to keep it is anither.

Proverb

* * *

Let the words of my mouth, and the meditation of my heart, be acceptable in thy sight, O Lord, my strength, and my redeemer.

Psalm 19:14

* * *

When we had a king, and a chancellor, and parliament-men o’ our ain, we could aye peeble them wi’ stanes when they werena gude bairns – But naebody’s nails can reach the length o’ Lunnon.

Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832): Mrs Howden in Heart of Midlothian

* * *

What tongue does your auld bookie speak?
He’ll spier; an’ I, his mou to steik:
‘No bein’ fit to write in Greek,
I write in Lallan,
Dear to my heart as the peat reek,
Auld as Tantallon.

Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894): “Maker to Posterity”

* * *

Bright is the ring of words.

Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894): “Songs of Travel”

The origins of this selection probably lie in a media consultation, The Voices of Scotland, which in 2002 generated the 90 quotations temporarily posted on the barricades concealing work in progress on the site. A small group of MSPs and literati oversaw that first exhibition but there is no information on the processes by which the final permanent items for the wall were identified. Who drew up the leet and who had the final say? Was is it a committee or a single person; an architect, a civil servant or a politician? One wonders what criteria operated. Given the physical limitations of the available space, omissions were inevitable, and there is little point in expecting balanced inclusiveness, but did anyone pause to think of the possible underlying agenda of these select graffiti? What if anything are they implying about Scotland? How will future generations read the runes?

Musing on the official list reveals some intriguing features:

    • There is no female author or direct reference to women.
    • The only two politicians mentioned are a communist and the leader of the anti-union party in 1707, and the prevailing attitude to politicians is at best sceptical.
    • As befits the medium of carved inscriptions, and perhaps a political audience, there is a tendency to terse aphorisms, canny, admonitory and aspirational.
    • There is only one light-hearted item, and that is from Scotland’s first official Makar.
    • Among the solemn themes foregrounded are international brotherhood, patriotism, sense of place, and conservation.
    • The quotations are mainly literary, with some weighting to poetry and to the 19th and 20th centuries. MacDiarmid is the most frequently cited author and there is no Adam Smith, Hume, or Hutton; no Barbour, Dunbar, Buchanan, ballads, Donnchadh Ban or Boswell. Space is found for one English contributor.
    • The three historic languages are represented, with English prevailing and the four Gaelic texts also translated in to English. No other language, classical or community, appears.
    • One complication is that although 26 texts are listed above, scrutiny on site reveals mysteriously that the wall carries only 24 of these. The missing items turn out to be Sorley MacLean on his admiration for his namesake, Great John; and Stevenson on his love of Lallans. One wonders why these particular two have been dropped. Were they jettisoned at the last moment by the politicians as insufficiently progressive? Were the texts too long or complicated for the carvers? It may be, of course, that they were just forgotten and will resurface as later additions.
    • Viewing it as a whole (and that is not easy), you may also sense that the wall looks sadly incomplete. It still carries some 70 empty lozenge-shaped cavities that are clearly intended for quotations or rock samples. Could it be that the compilers ran out of money or ideas – or indeed both?

These brief comments are meant to prompt speculation rather than criticism of the origins of the quirky, fragmentary, oddly moving little display which now embellishes the Canongait Wall, or Memory Wall as it is sometimes designated. Each of us could doubtless produce our own preferred alternatives and additions to this cultural jigsaw, but at least we should be grateful for a thought-provoking landmark to join Makars Court, the Book Trust, the Storytelling Centre, the Fergusson statue and the Poetry Library on the fringes of the Parliament’s campus in Unesco’s first City of Literature. After all, Miralles’ aspiration was that the buildings should be a demonstration of “architecture that’s never totally finished or totally explained”.

At the same time and for the sake of Festival visitors, WRI outings, school parties, overseas students and other puzzled wayfarers, someone ought also to consider publishing a well-designed booklet and CD celebrating whatever the wall may be trying to say about us Scots.

Postscript 
Since this article was written, the Parliament’s website has ventured further information about the Wall. This reveals that the two quotations from Sorley MacLean and Robert Louis Stevenson have now been dropped from the list so that it tallies with the 24 texts actually installed on the Wall. The overall designer and two carvers are given credits, and we learn that three MSPs were responsible for the final selection. There is no present intention to add any further texts. Welcome though these details are, they do not address the broader issues raised above, and there is still no booklet on sale for visitors.

Copyright © Jim Alison 2005

ALTUN, Ali, ‘John McGrath: an Anti-Class-based System Playwright’

by

A paper presented at ESSE 2012 |

One of the most prolific and outstanding figures in British drama, John McGrath was committed to socialism and used the stage as a political arena (Kershaw, 1992: 149) to promote his opinions and provoke the labour class audience to react against the established capitalist system in Britain (Holdsworth, 2002: xvii). With socialist insights into the nature of social struggle and the provoking tone concerned with the issues of oppression, McGrath’s plays can be classified as examples of agit-prop (Agitation-Propaganda) drama (Innes, 2002: 181). Using the stage as an instrument to give political messages, the playwright performed his plays at non-theatre buildings such as working-men’s clubs, pubs, village halls and community centres.

Having been influenced by some political thinkers of the left such as Antonio Gramsci, Rosa Luxemburg and Mao Tse Tung, McGrath grew interest in the social and political atmosphere of the late 1960s (Holdsworth, 2002: xv) and went to Paris during the revolts of May 1968. These revolts made important marks on him and the playwright started to grow opposition to the class-based society in Britain.

In 1971, McGrath, his wife Elizabeth MacLennan and her brother David MacLennan established the 7:84 Theatre Company, which took its name from a statistic that was published in The Economist that 7 per cent of the population of Britain owned 84 per cent of the country’s wealth. McGrath comments that “although this proportion may have fluctuated marginally over years, we continue to use it because it points to the basic economic structure of the society we live in, from which all the political, social and cultural structures grow” (McGrath, 1981:76). According to Patterson the reason why the company was founded lies in the fact that McGrath wanted to show the necessity of a struggle, a political organisation, and a hard, bitter, disciplined fight against powerful forces of capitalism (2003:109). Holdsworth indicates that the main aim of the company was to attract the audience to popular theatre so that they could be shown and provided with day-to-day realities of working class life. Yet it was not that easy to attract the audience to the theatre (2002: xvi). 

In order to manage to attract crowds to his non-theatre performances, McGrath made use of such popular forms as ceilidh, song, live music and caricature, performing his works at the working-men’s clubs and trade union buildings where the working class men spend their time. But when using these forms, he also aimed to show that “working-class forms of entertainment and popular forms are not inferior and that such audiences are not philistine” (DiCenzo, 1996:140). 

In 1973 the company were divided into two branches; English and Scottish. The first production of 7:84 Scotland was The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil, considered the masterpiece of John McGrath. The play provides information about different classes and historical background of the Highlands, how its people and natural resources were exploited by the ruling class and their capitalist aims after the discovery of the North Sea oil from a socialist perspective. One of the aims of the play was to make the audience aware of what had happened in Highlands and to tell of tales of local resistance, while also entertaining them. McGrath, when explaining the aims of the play, says that it “tries to present in its work a socialist perspective on our society, and to indicate socialist alternatives to the capitalist system that dominates all our lives today” (quoted in DiCenzo, 1996:137). Yet the main aim of the playwright was to create a counter-culture that would react against bourgeois culture and consequently overthrow them. Moreover it is mainly concerned “to encourage the Highlanders to alter the present system and the status quo in favour of the whole community” (Yerebakan, 1997: 194). To this end, McGrath used ceilidh form, unofficial histories, the Gaelic language and music of the region to arouse interest among the locals, which brought success to him and made him more popular. Thanks to tours to remote places, now the distant areas were introduced with theatre and this led to an increase in the number of audience, who also took more social responsibility. As a result, thousands of Highlanders saw the play and they both enjoyed it and were enlightened with their past, present and possible future events.

As far as The Cheviot … is concerned, at the very beginning the playwright talks of the history of Scotland as “that has a beginning, a middle, but, as yet, no end” (McGrath, 1981: 2), which comes to imply that Scotland and Highlanders have been used and abused by the British capitalists and the process of exploitation has not finished yet. On the other hand these remarks may also come to mean that the Highlanders should not lament their history, but should organise themselves into taking a militant action so that the exploitation that the play and the history reveals would not be repeated once again to the detriment of the working-class in the future (Yerebakan, 1997: 205). The political play is not only confined to economic exploitation of Scotland but also raises issues about cultural assimilation of a society. McGrath makes use of Gaelic songs to stress that new Scottish generation cannot speak their mother tongue because of the fact that they have been denied to learn it. He uses some striking historical facts about Scotland in the play and aims both to enlighten and have a great impact on the audience:

    • M.C.1. In the 18th century speaking the Gaelic language was forbidden by law.
    • M.C.2. In the 19th century children caught speaking Gaelic in the playground were flogged.
    • M.C.1. In the 20th century the children were taught to deride their own language.
    • M.C.1. The people had to learn the language of their new masters.
    • M.C.1. A whole culture was systematically destroyed – by economic power (McGrath, 1981: 52).

As a result of cultural assimilation of this society, the Gaelic songs were not understood where Gaelic was less widely known. But elsewhere, where it was widely known, the songs were both joined in and appreciated. According to Winkler the reason why the Gaelic lyrics are not translated in the Methuen edition is “to evoke curiosity and the desire to retrieve what has been lost” (Winkler, 1990: 296).

Anti-capitalist playwright draws audience’s attention to the fact that they should not let others control their land and warns them against potential threat of capitalist powers. He advocates that Scottish people must own and control their land and that they should decide on their future; otherwise they will gradually lose their culture and identity.

M.C.2. By economic power. Until economic power is in the hands of the people, then their culture, Gaelic or English, will be destroyed. The educational system, the newspapers, the radio and television and the decision-makers, local and national, whether they know it or not, are the servants of the men who own and control the land 
(McGrath, 1981: 55).

The views of socialist playwright are not only national but also international. While depicting Scottish working-class who have been suffering from the multinational corporations that seek their interests in the Highlands, he also touches on the problems of other workers in the world who have suffered as a result of political and economic imperialism.

    • M.C. One thing’s for certain, these men are not just figures of fun. They are determined, powerful and have the rest of the ruling class on their side. Their network is international.
    • M.C.4. Question: What does a meat-packer in the Argentine, a merchant seaman on the high seas, a docker in London, a container-lorry driver on the motorways, have in common with a crofter in Lochinver? 
      (McGrath, 1981:57).

