I was diagnosed with terminal cancer a year ago today. It’s been one of the best years of my life.
A blood test I was given on the morning of Tuesday 11th July 2023 – a Prostate Specific Antigen test – showed a reading of 269. For context: anything above 4 is considered a problem. It prompted a call at 5pm from the lead practitioner at my local surgery to tell me I had cancer. It was not normally something he would announce by phone, he said, but taken together with the result of an X-ray the previous week which revealed a possible collapsed vertebra, there was no time to waste. It was likely the cancer had gone into my spine and I was in danger of paralysis or worse. I had to pack a bag straight away and go directly to QEUH (Queen Elizabeth University Hospital).
His call came while I was listening to Oscar Peterson’s “Angel Eyes” with my grandson. He was transfixed by the music, his face a picture. All was well in our world. Twenty minutes later Dini and I were in a taxi on the way to the Acute Assessment Unit, telling ourselves there must be some mistake. After a wait I was seen by a doctor who told me I had to lie down on a hospital bed and stay still, like a Ming vase with a crack in it, while tests were done. That was a long night for me, but also for Dini, who went home at midnight to an empty house not knowing what would happen or when I’d be home. I took a selfie while I lay there wondering what was to come.
At one point an oncologist came and crouched down beside me to talk. I don’t remember much of what he said, but the way he came down to my level rather than hovering over me moved me to tears. Eventually, at 2am, a bed was found for me on the 9th floor. The porters who took me up in the lift joked about the amount of pee I’d left in the urine bottle.
Next morning the MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) showed that the collapsed vertebra was an old T5 wedge fracture, not directly linked to the cancer. This was good news. They believed the cancer must be on my spine, not in my spine, an important distinction. I could sit up and move about. I would be put on monthly stomach injections of Firmagon (Degarelix), a form of Androgen Deprivation Therapy (ADT), the standard treatment for reducing the testosterone on which the disease depends.
I saw four doctors in three days, a urologist and three oncologists. I was spoiled rotten. On the Wednesday morning after my MRI another doctor knelt at my bedside and asked if I understood what was happening. I didn’t really, and anyway they were telling me they didn’t have the whole picture yet. All I knew was that I had prostate cancer and it appeared to have spread to my pelvis and back. I saw a third oncologist on the Thursday morning who told me I was getting out of hospital. “But I’m institutionalised!” I said. He laughed, but I was half serious. With the trauma and the constant testing of my pee, blood being taken, and attention from nursing and medical staff, I felt I’d been in for forty days and not forty hours. This doctor pulled no punches about my condition, but he had constructive advice to give. People will say that you can’t do anything to help yourself, but that’s not true, he said. He explained how the hormone therapy would mean I’d lose muscle and bone density, increasing the risk of osteoporosis and fracture, but I could do weight training to help counter the effects. It would also make a difference if I ate well and stayed positive. I told him I had a conference coming up on the Tuesday of the next week that I’d spent years preparing for, which had already been postponed because of the pandemic. Don’t give up on anything that gives you pleasure, he said.
Five days later I was at the podium in Bute Hall introducing the Principal of the University at the opening of the first International Outlander Conference. Diana Gabaldon was our star speaker. I wore my loudest shirts and the conference went off like a cracker.
Although the diagnosis came out of the blue, I wasn’t completely surprised that there was something seriously wrong. I’d had sixteen months of symptoms prior to that PSA test, including back pain and inflammation from hip to shoulder on the right-hand side. It was the longest period of illness I’d had in my life, but because I’d been to the GP regularly and been given several blood tests I was confident it couldn’t be cancer. I had no idea what a PSA test was, and nobody had mentioned it. I thought I had some mystery illness.
When I got out of hospital I was given a discharge letter which provided details of the diagnosis for my GP. I gave it a cursory scan but didn’t look too closely. It’s true I read for a living, but I can be sloppy when it comes to reading things that matter. I passed the letter round family members that afternoon like a box of Quality Street, and they all read it. Dini scrutinised and digested it and began a long period of intensive research into prostate cancer on my behalf. I went off in a different direction, researching the history of cancer generally, and later, when I was lined up for that treatment, the history of chemotherapy.
Months later I came across the discharge letter and this time I read it properly. I confronted Dini with it. “Have you read this?” I said, shocked at the words “MRI confirmed bone metastases”. Of course, she had.
Over the next couple of months I had a CT Scan, a nuclear medicine bone scan, my second dose of Degarelix, and a biopsy. I inadvertently called it an autopsy when I was phoning to find out when it would happen, and I think that made the receptionist’s morning. Before I went in for the biopsy I sat in a waiting room with several other men around my age. It struck me that in our white gowns we looked like Roman Senators, dignified and resolute. We could have been carved in marble and set above the hospital entrance.
I still had to wait for all the results to be gathered and assessed before I would know the precise prognosis or programme of treatment. There were some delays, but to have had the diagnosis, CT Scan, bone scan and the appointment (for prognosis) within two months was a small miracle with the NHS under such enormous pressure. I met with a specialist cancer nurse at New Victoria Hospital on the 19th of September. He told me in a matter-of-fact manner that from the scans so far they could tell that the cancer had spread around my spine and possibly into my right lung, and I had a very advanced and aggressive form of the disease. Surgery wasn’t an option, but chemo was. I asked how long someone with my stage of cancer could survive. Five years at best, he said. As I left the hospital I saw in the grounds a monument in the form of a massive rock, and thought of Sisyphus.
A colleague who had had cancer recommended the Maggie’s Centre at Gartnavel and that was a godsend. Having a cup of tea there and chatting to others with cancer made me realise I was in good company. Not only did I now have access to fitness classes and yoga, counselling sessions and advice, but going there was important to me as an admission of my condition. That may sound strange, given that I have told family, friends, colleagues and the cats and dogs in the street about my cancer, but denial runs deep. Having conversations about the disease with people in the same boat, or a similar boat, brings it home. There’s a bond that forms instantly. “Cancer Conversations” is the name of a project I’m now working on with some colleagues who have also been through it, as a way to share our knowledge and experience.
It was decided I would be a good candidate for Triplet Therapy, a pioneering treatment for advanced prostate cancer. Three drugs were to be administered, the 3 Ds: my existing and lifelong monthly stomach injections of Degarelix; a new daily oral anti-cancer drug, Darolutamide; and the intravenous chemotherapy, Docetaxel. There were delays in starting, which was frustrating: the treatment had to be delayed for a week while clearance was confirmed for the Darolutamide; then I caught Covid and treatment had to be postponed for a further two weeks. On Wednesday 1st of November the chemo finally started. In my first session, sitting in a comfy chair in that big room with nine other people, winter sun slanting in, listening to Spotify – Genesis, the Jam, various compilations – and occasional chitchat, it didn’t feel like the end of the world.
I had minimal side effects, just twenty seconds of mild discomfort as the Docetaxel went in. My oncologist was a pioneering researcher with an interest in new treatments so I knew I was in good hands. The fact that I lived within walking distance of the Beatson West of Scotland Cancer Centre where I was getting the chemotherapy made things easier too. I often thought of those who had to travel some distance and find a place to stay overnight. On many levels I was lucky.
I took time off from work for the first couple of chemo sessions but after that I realised I could work fine from home and was able to answer emails while getting the chemo. Fortunately my side-effects were minimal. The hair loss paused at a sort of old Victorian doll look. I was tempted to shave the angel hair off but Dini persuaded me to let it take its course.
On chemo days I was given dexamethasone and hydrocortisone, and my feet were dancing in bed. I had no other side effects of note, just slight brain fog and an occasional hot flush.
When I had first heard I was getting chemo I’d called it “schemotherapy”. I like a pun as much as I like a podium and that coinage captured the attitude I hoped to take into the treatment. It also planted the seed of an idea for a rap under that title and in the middle of the treatment I started to scribble some lines. It came together quite quickly, and I thought I would share it with male friends who might be unaware of the need for vigilance around prostate health. When I recited the lines to my niece Norma she insisted I get it down on video. Norma filmed it at a location with a backdrop of graffiti to give it some street cred and I duly posted it on social media.It was picked up on by one of the first students I taught at the University of Glasgow, Paul English, and he interviewed me for The Herald about it. This was going public in a big way.
Around this time, as the result of a referral through the Maggie’s centre, I was contacted by Jill Robertson, Holistic Support Officer at the Improving the Cancer Journey Service based in Glasgow City Council. Before that phone call I thought I had everything under control, but talking to Jill made me realise just how much support and advocacy we all need as cancer sufferers even when we think we’ve got the hang of it. It was another lifeline.
In May I was given a new drug called Prostap (Leuprorelin), the first of a series of injections to replace the Degarelix to which I’d begun to have a bad reaction. In June I saw my oncologist to get the latest scan results – bone and CT – and he said they were “spectacular”. The treatment has improved my condition, and the cancer has shrunk significantly around my back and hip. The suspicious shadow on my lung turns out not to be cancerous after all, but some sort of bronchial issue. I asked the doctor about how much time I might have left. I had a wee joke with him that went like this:
ME: Have I got time to start a novel?
DOCTOR: It depends on how long you take to write it.
ME: I mean read a novel.
He said the prognosis based on the type of cancer I have remains 4-5 years from diagnosis, i.e. 3-4 years hence, so still quite life-shortening. My hope is that since I’ve responded well to treatment, I may be a statistical outlier. I plan to persist and to defy the data. New treatments are being developed all the time, and as my doctor said, “Cancer can’t read”, so it doesn’t know what it’s up against in future. I’ll do everything I can to cling onto dear life for dear life and for family and friends.
Cancer takes time off you, telescopes and truncates it, but it makes every minute count too. When I announced my plan to retire in September I had overwhelmingly warm, life-affirming responses from colleagues, friends and students. My hair has grown back thick and lush since the chemo and I’m averaging more steps a day this year than last, according to my phone. The weight training I’m doing to ward off the risk of osteoporosis and fractures is making me feel stronger and fitter, and I’m eating and sleeping better than before. It’s been a great year all round, and there’s more to come. I’ve never been so in love with my wife and with life, so keen to see my family and friends, so glad to enjoy the life outside work that was always just out of reach of the deadlines and demands of the job. No matter how many years are left, they will be all the more golden because of what has happened.
In Finnegans Wake, the most woke book in history, James Joyce alludes in his own unique oblique fashion to a match between two Scottish football clubs, Partick Thistle and St Mirren, a fixture played at Love Street, Paisley, on Holy Saturday, the 7th of April 1928, which ended in a 2-2 draw. (1) The University of Glasgow is hosting the International Joyce Symposium from 14-19 June 2024. The conference title, ‘Across the Waters’, is well-chosen, for as my colleagues organising this event point out, Joyce has a connection with this city that goes back to his earliest travels and forward to his last great work: ‘For James Joyce, as for many Irishmen and women, Glasgow was the first city he saw beyond his native shores. During the Summer of 1894, Joyce crossed to Scotland from Dublin on a Duke Line steamer with his father. It was also the city where his last book, Finnegans Wake, was printed by the firm of James MacLehose & Sons in Anniesland during the 1930s. 130 years after Joyce’s visit, the University of Glasgow is welcoming the James Joyce Foundation to Scotland for the first time to hold the 29th International Joyce Symposium.’ (2) Joyce was twelve years old at the time of his visit to Glasgow, and the short version is that it rained and his father drank too much and got into a fight. We only know about this jaunt at all thanks to his younger brother, Stanislaus, who describes it briefly but poignantly in his memoir, My Brother’s Keeper, published in 1958. James Joyce died in 1941, and Stanislaus in 1955, so neither brother was around to elaborate further on that Scottish journey. Richard Ellmann could take the story no further forward in his 1959 biography of Joyce, and scholars have subsequently lamented the fact that we have only a sketchy account of the writer’s first trip outside of Ireland. (3) Joyce’s visit to Glasgow with his father is touched on briefly by their respective biographers, who clearly haven’t visited the city in June, the rainy season, judging by comments like ‘The visit was spoiled by rain’, and ‘Depressingly, it poured with rain.’ I laughed out loud when I read those remarks. So, we don’t know much about Joyce’s Glasgow bucket list, except that it bucketed, but perhaps we know more than we think we know. We certainly know enough about the route Joyce would have taken to Glasgow by boat and train, and the things he might have seen on the way, to be able to follow in his footsteps – or wallow in his wake – up to a point. What I aim to do here is map out Joyce’s journey as far as is possible given the scarcity of sources and the barebones information provided by Stanislaus. (4)
Joyce’s first sight of Scotland would be the view of Princes Pier Station at Greenock, where the Duke Line docked. This was the first port of call for passengers on the way to Glasgow, some twenty miles from their final destination. In fact, we know exactly what Joyce’s first view of Scotland was, because we have some remarkable photographs of his landing point in 1894, the year after that it was revamped to compete with the neighbouring port of Gourock. (5)
The new station opened on 25th May 1894, so the Joyces would have disembarked here. But what did they see on their journey from Dublin? Imagine if we could join the young James Joyce on that trip with his father and see the journey through his eyes. Luckily we can, thanks to a tour guide from the time. Although published in June 1884, exactly ten years before Joyce’s journey, this account describes the overnight sea crossing in some detail, and points to the landmarks that passengers would pass as they travelled, from dawn to dusk, from Dublin to Greenock, from the Liffey to the Clyde. (6)
In Ulysses there’s a reference to ‘Dublin and Glasgow Steam Packet Company – The Duke Line, 70-72 North Wall Quay.’ Joyce was precise about these things. The Duke Line – or the Dublin & Glasgow Steam Packet Co., to give it its official title, as Joyce does – was formed in 1823, and sailed from the North Wall Quay on the Liffey to Princes Pier in Greenock and onwards by connecting train to Glasgow Central railway station, a total journey time of around 12-14 hours, the last leg by train in Joyce’s time taking between 45 minutes and an hour.
We don’t know the exact date of Joyce’s journey, though it probably took place sometime around June. We don’t have passenger lists for travel between Ireland and Scotland for this period so we don’t know which boat Joyce sailed on or the dates of travel. He could have been aboard any of the ‘splendid saloon paddle steam ships’ run by the company, including the Duke of Argyll, the Lord Clyde, and the Lord Gough. Joyce might have been onboard the iron paddle steamer, Duke of Leinster, built by Robert Duncan & Co. of Port Glasgow and launched in 1870. It was a vessel with a troubled history. On the 19th of November 1874 it ‘ran down jolly boat of HMS AURORA off Prince’s Pier (outward for Dublin); 15 of 30 in the rowing boat were drowned or killed by the impact.’ (7) Whatever vessel they travelled in, Joyce and his father would have stepped onto Princes Pier into a town that was a home from home.