McGrath gives the message that working-class of the whole world share the same destiny as the Highlanders. Yet still their destiny is not pre-determined. According to McGrath the rise of working-class depends on the “social, political and cultural development of the working- class towards maturity and hegemony” (McGrath, 1989:21). So if all the working-class unify and take action against the exploiters, they can overthrow the hegemony of capitalism and create a classless society and thus live under equal terms.

At the end of the play, the playwright gives direct messages to the audience, saying that they should organise and take militant action to be victorious. Yet they should not fight “with stones, but politically, with the help of the working class in the towns” (McGrath, 1981:73). And in order to be more influential on the audience the play ends with a Gaelic song that calls for the unification of the oppressed, and a fight against the oppressors.

M.C. The song says:
Remember that you are a people and fight for your rights – 
Remember your hardships and keep up your struggle 
The wheel will turn for you 
By the strength of your hands and hardness of your fists. 
Your cattle will be on the plains 
Everyone in the land will have a place 
And the exploiter will be driven out 
(McGrath, 1981:73–74).

Consequently, the socialist playwright McGrath vividly depicts the class struggle between the bourgeois and working-class, who have been abused and exploited by both Scottish and English landlords, and multinational corporations. The working-class not only have been made use of but also have been culturally assimilated. They were forbidden to speak their mother language – Gaelic – and even were denied to wear their traditional clothes. Despite all the hardships both Highlanders on national scale and all the working-class on international scale have suffered, there is still hope to change the status quo. If they unify and react against the hegemony of capitalism, they can manage to create a classless society both in Britain and in the world.

References

  • DiCenzo, Maria (1996), The Politics of Alternative Theatre in Britain, 1968–1990: the Case of 7:84 (Scotland) , Cambridge, New York and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press.
  • Holdsworth, Nadine (2002) Naked Thoughts That Roam About, London: Nick Hern Books Ltd.
  • Innes, Christopher (2002) Modern British Drama: The Twentieth Century, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  • Kershaw, Baz (1992) The Politics of Performance: Radical Theatre as Cultural Intervention, London: Routledge.
  • McGrath, John (1981) The Cheviot, The Stag and Black, Black Oil, London: Eyre Methuen Ltd.
  • —(1989) A Good Night Out: Popular Theatre: Audience, Class and Form, London: Eyre Methuen Ltd.
  • Patterson, Michael (2003), Strategies of Political Theatre: Post-War British Playwrights, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  • Winkler, Elizabeth Hale (1990), The Function of Song in Contemporary British Drama, Newark: University of Delaware Press
  • Yerebakan, İbrahim (1997), “Stages as a Political Platform: An Assessment of John McGrath’s The Cheviot, the Stag and Black, Black Oil”, Edebiyat Bilimleri Araştırma Dergisi, No: 24, 189–208, Erzurum: Atatürk Üniversitesi

Copyright © Ali Altun 2012

BATEMAN, Meg, ‘Gaelic Poetry for English Classes’

by

Laverock 3, 1997
(The text of a paper given to the ASLS Schools Conference in 1994)

I have been kindly asked to speak at this conference to make the suggestion that you might include some modern Gaelic poetry in translation in the work you do with your English classes. In my talk I hope to let you decide if this would be a good idea by talking about the poets involved, the books where their work is to be found, and the perspectives from which their work might be usefully studied.

Before I start on such practicalities I should take a moment to address the question of why teach Gaelic poetry in translation at all. A purist could argue that translation makes a nonsense of poetry and in some sense that is undoubtedly correct. A defence might be made on the grounds that poetry is in any case a translation – a translation from feeling to words, from a private insight to a parallel, hopefully communicable, experience. If this partially defends the teaching of translated poetry, I will continue with defending the teaching of Gaelic poetry, though perhaps to this audience no defence is necessary.

I would make such a defence on three grounds, the most important of which must be that there is some very good Gaelic poetry. At school level there is no point looking at inferior poetry simply because it’s there as we do when we want to get a picture of the whole or are in search of the sociological factors made evident in a poem. To inspire young people in the enjoyment of poetry only the “best” should be searched out, and I believe some of “the best” can be found in Gaelic.

The second argument is compatible with the notions of a child-centred curriculum. Gaelic, as one of the cultures constituting this nation, is bound to impinge at some level on all of the population. Any exposure bringing understanding and respect between the cultures can only be a good thing. I would be pleased to see a speaker on this platform next year representing translated poetry from other cultures in Scotland – translated for example from Urdu, Punjabi.

A rather more political point is that after centuries of the active destruction of the Gaelic language and culture by the school system, there is now a chance to make good a wrong. I would not want to make this claim on political grounds alone, if there were any question of pupils having to suffer for the sins of their fathers. But there is good material … 

I’ll turn now to the practicalities of books. For the purposes of this lecture I would recommend firstly an anthology, Nua-bhardachd Ghaidhlig; Modern Scottish Gaelic Poetry, edited by Donald MacAulay. It was first published in 1976 and is due to come out again next month, November 1994. I feel it is a book where virtually every poem works. That may be too subjective a remark to be useful. The book as a whole has a certain homogeneity about it; it comes from a distinct time and a distinct place, with distinct perspectives on the world. All of the five contributors are Highlanders, born between 1911 and 1930, all are men and university-educated. They all share some of the following characteristics: an anti-clericalism which demands as fundamental the individual’s – and not the community’s – values; a sense of outrage at the history of the Highlands and Islands and the country’s indifference to the language and culture; a sense of tension between the security of belonging to a small rural community, at the price of being required to conform, and the freedom, in particular, the intellectual freedom, of city life, at the price of an anonymity which slips so easily into existential dread. This hurt is made clear in the lines of Derick Thomson:

The heart tied to a tethering post, round upon round of the rope, till it grows short, 
and the mind free. 
I bought its freedom dearly. 
                      (Water and Peat and Oats)

The most important characteristic uniting the poets is the passion and honesty of their probing which accepts no easy answers. When their poetry was first published this was particularly refreshing as for over a century new Gaelic poetry had consisted mostly of sentimental evocations of a past that never was. It was as if Gaelic poetry couldn’t, or wouldn’t, look Gaelic society in the eye. There was of course good reason for this: with the upheaval of Clearance and emigration too much had been shaken for the old models to stand; likewise the present was often too gloomy to be the subject of the songs that emigre Gaels gathering socially in the cities would want to hear. It is no wonder if their preference was not for reality, but for a few hours of escapism that could hold them together before their return to the wheels of British Industry. 

I will return to discussing each of the five poets individually in a moment, but first I would like to mention another anthology of younger Gaelic poets, An Aghaidh na Siorraidheachd/ In the Face of Eternity, edited by Christopher Whyte and published by Polygon, that came out in 1991. Poems are not written to an agenda, but we inevitably teach to one. Therefore it is important we realise the limitations (this is in no way a criticism, but a statement of fact) of the first anthology which are partially righted by the second. Four of the eight poets in the second anthology are women, three are conventionally religious, three are Gaelic learners, one is gay, and all of them reflect the world thirty or forty years later on. If my talk were addressed to teachers of Gaelic rather than English I would speak much longer about this second anthology, because I think it is important that young people from a Gaelic background do not think (as they might gather from the first book) that you have to be male and reject established religion to be a “thinker”. For Gaelic speakers, the second volume is interesting precisely because it does not have an exclusively island perspective. The language rather than the subject-matter defines it as Gaelic in what I believe is a healthy expansion of domain. But for English classes, it is because In the Face of Eternity is not so obviously a window on a different culture that I want now to return to the “Famous Five” of the first anthology, MacAulay’s Modern Scottish Gaelic Poetry.

The oldest poet amongst these, and indeed the inspiration of much of what followed, is Sorley Maclean (b.1911). Most of his poems were written in his late twenties and were a sort of enquiry into the conflicting demands of love, political idealism and self-preservation. The scenario which generated many of the poems was as follows: MacLean was a young man in love. This experience inspired in him new levels of commitment to humanity, which at that time meant fighting fascism in Spain. The contemplation of such heroic action also entailed the contemplation of death, and hence an end to love, but his fear of death also deprived him of the self-worth necessary to pursue love. I think many young people can relate to this sort of perfectionism. His poetry can also be used to discuss questions of social justice, in particular the Clearances (see the poem Hallaig) and to show symbolism at work with his use of the dramatic landscape of Skye. 

I expect the most ‘teachable’ of the poets in the anthology is Derick Thomson. He has a number of highly-crafted poems where some features of the old way of life in the islands (a hand-made coffin, a well,etc) becomes a metaphor for change. These illustrate very clearly how the interweaving of the concrete and extended resonances make for a poem in which the overall effect is far greater than the sum of the parts. They are also the poems in the anthology which most poignantly grieve for the past.

The poetry of Iain Crichton Smith well illustrates the use of highly-coloured, if not surreal, language and imagery. These generally serve in making a plea for a fuller way of living, without the cramping of society’s ideologies (a frustration known to every adolescent). The poetry of Donald MacAulay makes much the same plea, and asks that people be given the respect to live by their individual yardsticks. He shows a suspicion of group behaviour and easy answers, and is critical of the sort of censorship practised by the very communities which Derick Thomson regards with such nostalgia.

George Campbell Hay stands out from the other poets in the anthology as being a poet of celebration, using beautiful language to evoke beautiful scenery. His anti-war poems too come from the same premise that life is beautiful and war a most unnatural evil.

I hope I have shown that this anthology could be a rich source of poems in the upper school and that I have given an idea of some possible approaches, both thematic and formal. The book itself has a detailed introduction and citations of other publications should a deeper study of an individual poet be required.

I would like to end with mention of a poem by the youngest poet in the second anthology, In the Face of Eternity. She is Anne Frater (b.Lewis,1967) and the poem is called ‘At the Fank’. In detail, she describes herself watching with a group of neighbours busy with sheep-dipping. At first she is reluctant to join in, feeling slightly cold and the job being messy. Gradually she is ‘moved to usefulness’ until at the final point of involvement and warmth she finds herself speaking ‘with her own language on her tongue’. I leave you here with this typically island scene depicted by a young woman who recognises language as the ultimate source of her identity.

Aig an Fhaing

Nam sheasamh thall aig geat a’ phreiridh,
feur glan fom bhotannan,
lamhan fuar nam phocaidean,
faileadh an dup
gu fann
gu neo-chinnteach
a’ nochdadh mu mo chuinnlean
’s mi a’ coimhead cach cruinn
lachanaich le cheile
timcheall air an fhaing:
a’ bruthadh nan caorach,
guthan ard ag eigheachd
’s a’ gearain, ’s a’ gaireachdainn
’s gach druim thugams’
gam ghlasadh a-mach.
Mi seasamh, ’s a’ coimhead
’s a’ feitheamh airson facal
mo ghluasad gu feum.
Mi siubhal gu slaodach
a’ cruinneachadh nan uan
’s gan ruagadh romham
a-steach gu cach;
uain a’ ruith
gu meulaich math’r.
Boinneagan uisge
mar mhillean mialan
a’ leum as an dup,
agus crathadh cinn nan adharcan
fliuch, fuar, feagalach
a’ deanamh as.
Ceum no dha eile
’s chi mi aodannan nan gair’.
Mo lamhan fhin a’ breith air cloimh,
faileadh an dup air mo chorragan,
peant a’ camharradh mo chasan, 
poll dubh bog air mo bhotannan 
’s mo chanan fhin nam bheul.

At the Fank

Standing over by the prairie gate
with clean grass under my wellies, 
cold hands in my pockets, 
the smell of the sheep dip 
faintly
hesitantly
coming to my nostrils
as I watch the others gathered
around the fank
and laughing with each other:
pushing the sheep,
loud voices shouting
and moaning, and laughing
and all with their backs to me 
shutting me out.
I stand and watch
and wait for a word
to move me to usefulness.
Moving slowly
gathering the lambs
and driving them before me
in towards the others;
lambs running
to a mother’s bleat.
Drops of water
jump from the sheep dip
like millions of fleas
and the horns’ head-shaking,
wet, cold, fearful
running off.
Another step or two
and I can see the laughing faces.
My own hands holding wool,
the smell of sheep dip on my fingers.
Paint marking my legs, 
soft black mud on my wellies
and my own language on my tongue.

Anne Frater.

Recommended Texts

  • Nua-Bhardachd Ghaidhlig / Modern Scottish Gaelic Poems ed. Donald Macaulay pub. Canongate.
  • An Aghaidh na Siorraidheachd / In The Face of Eternity ed. Christopher Whyte pub. Polygon.

Copyright © Meg Bateman 1994.

Aig an Fhaing / At the Fank copyright © Anne Frater.
First published in Gairm magazine, and reprinted here with kind permission of the author.

BICKET, Linden, ‘Robin Jenkins: a Centenary Celebration’

by

ScotLit 42, 2012 |

This year marks one hundred years since the birth of one of twentieth-century Scotland’s most prolific and critically acclaimed novelists. Robin Jenkins (1912–2005) is the author of over thirty novels – most famously The Changeling (1958) and The Cone-Gatherers (1955) – the latter of which has often been taught as part of the Higher English syllabus over the years and aptly displays many of his major thematic preoccupations. Prejudice, pomposity, guilt, innocence, judgement, idealism and authentic goodness are the abiding concerns of much of Jenkins’s body of work, and it is for this reason that Roderick Watson has identified his ‘combination of prose realism with an unrelentingly ethical imagination’, while Douglas Gifford notes that ‘matters of moral choice preoccupy Jenkins, with an intensity far beyond any other modern Scottish author’.1 Today, we might see Robin Jenkins as the grand old man of Scotland’s fiction in the latter part of the twentieth century, sitting in judgement over his cast of holy fools, innocents and spiteful, hardened characters, and delivering sentence. As Isobel Murray recognised in her evaluation of his work for the ASLS in 1996, Jenkins himself sums up his individual belief in moralistic terms, declaring: ‘I don’t see myself as a political person. I see myself as a moralist. I judge all political issues from a moral point of view. And in my books I’m pretty sure I sometimes over-steeped them in morality’.2 Nonetheless, for this great predecessor of the existentialist fictions of Kelman and Gray, there are moments of quiet gentleness, sweetness and concern for humanity that temper the didactic impulse felt in his work. This is particularly true in Jenkins’s later fiction, which (along with the rest of his corpus) has yet to receive its proper due in terms of critical attention and appraisal.

In an interview with Isobel Murray and Bob Tait in 1985, Jenkins thought back to his childhood:

I was a sort of sensitive recorder in the background, watching everything. […] And I know in my heart that I notice everything, or at least the essential things. […] That being the case, I must as a child have built up a vast reservoir, because I agree with Aldous Huxley and those who say that you never learn anything about human nature after the age of, well, twelve. You may, as you get older, find instances to back up your instinctive knowledge, but your instinctive knowledge is all there, and it’s built up when you’re two, three, four, five and so on.3

Childish Things (2001) deals with just these kinds of formative experiences and the way they shape a life. In the novel we meet Gregor McLeod, a retired and newly widowed schoolteacher, aged seventy-two, who, in terms of his boyhood and early life, is very clearly based on the author himself. The poverty of Gregor’s youth is the childish thing he never grows out of: it determines his whole character, and he has hidden it behind a carefully constructed middle-class facade. Gregor is boastful, conceited and vain, but he is also very much aware of his failings, and he can be startlingly self-aware and self-deprecating. Though he affirms often that he is a socialist, he finds wealth and glamour irresistible, and after the death of his wife, Kate, he travels to LA, ostensibly to live the good life: playing golf with elderly, lesser players, romancing a rich and ageing (but utterly vivacious) retired actress, and basking in sunshine, while the daughter and family he stays with are given barely a mention. But in this new setting, far from the Scottish widows and divorcées who desire him and buy into his own self-made myth, he is newly open to interrogation and is in danger of being exposed as the ‘lad o’ pairts’, rather than a fairly prosperous ex-teacher and (he reminds us frequently) war hero. However, Gregor never loses our sympathy. His vulnerability is more charming than his cultured accent, fine tailoring, or suave good looks, and through his scarcely concealed grief and the never quite forgotten poverty of his childhood, Jenkins subtly plants a familiar seed in his reader’s mind: deprivation is an injury or wound from which the individual can perhaps never recover. 

For all its wistful reflection on the human person whose little pretensions and facades have been stripped back by the great leveller of age, Childish Things still manages to be a funny and satirical gaze at Gregor and his pensioner cronies. Ironically, while this book diagnoses the immaturity still present in old age, it is Jenkins’s far darker novel, Matthew and Sheila (1998), which looks into the world of children, ultimately deciding that this is no time of straightforward moral purity and innocence. The dark moral ambiguity of this novel is heightened by the fact that its main protagonists are so young (around ten or so). Matthew and Sheila is an example of a work by Jenkins where, as Gifford notes, characters ‘may be self-deluding and self-justifying sinners, latter-day believers in the modern versions of that older creed which so plagued Scottish writers, the doctrine of the elect’.4 Indeed, the novel’s very first sentence plunges us straight into young Matthew Sowglass’s Calvinistic imagination: ‘Matthew was nine when he discovered, or more accurately, decided, that he was one of the Chosen, those favourites of God who could do no wrong, or rather who, if they did what in others would be called wrong, were immediately absolved and protected from punishment’.5 What unfolds is an often chilling little story, where Matthew’s school-mate Sheila becomes the Gil-Martin to his Robert Wringhim, and, as with Hogg’s original masterpiece, we may never quite decide whether this is a psychological study or a supernatural drama. Under a supernatural reading, although the motherless Matthew believes unrelentingly that he can do no wrong, he does have a conscience, and his natural goodness and grace do not allow him to fall prey to Sheila’s sly words, twisted threats, or malevolent intentions until the very end, where, like Wringhim, he must be free to choose between good and evil. However, instead of a battle for Matthew’s soul, the tale may be read more as a humanistic reflection on the need for forgiveness and compassion. Sheila is either a demon sent to tempt Matthew and drag his soul to Hell, or an orphaned child who has been so psychologically damaged by grief that her outward spite hides a desperate need for love. 

In fact, like Norman MacCaig and Iain Crichton Smith, Jenkins never commits fully to the religious understanding of a moral situation, but he often uses Christian language to reflect on this. The title of his novel Some Kind of Grace (2004) nods explicitly to his reluctance to put full trust in religious meaning, and he noted that, ‘I can’t think of any single person in my family who ever went to church, so utterly no religion, although certainly from my books you might think I had a strong religious background’.6 Like MacCaig, Jenkins finds consolation in the natural world, and his favourite and recurring features of Scottish landscape are summed up in the description of Ardnave in Poor Angus (2000):

The immense sea-meadow sloped up gently, so that walking on the springy turf was easy and delightful. The air was warm but not enervating, and it was fragrant with the scent of many thousands of little wild flowers. Bees buzzed and small blue butterflies fluttered. In the sky larks sang unceasingly, and from the beach curlews kept calling. Sheep and lambs were everywhere, galloping out of the way with sour bleats.7

However, this connection to Scotland’s landscape never really ties Jenkins in with his late ‘Modern Renaissance’ contemporaries, or his predecessors, Gibbon and Gunn. While others writing novels at the same time as Jenkins, such as George Mackay Brown, read a sacramental or at least a meaningful, tribal significance into rivers, cairns, brochs and standing stones, Jenkins is no inheritor of Celtic twilight, and he has little time for the roots and mythology which sustain the imagination of these writers. In general, Jenkins anticipates the urban realist fictions of Galloway, Kelman and even Welsh. He punctures the potential romance of the description of Ardnave by adding: ‘Janet soon broke into a Gaelic song about a girl herding cattle. Angus at first joined in but had to give up because of the flies. They rose in hordes from cowpats and bumped against his lips; one indeed got in his mouth and had to be spat out’.8

Realism tempers romance again in the posthumously published novel The Pearl-fishers (2007), a tale set in familiar Jenkins territory, as the action takes place in Argyllshire and Ardmore forest, a setting it shares with The Cone-Gatherers (1955). In fact, The Pearl-fishers can be seen as a conflation of this novel with The Changeling (1958) and A Would-be Saint (1978). The hero of A Would-be Saint, Gavin Hamilton, appears again in The Pearl-fishers and offers up his home to an itinerant, ‘tinker’ family, the head of which is the nineteen-year-old Effie Williamson. Effie’s mother is a version of Tom Curdie’s grotesque and grasping mother from The Changeling, and although the setting for the tale is rural Argyllshire rather than the Central Belt, Jenkins is quick to condemn the small community’s distrust of and outright hostility to the travelling family of pearl fishers for being grubby, nasty and beyond the pale – in the same way that he depicts the Forbes family’s horror of the Curdies in The Changeling.

While the title of The Changeling alludes to folklore, The Pearl-fishers also rests on subtle folkloric, ballad and fairy-tale conventions. Gavin Hamilton is quick to fall in love with Effie: by the end of the third chapter he decides to pick for her ‘the most beautiful rose in the garden’, his hands trembling.9 And indeed, Effie is a kind of princess in rags or queen in disguise. The beautiful girl, who fishes for pearls and approaches Gavin with ‘remarkable grace’, is herself a ‘pearl of great price’ in the biblical expression, and her goodness not only matches Gavin’s, but excels it.10 It can be argued that Jenkins plays cleverly with the parable of the pearl found in the Gospel of Matthew throughout the novel, and Gavin, soon to train as a minister, finds the promise of grace in Effie, like the man who sells everything he has for the pearl (or Kingdom of Heaven). 