First off, upon arrival in Greenock the Joyces may have been met by John Joyce, a 41-year-old railway porter living in the town at 21 Wellington Street. (8) They would have heard Irish accents aplenty. According to Shaun Kavanagh: ‘In the whole of Britain, by 1871 only London had more Irish migrants per head of population than Greenock.’ (9) Greenock was a hub of Irish cultural and political activity. The Greenock Irish National Association founded in 1865 would prove a seedbed for the Scottish contribution to the Easter Rising of 1916. (10)
Joyce would have been interested to know of the Greenock Burns Club, founded on 29 January 1802, and known as ‘The Mother Club’ because of its pioneering advocacy of the poet’s work. (11) Originating in Greenock Ayrshire Society in 1801, by the time of Joyce’s arrival in the town it was a bastion of Burns enthusiasm. According to the current website: ‘In 1894 the club’s activities were described thus: “Few if any clubs of a similar kind have done such excellent and praiseworthy work among the young people of the community. It has encouraged the reading of the great master’s poems, singing of his pure songs…and created and fostered a taste for the works of the other poets and literary men who shine with him in the galaxy of enduring fame.”’ The 1894 Invitation to the Greenock Burns Club reads: ‘Dr Nansen finds himself forestalled at the NORTH POLE by the proverbial Scotsman, but is consoled by an invitation to the local BURNS CLUB DINNER’, a reference to Norwegian Nobel prizewinning polymath Fridtjof Nansen’s polar expedition. Nansen is part of the ‘nansense’ of the Wake. (12)
There is so much to say about Greenock, this historic port town, the gateway to Glasgow for the young James Joyce, but what did the twelve-year-old Joyce make of Glasgow itself? Not much would be the short answer if we looked no further than Stanislaus, who speaks of a ‘visit of a few days in summer to Glasgow, at the invitation of the captain of one of the Duke liners, who was a friend of my father’s. The great joke of the visit, which was spoiled by rain, was that my father, soused to the gills on the return trip, had a heated and noisy argument about politics with the captain, an anti-Parnellite. Fortunately, the captain was a teetotaller on board though not one on shore. “By God, man”, my father would conclude in telling this wonderfully good story, “if he had been drinking he would have thrown me overboard.”‘ John Joyce was steaming on the steamer home, and steaming in Glasgow too. Stanislaus closes this account of his brother’s Glasgow visit with a couple of sentences that strike a chord: ‘I can picture my brother as a handsome young boy, all eyes and nerves, traipsing about in the muggy drizzle of Glasgow after his tipsy father. In Dublin I have more than once seen children, younger than my brother was at that time, trying to lead a staggering mother home.’ (13)
So there it is. On the surface, we know very little about Joyce’s Glasgow visit other than that it pissed, his father got pissed, and pissed off the ship’s captain, biting the hand that fed them their passage. All very Glasgow. (14) Not much trickledown besides the rain, the drink, and the piss. Yet 1894 was no ordinary year for the city. Joyce’s visit coincided with a defining moment for the arts and culture. The Glasgow Institute of the Fine Arts organised an ‘Exhibition Illustrative of Old Glasgow’ at the Galleries at 175 Sauchiehall Street. Items on display included books, chap-books, maps, magazines, manuscripts, periodicals, and portraits. Many were personal donations, but the University of Glasgow featured prominently as a contributor to the contents. A short prefatory note to the 450-page catalogue of the exhibition, published in July 1894, reads: ‘The Council of the Glasgow Institute of the Fine Arts have organized the Exhibition in order to illustrate the history and progress of Glasgow. The exhibits range in date from the earliest times until about the middle of this century. All the exhibits have a direct connection with Glasgow and its industrial, social, and civic life.’ (15)
So much for culture, what about sport. What might Joyce have made of Glasgow’s two great football clubs at the time – Celtic FC and Partick Thistle FC. We know that the name of the latter stuck in his mind from that mention in Finnegans Wake. It’s unlikely that Joyce saw a football match in Glasgow with his father in 1894, since he was there around June during close season, but he would have been aware of the importance of football as a form of popular culture. In season 1893-94, Celtic won League Division 1, finishing seven points ahead of their nearest rivals, Heart of Midlothian. The list of teams below them in the table of ten features some unfamiliar names to modern eyes: St Bernard’s, Third Lanark, Leith Athletic, and Renton. Partick Thistle finished fifth in League Division 2, topped by Hibernian. Again, a few unfamiliar names finished above and below them, including Cowlairs, Port Glasgow Athletic, and Abercorn.
At the risk of embarking on a wild goose chase, and providing some useless information, let me take a brief detour now and scrape some barnacles off the boat. It’s well-known that the starting-point for Joyce’s second novel, Ulysses, was his date with Nora Barnacle on 16th June 1904, ten years after his Glasgow trip, and that ‘when James Joyce’s father heard the surname of the girl with whom his son had run away, he exclaimed, as unable as his son ever to resist a pun, “Barnacle? She’ll never leave him”’. (16) If we go back to Glasgow ten years earlier we find another Barnacle, a Bearsden Barnacle. On the 19th of March 1894 Mary Ann Clark died in Bearsden (also known as New Kilpatrick) of apoplexy and congestion of the lungs. (17) She was 57 years old. Mary Ann’s maiden name was Barnacle, and her father, Thomas Barnacle, was a Master Baker. Norah Barnacle, Joyce’s first love and the muse behind the Bloomsday scenario, was also the daughter of a baker called Thomas. This is the kind of coincidence Joyce thrived on. But perhaps it was more than a coincidence. Perhaps Mary Ann was a relative of Norah’s. (18) Barnacle was a West of Ireland name, and Norah’s father, according to her biographer, ‘came from a line of Galway bakers’. (19) Whether that line stretched from Galway to Glasgow at some point in the mid-nineteenth-century I leave to others to untangle. Nora’s biographer, Brenda Maddox, tells us that ‘In the west of Ireland Barnacle was a common enough surname.’ (20) Conversely, there were only a handful of Barnacles in Scotland in the nineteenth century. (21) I wouldn’t wish to get into a bareknuckle fight with Joyceans – notoriously pugnacious – about whether Mary Anne Barnacle was a relative of Norah’s, although from my research it looks like neither she nor her father were born in Scotland.
Thus far James Joyce in Glasgow, but what about Glasgow in James Joyce. He appears not to have made much of his visit, but Joyce’s association with Glasgow did not end with that rowdy return trip to Dublin with his drunk dad. As Richard Barlow remarks, ‘Scotland provided Joyce’s first taste of a physical escape from Ireland. Later its literary culture would provide a different type of withdrawal.’ (22) Indeed when Stanislaus was trying to bail out his brother, Scotland became a great getaway story: ‘Stanislaus, still struggling to pay the debts Joyce had left behind, had new instructions for creditors: tell them he had gone to Scotland.’ (23) Stanislaus’s own admiration for Scottish literary culture is expressed in his memoir: ‘Scotland, too, has its Gaelic poets; but it has a host of poets even before Burns, in comparison with whose songs Anglo-Irish love poetry until Yeats is a very thin vintage.’ (24)
There are some passing allusions to Glasgow in the short story collection Dubliners, which has a Glasgow connection insofar as the publisher, Grant Richards, was born in Hillhead in the neighbourhood of the University. In ‘Grace’, Mrs Kernan reflects on her offspring: ‘Her two eldest sons were launched. One was in a draper’s shop in Glasgow and the other was clerk to a tea-merchant in Belfast. They were good sons, wrote regularly and sometimes sent home money.’ (25) In ‘The Dead’, Gabriel Conroy asks Mrs Malins about her crossing: ‘She lived with her married daughter in Glasgow and came to Dublin on a visit once a year. She answered placidly that she had had a beautiful crossing and that the captain had been most attentive to her. She spoke also of the beautiful house her daughter kept in Glasgow, and of all the friends they had there.’ (26)
References to Glasgow have been detected in Ulysses too, including Stephen’s line, ‘I suspect […] that Ireland must be important because it belongs to me’, which makes one editor ask ‘Could this be an allusion to the popular Scottish drinking song? “I belong to Glasgow, / Good old Glasgow town, / But what’s the matter with Glasgow / For it’s going round and round? / I’m only a common old working chap, / As anyone here can see, / But when I’ve had a couple of drinks of a Saturday, / Glasgow belongs to me.”‘ (27) ‘I Belong to Glasgow’ was written by Will Fyffe in 1920. Joyce would have liked the story behind it; ‘Fyffe, or so the story goes, met his greatest inspiration late one night at Central Station, Glasgow. […] That night at Central Station he met a drunk. According to Albert Mackie’s The Scotch Comedians (1973), the drunk was “genial and demonstrative” and “laying off about Karl Marx and John Barleycorn with equal enthusiasm.” Fyffe asked him: “Do you belong to Glasgow?” and he replied: “At the moment, at the moment, Glasgow belongs to me.”’ (28) ‘I Belong to Glasgow’ was not the only Scottish song that registered with Joyce. Stanislaus mentions a trip to London by James and his father in April 1900: ‘My father came back with funny garbled versions of popular songs, and my brother declared that the music hall, not poetry, was a criticism of life.’ (29) In ‘A Little Cloud’, one of the stories in Dubliners, Joyce alludes to the 1911 music hall song co-written and sung by Harry Lauder, ‘A Wee Deoch an Doris’. (30) Lauder became a weel-kent face in London as a stage Scotsman, but his professional debut took place in Larkhall in 1894. Joyce could have caught him in Dublin in July of that year when Lauder played in Dame Street. (31)
Joyce’s last work, Finnegans Wake was printed by the firm of James MacLehose & Sons, printers to the University of Glasgow, at their printing and bookbinding works at 15 Foulis Street in Anniesland in 1939. In 1972 MacLehose printworks, purpose-built in 1905, was taken over by another expanding business with strong University of Glasgow connections, Barr & Stroud Ltd, optical instrument engineers, co-founded by Archibald Barr, a former student of the University and later Regius Professor of Civil Engineering and Mechanics. Barr & Stroud were makers of periscopes and rangefinders for the navy and army, and built Scotland’s first minicomputer between 1958 and 1963. (32) In Finnegans Wake, in a passage rich in fleeting allusions to Scottish waterways like ‘so firth and so forth’ (200.13), ‘That’s the thing I’m elwys on edge to esk’ (202.15), and ‘Drop me the sound of the findhorn’s name’ (204.21), we find the following: ‘Linking one and knocking the next, tapting a flank and tipting a jutty and palling in and pietaring out and clyding by on her eastway’ (202.10-12). James Atherton noted that ‘“cly” with the meaning of “carry off illegally” is probably a part of “clyding” […] together with “gliding” and the river Clyde’. (33) Lawrence Rainey suggested ‘clyding merging “gliding” with the river Clyde in Scotland’, and ‘eastway echoing the word “estuary,’” but also saying which way the Liffey flows.’ (34) In ‘clyding’ we might also hear ‘colliding’ and ‘colluding’, and in ‘eastway’ we might detect the Clyde Estuary as well as the eastward direction of Joyce’s youthful journey from the lips of the Liffey to the mouth of the Clyde.
The bibliographical bloodhound will enjoy sniffing out more allusions to Glasgow and Scotland in Joyce. (35) In Finnegans Wake we find the query, ‘Arran, where’s your nose?’ (204.31-2.) This is, we are told, a reference to the notorious smell of Arran Quay on the Liffey in Dublin, the quay named after Richard Butler, Earl of Arran, whose title applied to the Aran Islands off the West coast of Ireland, not to be confused with Arran Island, ‘belonging to the Duke of Hamilton’, which Joyce’s boat nosed past at sunrise in the summer of 1894, unless, like the man himself, we rejoice in such confusion.
I end this excursus with a portrait of the Dublin artist by Glasgow counterpart, Gerry Mangan. The border text reads: ‘Portrait of the artist as an elderly metempsychotic, plucking the heartstrings on a minor quay of the Anal Livia harking to a harpie blowing his own Sireen ni Houlihan singing cocks and muscles alive aliffey a plurabell book and candlewicker to wake up Finnegan to begin again to plug in the five-pin djinn again to forge the cochlea of his race in the Smithfield of his sole mio before he flies too close to – yes – the Sony and melts the wax in his ear phoney in nomine patrimony et filibuster et mollification.’
(1) This occurs in a fragment of radio commentary in a pub. ‘Partick Thistle agen S. Megan’s’ (Finnegans Wake, 378.18-19) is mentioned alongside a game between Crystal Palace and Walsall and the coincidence of the two results – a 4-goal draw and a 4-goal victory (Palace beat Walsall 5-1 at Selhurst Park) – has been painstakingly traced to this date. See Peter J. Reichenberg, ‘Finnegans Wake: The Dating Game’, James Joyce Quarterly 46, 2 (2009): 362-365, at 363. According to Richard Barlow: ‘Probably the similarity of “Partick” and “Patrick” attracted Joyce; the team name almost brings together the patron saint of Ireland with the national symbol of Scotland.’ Barlow, The Celtic Unconscious, pp.254-255, n30. Reichenberg offers more detail: ‘Partick Thistle and St. Mirren evoke the names of two Irish saints: Saint Patrick and Saint Mirren. The name Partick, from the Gaelic aper dhu ec, means the place at the mouth of the dark river. Partick is an area of Glasgow on the north bank of the River Clyde. Saint Mirren was an Irish monk, the founder and abbot of Paisley Abbey, Renfrewshire, Scotland. He is the patron saint of Paisley and of the St. Mirren Football Club.’ Reichenberg, ‘Finnegans Wake: The Dating Game’, p.364. The nicknames of these two clubs – the Jags and the Buddies – captures their prickly but friendly rivalry, and with St Mirren being also known as ‘the Saints’, and the Partick/Patrick pun, we can see why Joyce fastened on this particular pairing.
(2) Across the Waters: XXIX International James Joyce Symposium University of Glasgow, 14-19 June 2024, https://ijjf2024.glasgow.ac.uk/.
(3) I first became interested in Joyce and Scotland 25 years ago when I published a newspaper article on the subject: Willy Maley, ‘Bloomsday Scenario: James Joyce had a lot to say about Scotland … almost all of it bad’, The Sunday Herald (Seven Days: Scotland’s Current Affairs Magazine, 13 June 1999), p.10. The following year I published a critical essay on the subject: Willy Maley, ‘“Kilt by Kelt Shell Kithagain with Kinagain”: Joyce and Scotland’, in Derek Attridge and Marjorie Howes (eds.), Semi-Colonial Joyce (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp.201-218.
(4) Richard Barlow, the major authority on James Joyce and Scotland, sets the bar high with his erudition and insight. In his groundbreaking book, The Celtic Unconscious, Barlow says: ‘It is unfortunate that so little is known about Joyce’s trip to Scotland.’ Barlow, The Celtic Unconscious, pp. 14-15. Despite the lack of flesh on the bones of Joyce’s Scottish sojourn, Barlow suggests that ‘it is highly likely that it would have brought him into contact with the results of waves of emigration, the mass movement of Irish labor-seekers into western Scotland in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. Indeed, given the very high numbers of Irish immigrating to Glasgow and environs in this period, it would have been difficult to avoid coming into contact with Irish workers.’ Barlow, The Celtic Unconscious, p.54.
(5) ‘Greenock Princes Pier was rebuilt for the Glasgow and South Western Railway in 1894 in a grand Italianate style. This was to counter the Gourock extension of the Caledonian Railway which opened in 1889 (and even the opening of Craigendoran Pier on the north bank in 1882).’ ‘Greenock Princes Pier (2nd)’, Railscot, https://www.railscot.co.uk/locations/G/Greenock_Princes_Pier_2nd/#:~:text=Greenock%20Princes%20Pier%20was%20rebuilt,the%20north%20bank%20in%201882). More information on the excellent Canmore site: ‘Princes Pier Railway Station, an impressive railway terminus overlooking the Firth of Clyde, was designed by the Glasgow architect, James Miller, and built in 1893 for the Glasgow & South Western Railway Company. The architectural photographer, Harry Bedford Lemere, was commissioned to photograph the building in 1894. The booking office occupied the central part of the terminus. It had a first-floor balcony with views across the pierside to the water, and was flanked by large Italianate stair-towers with tile-hung walls and pyramidal roofs that acted as imposing beacons for the paddle steamers drawing up to collect the train passengers at the quayside. In the late 19th century new rail networks encouraged leisure travel, and the Glasgow & South Western Railway Company’s line from Glasgow allowed holidaymakers to travel directly to Greenock to embark onto the paddle steamers that would take them ‘doon the water’ to the popular seaside resorts of Helensburgh, Dunoon and Rothesay on the Firth of Clyde. Source: RCAHMS contribution to SCRAN.’ Permalink http://canmore.org.uk/collection/716997, PHOTO CREDIT https://canmore.org.uk/file/image/716997.