Like her freshwater Scottish pearls, Effie is in no need of extra refinement or improvement. She is a naturally pure and refined beauty, formed through years of suffering and endurance. But is Hamilton’s love for her only a patronising impulse to ‘save’ a social pariah in order to satisfy his own ego? As with The Changeling, this novel follows the travails of a holy fool who notes potential in the figure of the outcast, but unlike Charlie Forbes in Jenkins’s earlier novel, Hamilton knows that ‘there was no virtue in being kind to people if in doing so you humiliated them’.11 Jenkins rarely provides easy answers and comfortable endings, and only on the final page do we discover whether the strain of tragedy that runs through the novel is fulfilled or relinquished.

In 1985 Robin Jenkins claimed, ‘I could have written fifty novels!’12 Perhaps many more remain in manuscript form, awaiting publication, but for the meantime, Jenkins has left us with a substantial published output, which demands greater attention. There could be no better time than one hundred years after his birth to examine his varied, compassionate, angry and righteous body of work.

Notes

  1. Roderick Watson, The Literature of Scotland: The Twentieth Century (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007), p. 162. Douglas Gifford, Sarah Dunnigan and Alan MacGillivray, eds., Scottish Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2002), p. 854.
  2. Robin Jenkins quoted in Isobel Murray, ‘Robin Jenkins’s Fiction’.
  3. Robin Jenkins in ‘Robin Jenkins’, Scottish Writers Talking 3, ed. by Isobel Murray (Edinburgh: John Donald, 2006), p. 106.
  4. Gifford et al, p. 854.
  5. Robin Jenkins, Matthew and Sheila (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1998), p. 3.
  6. Scottish Writers Talking 3, p. 105.
  7. Robin Jenkins, Poor Angus (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2001), p. 47.
  8. Ibid.
  9. Robin Jenkins, The Pearl-fishers (Edinburgh: Polygon, 2007), p. 18.
  10. Ibid., p. 5.
  11. Ibid., p. 63.
  12. Scottish Writers Talking 3, p. 106.

Copyright © Linden Bicket 2012

BORTHWICK, David, ‘From Grey Granite to Urban Grit: A Revolution in Perspectives’

by

James Leslie Mitchell (Lewis Grassic Gibbon) Centenary Conference, 9 June 2001

A revised and updated version of this paper, along with eleven other essays on Gibbon’s works, is available in A Flame in the Mearns, published June 2003 by ASLS.

References are given at the end of the document.

Grassic Gibbon’s Grey Granite 1, despite being sixty-seven years old, provides a narrative model for describing urban life, and working class life, that is constantly borrowed from in contemporary fiction. Gibbon’s model is seen, perhaps most recently, in the juxtaposed voices and narratives utilised by Irvine Welsh. It strikes me that both Gibbon and Welsh have portrayed an urban sphere that is in a state of cultural and economic crisis. The working classes of both Gibbon’s Duncairn and Welsh’s fictionalised Edinburgh share a level of change and uncertainty characterised by the machinations of corporate economics. In Grey Granite and, indeed, within Welsh’s vision of Edinburgh, dependence on low-paid labour and handouts from the state are central to the survival of many protagonists. Gibbon’s ‘broo men’ and Welsh’s ‘dole-moles’ and addicts are characterised by their economic unproductiveness. They are unable to contribute fully to society and, furthermore, to a society in which material wealth and economic success determines rank. What we have here are two instances of what Jürgen Neubauer 2 has described as ‘problem populations’ who are ‘redundant, stranded and bored’.

Ian S. Munro, referring to an article by William Montgomerie, makes the point that Gibbon’s Duncairn is ‘a city without a history, without development, without depth, without background’.3 To a non-Scottish reader, Welsh’s fictionalised Edinburgh is equally unknowable. Of course, Gibbon’s city is fictional4 while Welsh’s Edinburgh is a representation of a real location. However, without a Scot’s background knowledge, Welsh’s Edinburgh, too, is without history or depth. Welsh’s references to Montgomery Street or The Meadows occupy the same status as the Windmill Steps or Craigneuks to the uninformed reader. The fictional Duncairn, like the fictionalised Edinburgh, is ‘anonymous and voiceless despite the tumult of traffic and noise of its inhabitants’ (Munro, p. 177). The communal ‘you voice’, expressing ‘generally acknowledged truths’5 that summed up community opinion in Kinraddie and Segget has been lost in the city of Duncairn. The city’s voices are stratified and fragmented according to geography and class. Duncairn’s working-class ‘keelies’ have no voice that can sound out across the city: their voice is confined to the slums of Paldy Parish and the Cowgate. In Welsh’s fictionalised Muirhouse and Wester Hailes, there is no communal voice whatsoever that can express working-class experience in a holistic way. Nonetheless, these two fictional cities are only knowable by the multiple voices of their inhabitants, and it is these voices, and working-class voices in particular, that I will go on to explore.

Gibbon’s Duncairn is socially, geographically and ideologically stratified. The multiple voices of the city make Duncairn a city of ideas. The many represented voices, across the boundaries of class, represent in themselves commitments, ideologies and obsessions. These commitments range from Neil Quaritch’s view that Douglasism is ‘the Only Plan to Save Civilisation’ (GG, p. 51), to John Cushnie’s desperate attempts to retain his “improved” status. There is also Miss Murgatroyd’s ultra-conservative Unionist Ladies. So too, we have the Reverend MacShilluck’s congregation, hermetically sealed in Craigneuks, with only the Daily Runner to rely on for happenings outwith their own district of the town. The Daily Runner provides ready-made modern parables for MacShilluck that affirm the dignified status of his parishioners in opposition to what he perceives as ‘the atheist, loose-living times’ (GG, 58) encouraged by the political activists in Footforthie. The class-based ideologies of geographically situated groups in the middle and upper-classes perpetuate their own social identities using a communal voice that is constantly in agreement with itself. However, it is not a communal voice recognisable to the inhabitants of Kinraddie or Segget. Gibbon lets us know that the gossiping ‘you’ voice of these communities, expressing ‘generally acknowledged truths’, and largely using a Scots vocabulary, is not suitable as a communal voice for the inhabitants of Craigneuks. Gibbon employs an external narrator to report events and to sum up a communal sentiment. The narrator does so as Craigneuks reads the newspaper over breakfast on the morning following the riot at Gowans and Gloag’s. We are told: ‘all Craigneuks read the news with horror, every word of it’ (GG, p. 122). While Gibbon’s narrator is mocking and satiric as he describes the rich breakfasts enjoyed in Craigneuks, he does succeed in conveying a communal sentiment that is fitting. He ends this narrative with Craigneuks’ resolution on the strikers: ‘[s]omething would have to be done about them’ (GG, p. 122).

The class-system in Duncairn is held firm by agreement in issues that affirm ‘gentry’ identities in opposition to sections of the population who are geographically removed in peripheral areas of the town and who are, furthermore, traditionally employed in manual, low-paid forms of work. The alarm in Craigneuks at news of ‘Red’ tendencies among the ‘keelies’ is because such agitation threatens to upset the status-quo of the class system in the town. News of Communist agitation also unnerves the residents of wealthy areas of the town, because their idea of the working classes is disrupted by it. Among Duncairn’s gentrified inhabitants, the working-class in themselves exist as an idea rather than as a reality. This is seen when news of ‘Red’ agitators among the Footforthie ‘keelies’ filters up to Craigneuks care of the Daily Runner. The town fathers immediately view ‘Reds’ and working-class ‘keelies’ as being distinct. Lord Provost Speight puts the incident down to ‘Communist agents, paid agitators who were trained in Moscow’ (GG, p. 58). For Speight, the problem does not originate among the working-class in Duncairn. He uses a general comment, regarding the consequences of Communism in Russia, in order to offset the riot’s relevance to any unrest in Duncairn. In this way, he affirms his own ideas of the identity of the Duncairn workers. He is reported as saying that ‘the working-class was sound as a bell’ (GG, p. 58). During the strike, when workers who ‘scabbed’ are attacked, the Daily Runner also differentiates between ‘Red’ strikers and Duncairn’s idealised vision of the working-class. The strikers are accused of doing ‘awful things’ to ‘working folk that were coming decent-like from their jobs’ (GG, p. 122). To the higher orders of Duncairn – the gentry – the ‘keelies’ of Footforthie do not exist as a social reality. At the end of the novel, as the hunger strike is organised, the Daily Runner sub-editor takes the following line: ‘Hunger – there was none anywhere in Duncairn’ (GG, p. 196). In Gibbon’s fictional city, the working-classes are a homogenous and indistinct entity, existing only as a bourgeois idea. John Cushnie’s ‘feeungsay’ speaks of ‘the Communists, coarse beasts’ who are ‘aye stirring up the working-class’. Her opinions can be seen to be representative of the views of the Duncairn ‘gentry’. Her speech regarding the town’s working classes is reported as follows: ‘they could be led astray by agitators, they’d no sense and needed to be strongly ruled’ (GG, p. 173).

In Irvine Welsh’s 1995 novel Marabou Stork Nightmares 6, Roy Strang and his family return from a disastrous attempt at emigration to South Africa. The family has left a South Africa still deep within the Apartheid regime. As a white family in South Africa, the Strangs have enjoyed special privileges. Before they leave, Roy contemplates his re-instalment into a Scottish working-class housing scheme. He finds that, as a result of the Apartheid regime, he has gained new insights into the family’s forthcoming living conditions. He explains:

Edinburgh to me represented serfdom. I realised that it was exactly the same situation as Johannesburg; the only difference was that the Kaffirs were white and called schemies or draftpaks. Back in Edinburgh, we would be Kaffirs; condemned to live out our lives in townships like Muirhouse or So-Wester-Hailes-To (MS, p. 80).

While in South Africa, Roy’s Uncle Gordon, whom the family lodge with, expresses various opinions regarding his servants. Roy recounts one such sentiment: ‘[e]ven the good ones needed white people to look after them, to provide them with jobs and homes’ (MS, p. 65). Gordon’s sentiments echo those of John Cushnie’s ‘feeungsay’ in their insistence on provision and rule for those seen as weak and inferior. Ironically enough, throughout the Strangs’ stay in South Africa, Roy’s uncle Gordon provides the family with a home, and initially finds Roy’s father a job. Of course, Welsh is not saying that Roy and his family are somehow Scottish ‘Kaffirs’. What he issaying, however, is that, in the context of this country, they are analogous to the oppressed population of Johannesburg. While in South Africa, Roy notes that Johannesburg looks to him like ‘a large Muirhouse-in-the-sun’ (MS, p. 61). On his return to Scotland, he says: ‘Edinburgh had the same politics as Johannesburg: it had the same politics as any city’ (MS, p. 80, my italics). He describes his scheme as ‘a concentration camp for the poor’ (MS, p. 22). Similarities between Roy’s Edinburgh schemes and Duncairn’s districts of Paldy Parish and the Cowgate are fairly apparent. Roy is trapped in a world of ‘self-contained camps with fuck all in them, miles fae the toon’ (MS, p. 80). In Welsh’s present-day depiction of Edinburgh, the ‘problem populations’ mentioned earlier – those who are economically unproductive, who cannot contribute fully to society – are situated geographically on the peripheries of a city dominated by Capitalist economics. In this way, they exist outwith the mercantile city in the same way that Duncairn’s working-classes live in de-centralised areas where they exist, not as social reality, but as an idea: in terms of social homogenisation, there is not much that separates a ‘keelie’ from a ‘schemie’.

I have already said that Gibbon’s Duncairn exists as a city of ideas. Ideas, particularly political ideas, help to unify and strengthen Duncairn’s workers into solidarity. When talking of, or participating in, political action, a communal ‘you’ voice operates, expressing the ‘general truths’ of working-class experience at that particular time. Even before Ewan’s political agitation gets underway, we are given to know that empathy with the Labour movement gives cohesion to individual workers’ experiences. We are told: ‘somehow when a chap knew another had a father who’d been Labour you could speak to him plainer, like, say what you thought’ (GG, p. 48). When Jim Trease is recruiting for the hunger march, it is the sight of the names of friends and acquaintances that motivates men to sign up: ‘you saw Will’s there and Geordie’s and Ian’s and even old Malcolm’s – Christ, you could go if they were going’ (GG, p. 198). The communal ‘you’ voice also appears during the initial march to the Provost’s house. The singing of the broo men, we are told, ‘gave a swing to your feet and you felt all kittled up and high’ (GG, 54). The voices states: ‘[t]hey couldn’t deny you, you and the rest of the Broo folk here, the right to lay bare your grievances’ (GG, p. 54). Of course, the broo men cannot become a tangible social reality to the more economically successful inhabitants of Duncairn, and the marchers are denied this right. However, there is a sense in which the working class inhabitants of Duncairn remain a cohesive community even in failure. They, too, assert their own identity within their own parishes of the town, and define themselves in opposition to those who oppress them. When pepper is thrown in the face of Policemen at the gates of Gowans and Gloag’s, the arrival of the Daily Runner in working class areas produces ‘a growl of laughing and cursing’ (GG, p. 124) rather than the social outrage felt in Craigneuks. Even the broo men, who could potentially poach jobs at Gowans and Gloag’s during the strike, resolve not to do so and to remain in solidarity with those of their own class. We are told that they ‘gave a bit rub at their hunger-swollen bellies – ah well, they must try the PAC again’ (GG, p. 124). Within the working-class parishes of Duncairn, political agitation provides a communal voice as well as a carnival atmosphere generating a feeling of both escapism and hope. The inaction of the unemployed men is converted into action. As the workers’ communal voice states at one stage: ‘Communionists like Big Jim might blether damned stite but they tried to win you your rights for you’ (GG, p.55). Communist politics might be viewed as ‘damned stite’ but they are nonetheless symbolically unifying. Politics lends a voice to the workers that can be heard across Duncairn, asserting its own existence.

In Irvine Welsh’s working-class vision, no such political motivations exist. Furthermore, no unifying ideas or ideologies are exercised. In Welsh’s fictionalised Edinburgh, the only ‘generally acknowledged truth’ is that violence holds currency in the social sphere. Early in his life, Roy Strang works out a simple formula: ‘if you hurt them, they don’t laugh’ (MS, p. 35). Within Strang’s scheme, power and violence are synonyms. Following an attack on a female classmate, Roy realises ‘[t]hat was it wi the power […] you just had to take it. When you took it, you had to hold onto it. That was all there was to it’ (MS, p. 106). Social status in Welsh’s vision of working-class Edinburgh runs along very simple lines: the more physically violent you are, the more respect is accorded you. In Welsh’s infamous 1993 novel Trainspotting 7, Renton sums up this equation as he accompanies the sociopathic Begbie to the house of an acquaintance. He says: ‘[s]trutting doon the Walk wi Begbie makes us feel like a predator, rather than a victim, and ah start looking fir cunts tae gie the eye tae’ (TS, p. 308). In the company of Begbie, Renton gains status by association. Renton’s social sphere is divided up simply into those classified as ‘predators’ and ‘victims’. No class solidarity exists: every individual must affirm his own status as ‘predator’ at all costs, lest their public image be reduced to that of ‘victim’, with obvious consequences. The only form of politics that does exist in Welsh’s urban vision is that of the soundbite. Roy joins a group of football casuals and, as his group violently assaults visiting Glaswegian supporters, he recalls Winston Churchill’s statement that ‘the Germans were either at your feet or at your throat’. This quote is ridiculously reinterpreted to apply to those whom he opposes. Regarding his opponents, he says: ‘back doon tae they cunts and they’re fuckin swarming all over ye’ (MS, p. 172, italics removed). Churchill’s sentiment is applied to an inappropriate context, yet acts as a form of self-justification for Strang. It amounts to a temporary ideological position regarding those whom he opposes. His own violent reputation is affirmed, and his actions are justified in his own mind.

Ironically, though, Roy does realise at one stage that he is contributing to the fragmentation of his own community through violence and other illegal activities. He realises that he should be in solidarity with his own class, and in opposition to the contemporary equivalent of Duncairn’s moneyed classes. Regarding the managers in his workplace, he says: ‘it’s these cunts we should be hurtin, no the boys we knock fuck oot ay at the fitba, no the birds we fuck aboot, no oor ain Ma n Da, oor ain brothers and sisters, oor ain neighbours, oor ain mates’ (MS, p. 200–01). Strang briefly recognises that all his aggression is exercised upon his own class. Welsh’s commitment to the depiction of the working-classes in Edinburgh is such, though, that he largely excludes voices from outwith that sphere. Just as the working-classes remain largely out of sight, out of mind, to the inhabitants of Gibbon’s Craigneuks, it is the middle-classes that remain invisible to Welsh’s working-class protagonists. Speaking again of his employers, Strang states: ‘it’s like ahm jist invisible tae thaim n they are tae me’. He continues: ‘these cunts wi dinnae even fuckin see. Even when they’re aw aroond us’ (MS, p. 200–01). Welsh effectively maroons his characters in their own urban sphere: their own invisibility on the economic margins of the city is counter-defined by their blindness to those who are economically prosperous and geographically removed. Arguably, this blindness contributes to the atomisation and lack of solidarity within their urban space. If a more prosperous life cannot be seen, it is hard to aspire to that life or, alternatively, to mobilise oneself against those who live it at your expense. Rather than solidarity and political campaigning to attain a better life, Welsh’s protagonists seek to escape from their lives altogether. The euphoric experiences obtained through the use of drugs appear again and again in Welsh’s depiction of working-class Edinburgh. Even Roy’s violence at football matches is defined in terms of a ‘swedge buzz’: the euphoric experience that he gains owing to an adrenaline high during the act of violence. In Trainspotting, Swanney’s cocktail of drugs is described as ‘his ticket to better times’ and ‘that wee private heaven the uninitiated pour scorn on’ (TS, p. 321, my italics). This commitment to a private heaven bears no desire for solidarity. Nowhere in Welsh’s fiction is there a ‘you’ voice, the voice of a community or a parish. Indeed, the number of first-person narratives contained within Trainspotting alone bespeaks a location in which the self is preserved and valued above all else. In Welsh’s novella ‘A Smart Cunt’ 8, Brian ponders what he can do to aid ‘the emancipation of working people in this country’. He says: ‘the answer is a resounding fuck all’. In preference to political thinking, he decides: ‘I think I’ll stick to drugs to get me though the long, dark night of late capitalism’ (AH, p. 240).

It must be noted here, though, that the political ideas that aid solidarity and cohesion within the working-class parishes of Duncairn are not un-problematic. This is because, in Grey Granite, the political life of the working-classes is only interesting to Gibbon insofar as it shows the progression of Ewan’s obsessive ideals. During Ewan’s Socialist phase, his Young League has the aim of persuading the workers ‘of whatever party to join together and stop the old squabbles and grab life’s share with their thousand hands’ (GG, p. 106). In his speech following the tanner hop, Ewan describes the rights that he feels the workers are denied. He says: ‘every one should have a decent life and time for dancing and enjoying oneself, and a decent house to go to at night, decent food, decent beds’ (GG, p. 106). The support of the workers is gained, not only through rhetoric, but through entirely practical issues that affect every member of Duncairn’s working-class. However, as Ewan’s Communist philosophies develop, the political action he encourages has less to do with Duncairn’s oppressed than it has to do with his own personal philosophies and commitments. The workers at Gowans and Gloag’s engineer a strike, not for decent housing and decent food, but to be in solidarity with Chinese workers who are assumed to be the potential victims of the shell cases and gas canisters that Gowans has put into production. When the strike is over, however, the Gowans and Gloag’s communal ‘you’ voice expresses the following opinion: ‘if the Chinks and the Japs wanted to poison one the other, why shouldn’t they? – they were coarse little brutes, anyhow, like that Dr Fu Manchu on the films’ (GG, p. 177). For the workers of Duncairn, the strike may have heightened class solidarity within their own communities, but it has done them little good personally. They have picketed Gloag’s pointlessly for an ideology that is quickly disregarded. Soon enough, too, they are working alongside poisonous gas themselves, and there is no word of any agitation from Ewan on this subject until the plant explodes with loss of life. At this point, Ewan effectively betrays his fellow workers by using the incident as propaganda to further his own Communist beliefs. He suggests that ‘[it] had all been deliberately planned to see the effect of poison gas on a crowd’ (GG, p.187). In a counter-attack, the gentry-friendly Daily Runner subtly suggests that Communist terrorism may have been to blame for the explosion: ‘hadn’t there been similar occurrences abroad inspired by the Asiatic party of terrorism?’ (GG, p. 195). In this war of propaganda, the only losers appear to be the workers of Duncairn. Rather than workers’ rights, Ewan is now far more concerned with the coming of the Communist state: it is ‘a great black wave’ that will succeed by ‘swamping the high places with mud and blood’ (GG, p. 181). Ewan’s ambition to ‘be history’, ‘LIVING HISTORY ONE-SELF’ is surely an idealistic and personal ambition rather than a specific commitment to the workers of Footforthie. Furthermore, Ewan and Jim Trease are agreed that ‘there wasn’t much time for the usual family business when you were a revolutionist’ (GG, p. 180). Ewan’s ideals get further away from the everyday lives of the working-class people of Duncairn. Ewan and Trease are so engrossed in their own idea of what it is to be a worker that they are convinced that ‘THEY THEMSELVES WERE THE WORKERS’ (GG, p. 181); yet they share no common problems with those that they purport to symbolise. Their idea of the identity of the workers is filtered through Communism. Just as the inhabitants of Craigneuks share a communal idea of the workers, so too do Ewan and Trease share a different idea of the same class. As Jim Trease says: ‘it’s me and you are the working-class, not the poor Bulgars gone back to Gowans’ (GG, p. 147, italics removed). This statement is obviously ridiculous. Just as the gentry feel that the working class need to be guided and ruled on their terms, so too do Ewan and Trease have ideas of the workers and the way they must be led to emancipation. Neither the idea of the workers held by those in Craigneuks, nor the idea of the workers held by the idealistic Ewan, does anything but damage and betray the class that they purport to represent. Although the workers of Duncairn are given a chance to sound a public voice across Duncairn, to assert their existence in the face of bourgeois ignorance, they are not in control of the voice that is sounded. They remain an oppressed ‘problem population’, both in the eyes of the economically-successful Craigneuks gentry; and in the eyes of political idealists, who would harness the workers for their own ends.