(6) J. H. D. Molony (ed.), The Tourist’s Guide, compiled by J.H.D. Molony. June, July, Sept., Oct. 1884 (Dublin: The Official Guide Ltd., 1884), June, p.8.
(9) Shaun Kavanagh, ‘Home Rule, Sinn Féin and the Irish Republican Movement in Greenock’, in Kirsty Lusk and Willy Maley (eds.), Scotland and the Easter Rising: Fresh Perspectives on 1916 (Edinburgh: Luath Press, 2016), pp. 94-100, at p. 94.
(10) ‘The Young Ireland Society in Greenock organised weekly lectures, usually followed by a debate and singing of national songs.’ Kavanagh, ‘Home Rule, Sinn Féin and the Irish Republican Movement in Greenock’, p. 96. The Irish Revival had strong roots in Greenock: ‘In Greenock, this cultural revival took the form of associational culture; organisations like the Ancient Order of Hibernians and Gaelic football clubs such as St Patrick’s, Sarsfields, and Eire Og in Port Glasgow, fostered a sense of ethnic Irish identity in Greenock. Indeed, this new ethnic and cultural confidence led members of the republican Young Ireland Society to stand in defiant separation from electoral politics. In the process, they distanced themselves from the majority of the Greenock-Irish community. The pursuit of Gaelic ethnic virtues would ultimately be attained through political separatism. By rallying and maintaining support for anti-British sentiment and emotional Irish nationalism, Irish republicans appealed to simple expatriate feeling, evoking images and memories of ‘home’ through organisational meetings, and readily accessible writings and songs. In short, Irish republicanism in Greenock provided a portable identity – a way of ‘being Irish’ outside Ireland.’ Kavanagh, ‘Home Rule, Sinn Féin and the Irish Republican Movement in Greenock’, p. 96.
(11) See Clark McGinn, ‘The True Date of the Foundation of the Greenock Burns Club’, Burns Chronicle 131, 2 (2022): 156-170.
(13) Stanislaus Joyce, My Brother’s Keeper: James Joyce’s Early Years edited, with an introduction and notes by Richard Ellman, preface by T. S. Eliot (New York: Viking Press, 1958), p. 60. On this passage, and Stanislaus’s own qualities as a writer, see Wyatt Mason, ‘A Staggering Mother’, Harper’s Magazine (July 2, 2008), https://harpers.org/2008/07/a-staggering-mother/.
(14) Joyce’s visit to Glasgow with his father is touched on briefly by their respective biographers, who clearly haven’t visited the city in June, the rainy season, judging by comments like ‘The visit was spoiled by rain’, and ‘Depressingly, it poured with rain.’ Richard Ellmann, his first critical biographer, drawing on the recollection by Stanislaus observes: ‘He was the only one of the children who got along easily with their father. The two liked to travel together, and that summer of 1894 John Joyce brought James along on a trip to Glasgow. He had made friends with the captain of one of the Duke liners that sail between Dublin and Glasgow, and took up the captain’s invitation to make the journey. The visit was spoiled by rain, but it gave John Joyce another sea story; on the return trip he and the captain quarreled violently over Parnell. “By God, man,” John Joyce would say afterwards, “if he had been drinking he would have thrown me overboard.”‘ Richard Ellmann, James Joyce: New and Revised Edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982; first published 1959), pp.40-41. The biographers of Joyce’s father likewise touch on the episode: ‘In June news came that Jim had vindicated his father’s boasts about him to Fr Conmee and had been awarded £22 for himself and £1 2-4s.od for the College in the 1894 Preparatory Grade Intermediate Examination. The money was paid to John but he passed it on to Jim, who promptly began to spend it, even taking his parents out to dinner at an expensive restaurant. It was probably this windfall and the goodwill it engendered between them that prompted John to invite Jim to accompany him on a summer trip to Scotland (perhaps, as “The Dead” seems to hint, for the wedding or funeral of one of the Malinses) . John did not have to pay for the sea crossing: as a seafaring man who knew the language since his Queenstown days, he had made friends with some of the personnel of the shipping companies when he was a Collector in the North Dock Ward and persuaded the captain of one of the Duke Line steamers to allow them an unused berth up the Irish Sea. Jim with his winnings could help to subsidise food, entertainment and somewhere to stay.
As Stanislaus remembered, they went first to Glasgow, then a city with a greater claim than Dublin to be the Second City of the Empire: its industrial vigour – in shipbuilding and locomotives – was quite unlike anything to be found in Dublin. James Joyce’s notes for Stephen Hero, however, strongly suggest that their final destination was beyond Glasgow and that a visit to Edinburgh featured in the lost chapters of that book – the existing parts of which are firmly rooted in fact. Depressingly, it poured with rain, which likely forced them to spend much of their time sheltering in city gin palaces. In delineating the development of the father-son relationship on this jaunt, another Stephen Hero note on the same page states darkly: “We cannot educate our fathers.” On the return voyage to Ireland the kindly captain was severely provoked by his inebriated friend who insisted on arguing vehemently and tediously with him about his favourite subject – Parnell. Afterwards, as he acted out an entertaining version of the story for the family, John reflected wryly that he was lucky not to have been seized bodily and thrown into the Irish Sea. Jim may not have been able to educate his father, but he was certainly learning a good deal from him and about him.’ John Wyse Jackson and Peter Costello, John Stanislaus Joyce: The Voluminous Life and Genius of James Joyce’s Father (London: Fourth Estate, 1998; first published 1997), pp.185-6.
(15) Glasgow Institute of the Fine Arts: Exhibition Illustrative of Old Glasgow (Glasgow: William Hodge and Company, 1894), p.vi.
(16) Brenda Maddox, Nora: The Real Life of Molly Bloom (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), p. 9.
(17) Mary Ann’s death certificate was viewed at https://www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk. Mary Ann was married to Edward Clarke in the Kelvin Registration District of Glasgow in 1877. Her marriage certificate gives her name as ‘Mary Anne Barnacle’.
(18) According to her biographer, ‘Nora Barnacle was born in March 1884 on either the twenty-first or the twenty-second (church and state records disagree). Her birth took place in the Galway City Workhouse, not because her family was penniless — they were not — but because the handsome limestone-terraced institution, which had sheltered more than a thousand people during the Great Famine of 1847-48, later served as general hospital for the city.’ Maddox, Nora, p. 9. Norah Barnacle became Nora after meeting Joyce, dropping the ‘h’. She was ‘Norah’ on her birth certificate but ‘Nora’ after she met Joyce. Norah Barnacle’s parents were called Thomas and Annie (nee Healy) and they had a daughter called Mary, Norah’s older sister.
(19) Maddox, Nora, p. 9.
(20) Maddox, Nora, pp. 9-10.
(21) On the 28th August 1848 Charles Barnacle married Elizabeth Tullo in Dundee, and the 1851 census lists three Barnacles in Canongate – Elizabeth Barnacle, aged 24, Henry Glanville Barnacle, aged 31, and Henry, aged 1. Information taken from https://www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk.
(22) Barlow, The Celtic Unconscious, p.15.
(23) Maddox, Nora, p. 76.
(24) Stanislaus Joyce, My Brother’s Keeper, p.158.
(25) Harry Levin (ed.), The Essential James Joyce (St. Albans, Herts.: Granada, 1977), p.124.
(26) Levin, The Essential James Joyce, p.149.
(27) Don Gifford, Ulysses Annotated: Notes for James Joyce’s Ulysses (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), p.550.
(30) See Cóilín Owens, ‘Harry Lauder: A Little Cloud’, James Joyce Literary Supplement 15, 1 (2001): 6-8.
(31) Owens, ‘Harry Lauder: A Little Cloud’, p.6.
(32) See Paul A. V. Thomas, ‘Solidac: an early minicomputer for teaching purposes’, IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 15, 4 (1993): 79-83.
(33) J. S. Atherton, ‘Ā Few More Books at the Wake’, James Joyce Quarterly 2, 3 (1965): 142-149, at 144.
(34) Lawrence Rainey (ed.), Modernism: An Anthology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), p.291, notes 283-4.
(35) Richard Barlow is the exemplary scholarly sleuth in this regard, and The Celtic Unconscious is a treasure chest of material on Joyce and Scotland. Here I have simply thrown a pebble into the water to make a small ripple.
FURTHER READ HEARINGS
S. Atherton, ‘Ā Few More Books at the Wake’, James Joyce Quarterly 2, 3 (1965): 142-149.
J. B. Baddelay, Ireland, Part I. Northern Counties, including Dublin and Neighbourhood. 20 Maps and Plans, by Bartholomew, 4th edition, Thorough Guide Series (London: Dulau, July 1897).
Richard Barlow, ‘Crotthers: Joyce’s Scots Fellow in Ulysses’ in Notes and Queries 57, 2 (2010): 230-233.
Richard Barlow, ‘The “united states of Scotia Picta”: Scottish Literature and History in Finnegans Wake’, James Joyce Quarterly 48, 2 (2011): 305-318.
Richard Barlow, ‘“Northern Ire” and “invertedness”: Macbeth, the Wake, and the North’, in John McCourt (ed.,) Shakespearean Joyce – Joycean Shakespeare (Roma: Anicia, 2016), 121-130.
Richard Barlow, The Celtic Unconscious: Joyce and Scottish Culture (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2017).
Richard Barlow, ‘James Joyce and Walter Scott: Incest, Rivers of History, and “old useless papers”‘, Scottish Literary Review 12, 1 (2020):1-18.
Finn Fordham, ‘“A hubbub caused in Edenborough”‘, review of The Celtic Unconscious: Joyce and Scottish Culture by Richard Barlow, Breac: A Digital Journal of Irish Studies (July 17, 2019: https://breac.nd.edu/articles/a-hubbub-caused-in-edenborough/
Glasgow Institute of the Fine Arts: Exhibition Illustrative of Old Glasgow (Glasgow: William Hodge and Company, 1894).
Clive Hart, ‘Notes on the Text of Finnegans Wake’, The Journal of English and Germanic Philology 59, 2 (1960): 229-239.
Stanislaus Joyce, My Brother’s Keeper: James Joyce’s Early Years edited, with an introduction and notes by Richard Ellman, preface by T. S. Eliot (New York: Viking Press, 1958).
Joseph Kelly, ‘Stanislaus Joyce, Ellsworth Mason, and Richard Ellmann: The Making of “James Joyce”‘, Joyce Studies Annual 3 (1992): 98-140.
John Lurz, ‘Literal Darkness: Finnegans Wake and the Limits of Print’, James Joyce Quarterly 50, 3 (2013): 675-691.
Hugh MacDiarmid, In Memoriam James Joyce (Glasgow: William MacLellan, 1955).
Clark McGinn, ‘The True Date of the Foundation of the Greenock Burns Club’, Burns Chronicle 131, 2 (2022): 156-170.
Carol McGuirk, ‘Reading Scotland in Later Joyce’, review of The Celtic Unconscious: Joyce and Scottish Culture by Richard Barlow, James Joyce Literary Supplement 33, 1 (2019): 14-16.
Willy Maley, ‘Bloomsday Scenario: James Joyce had a lot to say about Scotland … almost all of it bad’, The Sunday Herald (Seven Days: Scotland’s Current Affairs Magazine, 13 June 1999), p.10.
Willy Maley, ‘“Kilt by Kelt Shell Kithagain with Kinagain”: Joyce and Scotland’, in Derek Attridge and Marjorie Howes (eds.), Semi-Colonial Joyce (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp.201-218.
Vivian Mercer, ‘When The Artist Was A Young Man’: Stanislaus Joyce, My Brother’s Keeper: James Joyce’s Early Years edited, with an introduction and notes by Richard Ellman, preface by T. S. Eliot (New York: Viking Press, 1958), The New York Times (2 February, 1958).
Wim Van Mierlo, ‘Editing the Wake’, review of Finnegans Wake by Danis Rose and John O’Hanlon, James Joyce Literary Supplement 25, 2 (2011): 6-9.
H. D. Molony (ed.), The Tourist’s Guide, compiled by J.H.D. Molony. June, July, Sept., Oct. 1884 (Dublin: The Official Guide Ltd., 1884), June, pp. 3-8.
Edwin Morgan, ‘Dialogue I: James Joyce and Hugh MacDiarmid’, In James Joyce Broadsheet 9 (1982): 5.
Edwin Morgan, ‘James Joyce and Hugh MacDiarmid’, in W. J. McCormack and Alistair
Stead (eds), James Joyce and Modern Literature (London, 1982), 202-217.
Cóilín Owens, ‘Harry Lauder: A Little Cloud’, James Joyce Literary Supplement 15, 1 (2001): 6-8.
V. M. Plock, ‘“Knock knock. War’s where!”: History, Macbeth and Finnegans
Wake’ in Joyce Studies Annual, article no. 9 (2006): 212-223.
Peter J. Reichenberg, ‘Finnegans Wake: The Dating Game’, James Joyce Quarterly 46, 2 (2009): 362-365.
J. Tutty, ‘The City of Dublin Steam Packet Company’, Dublin Historical Record 18, 3 (1963): 80-90.
On the 30th July 2009 four men had a beer in the White House Rose Garden. (1) All were of Irish descent. Barack Obama and Joe Biden were well-known, the other two less so, though Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., a founding figure in African American Studies, would be familiar to some. The fourth man, Police Sergeant James Crowley, had arrested Professor Gates while he was trying to gain entry to his own home, having found the gate jammed shut on his return from a research trip. The report of a Black academic being apprehended by a white cop for apparently breaking and entering his own home was viewed as a case of racial profiling, and Gates’s arrest got a lot of media attention. The Irish heritage of Obama and Gates is well-documented. (2) Enslavement lies behind Black diasporic history and genealogy. (3) Settler colonialism and famine gave rise to the Irish diaspora. As Gates says of his own family research, “I don’t think you can know who you are without looking into your ancestry. I think it’s empowering to learn where you came from.” (4) Who could disagree? Gates once told a fascinating story based on his experiences in London over fifty years ago: “In 1973 I was amazed to hear a member of the House of Lords describe the differences between Irish Protestants and Catholics in terms of their ‘distinct and clearly definable differences of race’. ‘You mean to say that you can tell them apart?’ I asked incredulously. ‘Of course’, responded the lord. ‘Any Englishman can’”. (5)
Anti-Irish prejudice has a long history, and has at times been tangled up with problematic ideas about “race”. (6) It’s also been bound up with so-called “Afro-Celtic” connections, links between Irish struggles and those of Black Americans. (7) Claude McKay, author of Home to Harlem (1927), after attending an Irish rally in London in 1919, declared: “For that day at least I was filled with the spirit of Irish nationalism – although I am black”. (8) The following year, 1920, Marcus Garvey drew inspiration from events in Ireland. (9) As has been pointed out: “This black/Irish analogy has a history […] Many […] leaders of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s looked to the Irish Renaissance of the turn of the century for a model of creating new art that would be by and for themselves, and that would provide more accurate representations of their people … Maya Angelou provides a more recent example, stating [in 1992] that she would like to see a production of her play And Still I Rise, about the oppression of African-Americans, with an Irish cast.” (10) None of this is straightforward; nothing ever is. (11) Alongside efforts at solidarity we find arguments that align with “white American romanticism, theft, and ignorance of African-American” culture that “back away from the political alliance they claim to make”. (12)
An Irish History Month for Scotland is an idea for a way of celebrating and commemorating the Irish contribution to Scottish life through immigration, history, politics and the arts in the month of March, pivoting around St Patrick’s Day. From plantation to partition, through the Famine and the Troubles, from De Valera to Devolution, through the St Andrews Agreement to Brexit and beyond, Irish history impinges on Scottish culture and politics at every level. (13) Irish History Month is not a new idea, but it is one bound up with racist resistance to Black History Month, a celebration which can trace its origins back over a century. (14)
From its inception, Black History Month has been dogged by “whataboutery”. Intriguingly, according to the OED the word “whataboutery” has its origins in Irish history. (15) Whataboutery is at the heart of a desire to displace or supplant the focus on Black lives and culture. Such debates have been around for decades and are especially fraught in the United States. In 1992 an editorial in The Champion, the magazine of Liberty University in Lynchburg Virginia, cast doubt on the value of a distinct history month. (16) A student at the University of Maine speaking in The Maine Campus newspaper in 1995 during a discussing of Black History Month said: “We also have to consider everyone […] There is no Scottish History Month, French History Month or Irish History Month.” Daveta Saunders, Associate Dean at the Centre for Multicultural (Center4Me) at Liberty University took a more nuanced and inclusive stance in 2007: “We don’t deal with people of different races. We deal with different cultures. Everybody is a Center4Me. Everybody has a culture. We all come from different regions (and) different religious backgrounds.” Center4Me’s planned events at the time included Hispanic History Month and Irish History Month.