Earlier, I described Duncairn as a city of ideas. If this is the case, then Irvine Welsh’s fictionalised Edinburgh is a city that is completely devoid of ideas but for those that encourage personal gain. In Trainspotting, Renton criticises Capitalism’s ‘materialism and commodity fetishism’ (TS, p. 343). He rejects what Capitalism has to offer in his, now infamous, ‘choose life’ speech: ‘[c]hoose life. Choose mortgage payments; choose washing machines; choose cars; choose sitting oan a couch watching mind-numbing and spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing fuckin junk food intae yir mooth’ [etc., etc.] (TS, p. 187). Welsh’s protagonists are entirely aware of the capitalist system that oppresses them. During one of his coma-dreams, Roy Strang holds a conversation with Dawson, in which he argues about the effects of Capitalism upon the working classes. Dawson points out that, in previous eras, there existed within communities, ‘a shared understanding with the world’ (MS, p. 45). This has been replaced, he argues, with ‘empathy with the profit system’, in which advertising and commodities motivate the individual to gain wealth and possessions at the expense of the greater good of the community. Ironically, though, Welsh’s protagonists have such ‘empathy with the profit system’ that they directly mimic the system that they purport to reject. They buy and sell drugs –commodities – that are no different from any other commodity but for their illegality. They are entirely guilty of the ‘commodity fetishism’ that Renton so vehemently rejects. Even Pete Gilbert, the big-time drug dealer that the Trainspotters meet in London, has his activities described as follows: ‘[h]e’d buy and sell anything. For him, it was strictly business, and he refused to differentiate it from any other entrepreneurial activity’ (TS, p. 339). The system that oppresses Welsh’s protagonists, characterising them by their economic unproductivity, confining them to their housing schemes on the periphery of a mercantile city, is the very system that Welsh’s protagonists mimic for want of a better ideology. Welsh’s protagonists essentially accept that no better equivalent to rampant capitalism exists. The profit system dictates that a ‘private heaven’, such as the one Swanney achieves with his cocktail of drugs, can be purchased if one has enough money to do so. A ‘private heaven’ is preferable to communal oppression. Life can be escaped from via the back door, and the future – the very thing that Ewan Tavendale must rely on – can be denied until the next fix is required.

Thomas Crawford describes Grey Granite as ‘a method of thinking about contemporary morals and politics in aesthetic terms’ (GG, p. xv, italics removed), where each stratified viewpoint and voice represents a part of the social equation that made up Gibbon’s view of a Scottish city. If this is the case, Welsh’s protagonists are a means of describing that communal ideas and morals are dead, that rampant individualism, expressed through the purchase of commodities, is the only communal ethic left in play; and, furthermore, that this communal ethic must be expressed in isolation: a ‘private heaven’ that can not be shared. A private heaven requires a private voice, and Welsh’s fictionalised Muirhouse sounds no communal voice to prove its own existence. While Duncairn’s ‘keelies’ are mis-represented by the politics of their time, their social cohesion – their ‘you voice’ – at least remains true to their communal experience while they actively search for a representative voice. Welsh’s disparate voices bear no hope, and no desire, for class emancipation.

Notes 

1 Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Grey Granite, ed. by Thomas Crawford (Edinburgh: Canongate, 1990 [1934]). All future references to this text will be cited as follows: (GG, Page). 
2 Jürgen Neubauer, Literature as Intervention: Struggles over Cultural Identity in Contemporary Scottish Fiction (Marburg: Tectum Verlag, 1999), p. 97. 
3 Ian S. Munro, Leslie Mitchell: Lewis Grassic Gibbon (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd Ltd., 1966), p. 176. 
4 Ian Campbell has argued that Gibbon’s Duncairn is, in fact, a fictionalised version of Aberdeen. See Ian Campbell, ‘Lewis Grassic Gibbon and the Mearns’, in A Sense of Place, ed. by Graeme Cruickshank (Edinburgh: Scotland’s Cultural Heritage, 1998). 
5 A paraphrase from the article by Graham Trengrove in Scottish Literary Journal, Vol. 2, No. 2 (December 1975), p. 47–62. Trengrove points to the use of a stylistic community ‘you’ voice in Sunset Song as a device for ‘powerfully suggesting a homogenous body of opinion in Kinraddie’ (p. 49).
6 Irvine Welsh, Marabou Stork Nightmares (London: Jonathan Cape, 1995). All future references to this text will be cited as follows: (MS, Page).
7 Irvine Welsh, Trainspotting (London: Minerva, 1994 [1993]). All future references to this text will be cited as follows: (TS, Page). 
8 From the collection The Acid House (London: Vintage, 1995 [1994]), p. 177–289.

Bibliography
Primary Sources

Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Grey Granite, ed. by Tom Crawford (Edinburgh: Canongate, 1990 [1934] ).

  • A Scots Quair, ed. by Tom Crawford (Edinburgh: Canongate, 1995).

Irvine Welsh, Trainspotting (London: Minerva, 1994 [1993] ).

  • The Acid House (London: Vintage, 1995 [1994] ).
  • Marabou Stork Nightmares (London: Jonathan Cape, 1995). 

Secondary Sources

Angus Calder, ‘A Mania for Self Reliance: Grassic Gibbon’s Scots Quair’, in The Uses of Fiction: Essays on the Novel in Honour of Arnold Kettle, ed. by Douglas Jefferson and Graham Martin (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1982), pp. 99–115.

Ian Campbell, ‘Lewis Grassic Gibbon and the Mearns’, in A Sense of Place, ed. by Graeme Cruickshank (Edinburgh: Scotland’s Cultural Heritage, 1998).

William K. Malcolm, A Blasphemer and Reformer: A Study of James Leslie Mitchell/Lewis Grassic Gibbon (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1984), pp. 151–185.

Manfred Malzahn, ‘The Industrial Novel’, in The History of Scottish Literature, Vol, 4: The Twentieth Century, ed. by Cairns Craig (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1987), pp. 229–243.

Ian S. Munro, Leslie Mitchell: Lewis Grassic Gibbon (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd Ltd., 1966), p. 172–85.

Isobel Murray, ‘Action and Narrative Stance in A Scots Quair’, in Literature of the North, ed. by David Hewitt and Michael Spiller (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1983), pp. 109–121.

Jürgen Neubauer, Literature as Intervention: Struggles over Cultural Identity in Contemporary Scottish Fiction (Marburg: Tectum Verlag, 1999).

Graham Trengrove, ‘Who Is You? Grammar and Grassic Gibbon’, in Scottish Literary Journal, Vol. 2, No. 2 (December 1975), pp. 47–62.

Douglas F. Young, Beyond the Sunset (Aberdeen: Impulse, 1973), pp. 119–134.

Copyright © David Borthwick 2001

BROWN, Ian, ‘The Representation of Manifold Identities in Post-war Scottish Theatre’

by

A paper presented at ESSE 2012 |

Carla Sassi was not alone when she famously talked in 2009 of ‘the powerful literary strain that rigidly connotes Scottish nationhood as male, working-class and, ideologically, as socialist or republican’.1 Certainly this was an issue I drew attention to in my chapter on Scottish theatre in the Edinburgh History of Scottish Literature.2 That chapter’s title was ‘Staging the Nation’, but it continues ‘Multiplicity and Cultural Diversity in Contemporary Scottish Theatre’. This paper argues that, while there was certainly a period when Sassi’s strictures and mine held true, particularly for theatre the 1970s, there was a different version of Scottish nationhood to be found earlier in the twentieth century and a much more complex representation more recently. In the early part of the century, the difference was found, not least in the productions of the Scottish National Players, active in one way or another between 1921 and the end of the World War Two. The Players had very little to do with a concept of Scottish nationhood that was ‘male, working-class, and ideologically socialist and republican’. I will argue, however, that in the 1920s, when the Scottish National Players were attempting their version of Scottish nationhood, Joe Corrie with the Bowhill Players and In Time o Strife (1927) offered, in reaction, an alternative vision closer to that identified by Sassi. But Corrie stood, if not alone, at least relatively marginalised.

The idea of forming the Scottish National Players emerged before the First World War, largely as means of establishing a Scottish drama as opposed to the predominantly English-language West End-centred industrial-scale theatre that prevailed throughout Britain. One of its objectives was ‘To found a Scottish National Theatre’.3 The idea’s fruition was deferred until peace came and, launched in 1921 and based in Glasgow, it toured intermittently into the rest of Scotland. Its actors were amateur or semi-professional and, despite a wish by board members like the playwrights James Bridie and John Brandane that the company set itself on a fully professional footing, this never happened. David Hutchison suggests that the reason for this was that the actors ‘were understandably nervous about giving up their jobs’.4 Brandane was a driving force in the company and it presented his play The Glen is Mine in 1923, first at the Athenaeum and later that year, and again in 1926, at the King’s Theatre, Glasgow. This play typifies aspects of the Scottish National Players’ repertoire.