In 2007, the Irish Arts Foundation in Leeds introduced a month-long marking of that city’s Irish heritage, and other institutions with an Irish Studies focus have participated in that city’s events, including St Mary’s University, Twickenham. In 2018 a petition was started to persuade the British Government to support a UK-wide initiative around an Irish History Month. It found little support. (17)
Scotland of course is different, distinct, unique – its Irish history is arguably richer, deeper, more complex due to a long history of settlement, migration and collaboration. That the leading political theorist of the Easter Rising was Edinburgh-born James Connolly is evidence of the links between the two countries. Irish-Scottish studies as a comparative field – cultural, historical, political – has made significant inroads into teaching and the arts over the last thirty years or so. A recent event on Scottish-Irish Cultural Diplomacy and Relations is typical of the kind of high-end academic forum that has been key to this development. (18)
The Irish-Scottish connection deserves the kind of sustained attention and exploration that an Irish History Month would provide. The Decade of Commemorations has drawn to a close it is time to take a closer look at a history that is integral to Scotland’s current cultural and political makeup but which is increasingly overlooked outside of academic study and specific Irish-interest organisations and institutions. The Research Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies (RIISS), founded in 1999 in step with the Good Friday Agreement, Devolution, and the establishment of an Irish Consulate in Edinburgh, has done much to break down academic barriers between Ireland and Scotland.
Irish History Month would go deeper and wider. Its purpose would be to educate and inform right across the board, and to be inclusive in its understanding of the ways in which Ireland has impacted upon Scotland and vice versa, including through language, labour, and sport, as well as showcasing the rich tradition of Scottish writing influenced by Ireland. Irish History Month would enhance understanding of a relationship too often viewed in terms of troubles and traditions rather than creativity and resilience. It would bring together a range of partner institutions and organisations in order to create a grassroots, ground up organising body. (19)
Finally, while at times the idea of an Irish History Month – particularly when raised in the United States – has been put forward as a challenge or objection to Black History Month, and has thus assumed racist overtones, we should see an Irish History Month in a Scottish context as enhancing and enriching our understanding of cultural diversity, including links between Black Irish and Scottish writers, at a time when the diversity of both cultures is being increasingly noted and celebrated. (20) What is clear is that Irish and Scottish culture are both more diverse than they were a generation ago. (21) An Irish History Month in Scotland would have the aim of offering multiple opportunities for public engagement with the ways in which Ireland and Irishness have impacted on Scotland, and for acknowledging the Irish contribution to Scottish culture and society. The University of Glasgow was able to flee the impoverished East End of the city and move to an affluent West End neighbourhood thanks in part to the Irish labourers who built the Glasgow-Edinburgh railway line from 1838-42, allowing the railway company to purchase the old medieval site formerly occupied by the University. (22) The Irish contribution to Scotland deserves to be more widely known. Of course, some may ask, “What about Scottish history?” It ought to be taught all year round, and will be once we get our independence. It could be argued that one reason for the relative ignorance of Scottish history lies in Anglo-Irish history, and the squeeze on Scotland as a result of that history. In 1895, the pioneering Scottish ecologist Patrick Geddes lamented the lack of awareness of Scottish history and culture despite the fashion for celebrations and commemorations: “For we have gone on increasing our libations and orations every St Andrew’s Day, the same for St Robbie’s and now for St Walter’s, till all the world perforce must join our revels. But all this while the history we boast of has become well-nigh unknown among us.” (23)
NOTES
This is the text of a short talk presented at the 2023 Centenary Conference assessing the impact of the Church of Scotland Report, The Menace of the Irish Race to our Scottish Nationality, at the University of Glasgow on Tuesday 23rd May 2023.
(1) Obama had a Bud Light, Biden had a Bucklers, Gates a Sam Adams Light, and Crowley drank a Blue Moon. See Frank James, ‘Obama Beer Photo Op Now White House History’, The Two-Way (July 30, 2009),
(2) On Obama, see https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/rediscovering-obamas-irish-roots. For Gates, see https://www.cbsnews.com/baltimore/news/professor-asks-residents-to-help-solve-mystery/. In his autobiography, Gates remarks: “I rebel at the notion that I can’t be part of other groups, that I can’t construct identities through elective affinity, that race must be the most important thing about me. Is that what I want on my gravestone: Here lies an African American? So I’m divided. I want to be black, to know black, to luxuriate in whatever I might be calling blackness at any particular time – but to do so in order to come out the other side, to experience a humanity that is neither colorless nor reducible to color. Bach and James Brown … I am not Everynegro. I am not native to the great black metropolises: New York, Chicago, or Los Angeles, say. Nor can I claim to be a “citizen of the world.” I am from and of a time and a place – Piedmont, West Virginia – and that’s a world apart, a world of difference. So this is not a story of a race, but a story of a village, a family, and its friends. And a sort of segregated peace. What hurt me most about the glorious black awakening of the late sixties and early seventies is that we lost our sense of humor. Many of us thought that enlightened politics excluded it”. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Coloured People, Coloured People (Viking: London, 1994), xv-xvi. See also Toni Morrison, ‘Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation’, in Dennis Walder (ed.), Literature in the Modern World: Critical Essays and Documents (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 326-332. Interestingly, Gates and Crowley are said to share the same Irish lineage: https://www.oregonlive.com/race/2009/08/harvard_professor_gates_shares.html.
(3) This history too is complex. Sir Hilary McDonald Beckles, vice-chancellor of the University of the West Indies, who recently signed a memorandum of understanding with the University of Glasgow as part of reparations for slavery, has written extensively on the slave trade (https://www.uwi.edu/vcbiography.asp). He is a pioneering historian of the links between black slavery and the “oppressed landless British working class who were a critical part of Empire and of the slave societies of the British Caribbean”, and who resisted planter-class hegemony. What Sir Hilary has to say of the early period is fascinating: “The system of commodity production was built upon the labour of thousands of indentured servants imported from England, Ireland, Wales and Scotland. Unlike the Spanish settlements in the Greater Antilles, Barbados and the Leewards were not densely populated with Indians who could be reduced to chattel slavery. […] The rise of the plantation system, like the development of white ‘proto-slavery’ preceded the emergence of ‘sugar and black slavery’. The demands of commodity production had the effect of creating a new form of servitude out of the old institution, one which was more suitable to the market requirements of the early planters. This subject has gone largely unresearched because of the greater involvement of African slave and Asian indentured labour in plantation development in the West Indies. Much work has been done on the servant trade and the displacement of servant labour by black slaves particular [sic] on the mainland colonies, but the economic nature of early West Indian servitude on the plantations is still in need of researchers. However, it is important to realise that the development of plantation economy in the early decades of West Indian colonisation was based upon white labour, and it was upon this basis that expansive black slavery emerged between 1645 and 1650.” Hilary McD. Beckles, ‘Plantation Production and White “Proto-slavery”: White Indentured Servants and the Colonisation of the English West Indies, 1624-1645’, The Americas 41, 3 (1985): 21-45, at 30 and 45.
(4) Genealogy can compound identities and challenge hardened perspectives: “The purpose of history, guided by genealogy, is not to discover the roots of our identity but to commit itself to its dissipation. It does not seek to define our unique threshold of emergence, the homeland to which metaphysicians promise a return; it seeks to make visible all of those discontinuities that cross us”. Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. D. F. Bouchard, trans. D. F. Bouchard and S. Simon (Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press, 1977), 162.
(5) Henry Louis Gates, Jr, ‘Writing “Race” and the Difference it Makes’, in Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (ed.), ‘Race,’ Writing, and Difference (Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 1986), p.5.
(6) The Irish philosopher George Berkeley observed in 1749: “The Negros in our Plantations have a Saying, If Negro was not Negro, Irishman would be Negro. And it may be affirmed with Truth, that the very Savages of America are better clad and better lodged than the Irish Cottagers throughout the fine fertile counties of Limerick and Tipperary.” George Berkeley, A Word to the Wise: or, the Bishop of Cloyne’s Exhortation to the Roman Catholic Clergy of Ireland (Dublin: George Faulkner, 1749), 4. As Lauren Onkey observes of the later development of this discourse: “The discursive relationship between the Irish and African Americans has a long and sometimes surprisingly reciprocal history. Its roots lie in English prejudice; as anthropology developed powerful cultural purchase in the mid-nineteenth century, the Irish were represented often in English novels, plays and cartoons as a race of blacks”. Onkey, “Celtic Soul Brothers”, 148. According to Keith Booker: “Theodore Allen’s The Invention of the White Race […] details the close historical parallels between racist treatment of blacks in America and the figuration by the British of the Irish as an inferior and primitive people”. M. Keith Booker, “Late Capitalism Comes to Dublin: ‘American’ Popular Culture in the Novels of Roddy Doyle”, ARIEL 28 (1997): 27-45, at 32.
(7) This has to be viewed historically since early alliances were wrecked by racism and competition in the labour market. See Daniel T. McClurkin, ‘A Parallel Case?: The Irish in Abolitionist Thought and the Emergence of White Labor in the United States’, Atlantic Studies 20, 1 (2023): 134-149. See also Kieran Quinlan, Strange Kin: Ireland and the American South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005), and Geraldine Higgins, ‘Tara, the O’Haras, and the Irish Gone With the Wind’, Southern Cultures 17, 1 (2011): 30-49.
(8) Cited in Timothy D. Taylor, “Living in a Postcolonial World: Class and Soul in The Commitments”, Irish Studies Review 6, 3 (1998): 291-302, at 291.
(9) See Desmond Jagmohan, ‘Between Race and Nation: Marcus Garvey and the Politics of Self-Determination’, Political Theory 48, 3 (2020): 271-302: A 1920 bureau report cautioned that Garvey was, in fact, encouraging African Americans to emulate the Irish and Indian struggles” (278). Garvey’s comparative politics was complicated, and although he drew an analogy between Irish independence and the rights of African Americans he pointed to the fact that the Irish struggle was about national liberation rather than more fundamental freedoms (276).
(10) Taylor, “Living in a Postcolonial World”, 291. According to George Bornstein, “Afro-Celticism […] reflects a long history of cross-constructions between those two cultures, usually driven by a common experience of oppression and hope of emancipation […] Perhaps the tracing of Afro-Celtic connections here suggests that ethnic interaction is the normal state of cultural production, and that fantasies of separatist purity and tradition are themselves urgently in need of demystification”. George Bornstein, “Afro-Celtic Connections: From Frederick Douglass to The Commitments”, in Tracy Mishkin (ed.), Literary Influence and African-American Writers: Collected Essays (New York and London: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1996), 171-88, at 172, 185.
(11) Lauren Onkey sounds a cautionary note in assessing Irish appropriations of Black radicalism: “These works revere African Americans as a source of spiritual and sexual vitality, and create an alliance between the Irish and African Americans as a means to reveal a sense of essential Irishness lurking under colonial oppression or economic difficulties. These works sometimes hearken back to the nationalist rhetoric of the Irish Ireland movement, transforming the Irish-speaking Gael of the West into an oppressed, tuneful, antimodern, ‘Celtic soul brother’”. Lauren Onkey, “Celtic Soul Brothers”, Éire-Ireland 28, 3 (1993): 147-58, at 148.
(12) Onkey, “Celtic Soul Brothers”, 158. Lorraine Piroux argues that “to inscribe Irishness within blues and soul music … is to retain the memory of a specific colonial discourse that had constructed a common ancestry for the Irish and the African-Americans and had represented both groups with similar attributes of primitive barbarism.”. Lorraine Piroux, “‘I’m Black an’ I’m Proud’: Re-Inventing Irishness in Roddy Doyle’s The Commitments”, College Literature 25, 2 (1998): 45-57, at 46.
(15) From its inception, Black History Month has been dogged by “whataboutery”. Intriguingly, according to the OED the word “whataboutery” has its origins in Irish history. “The practice of responding to an accusation or difficult question by making a counter-accusation or raising a different issue. Also in later use: the practice of raising a supposedly analogous issue in response to a perceived hypocrisy or inconsistency. […] Originally with reference to the Troubles in Northern Ireland”. The source is The Irish Times (2 February 1974): “We have a bellyfull of Whataboutery in these killing days and the one clear fact to emerge is that people, Orange and Green, are dying as a result of it.” This neologism is a response to a letter in the same newspaper a few days earlier, on 30 January 1974: “I would not suggest such a thing were it not for the Whatabouts. These are the people who answer every condemnation of the Provisional I.R.A. with an argument to prove the greater immorality of the ‘enemy’, and therefore the justice of the Provisionals’ cause.”
(16) “The original intent of Black History Month was to create an awareness of achievements made by black Americans. This purpose, although honorable and correct, has often been distorted into a tool to promote unity and equality. It has accomplished neither. Black history month promotes unity and equality as much as the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. eased tensions between whites and blacks. The cry is for equality, so why set yourself apart from those with whom you are equal? If Black History Month provides equality, then there must also be an Irish History Month, along with a French, Indian, Mongolian, Korean, Spanish and Polish […] Black History Month only accentuates the differences within our society. […] An American History Month would instill the strength of unity while recognizing the abundant diversity in its proper context, which acts more like a chemical reaction that unifies several elements into one, rather than the splintering of wood under extreme heat. A serious look at American history cannot result in finger pointing and division. We must concentrate on the premises of our nation: one people, under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all. Accentuating the differences will only cause deeper chasms within the greatest nation on earth.”
(19) The Strathclyde Irish Festival that ran between 1989 and 1993 encompassing dance, drama, music and lectures, so there is a precedent for this kind of extended cultural celebration.
(20) Comparisons are always vexed where identity is concerned. Lauren Onkey traces the genealogy of this the Irish-Black analogy as it arose out of a political struggle with a strong literary and cultural component: “in his preface to The Book of American Negro Poetry (1930), James Weldon Johnson writes, ‘What the coloured poet in the United States needs to do is something like what Synge did for the Irish; he needs to find a form that will express the racial spirit by symbols from within rather than by symbols from without; such as the mere mutilation of English spelling and pronunciation’. In The New Negro (1925), Alain Locke writes, ‘In Harlem, Negro life is seizing upon its first chances for group expression and self determination which are playing a creative part in the world today … Harlem has the same role to play for the New Negro as Dublin had for the New Ireland’. The writers of the Harlem Renaissance looked to the Irish for a rhetoric of pride and advancement, and for their attempt to find value and inspiration from an indigenous ‘folk’ culture”. Onkey, “Celtic Soul Brothers”, 149. In Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), a Black teacher harangues his students with an Irish analogue: “I could see him vividly, half-drunk on words and full of contempt and exaltation, pacing before the blackboard chalked with quotations from Joyce and Yeats and Sean O’Casey; thin, nervous, neat, pacing as though he walked a high wire of meaning upon which none of us would ever dare venture. I could hear him: ‘Stephen’s problem, like ours, was not actually one of creating the uncreated conscience of his race, but of creating the uncreated features of his face. Our task is that of making ourselves individuals. The conscience of a race is the fight of its individuals who see, evaluate, record … we create the race by creating ourselves and then to our great astonishment we will have created something far more important: We will have created a culture’”. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (New York, NY: Vintage International, 1995), 347.
(22) “The population of Glasgow had quadrupled, and the University was surrounded by a dense mass of the labouring population living in overcrowded, unsanitary accommodation. Close at hand were a mixture of undesirable chemical and other dirty manufacturing concerns that created far from satisfactory environment conditions which the memorialists saw as being detrimental to the successful redevelopment of the existing University site”. David Grant, ‘Removal of the University of Glasgow to Woodlands Hill 1845–9 and Gilmorehill 1853–83’, Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland 135 (2005): 213–258, at 231-2.
A unique collaborative project involving inmates of Barlinnie Special Unit, students of the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, and Glasgow band The Basement.
Mayfest 1992 (Arches Theatre, community and prison tour Edinburgh Fringe 1992 (De Marco Gallery). Scotsman Fringe First Winners 1992. Scottish Tour Spring 1993 (The Tron, Glasgow; The Lemon Tree, Aberdeen; Edinburgh community tour; Scottish prisons)
Directed by Irvine Allan
Script edited by Willy Maley
Written by Irvine Allan, Steve Cooper, Kate Dickie, Billy Elliott, John Gordon, James McHendrie and Willy Maley
Poems by Tommy Campbell and Hugh McDiarmid
All songs by Derek Lang, except for No Mean Fighter (words by Willy Maley) and John Maclean (words by Billy Elliott, chord progression by Joe Kydd)
About The Play
“I would rather be immediately put to death than condemned to a life sentence in Peterhead.” – John Maclean.
No Mean Fighter is a musical about Peterhead prisoners, past and present, including one of Glasgow’s most celebrated socialists, John Maclean. The idea for the musical came out of discussion in the Special Unit between inmates, students of the RSAMD, and members of Glasgow band The Basement. There are five songs in the show – John Maclean; Sandman of Peterhead; We’ll Take Our Chances; Tell us who you are, John Maclean; and No Mean Fighter.
John Maclean is well-known as a Red Clydesider. What people sometimes forget is that John Maclean was also a Peterhead prisoner, a man who did time in one of Scotland’s toughest jails. His experiences mirror those of modern inmates. Speeches by Maclean, and tributes to him, are interwoven with material from Special Unit inmates based on their experiences of Peterhead.
Peterhead Prison, situated 34 miles north of Aberdeen, was built in 1888. It’s history goes back to 1881 when a Committee on the Employment of Convicts reported that the ‘most likely prospect for benefitting the shipping and fishing interests of the country at large and at the same time profitably employing convicts is the construction of a harbour of refuge at Peterhead in Aberdeenshire’. Peterhead was designated a General Convict Prison for male prisoners sentenced to a minimum of five years.
John Maclean was kept out of circulation in prison. He complained of his food being tampered with, and being constantly fed false information by the authorities about his family and friends. Red Clydeside is gone, but Peterhead still feeds off young Scotsmen.
Two prisoners, John Maclean and another are in solitary in Peterhead in the same cell at different times. Their experiences are told through speeches, poems, songs and voices. We also hear the views of other prisoners, visitors and a warder.
Scene 1
GOVERNOR: Our aim is to provide a secure environment within which all who live and work at Peterhead Prison are encouraged to participate in a positive and progressive yet structured and controlled regime. We are committed to developing a constructive working relationship at all levels. Thus forming the basis for mental trust and consensus. We must continue to shape and respond to society’s expectations, and to meet the objectives of the Scottish Prison System.
Security. Control. Humanity. Opportunity. Responsibility.
Scene 2
[Prisoner hides knife and finds diary]
PRISONER: What’s this? A wallet? Naw. It’s a book. Somebody’s diary.
PRISON OFFICER: Still here Maclean?
JOHN MACLEAN: Aye, caged in body but not in spirit. Shiteing out the poison yous are feeding me.
PRISON OFFICER: Paranoia you suffer from, laddie. That and allusions of grandeur.
[Maclean returns to writing furtively in diary]
JOHN MACLEAN: I had for some months here starting in December been feeling very ill, with what I can only describe as a chemical-induced pain. I went on sick roll. Now then, I come to the doctor. The doctor I refer to is the prison doctor.
DOCTOR: Well, saviour of the human race, what ails you this time?
MACLEAN: I told you, when I first arrived in Peterhead it was plain sailing.
PRISON OFFICER: Aye. Now you’ve realised you’re marooned. Got bored with four walls for scenery.
MACLEAN: Doctor, I was fevered up. And being able to combat that, I then chilled down. Two men came to see me at the end of December.
PRISON OFFICER: Santa and a pal?
MACLEAN: Doctor, do I have to suffer these types of remarks while describing the state of my health?
DOCTOR: He’s not interrupting me. You were just about to mention your two visitors.
MACLEAN: One a prominent lecturer in this country, and Mr Sutherland MP. And to them I protested that my food was being drugged. I said that there was alcohol in the food.
DOCTOR: Nonsense.
MACLEAN: Doctor, I know alcohol in the food can lower my temperature. I know also that potassium bromide is given to people in order to lower their temperatures. I was aware of what was taking place in Peterhead from hints and statements from other prisoners.
DOCTOR: Are you complaining, or boasting? Alcohol!
PETERHEAD PRISONER: Don’t let them play mind games with you, John. You keep it going, man. We’re all with you.
[Song: ‘John Maclean’]
John Maclean, John Maclean, tell us who’s to blame?
John Maclean, John Maclean, you’re like a burning flame.
When you were here, when you were here, the Clyde was red.
Since you’ve been gone, since you’ve been gone,
all the colours bled.
In Peterhead. In Peterhead. Oh they wished you dead.
But you returned, yes you returned,
with a vision instead.
John Maclean, John Maclean, tell us who’s to blame?
John Maclean, John Maclean, you’re still a burning flame.
MACLEAN: I know you’re watching me. I can hear you breathing. I know I’m under observation. You’ll not intimidate me. When I get out I’ll make sure people know what’s going on in here. This is inhumane. I’m sick of your petty tyrannies. If you’re a doctor, you ought to be ashamed of yourself. How can you expect a man to keep his health in these conditions? If you’re a turnkey, you’re wasting your time. There’s nothing to see here.
WARDER: Talking to yourself again, Maclean? My God you’re paranoid.
MACLEAN: I won’t be cowed by your bullying.
WARDER: There’s time yet. Don’t be in a hurry to be a hero.
MACLEAN: I’m only a man, mister. I never pretended to be anything else. No saint. No sinner. Just a man.
WARDER: A man with convictions, eh? And time on his hands. Well, I’m a man, too, Maclean. One of your precious working men. Earning an honest shilling. You can see I love my work. The bosses are good to me. What’s all your talk done for you?
MACLEAN: I am a teacher. I am a socialist. I am a fighter for justice.
WARDER: Socialism? The war put a stop to all that. It’s all king and country now. Except for traitors and troublemakers.
MACLEAN: What about the Rent Strikes?
WARDER: You don’t need to worry about rent strikes, Maclean. You can stay here rent-free.
MACLEAN: Nothing’s free. The state is paying to keep me out of its hair, and the money comes from the workers. All this ugly business is being done in their name. I’m a prisoner of war. Class war.
WARDER: The war’s over for you, Maclean. You’ve had your war. Now give us peace.
MACLEAN: There’s no peace in Peterhead. It’s always war here. Did you hear me? I said there’s no peace in Peterhead!
WARDER: Not for you!
MACLEAN: Not for anybody. You’re in jail, too, mister. You’re just too bloody stupid to notice it!
[Maclean returns to scribbling in his diary]
MACLEAN: “From January to March, the so-called winter period, the doctor is busy getting the prisoners into the hospital. Breaking up their organs and systems…I give notice that I take no food inside your prison. Absolutely no food. If food is forced upon me, and if I am forcibly fed, then my friends have got to bear in mind that if any evil happens to me I am not responsible for my actions”. (Delirious, repeating his famous speech from the dock) No human being on the face of the earth, no government is going to take from me my right to protest against wrong, my right to do everything that is for the benefit of mankind. I am not here, then, as the accused; I am here as the accuser of Capitalism dripping with blood from head to foot.
PRISON OFFICER: Are you pulling yourself in there, Maclean?
MACLEAN: (Writing) “… I’ve seen the monster face to face. There’s no velvet glove in Peterhead. Only an iron fist. This is where the bosses show their true colours. The poor men in here are testimony to the injustice of the capitalist system. I leave this account here for a future inmate. It may be my last will and testament. I don’t know if I’ll ever get out of here alive. What I leave to mankind, my only worldly possession, is my rage against tyranny”.
[He hides the notebook].
Scene 3
PETERHEAD PRISONER: Who’s that? Who’s there? Bastards!
PRISON OFFICER: What do you want, son?
PETERHEAD PRISONER: A pen and some paper.
PRISON OFFICER: What do you want with a pen?
PETERHEAD PRISONER: I want to write.
PRISON OFFICER: Then scratch the walls, son. That’s what everybody else does. This isn’t a school, you know.
PETERHEAD PRISONER: They say the pen is mightier than the sword. Frankly, ah’d rather get chibbed with a pen. But then again, a nib’s a chib. You can take some bastard’s lamp out with it!
[Song: No Mean Fighter]
This man was a visionary, a teacher, and a writer
When he raised his fist on Glasgow Green
He was No Mean Fighter
This man he defied the law, its chains were pulling tighter
So they poisoned him in Peterhead
He was No Mean Fighter
This man was a burning flame, a flame still burning brighter
The people they recall his name
He was No Mean Fighter
This man had no stolen wealth, to make his burden lighter
All he had was his own self
He was No Mean Fighter
This man took a narrow mind, and made it open wider
He made them see who once were blind
He was No Mean Fighter
This man was a Glasgow Boy, and a Red Clydesider
They sent him to an early grave
He was No Mean Fighter
Scene 4
1st WOMAN: They used to send them to Australia. Had them building roads and railways hell-knows-where.
2nd WOMAN: Now they’ve got them caged at the other end of the country.
3rd WOMAN: Getting there from Glasgow is a nightmare. Travelling all day. And for what? To look at a broken man through a glass partition.
1st WOMAN: A couple of hours once a month. Twelve hours on a bus for that.
2nd WOMAN: They built the prison there so that the prisoners could build the harbour.
3rd WOMAN: Now the harbour’s built, and the quarry’s closed, but the men are still there.
1st WOMAN: Isn’t there something in Glasgow they could build?
2nd WOMAN: Like houses.
3rd WOMAN: They don’t build houses anymore, just jails.
1st WOMAN: They’ve made prisoners of us too.
2nd WOMAN: Breaking up families.
3rd WOMAN: Like stones in a quarry. Smashed to pieces. Good for nothing but breaking glass.
1st WOMAN: Dirty protests.
2nd WOMAN: Hunger strikes.
3rd WOMAN: Solitary confinement.
1st WOMAN: Rooftop protests.
2nd WOMAN: Ugly suicides.
3rd Woman: Cries for help we never hear.
1st Woman: Voices in the wilderness.
2nd WOMAN: Like a seabird in a storm.
3rd WOMAN: They come out worse than they went in.
1st WOMAN: On an elastic band.
2nd WOMAN: No future.
3rd WOMAN: Shell-shocked.
1st WOMAN: Further away from us than ever.
2nd WOMAN: Pacing up and down.
3rd WOMAN: Turning outside in.
1st WOMAN: They had them making nets. To catch fish.
2nd WOMAN: Cold eyes staring into space.
TOGETHER: Gutted!
Scene 5
PRISON OFFICER: Aye, you were a big man in court, MacLean. But you’re no such a big man now! If they could see you, they bloody comrades of yours. Standing there in your drawers, with your shirt tail hanging out.
MACLEAN: Freedom is a flame that never goes out.
PRISON OFFICER: Aye, you’re a political animal alright, MacLean. But there’s no politics in Peterhead, only animals. How does it feel, MacLean, to be locked up with murderers and thieves?
MACLEAN: Don’t tell me there’s policemen, and bosses, and government ministers in here!
PRISON OFFICER: You’re always on about the workers, MacLean. Well you’ll get plenty of work to do here. All the prisoners are workers.
MACLEAN: And all the workers are prisoners.
PRISONER: Yes, get it up you!
PRISON OFFICER: Keep that noise down!
MACLEAN: You can break my body, but you’ll never break my spirit. You can take away my clothes, but you’ll never take away my dignity. You can take me out of the struggle, but you’ll never take the struggle out of me.
PRISONER: Well said, my man!
PRISON OFFICER: Quiet in there!
PRISONER: (Holding up Maclean’s prison diary, reciting poem by Hugh MacDiarmid)
Look at it, you fools, with unseeing eyes,
And deny it with lying lips!
But your craven bowels well know what it is
And hasten to eclipse
In a cell, as black as the shut boards of the Book
You lie by the light no coward can brook.
As Pilate and the Roman soldiers to Christ
Were Law and Order to the finest Scot of his day,
One of the few true men in our sordid breed,
A flash of sun in a country all prison-grey.
Speak to others of Christian charity; I cry again
For vengeance on the murderers of John Maclean.
Let the light of truth in on the base pretence
Of Justice that sentenced him behind these grey walls.
All law is the contemptible fraud he declared it.
Like a lightning-bolt at last the workers’ wrath falls
On all such castles of cowards whether they be
Uniformed in ermine, or blue, or khaki.
PRISON OFFICER: We’re all equal in here, Maclean. There are no leaders here. No saviours either. You’re on your own. No big crowds to cheer you on. No flags waving. No fists clenched but your own. Look at him. Look at the saviour of the working class. Where’s yer comrades now, Maclean? Your friends have deserted you. Your wife has left you. You’re losing your mind, Maclean.
MACLEAN: Liar!
PRISON OFFICER: The red flag’s flying at half-mast now, Maclean.
MACLEAN: Where e’er we go, we’ll fear no foe. We’ll keep the red flag flying high.
PRISON OFFICER: I’ll weave you a red flag alright, and make you wear it for a shroud.
PRISONER: Nothing changes.
MACLEAN: Not without struggle.
PRISONER: Where Were you when we needed you?
PRISON OFFICER: Is that you talking to yourself, Maclean?
MACLEAN: Who’s that?
PRISONER: Who’s there?
PRISON OFFICER: Keep that bastarding noise down.
[Song: The Ghost of John Maclean]
I can feel your heartbeat next to mine
Though we live in different times
Oh how times have change
But in Peterhead, they’re still the same
I can feel your pain
Tell me who you are, John Maclean
John Maclean …
I can feel your anger towards me
Johnny can’t you see
No-one knows like me
What it’s like to be insane.
I can hear you breathing in my sleep
Pacing up and down will you greet
You were just a working man trying to lend a hand
I understand.
There is no answer I can give to you
They lock you up for what we do
Knock you black and blue
Yes that’s what they do, well it’s true.
I can feel your heartbeat next to mine
Though we live in different times
Oh how times have changed
But in Peterhead, they’re still the same.
WOMAN: No child is born a criminal: no child is born an angel: he’s just born.
Scene 6
[Woman at home. Man enters.]
WOMAN: Come in. You’re late.