The Glen is Mine sets an island landowner, Colonel Murray against his son the Captain, Charlie, to whom, the Colonel, to avoid death duties, has handed over responsibility for his estate. Charlie, working with London financiers wants to mine for haematite in the glen to supply the iron industry. The colonel is horrified by Charlie’s plans:

CAPTAIN: But it just comes to this. There’s money in that old hill, so why shouldn’t we have it? 
COLONEL: And you’re Highland, and can say that! Ben Creach! The deer-forest! […] The river with oily scum on it! Labourers slouching about!5

The Colonel ‘s horror is clearly at the desecration in his eyes of industrialising his rural fastness. It is ironic in this case that the deer-forest that arose out of the impact of the Clearances is by this stage seen by him, and Brandane, as the natural state for the Highlands. The Colonel’s horror is as much at the thought of ‘labourers slouching about’ ‘his’ glen as at the oily scum on the river. The vision of the Highlands as unspoiled and idealised continues:

COLONEL: […] But the Highlands, Charlie! Is this to be the beginning of the end of them? Are the old hunting pastoral days to go – the wild free open life?6

Brandane entirely ignores the social and economic forces that have led to the depopulation of the Highlands to create this idealised free open wilderness that has now to be protected. His romantic values look back to the kailyard, while his play is written with a clear sense of social hierarchy. The Colonel is not only sure of the pristine nature of his Highlands, but is opposed to those he sees as arriviste:

It’s always your profiteers that love to get their claws into our set. Makes the hair-restorer Johnny and the furniture polish man feel big to point the finger of scorn at the old families.7

Beside the established landowner’s desire to keep the Highlands as they are is a social snobbery that is entirely assured that the present hierarchy is as it should be and the Highlands should not be developed by new investment. The use of language marks here a similar sense of hierarchy, one in which the local characters who speak Scots (though in this play that is marked lightly in the use of words like ‘ken’ and ‘skelp’) are treated as comic unless they are the two young romantic lovers, Morag and Murdo. A key sub-plot is the confounding of the local merchant, MacPhedran, who is also, by offering credit, in effect a moneylender. In this position, he does not scruple to try to use his power over Angus MacKinnon, a crofter whose croft’s location is key to the Captain’s plans, to help to try to evict the crofter who loves his land. While Brandane gives Murdo a speech that attacks the hard life of crofting, he asserts the romance of the ‘free’ way of life found in the ‘Glen’. The Colonel’s generosity saves Angus and, in the end, the developers are defeated so far as the ‘Glen’ is concerned, though they find a more profitable area in the Highlands to develop. Brandane’s Glen may be saved, but not someone else’s. The romanticised way of life remains under threat, but clearly the Players and Brandane are promoting a rural, regressive and socially conservative vision of ideal ‘Scottish nationhood’.

The Glen is Mine accords very well with David Hutchison’s description of the repertoire of the Scottish National Players:

As many of the [company’s] plays […] are naturalistic in form and set in areas where dialect was still spoken at the time of writing, it was possible to use the Scots of the particular area, and this may be another reason why dramatists preferred rural settings: they were able to use Scots without producing the uneasy situation where contemporary characters speak in archaic language. The rural setting, because dialect could be employed, possibly seemed to them to be that much more Scottish than the urban one, although there was nothing to prevent a writer from rendering the Glasgow dialect on the stage, as Unity’s writers were later to do.8

The issue that emerges here, as in other plays presented by the Scottish National Players is just what constitutes ‘Scottish’, or, for that matter, to quote another of the company’s objectives, what constitutes Scottish ‘life and character’. On the question of the identification of ‘national’ or ‘nation’ in their work, Bill Findlay remarks of the Scottish National Players and companies that followed their path:

despite their ‘national’ aspirations, held with sincerity and integrity, the companies tended to have a limited sense of ‘national’ when it comes to work in a Scots idiom, in that the playwrights avert their gaze from the contemporary industrial and urban reality of Scotland, and therefore from the associated linguistic reality, too. Hence work in Scots typically has country or historical settings; settings where the Scots employed could be a traditional, conservative, country-inflected Scots, or a re-imagined Lallans.9

In effect the Scottish National Players represented an attempt at a Scottish theatre, but one frankly conservative in its artistic and social attitudes, a largely bourgeois theatre.

There is a tendency now in thinking about Scottish theatre in a post-war setting to forget the importance of the vision of Scottish nationhood embedded in the work of the Scottish National Players. Indeed, this vision largely permeated the plays presented throughout the Scottish amateur movement under the auspices of the Scottish Community Drama Association founded in 1926 and still active. In fact, the kind of ‘Scottish nationhood’ Sassi rightly identifies can be seen to arise from a reaction against the Highlandising, idealising, feminising, historicising drama that grew out of the work of the Players. Even if Brandane’s The Glen is Mineis contemporary to its time of production it is nostalgic, while other of Brandane’s work, like The Lifting (1925) – a Jacobite adventure involving resistance to redcoats – is clearly backward-looking in its identification of ‘Scottish nationhood’.

It is against a background of such drama that Corrie writes the plays he does in the 1920s and certainly in reaction to such romantic nostalgia that Unity Theatre develops its repertoire. This from George Munro’s Gold in his Boots (1947), about corruption in football, to Robert McLeish’s Gorbals Story (1948), about housing shortage, is determinedly working-class and socialist in its tone. Yet Unity was not, as we remember in the work of Ena Lamont Stewart, simply ‘male’. Neither her Starched Aprons (1945) nor her Men Should Weep (1947) expresses strong support for the male as an embodiment of Scottish nationhood, but both represent a society in which men have substantial power, and weaknesses. This was especially true of the first version of Men Should Weep where Maggie ends by killing herself. The version we are now more familiar, with rewritten in the 1970s, where Maggie faces down her husband’s male attitudinising, emerged from a later period and later ideas about the role and power of women in society.

Although Unity closed under public funding pressure in 1951, it marked, when Corrie had been tamed to become effectively a house dramatist for the Scottish Community Drama Association, a diversification of Scottish theatre away from a bourgeois ‘legitimate’ theatre. Yet, the most prominent Scots-language theatre continued to be written by such figures as Robert McLellan, Robert Kemp, Alexander Reid, and, in translation, Douglas Young. This generally did not conform to that principles of Unity, nor was it a drama that was in Sassi’ terms ‘male, working-class and, ideologically, as socialist or republican’. It was generally historically focused, with traditional views of social organisation and hierarchy. In fact, what Sassi rightly confronts as a key strain in Scottish literature and drama prevailed substantially in the later decades of the twentieth century and especially in drama in the 1970s. One should remember that, when those literary and dramatic strains developed, they were often a progressive reaction to what preceded them. When Stewart Conn, Bill Bryden and others began to write in Scots broadly in the terms Sassi identifies, they were resisting a tame, bourgeois theatre. This looked back at Scottish history, by and large, sentimentally so that ‘Scottish nationhood’ was under that influence defined in regressive terms that paid no attention to the urban and industrial nature of contemporary Scottish life. The new synthesis of popular and ‘legitimate’ theatre that came to fruition in the 1970s broke that mould, but it did so in terms of presenting maleness, working life and socialist values. From our perspective now, this may seem limited. At the time it was revolutionary and fresh.

Nonetheless, this male, working-class, socialist drama opened new doors and led to further diversification of identities on the Scottish stage. It would be redundant at this point to list the many ways in which women’s playwriting broke through after 1980 in the work of Sue Glover, Liz Lochhead, Marcella Evaristi and Sharman Macdonald, not to mention later women playwrights like Nicola McCartney and Isobel Wright. After my own play exploring gay sexuality and activism, The Fork, (1976) – performed not by a Scottish company as it happened, though the Traverse’s Chris Parr was interested in it, but by Gay Sweatshop, which toured it to Edinburgh – a number of 1980s gay playwrights presented gay themes on stage. These included John Binnie and Christopher Dean, while Rona Munro explored lesbian love in Saturday Night at the Commodore (1989). Michelle Macleod and Moray Watson have written eloquently on the vitality of Gaelic-language drama in the 1960s and 1970s in their chapter in the Edinburgh History.10 Despite the failure to survive of the companies Fir Chlis (1978–81) and Tosg (1996–2006), attempts at Gaelic-language drama have been energetic and often in the form of soaps, like Machair(STV, 1992–98), have made a longer-term impression. Now, any vision of ‘Scottish nationhood’ expressed on the Scottish stage has achieved such a range of diversity and multiplicity of identities that it is no longer possible to argue for any single vision of ‘Scotland’. As David Pattie puts it, the questioning of ‘Scotland’ by one of our leading playwrights, David Greig 

seems to position Scotland as the silent partner in a never-to-be completed conversation; as though the country has no substance in itself, but acquires meaning only through a process of continual re-engagement. Greig is not simply Scottish, he exists in a dialogue with the nation, one in which neither Greig nor the nation he identified with are fixed essences. One might say that the two exist only when placed in relation to each other.11

Pattie estimates Greig’s prolific output at five plays in most years; alongside David Harrower Greig is one of the most widely translated Scottish writers, being translated into something of the order of thirty other languages. Scottish nationhood, as expressed in its drama, is now clearly manifold and firmly set in international contexts.

Twentieth-century theatrical developments, after the first strugglings in the1920s of the Scottish National Players and Corrie’s radical reaction to them, were reinforced by the work of Glasgow Unity, not to mention new writing presented by the Glasgow Citizens, founded in 1943, and the Edinburgh Gateway Theatre Company, founded in 1953. Since the 1970s, a diversification of topics, themes and language choice, whether English, Scots or Gaelic, has meant that Scottish theatre has embodied and led in the determination and celebration of the perception that there is no single Scottish ‘identity’. Rather there is recognition of many identities – linguistic, gender-based, sexual, regional and social – which make up Scottish culture, or ‘nationhood’. That ‘powerful literary strain that rigidly connotes Scottish nationhood as male, working-class and, ideologically, as socialist or republican’ has been subverted and surrounded by enhanced and enriched conceptions of what makes up Scottish nationhood. But I would always want to repeat that, in its time, in the middle of the twentieth century, that strain, which now seems so regressive, was, in its time and context, progressive. I suppose today’s literary and theatrical revolutionaries will, to the next generation, appear somewhat passé.