MAN: It was a long drive, and it wasn’t me who was driving or I would’ve been here hours ago.
WOMAN: What’s the hurry? The less time you’re here the better.
MAN: Some homecoming. I didn’t think it would be like this when I saw the house again.
WOMAN: You weren’t home when you were needed.
MAN: I’m sorry.
WOMAN: I had to arrange everything myself.
MAN: There was nothing I could do about that. I couldn’t get here any earlier.
WOMAN: You should never have been away in the first place.
MAN: We’ve been through all this a thousand times. I’m here now.
WOMAN: He wanted to be like his daddy. He said he wanted a scar. He got more than he wanted…
MAN: Stop it!
WOMAN: …All my scars are on the inside.
MAN: I tried to tell him right from wrong.
WOMAN: He didn’t listen to what you said. He learned from what you did. I’m burying two men today. I mean it. You can stay in that tomb up there till hell freezes over.
MAN: Please. Don’t…
PRISON OFFICER: (Intruding) When you two are finished fighting we should go. The cars are waiting.
MAN: It’s our funeral, you bastard! We’ll leave when we’re fucking ready!
WOMAN: The last thing I needed today was you with one of those vultures at your shoulder.
VOICE: Winston Churchill, of all people, once said “You can tell how civilised a society is by looking inside its prisons.”
Scene 7
[Three prisoners playing cards]
1st PRISONER: Unsatisfactory.
2nd PRISONER: Diabolical.
3rd PRISONER: Atrocious.
1st PRISONER: Counter-productive in the imaginary sphere of reform.
2nd PRISONER: Dehumanizing.
3rd PRISONER: Barbaric.
1st PRISONER: Hygiene’s a dirty word in here.
2nd PRISONER: You never feel clean.
3rd PRISONER: Two wash-hand basins.
1st PRISONER: Two showers.
2nd PRISONER: For forty men.
3rd PRISONER: One a week.
1st PRISONER: If the S. O. okays it…
2nd PRISONER: The shower heads are, what, four foot up the
wall?
3rd PRISONER: You’ve just about got to kneel.
1st PRISONER: On your knees for the privilege of cleanliness.
2nd PRISONER: The smell of the place.
3rd PRISONER: It stinks.
1st PRISONER: I’ve got dead pigeons in my air vents.
2nd PRISONER: There’s live ones flying about the hall.
3rd PRISONER: Pigeons, sparrows, starlings. You name it.
1st PRISONER: Wee feathery bastards.
2nd PRISONER: Birdshit all over the place.
3rd PRISONER: In your food and everything. ALL: And can you spot the difference?
PRISON OFFICER: 1952 Rules, Rule 101: The diet shall at all times be wholesome and appetising, reasonably varied and adequate for the maintenance of health.
1st PRISONER: Ever had spaghetti hoops for breakfast?
2nd PRISONER: Or a salad when it’s below freezing outside?
3rd PRISONER: Most of us supply our own vitamins.
1st PRISONER: Paid for out of our own wages.
2nd PRISONER: Oh aye, the wages.
3rd PRISONER: If you’re working.
1st PRISONER: If they’ll let you work. Had me unknotting a goal net last week.
2nd PRISONER: How about tearing up bits of foam for soft toys?
3rd PRISONER: It passes the time.
1st PRISONER: Sometimes.
2nd PRISONER: Then it’s time for…
ALL: REC-RE-ATION!
1st PRISONER: A telly.
2nd PRISONER: A pool table.
3rd PRISONER: A video.
1st PRISONER: Between, what, forty guys?
2nd PRISONER: Cannae get near it.
3rd PRISONER: And the noise.
2nd PRISONER: Can’t even get peace to write a letter.
[Pause]
3rd PRISONER: The mail.
1st PRISONER: One free letter each week at public expense.
2nd PRISONER: Public property as far as the screws are
3rd PRISONER: Our mail gets delayed.
1st PRISONER: Withheld.
2nd PRISONER: Censored.
3rd PRISONER: And the screws all get a good laugh at you, the cunts.
1st PRISONER: For example.
2nd PRISONER: Observe the screw with the sleekit grin and the pole up the whole walk.
1st PRISONER: Operation wind-up is about to commence.
PRISON OFFICER: Mail! Jackson! MacDonald!
3rd PRISONER: Now watch this carefully. This particular screw’s had it in for Morrison ever since he came in.
1st PRISONER: It’s nothing personal.
3rd PRISONER: Just doesn’t fucking like him.
PRISON OFFICER: Morrison. Letter from your wife. It’s a ’Dear John’. Did you hear me, Morrison? I said it was a Dear John’!
[Long pause, then prisoners erupt, table flies, others freeze, but John moves again as his wife appears]
PRISONER: Who’s there?
WIFE: Who’s that?
PRISONER: How did you get in here?
WIFE: How did you get out?
PRISONER: Am I seeing things?
WIFE: Is it you, James?
PRISONER: Is that you Ann?
WIFE: Am I hearing things?
PRISONER: How could you leave me when I needed you most?
WIFE: How could you leave me when I needed you most? The weans need a daddy. I need somebody. I waited as long as I could.
PRISONER: I got your letter. Now I know what a paper cut is. It went through me like a knife through butter.
WIFE: It was as hard to write as it was to read.
PRISONER: All I had left was my family. Who’ll visit me now?
WIFE: Everything begins and ends with you.
PRISONER: You never had the guts to tell me to my face.
WIFE: You wouldn’t have the spine to take it. Hard man my arse. You’re as soft as shite.
PRISONER: I worry about you darling. Out on your own.
WIFE: Don’t worry.
PRISONER: It’ll no be long till I’ve finished my sentence.
WIFE: You never let me finish a sentence.
PRISONER: I love you.
WIFE: Heard it. You never showed it.
PRISONER: We’ll start over again when I get out. I’ll go straight.
WIFE: You’ll be as straight as a spiral staircase.
PRISONER: You cannae take my weans away from me.
WIFE: You took their daddy away from them.
PRISONER: I’m being punished enough as it is.
WIFE: Poor you. You’re used to propping up bars. A big man with a drink in you. Sober, you’re no so big.
PRISONER: I’m all alone.
WIFE: I’m lonely.
PRISONER: I live for your visits.
WIFE: That’s no a life. It’s mental torture. The weans greet non-stop on visiting day. It’s tearing them apart. I knew what I was getting into. They deserve better.
PRISONER: Don’t you judge me. Where do you think you’re going? Come back here and give me a fair hearing.
WIFE: You never listen.
Scene 8
PRISON OFFICER: Scumbags the lot of them. No loyalty among thieves. Sell one another for a cigarette. Too many bleeding hearts these days. What about the victims? What about their families? There’s open visits at the cemetery. They do it to their own kind as well. No fucking loyalty. Colleague of mine lost an eye. Some monster with a coat hanger. Can’t trust them with anything. If they’re no wanking and working-out, then they’re up to something. Okay, so I’m bitter. But that disnae mean I’m bad, does it? We’re not all brutes, ye know. We’re not the way we’re made out to be. I take my kids to the pictures. To the park. I prefer the park. I like open spaces. Truth be told, I’m a bit of a fresh air fiend. A bit of a one for the great outdoors. Well, you don’t get much fresh air in the tin pail, do you? Not when there’s people emptying their pisspots over you. Kicked a young fella to death, so they did. Nobody lifted a finger. They won’t grass. Grassing’s worse than murder in their book. If they want the prison population reduced and our job made easier, then give the public what they want. Bring back the noose. The only place they bastards should be kicking is at the end of a rope.
Scene 9
GOVERNOR: Scottish Prison Service Report 1990. Nice and glossy, eh? “The Secretary of State for Scotland has expressed his concern that steps should be taken to minimise the harmful effects of the prisoner’s removal from normal life (particularly in terms of family responsibilities and job prospects). Paragraph 4 – Access to Families. We agree the prisoner must have greater access to his family, however, it would be very difficult to provide the additional visit facilities within already cramped prison sites, and it would also be very expensive. We feel that this approach would, in any case, only increase the artificiality of the prisoner’s access to his family.”
Can you imagine the mental torture of having your wife and wens an arm’s length away from you, once a month, for five years, without being able to touch them?
Scene 10
[Women in visits. We hear snatches of their side of conversations with men]
1st WOMAN: … I’m no going through all that again … I know it helps you sleep; you told me that … Awright. One more time, but that’s your last … You only say that when you want me to do something for you … It is true … Look, have I ever missed a visit before? … Well then … I know it’s hard for you. Do you think I’m living the life of Riley or something? I’ve got more locks on my door than you. I couldn’t afford to feed a dog … It’s no easy being a woman on your own … Don’t start that. It’s not a fucking man I need. It’s a babysitter and a job … Aye, he came round with it last week … Of course I appreciate it. It got a bag of messages … It’s called inflation. You wouldn’t know much about it … I’m no raising my voice …
2nd WOMAN: … The wee yin’s with her granny … It’s no exactly a day oot, is it? … I wasn’t well … That’s you all over. Act first, then have a wee think about it … What do you mean, am I no looking after myself? I’m doing the bloody best I can … No it’s no easy … Is that right? Your nose’ll bleed for me in a minute … Damn right I will … You dare … What did you do with the last one I gave you? … In that case you can look at a magazine instead. I’m no posing like that again. I couldn’t look my sister in the eye … Alright. Calm down. I’ll see what I can do … You bought me that six years ago. It didn’t so much wear out as disintegrate … ! wasn’t your baby doll five minutes ago … You look sorry … You’ve lost a lot of weight too … We should be touching, no talking …
3rd WOMAN: … How did you get they marks? … see you, you could start a fight in an empty house … Then you’d be better off in solitary … Are you kidding? What would I want you out the way for? You’re already out the way as far as I’m concerned. It took me six hours to get here … No if you meet me with a greetin face it’s no … You cracked up the last time when Big Alex gave me a lift … That’s your problem … Every man’s your enemy or your friend. There’s nobody in between. It’s a feast or a famine with you… I dream about you, too. Though God knows at times it’s more like a nightmare … George was asking for you … Aw, has he been excommunicated as well? … They’ve got lives to live the same as you … No, they’re no doing a lifer, but they cannae just drop everything and come running because you need them … No, neither can I …. Exactly, “Till death us do part”, no “till Peterhead do us part”. There wisnae any provision for this … I know you didnae plan it. I didnae plan to marry you either … That’s no what I meant. We’ve made our beds now … Mine’s might as well be a jail bed for aw the warmth there is in it …
Scene 11
GOVERNOR: You know, it’s alright knocking authority. Lampooning leadership. Mocking management. Taking the mickey out of your superiors. Who was it said, “Sarcasm is the lowest form of wit”? Some sarky bastard, no doubt. Satire is the sport of the impotent, that’s my view. My humble opinion. We all have our crosses to bear, and if society washes its hands of these people, somebody’s got to step in and take control. Somebody’s got to put their shoulder to the wheel. It’s alright kidding and swanking, joking aside, though, it’s a bit of a cliche, call me old-fashioned if you like, but at the end of the day, when all is said and done, the buck stops here, with those who bear the burden of responsibility. Of course, maintaining order in an establishment such as this is no easy task. The prisoners are often recalcitrant, anti-social and disruptive towards the prison community – staff and other inmates alike. Firmness is essential when dealing with cases like the one I am about to hear this morning. A vicious, sustained and unprovoked assault upon an officer during a mail call. Bring in the prisoner!
[Prisoner – John Morrison – brought in by warder, obviously in some pain]
PRISON OFFICER: Stand to attention, back straight, hands out of pockets – prisoner Morrison, Sir!
GOVERNOR: Thank you, officer. Morrison?
PRISONER: Yes sir?
GOVERNOR: Morrison, you are charged with… This prisoner appears to be experiencing some difficulty in standing upright, officer.
PRISON OFFICER: Prisoner Morrison required some considerable restraint, sir.
GOVERNOR: I see. You know what Rule 42 is?
PRISONER: Yes, sir.
PRISON OFFICER: Silence when addressing the Governor!
GOVERNOR: Rule 42 – our disciplinary system revolves around it and it’s eighteen sub-sections. Where would we be without it, officer? Where would we be?
PRISON OFFICER: Drowning in a sea of chaos, sir.
GOVERNOR: How true, how very true. I’ve said it so many times myself. Drowning in a sea of chaos. And the particular brand of chaos you instigated yesterday was of a sort I will not, I repeat, will not tolerate under any circumstances. I regard an assault on a member of my staff as an assault not only on the officer concerned, but as an attack on the very fabric of our establishment, of our authority, of our system of criminal justice which is our only bulwark against … against…
PRISON OFFICER: Mindless anarchy and mob rule, sir!
GOVERNOR: Thank you, officer!
PRISON OFFICER: Sir! Stand to attention, Morrison!
PRISONER: Yes, sir.
PRISON OFFICER: Silence!
GOVERNOR: Yes, mindless anarchy and mob rule. Therefore I have no hesitation, in view of our…Aw fuck it! All this sanctimonious patter’s fine for the cameras and the Scottish Office but you cannae talk to scum like that, they’d think you were a poof or something – anyway, I’m new here and I don’t want anybody thinking that they can take advantage. I’ve got to make it crystal clear to all and sundry that I’m the Governor. I’m the daddy in here, biggest barn on the block, as hard as… as… as…
PRISON OFFICER: A very hard thing, sir?
GOVERNOR: Aye, that’ll do. The likes of him would never respect you otherwise. Okay then, big man, fill me in?
PRISON OFFICER: Sir?
GOVERNOR: Tell me what happened. Slag’s going to solitary anyway.
PRISON OFFICER: Right then sir, for the record. I was handing out the mail and I called out this one’s name and he went for us.
GOVERNOR: Oh, did he now? This wee bastard thinks he can gub one of my officers, does he? Do you, Morrison? Do you really think you can get away with it? Do you?
PRISONER: Sir. No I don’t, sir.
GOVERNOR: So would you care to attempt to explain yourself to me?
PRISONER: Well sir – I was in the hall – mail came round – and this officer shouts us over – says it’s a “Dear John” – and – sir …
GOVERNOR: A “Dear John”? Is this correct, officer?
PRISON OFFICER: Yes, sir.
GOVERNOR: A “Dear John” prisoner Morrison!
PRISONER: Sir?
GOVERNOR: What’s your name, Morrison?
PRISONER: Sir, my name sir? It’s Morrison, sir.
PRISON OFFICER: The prisoner is being disrespectful, sir. Shall I. … ?
GOVERNOR: Not just yet officer. I meant your first name, Morrison.
PRISONER: Sir, my first name, sir?
PRISON OFFICER: His name is John, sir. John Morrison.
GOVERNOR: I see. Get him out of here. Oh, and officer …
PRISON OFFICER: Sir?
GOVERNOR: No accidents, please. Just re-acquaint the prisoner with our regulations.
PRISON OFFICER: As you say, sir.
[Prisoner is led away]
GOVERNOR: A new broom. I’ll show them who’s in charge here. There will be no fucking about in my jail!
[Prison officer strikes prisoner, who falls]
Scene 12
[Woman and man seated at table]
MAN: Any other mail?
WOMAN: Just bills. That bloody Poll Tax as well. I’m no paying it anyway. Neither is anybody in the street.
MAN: You tell them.
WOMAN: That tea’s like tar.
MAN: It always is.
WOMAN: You were always complaining about mine being weak, too.
MAN: Hot water knocked stupid.
WOMAN: It was you that was knocked stupid.
MAN: You’re right there.
WOMAN: I was always right.
MAN: How’s Daniel?
WOMAN: The usual. Never in. Takes after his father.
MAN: Tell him I’ll take after him.
WOMAN: You’d have to be fast to catch him. He’s like a bloody whippet.
MAN: Sure, I raced whippets for years, did I not?
WOMAN: I’m getting a new bed from the social.
MAN: What are you telling me that for?
WOMAN: I thought you’d be pleased. The springs were coming through on the old one.
MAN: Happy days.
WOMAN: It’s nearly time.
MAN: It flies when you’re enjoying yourself.
WOMAN: The weather’s been a lot better. In Glasgow anyway.
MAN: It’s been miserable here. What I’ve seen of it.
PRISON OFFICER: Finish off your visits now please!
[The couple clasp hands and stare at one another]
Scene 13
PRISONER: They fucking beasts. Hanging’s too good for them. Fucking castration, that’s what they want. Let’s fucking riot and fling them off the roof along with the slates. Scumbags. Slags. Rides. Fucking perverts. Them and the grasses. Rapists. Muggers. Fucking low-lifes. Over the bannisters with them. That one Tarzan’d a wee boy. Him there raped a lassie then beat her to a pulp. We’ll be the fucking judge and jury with they bastards. Take a razor to their balls. A sheet with a knot in it. Under the ear. Watch them kicking, and screaming, and shiteing their trousers. Fucking vermin.
Scene 14
WOMAN: You’ve got that look in your eyes again. It’s getting stronger every time I come. What’s this place done to you that you can’t even trust your wife? You keep saying I don’t understand. Of course I don’t. How could I. But I am trying. I am trying to see what they have done to you that’s making you a stranger to me. My eyes are searching yours, looking for some sort of sign, but the shutters are down. I can’t see past the “Trust no-one” signals that are flashing as strong as the love that once used to be there. Of course I long for someone at night, to wake up in the morning and feel wanted instead of lonely, to love and be loved. But you won’t believe me when I tell you again and again it’s only you I yearn for. Have these bastards degraded you so much that you don’t feel human any more? That you don’t believe I could still love you as wholly and as consuming as before. The mental barriers are closing down slowly, bit by bit until one day I know I will be told to go away. It’s you that’s leaving me not the other way round. I hope those bastards can sleep at night, cos I can’t.
Scene 15
[Psycho in Solitary – poem by Tommy Campbell]
PRISONER: I wish I had a spider
I’d feed it your guts
Fucking wee fly bastards
I’ve never liked you much
Splat!
There goes another one
Zap! Oh! What fun
scatter little insects
I’ve got you on the run
Wow!
Did you see that there? I walloped two in one
Wouldn’t like to see what I could do
If I had a gun
Pow!
Backhand, forehand
Gee whiz I’m some kid
Is anybody watching this?
I’m full of little tricks
Growl!
See that little fucker? Nearly got away
These wee cunts are getting flyer
But I’m getting flyer tae
Aw – Biff!
Little suckers, another two-er tae
man! That makes way over fifty
and nothing’s getting away
man oh man! So nifty
psycho in solitary.
WOMAN: It’s called sensory deprivation, you know. It’s torture of the mind. Keeping him locked up. It’s no right. He wisnae bad, he was just sick with the drugs. And to see the weans and that, the way they were. They had nothing. Stealing for need, is that a crime? Christ, what chance did he have? Keeping him locked away, it’s no right, so it’s no. That’s all he ever did. Folk that wanted to turn the key on him. In the cupboard under the stairs. Locked in the headmaster’s office. Stuck in the jail for Christ’s sake! Just a wean too, so he is. Jails for weans, for Christ’s sake.
Still jail weans now too, so they do. They do, you know. or maybe we do, you know. In our names. You used to only have to be late in, in the old days, and they could jail you, so they could. Call you a whore and jail you. Well, they cannae do that now. And one day there’ll be no more jail, so they’ll no. One day, somebody up there, it’s going to dawn on them. And they’re going to have to say, “That was barbaric that, wasn’t it? How could they have done that to folk? That was terrible, that”, they’ll say, “bit short-sighted”, they’ll say, “in the long run”. Aye, one day, and I’ll tell you again, there’ll be no more jail. “They couldn’t have known about it”, they’ll say. “Jailed more young folk than anyone else in Europe. It’s hard to believe. No the Scots. They were well-educated. Had a sense of nationhood, so they did. They probably didn’t realise. Aye, that’s it. It was probably kept secret from them”. “Or maybe they were just feart, somebody else will say, “you know, temporarily lost the use of their imagination… and their compassion… desensitised to the horror… it’s called sensory deprivation, you know…”
PRISONER: You fucking looking at, eh? What are you fucking looking at. What do you know, eh? What do you care? Who the fuck are you? See me. I’ve done more time than Big Ben. I’ve had more porridge than Goldilocks. I’ve done more solitary than Howard Hughes. What do you know about me, eh? Do you want to welcome me back into your community? Oh, welcome home, son. All is forgiven. Well, answer me this. What fucking community? Eh? What fucking community? Community care? Community charge? Community policing? Community service? That’s all that’s left of your fucking community! Reform? Rehabilitation? Resettlement? Care? Who cares? Reform yourself, ya slag! Rehabilitate yourself, ya bastard! Resettle you, ya hopeless case! It’s got to be bad in here. Sure it’s bad in here. It’s got to look bad in here. That way it doesn’t look so bad out there. Am I right? Just tell me! Where do you live? How much freedom have you really got? How much time? How much space? How many visitors? How do you sleep? What’s your number? I don’t envy you. I don’t need your sympathy. The only place I want your bleeding heart is on the end of a fucking skewer. What are you fucking looking at, eh? Don’t look at me. Look at you. There’s your fucking prisoner! You’re doing life, ya mug. You’re doing a seventy stretch, but you don’t even know it!
…Who rattled your cage?
[Poem: Take Heed (Ode Note – to my children) – Tommy Campbell]
PRISONER: This is the dungeon
In which I reside
These are the bars
Which keep me confined
This is the slab
Upon which I sleep
This same cold stone
Where the cockroaches feed
This is the ceiling
This is the floor
This is the spyhole
my steel-studded door
These are the walls
all spattered in spite
This is my world
this is my fight
This is the wind
that roars so loud
As scavenger gulls
screech all around
This is the salt
I smell from the sea
This is my vault
And yes!
This is me
This is forever
This is for real
This pain of my vision
The sorrow I feel
This is my tomb
where tumbleweed blow
Dark side of the moon
Where you must not go
This is my anger
this is my pain
This is my hunger
For freedom again
These are my bones
my skull, my teeth
This is my heart
I beg you – take heed
[Cast cross the stage repeating lines from earlier scenes]
PRISONER: Having your liberty taken away is punishment enough, because it’s not just today, it’s tomorrow, and the next day, and the next day…etc.
GOVERNOR: Slag’s going to solitary anyway…etc.
WOMAN: Making people understand is like giving them a blindfold and saying ‘“Now you know what it’s like to be blind…etc.
WOMAN: They’ve made prisoners of us too…etc.
PRISONER: Hate factories … etc.
[Riot scene and gunshot. Freeze]
1st WOMAN: Rooftop protests.
2nd WOMAN: Ugly suicides.
3rd WOMAN: Cries for help we never hear.
1st WOMAN: voices in the wilderness.
2nd WOMAN: Like a seabird in a storm.
THREE WOMEN: Gutted!
[Song: Sandman of Peterhead – solo by Derek Lang]
Close your eyes now, have no fear,
The Sandman will soon be here, etc.
[Song: We’ll Take Our Chances]
Is there a man these days that has no trouble brewing
Taking hame a pay the way that maist men should
They say a government is there to do you good
Do you think those crooks in London really could.
Can you tell me how it came to be this way
You try to drag us down and take our pride away
Do you really think your kind is here to stay
Well we’ll march until we see our light of day.
We’ll take our chances on our own
We’ll make a stance ‘till every working seed’s been sown
And tae hell and back I’ll roam
Just to see a crooked system overthrown.
And you tell me that these bad times soon will change
You patronize your lies and try to shift the blame
You’ve got to understand that every man’s the same
Well you’ve got to work to feed your wife and weans
John Maclean would say the same.
We’ll take our chances on our own, etc.
So get tae fuck and leave us all alone,
We’ll take our chances on our own.
Alasdair Gray’s Poor Things catching the eye in Glasgow Central Station I’m standing in Glasgow Central Station at the New Year and two giant screens are showing the trailer for Poor Things on a loop. This new adaptation of Alasdair Gray’s novel is setting the heather alight and bringing Gray’s literary pyrotechnics to a global audience three years after it was first announced as being in the works. Poor Things, published in 1992, is a brilliant book, and like all of Alasdair’s fiction it is much more than a novel. On the surface the narrative is a patchwork quilt, riffing on nineteenth-century novels from Frankenstein to The Master of Ballantrae, but deep down it offers a rich exploration of social class, education, empire, equality, feminism and independence, both personal and political, issues that fired Gray’s imagination and remain pressingly relevant. In form it is a gothic time machine, a typographical feast, with its graphic devices, maps and illustrations, clearly a fertile seedbed for a storyboard. Gray’s work with its stunning visual artistry has long been an open invitation to filmmakers. Yet until recently this novel received relatively little critical attention compared to Lanark (1981), Gray’s best-known work. Poor Things is equally remarkable, and its surreal qualities were always likely to lend themselves to the screen. In fact, twenty-odd years ago there was talk of an adaptation based on a script by Gray himself. The major roles were cast, a director was in place, and a date set for production, but that adaptation never materialized. On 21 February 2004 an editorial in The Herald newspaper bemoaned the state of cinema in Scotland and asked about a raft of creative projects that had withered on the vine:
“What happened, for instance, to the Robert Burns biopic that’s been whispered about for years, often in close conjunction with words such as Johnny and Depp? Where’s that long-mooted remake of Greyfriars Bobby? Things have also gone quiet on Craig Ferguson’s proposed ‘‘socialist musical’’ about Clydeside shipbuilders. And what about the film adaptation of Alasdair Gray’s novel Poor Things, which went so far as declaring principal cast members (Helena Bonham Carter, Robert Carlyle, Jim Broadbent) and a director (Sandy Johnson) before vanishing off the radar? No-one ever rose to the not inconsiderable challenge of putting Gray’s magnum opus Lanark on the big screen, either; and while we’re on the subject of great novels, isn’t it possible that there’s a Confessions of a Justified Sinner-shaped hole in the period-thriller market?”
Now, twenty years later, the challenge has finally been taken up by award-winning Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos, whose experimental style matches Gray’s creative vision. When asked what drew him to Gray’s novel, Lanthimos has said, “I have a Scottish friend who’s a big fan of his, […] so I read quite a bit of his stuff. When I read Poor Things, I was immediately taken by it. I went to Scotland to meet Gray, actually. He was very, very generous and energetic. He showed me all the places in Scotland he imagined the story taking place. When we got back home, he gave me his blessing.” And the rest is cinematic history. Poor Things is now on general release, starring Emma Stone, Mark Ruffalo and Willem Dafoe, in an adaptation that is garnering awards and generating massive critical attention. The reviews have been exceptional.
With its fantastic female figure, a mannequin-turned-independent woman Poor Things is very much of the moment. Gray’s gothic heroine, Bella Baxter, is Barbie meets Barbarella. The story of a woman who refuses to be moulded by her alleged male creator – Godwin “God” Baxter – is a tale for our times. Emma Stone won a Golden Globe for her performance as Bella, and in her acceptance speech she said, “Bella falls in love with life itself”, and that the character “made her look at life differently”. That’s a big statement but entirely understandable given Gray’s imaginative powers and Stone’s performance.
Alasdair may have given his blessing for the film to be made but having showed Lanthimos “all the places in Scotland he imagined the story taking place”, many people feel he would surely have been dismayed at the exclusion of those places from the finished film. The fact that the adaptation has transplanted the beating heart of the novel – Glasgow, Gray’s great civic muse – to London, has not been well received, particularly by Scots. A recent documentary, “Poor Things & Alasdair Gray’s Legacy”, produced by filmmakers Gavin Lundy and Jack O’Neil, responds to these concerns about Scotland’s omission from the film. It stresses Gray’s rootedness in Glasgow, but also acknowledges that his art transcends the city and country of his birth. In his contribution to this documentary Rodge Glass speaks of Gray’s fusion of the local and the universal. You can take Gray out of Glasgow but can you take Glasgow out of Gray? The question persists: why was the film adaptation of Poor Things not set in the city that gave birth to it? Glasgow has after all been used to excellent effect as a film location in recent years. If it was photogenic enough for The Batman and for Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny then why not for Poor Things, which has the city hard-wired into its system?
A reflective piece by Elspeth King added weight to the criticisms by pointing out that Gray’s novel was a response to cultural neglect and official disdain for the poor things of the city: “In future, there will be many film productions of Poor Things and other works by Alasdair Gray. Like Robert Burns, Gray was always confident that his work would be appreciated by later generations. Whether that will be in Scotland and by Scots is in doubt, for Gray’s talent has had less than lip-service here. It is no accident that he characterized the city of Glasgow as Unthank in his novel Lanark and twice refused the ‘honour’ of the St. Mungo Prize.”
Alasdair was a passionate advocate of Scottish independence and was always dismayed by the patronizing attitude that refused to see the rich cultural potential of Scotland. From this perspective, he too would have lamented the relocation of this film adaptation. But Gray is a writer of global significance, and if this adaptation brings new readers to his writing and his art, and to the myriad ways in which he represents and celebrates Scotland, it will have been worth it.
I’ve had a strong interest in Poor Things since its publication over thirty years ago. What has struck me whenever I’ve taught the novel or written about it is that Alasdair’s appeal really is universal. His work is eminently adaptable, like that of all great writers. The charge of parochialism sometimes aimed at Scottish writers – a charge that usually masks class snobbery – can never be leveled at the fruits of his capacious imagination. If this film version of Poor Things leads to a dramatic uplift in the novel’s readership and generates the interest in Gray’s creative art that it so richly deserves then it will have done its work, and who knows, perhaps some enterprising production company will see the potential for a serial adaptation.
Poor Things – the novel itself – is certainly worth revisiting. A new edition of the novel bearing the legend “NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE” is already in bookshops, although it’s bittersweet to see Emma Stone on the cover rather than Alasdair’s own distinctive artwork.
Asked by Mark Axelrod in 1995 what we can expect in the future, Gray answered that he hoped the financing would be secured to make the film version of Lanark. That hope is strengthened by the success of Poor Things and Lanark now awaits its film adaptation. I wonder who’ll play Duncan Thaw …
It all started when a guy called Billy Elliott phoned me out of the blue in January 1991. “When can you get up here?” he asked. I didn’t know who he was or where “here” was. It slowly became clear, while Billy spoke nineteen-to-the-dozen, that he was in prison, doing life: in HMP Barlinnie Special Unit to be precise. We had a mutual friend, Jamie Burns, who had been working with Billy on Glasgow Boy, a play about his life. Jamie had mentioned me as someone Billy might like to know, since my father was from the Calton, my mother from Cowcaddens, and I was from Possilpark, three places Billy knew well. A play I’d co-written with my brother, From the Calton to Catalonia, had been on at the Pearce Institute in Govan in December 1990, and Jamie had been telling Billy about it. Billy was steeped in the Calton – he had been a member of notorious Glasgow gang the Calton Tongs in the 1960s. Something clicked. We were from similar backgrounds, but I was an aspiring academic and Billy was serving a life sentence for murder, as were other inmates of the Special Unit.
I visited the Special Unit the following day, then the following week, then every week for the following year. I was fascinated by Billy’s stories. Looking back now it’s obvious there was a Pip and Magwitch dimension to the relationship, though I didn’t see that at the time: I was too caught up in his endless tales about growing up in Glasgow. I gradually got to know the other inmates and their visitors and learned about the lives of these lifers. Because of my commitment, my education, and my background, the Governor, Dan Gunn, asked if I’d like to act as a writer-in-residence for a few months. The Unit was famous for attracting people from the arts and Dan felt that since I’d been in the Unit so much and knew the “community” – as the inmates plus staff were called – I would be a good person to work with them on developing some writing projects.