Notes

  1. Carla Sassi, ‘The (B)order in Modern Scottish Literature’ in Ian Brown and Alan Riach (eds.), The Edinburgh Companion to Twentieth-Century Scottish Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh |University Press, 2009) p. 153.
  2. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007).
  3. Quoted by Hutchison, ‘1900 to 1950’ in Bill Findlay (ed.), A History of Scottish Theatre (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1998), p. 221.
  4. Ibid., p. 223.
  5. John Brandane, The Glen is Mine and The Lifting (London: Constable, 1925), p. 35
  6. Ibid., p. 36.
  7. Ibid., p. 106.
  8. David Hutchison, The Modern Scottish Theatre (Glasgow: Molendinar, 1977), p. 71
  9. Bill Findlay, ‘ Modern Scots Drama and Language Planning: A Context and Caution’, in John M. Kirk and Dónaill P. Ó Baoill (eds.), Towards our Goals in Broadcasting, the Press, the Performing Arts and the Economy (Belfast: Cló Ollscoil na Banríona, 2003), pp. 165–169, pp. 166–7.
  10. ‘In the Shadow of the Bard […]’, in vol. 3, pp. 280–2.
  11. David Pattie, ‘Scotland & Anywhere: The Theatre of David Greig’ in Anja Müller and Clare Wallace, Cosmotopia: Transnational Identities in David Greig’s Theatre (Prague: Litteraria Pragensia Books, 2011), p. 55.

Copyright © Ian Brown 2012

BURGESS, Moira, ‘Dot Allan – a Glasgow Woman Novelist’

by

ScotLit 19, 1998 |

A 1930s novel by a Scottish writer; theme, the contemporary Great Depression and the hardships of a workless Glasgow; near the beginning, the sentence: ‘It was one of those days when you felt God had forgotten the city.’ Would you like to guess the author and title? George Blake’s The Shipbuilders, perhaps or James Barke’s Major Operation? No, it’s Hunger March by Dot Allan, published in 1934, predating Blake’s and Barke’s better-known treatments of Depression Glasgow in 1935 and 1936.

All three are novels of social concern. The Shipbuilders and Major Operation are sometimes called ‘proletarian fiction’, but it’s not so simple. While Barke was proud of his descent from Galloway farm-workers, several critics (including himself) have pointed out that Blake was hardly a child of the proletariat, and the same could be said of Dot Allan.

She was born in 1892 in industrial Stirlingshire, only child of an iron merchant. Her maternal grandfather was founder of the Vale Paper Works in Denny. By the time she begins to appear on the literary scene we find her, still a young woman, living in the west end of Glasgow with her widowed mother. She remained there, never marrying, until her death in 1964.

Contemporaries describe her as small, soft-voiced and retiring, hostess of elegant afternoon teas. During both World Wars she apparently abandoned writing for nursing and charity work. She does seem an unlikely figure to have written a Glasgow proletarian novel, and indeed that’s not exactly what she has done in Hunger March. What she did do may lead us to consider the relationship between her fiction and her life.

We should first sketch Allan’s writing career as a whole. The stereotypical west-end lady, the daughter at home, is surely a dilettante writer? Yet by 1926 Christopher Murray Grieve (Hugh MacDiarmid) had mentioned her work in his influential Contemporary Scottish Studies:As belonging to the new Glasgow school may be mentioned Miss Dot Allan with The Syrens (some of her more recent work in the form of short sketches has reached a much higher level) …

Grieve does not specify which sketches have impressed him, but Allan was writing a lot; sketches, articles and short stories were regularly published in a range of newspapers and periodicals. This was not a hobby, but – albeit freelance – a career.

In 1921 Allan published her first novel. As Grieve indicates, The Syrens, romantic and slightly clumsy, is prentice work. In some of her later novels, indeed, there’s an uneasy feeling that she’s still searching for her own voice. Allan’s contribution to the currently popular genre of realistic tenement stories, The Deans (1929), isn’t a great success, possibly because she had never lived in a tenement. She is much more at home in Deepening River (1932), the leisurely tale of four generations of a shipbuilding family in Glasgow, and in John Mathew, Paper-Maker (1948), closely based on her own family history. (Her grandfather the paper-maker was called John Luke.) These books take a ‘managerial’ point of view, unusual in Glasgow fiction; we may class them, perhaps, with George Blake’s ‘Garvel’ novels and Guy McCrone’s Wax Fruit.

Allan published only some ten novels in all in a writing career which spanned nearly forty years. Her work found popularity and critical approval in the 1920s and 1930s. (Her post-war novels seem to have sunk without trace, the time out for charity work doing no good for her career.) Among these earlier novels is Hunger March.

Hunger March ought not to remain entirely forgotten in a Scottish publishing scene which has rediscovered so much equally flawed – for it does have its faults – but significant work. Though undoubtedly a ‘Glasgow novel’ – the city is unnamed, but clearly recognisable as Glasgow – it tries to steer clear of parochiality, opening with a prologue which makes that very point. The hunger march of the title, one of many during the Depression years, is seen as one of a series of events dating from earliest antiquity. Allan cites the tale of Joseph and his brethren and the story of Jesus with the loaves and fishes. ‘The meanest hunger marcher today … is walking in the shadow of God.’ That is the big picture, in Allan’s view.

To considerable effect, the action is confined to a single day, the day of the great hunger march. Intending to present a complete overview of the city, Allan chooses both working-class and middle-class characters, whose stories interweave through the day. Like Blake and Barke, she explores a ‘two cities’ theme: the middle classes don’t care about the workers – sometimes don’t even notice them – while the workers intend to make them notice. We focus in turn on the failing merchant Arthur Joyce; his cleaner Mrs Humphry and her longterm unemployed son Joe; a young clerk facing dismissal; a (now very dated) ‘society beauty’; and a charismatic revolutionary Nimrod, as observed by middle-class radical Jimmy. Again like Blake and Barke, Allan copes better with some of these strands than with others. If she doesn’t quite manage in Hunger March to get the whole of Glasgow into one novel, she is not alone among Glasgow novelists.

The Mrs Humphry/Joe story is perhaps rather determinedly ‘Glasgow’, but the mother-son relationship has moments of sensitivity. Mrs Humphry’s incessant blathering about the glories of work brings the unemployed Joe to such a pitch of frustrated rage that he nearly brains her. But he )or Allan) stops in time, and the moment is a turning-point for the characters.

The novel moves to its obligatory scene of violence in the Square and an epiphany for the young reporter, Jimmy, a credible enough character, though Nimrod is a bit larger than life. But Allan is probably most comfortable with the employer Mr Joyce, on the survival of whose business the fates of many of these characters depend. The symbiotic relationship between employer and employee, a feature of both The Shipbuilders and Major Operation, is no less significant here. Allan sees the future of firms like Joyce and Son as the future of Glasgow. Arthur Joyce has vowed to carry on, rather than winding up his business before it collapses and retiring in modest comfort. Recognising how his workers would suffer if he gave up, he is racked with responsibility and guilt.

But Hunger March is not a hymn to middle-class virtues. A telling scene occurs while the great march is converging on George Square in early afternoon. The marchers are idly watched by leisured shoppers and lunchers. In one of the famous Glasgow tearooms we overhear a comment by a lady customer: ‘It shouldn’t be allowed. I’m sure and I don’t know what the world is coming to!’ In a corner of the room a young waitress silently agrees, but – as Allan economically indicates – with quite a different implication to her thoughts.

As we have seen, Dot Allan, by upbringing and outward social status, is the lady at the table, but she sympathises with the waitress. She is registering an indictment of the prosperous middle class to which she herself belongs; an attitude which recurs in her writing.

Among other good reviews which Hunger March received on publication, the Times Literary Supplement found it ‘honest and inspiring’. There is something, however, a little odd about this review: ‘Mr Dot Allan has adopted an ingenious and effective technique for his story Hunger March…’ 

The reviewer has assumed (presumably from reading the book) that the author is a man: an interesting misidentification. Perhaps, even as late as 1934, it isn’t the kind of book that women are expected to be writing? Has Allan managed to break free of the persona of a middle-class lady (which does appear in some of her sketches) and write as she could write, unhampered by any conventions about ‘women’s writing’? These questions call for further investigation, particularly because, some years earlier, Allan had considered these very conventions in her second novel, Makeshift (1928), even less well known than Hunger March.

Makeshift opens with a condemnation of middle-class ladies so pointed and bitter that the reference in Hunger March pales in comparison. The prologue introduces the child Jacqueline, whose adolescence and adulthood are the theme of the book. Her mother, a dressmaker working at home, is embittered about the state of her marriage. her husband is a sea-captain and his ship is her rival, the mistress to whom he rushes off eagerly after every leave. She thought marriage would be wonderful, but:’Second best!’ she raved. ‘That’s what my life has been made up of, Jacqueline; makeshift all the time … I’ve missed it somehow; but there’s more in life than that.’

Her lady clients treat her with disdain, not even paying their bills, on which income she and Jacqueline depend. At last she slashes a customer’s dress material into shreds, realises what she’s done, goes into her room, and gasses herself. Nothing here for the comfort of Dot Allan’s neighbours in Kelvinside.

Jacqueline, the ‘second best’ cry in her ears, grows up, begins to write, and feels the first stirrings of ‘sex consciousness’. The phrase is awkward, but there is honesty and frankness in Allan’s description of Jacqueline’s sexual feelings, and of her awareness of the same urge in men. Makeshift is as outspoken for its time as Catherine Carswell’s Open the Door! 

After a closely-observed scene of sexual harassment by Jacqueline’s boss, and more conventional romance with Owen (who is then rather melodramatically stabbed to death), Jacqueline is called home to keep house for her widowed uncle, and begins to go out with William, the bailie’s son. She is moved by unexpected passion (to William’s surprise, not to say alarm), but accepts his proposal almost entirely from fear of becoming a ‘surplus woman’ like her alcoholic colleague Miss Price. ‘Would it be all right? At the back of her mind she knew that it wouldn’t.’ When writing friends drop in before the wedding, William is annoyed.What the blazes did the man mean jawing away about Jacqueline’s poetry, puffing up the poor kid she could write? Write? Hell! Didn’t he realise she was going to be married – married?

Shades of Carswell’s The Camomile, and Allan treats no less thoughtfully the problems of a woman writer in 1920s Scotland, which (as in Carswell) can only be solved by taking the train south.

Were they, to some extent, Allan’s own problems? She did not take the night express to Euston, but stayed in Glasgow, caring for a frail mother. Some of her writing is fairly run-of-the-mill – what you might expect from a middle-class woman writer of her place and time – but Makeshift and Hunger March transcend such expectations. We can postulate, but pending further research cannot prove, tensions in her life and work between what she ‘ought’ to write and what she wanted to write, what she was doing in genteel Kelvinside and what she wanted to do. Meanwhile Hunger March and Makeshift ought to be rediscovered – as the work of Blake, Barke and Carswell has quite recently been – and studied in the context not just of Glasgow fiction, but of Scottish women’s writing.

Copyright © Moira Burgess 1998