My first task was organising an arts festival and exhibition in the Unit in December 1991. Visitors included artists and writers as well as families and friends and at that event I got to know Irvine Allan, a final year drama student at the RSAMD (Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama). I told him about the plan to put a play on at Mayfest, Glasgow’s community arts festival, a prison drama based on discussions I’d had with Billy over the previous months. Irvine came up to the Special Unit in January with a group of drama students keen to collaborate, to listen and to learn. That led to the spark of an idea for a collectively-written musical drama, No Mean Fighter. The drama students in the cast were joined by Special Unit visitor James McHendrie, a talented writer and actor who brought a streetwise directness to the table.
No Mean Fighter had begun to take shape around conversations with a group of Special Unit inmates who had served time in Peterhead Prison during the riots and dirty protests there in 1987. Billy had heard that John Maclean, the Scottish socialist leader, had been kept in the same cell as him, back in 1916. That was the seed for the play – a latter-day inmate finding a prison diary that linked the past to the present. We wanted to explore the links between a notable political prisoner and historical figure like Maclean and the conditions that persisted in Peterhead into the 1980s. Social class was a factor in the makeup of prisons, so the politics was there to begin with. Maclean, the renowned Red Clydesider, had famously said, “I would rather be immediately put to death than condemned to a life sentence in Peterhead.” His experiences there seemed to echo those I spoke to who had been incarcerated there. We learned that Maclean was kept out of circulation in prison. He complained of his food being tampered with, and of being constantly fed false information by the authorities about his family and friends.
Peterhead Prison, built in 1888, had its roots in an 1881 report by the Committee on the Employment of Convicts which declared that the “most likely prospect for benefitting the shipping and fishing interests of the country at large and at the same time profitably employing convicts is the construction of a harbour of refuge at Peterhead in Aberdeen shire.” Peterhead was designated a General Convict Prison for male prisoners sentenced to a minimum of 5 years.
The premise of the play is that two prisoners, John Maclean and another, are in solitary confinement in Peterhead in the same cell at different times. Their experiences are told through speeches, poems, songs and voices. We also hear the views of other prisoners, visitors and a prison officer, interwoven with extracts from the fictitious diary of Maclean. One scene early in the play captures the voices of the women who make the journey from Glasgow to Peterhead to visit their menfolk and distils the history of the prison and its location:
Scene 4
1st WOMAN: They used to send them to Australia. Had them building roads and railways hell-knows-where.
2nd WOMAN: Now they’ve got them caged at the other end of the country.
3rd WOMAN: Getting there from Glasgow is a nightmare. Travelling all day. And for what? To look at a broken man through a glass partition.
1st WOMAN: A couple of hours once a month. Twelve hours on a bus for that.
2nd WOMAN: They built the prison there so that the prisoners could build the harbour.
3rd WOMAN: Now the harbour’s built, and the quarry’s closed, but the men are still there.
1st WOMAN: Isn’t there something in Glasgow they could build?
2nd WOMAN: Like houses.
3rd WOMAN: They don’t build houses anymore, just jails.
1st WOMAN: They’ve made prisoners of us too.
2nd WOMAN: Breaking up families.
3rd WOMAN: Like stones in a quarry. Smashed to pieces. Good for nothing but breaking glass.
1st WOMAN: Dirty protests.
2nd WOMAN: Hunger strikes.
3rd WOMAN: Solitary confinement.
1st WOMAN: Rooftop protests.
2nd WOMAN: Ugly suicides.
3rd WOMAN: Cries for help we never hear.
1st WOMAN: Voices in the wilderness.
2nd WOMAN: Like a seabird in a storm.
3rd WOMAN: They come out worse than they went in.
1st WOMAN: On an elastic band.
2nd WOMAN: No future.
3rd WOMAN: Shell-shocked.
1st WOMAN: Further away from us than ever.
2nd WOMAN: Pacing up and down.
3rd WOMAN: Turning outside in.
1st WOMAN: They had them making nets. To catch fish.
2nd WOMAN: Cold eyes staring into space.
TOGETHER: Gutted!
The writing team included Kate Dickie, Billy Elliott, John Gordon, James McHendrie and myself, with poems by Tommy Campbell and Hugh MacDiarmid. All the songs were written and performed by Derek Lang, with lyrics to “John Maclean” by Billy Elliott, based on a melody by Joe Kidd. I was script editor and contributed the words to the title song. Cast improvisations directed by Irvine also fed into the final script, and there were extracts from printed sources including The Gateway Exchange “Independent Inquiry into the Peterhead Riots”, The 1990 Scottish Prison Service Report, a report from the European Committee for the Prevention Of Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, John Maclean’s “Condemned from the Dock” speech, and James D. Young’s John Maclean: Clydeside Socialist. With so many fragments in front of him, Irvine had to be much more than a director. He proved to be an expert tailor who took the patchwork of speeches and songs given to him and sewed them into a magnificent banner. Irvine reflected on the creative process at the time:
“Some say great plays come through individual genius. The making of No Mean Fighter […] has been a collaboration involving many people in research, writing, improvising and song-writing. It was my job to find a shape for the myriad of ideas, scripts, poems and songs which emerged, and to harness the creative energies of all involved. During this process I have tried to circumvent the strict divisions of labour which normally apply in the creation of a play, by allowing all those who wanted to contribute the chance to do so.”
Theatre, like all the arts, is full of egos, but there was something about this play and this project that made a diverse and strong-willed set of individuals want to work together and sink their egos into the collective pool. I mentioned cast improvisations. One cast member, drama student Kate Dickie, contributed to the script at a crucial stage when we were looking for a series of intercut monologues before the big ending. Kate came in with a standout speech that she performed, one that nailed the inside/outside relationships that the play sought to explore:
“WOMAN: You’ve got that look in your eyes again. It’s getting stronger every time I come. What’s this place done to you that you can’t even trust your wife? You keep saying I don’t understand. Of course I don’t. How could I. But I am trying. I am trying to see what they have done to you that’s making you a stranger to me. My eyes are searching yours, looking for some sort of sign, but the shutters are down. I can’t see past the ‘Trust no-one’ signals that are flashing as strong as the love that once used to be there. Of course I long for someone at night, to wake up in the morning and feel wanted instead of lonely, to love and be loved. But you won’t believe me when I tell you again and again it’s only you I yearn for. Have these bastards degraded you so much that you don’t feel human anymore? That you don’t believe I could still love you as wholly and as consuming as before. The mental barriers are closing down slowly, bit by bit until one day I know I will be told to go away. It’s you that’s leaving me not the other way round. I hope those bastards can sleep at night, cos I can’t.”
Because it was a drama and not a policy document we had different voices offering different perspectives. For example, in one scene a prison officer sick of dirty protests and violence among the inmates gets it off his chest:
“PRISON OFFICER: Scumbags the lot of them. No loyalty among thieves. Sell one another for a cigarette. Too many bleeding hearts these days. What about the victims? What about their families? There’s open visits at the cemetery. They do it to their own kind as well. No fucking loyalty. Colleague of mine lost an eye. Some monster with a coat hanger. Can’t trust them with anything. If they’re no wanking and working-out, then they’re up to something. Okay, so I’m bitter. But that disnae mean I’m bad, does it? We’re not all brutes, ye know. We’re not the way we’re made out to be. I take my kids to the pictures. To the park. I prefer the park. I like open spaces. Truth be told, I’m a bit of a fresh air fiend. A bit of a one for the great outdoors. Well, you don’t get much fresh air in the tin pail, do you? Not when there’s people emptying their pisspots o’er you. Kicked a young fella to death, so they did. Nobody lifted a finger. They won’t grass. Grassing’s worse than murder in their book. If they want the prison population reduced and our job made easier, then give the public what they want. Bring back the noose. The only place they bastards should be kicking is at the end of a rope.”
The voices of prisoners are heard too – tender and paranoid in visits, frightened and threatening in solitary, angry and dangerous out of their cells, addressing the audience directly on one occasion:
“PRISONER: You fucking looking at, eh? What are you fucking looking at. What do you know, eh? What do you care? Who the fuck are you? See me. I’ve done more time than Big Ben. I’ve had more porridge than Goldilocks. I’ve done more solitary than Howard Hughes. What do you know about me, eh? Do you want to welcome me back into your community? Oh, welcome home, son. All is forgiven. Well, answer me this. What fucking community? Eh? What fucking community? Community care? Community charge? Community policing? Community service? That’s all that’s left of your fucking community! Reform? Rehabilitation? Resettlement? Care? Who cares? Reform yourself, ya slag! Rehabilitate yourself, ya bastard! Resettle you, ya hopeless case! It’s got to be bad in here. Sure it’s bad in here. It’s got to look bad in here. That way it doesn’t look so bad out there. Am I right? Just tell me! Where do you live? How much freedom have you really got? How much time? How much space? How many visitors? How do you sleep? What’s your number? I don’t envy you. I don’t need your sympathy. The only place I want your bleeding heart is on the end of a fucking skewer. What are you fucking looking at, eh? Don’t look at me. Look at you. There’s your fucking prisoner! You’re doing life, ya mug. You’re doing a seventy stretch, but you don’t even know it! Who rattled your cage?”
We formed a company around the play called Cat. A, named after Category A prisoners, “those that would pose the most threat to the public, the police or national security should they escape”. In other words, the kind of men who ended up in the Special Unit. The cast – Tony Curran, Steve Cooper (aka Stephen Clyde), James McHendrie, Derek Lang, Carol Rafferty, Claire Miller, Suzie Fannin, Kate Dickie, Stephen McDowall, Michael Connolly and Derek Munn – did an outstanding job, putting in performances that lit up the stark set, and we had a hugely supportive crew in Gillian Hamilton, Fraser Kerr, Colin Begg, Gary Brunton, Suzie Fannin, Mark Stevenson, and Jake McIlvenna. Pavla Milcova and Mark Stevenson took some striking photos.
The play was performed first at Mayfest in 1992, with a run at the Arches Theatre as well as a community and prison tour. Joyce McMillan’s review in The Guardian on 8th May was the first sign that we had something special on our hands:
“The Category A theatre company’s No Mean Fighter at the Arches Theatre – a devised piece by a team of five writers and a 12-strong cast, including professional performers and people with direct experience of the Scottish prison system – is one of those shows which could have been a self-indulgent shambles. Instead it emerges as a powerful, strikingly well-acted polemic against the regime in Scotland’s top security prison at Peterhead, using the words of the great Glasgow political activist John Maclean – himself a prisoner in Peterhead 70 years ago – to expose the brutalisation and agony the system imposes on prisoners, their families, and prison officers alike.” (1).
A review in Scotland on Sunday two weeks later was equally enthusiastic:
“No Mean Fighter has the directedness and strength of a protest song. It is a series of scenes, monologues and ballads about prison life which have been tightly meshed into an emphatic performance by the director, Irvine Allan, a final year student at the RSAMD. […] The issues are familiar enough: the brutality of the system breeding monsters amongst both prisoners and staff; the suffering of wives, mothers and girlfriends torn between two worlds; the inhuman stupidity of society’s sledgehammer solution to crime. The performance rises above the level of documentary, however, creatively channelling its anger into expressive, vehement theatre.” (2)
After Mayfest and a tour of community and prison venues the play went to the De Marco Gallery for the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. The play was extremely well-received in Edinburgh. Flagged as a Critics’ Choice in The Sunday Times on 30th August, it justified its billing, winning a Scotsman Fringe First for Outstanding New Production. I was credited as Project Co-ordinator and got my name on the much sought after Fringe First wee bronze plaque (now lost, but the memories are golden). John Linklater’s review of the play says a great deal both about the production and the background against which it was staged:
“Employing an effective spareness of set and lighting, Cat A Theatre Company recreate the degrading world of Peterhead Prison with individual inmates occupying small square pallets spread like rafts around the open stage. There are no iron bars or cages to introduce the false notion that the lives portrayed in this collaborative piece, and the issues raised by it, can be conveniently dubbed up and forgotten. Society imprisons itself if it ignores the inhumanity of its penal system, and you can quote no less a source than Churchill to that effect. […] The impressive thing about Cat A’s treatment is that it focuses strongly on the damaging effects of imprisonment for wives and family, and its emphasis on the men’s responsibilities in this area is just one of the strands which saves the piece from polemic. Neither is the piece blind to the needs of its audience. Songs performed by the ensemble, with Derek Lang on guitar, are of high quality, and there are some splendid theatrical touches. The women confront the audience with their grievances. The men throw theirs down in a game of cards. The riot scene at the end is loud enough to drown out the bulldozers outside on Blackfriars Street, thoughtfully provided yesterday by Lothian Region for road operations in the final week of the Festival.” (3)
Reflecting on Festival highlights in a Guardian review a few days later, Joanna Coles applauded “the excellent No Mean Fighter by Category A”. (4) On the same note, Jackie McGlone, writing in The Herald pointed to the play as a dramatic high spot: “It has been a vintage year for high-voltage performance, with the acting honours going to Cat A’s powerful ensemble drama No Mean Fighter”. (5) A further run followed in the spring of 1993, with dates at The Tron Theatre in Glasgow and The Lemon tree in Aberdeen, as well another community venue and prison tour. That tour was accompanied by an exhibition with research by Julia Allan and layout by Celine McIlmunn and Gerry Clark.
During the spring 1993 tour of the play Irvine was interviewed by his former mentor George Byatt, known for This Man Craig, The Troubleshooters, and Sutherland’s Law. Irvine told George: “There has got to be something wrong with a society where you can go to prison for months if you strip the lead off a roof but can get a knighthood if you strip the assets of a company.” George thought the play Irvine had woven out of workshops was a form of political theatre that deserved a wider audience and praised the new company for its social awareness and class politics: “No Mean Fighter with its authentic and committed writing, passionate acting and powerful presentation, lives up to the company’s aims as described by Irvine Allan. If any group deserves to inherit the mantle of John McGrath’s 7:84 (Scotland), it is this one.” (6)
One of the most insightful reviews of No Mean Fighter was penned by Stewart Hennessey, who homed in on the play’s movement between political drama, prison drama and domestic drama:
“This impressionistic drama, whose seven writing credits include inmates of Barlinnie Special Unit, works as a hard-hitting fast-paced catharsis. However, the in-your-face action and emotional outpourings don’t always square tidily with the wide ranging attitudinising which underpins the play. The unrelenting energy, while pulling the play along at an entertaining rate, is less persuasive and moving than the tragedy implicit in the love-sex dynamics. The first-rate performers (including students from the RSAMD), imbue the visiting scenes with an almost awesome futility. Lonely, impoverished wives waiting years for degraded men, amid stifling suspicion and bitterness, lend eloquence to the play’s one consistent and indisputable contention; isn’t it enough punishment to lose liberty? Aside from gratifying the base urge for revenge, what purpose does it serve to treat men as animals? And why be surprised if they then leave jail ready to commit more crimes?” (7)
Equally insightful and even more incisive was the response of Ajay Close, who went to the heart of the play’s tensions and contradictions in a review as hard-hitting as the drama it described:
“Politics encloses No Mean Fighter like electrified wire, leaving the audience two choices: inside or outside. Only fools and masochists sit on the fence. Cat. A is one of the success stories of the Barlinnie Special Unit, a theatre company whose purpose is to ‘agitate, educate and inform.’ Its current concern is the brutal prison regime which provoked the Peterhead riots, and this stirring piece of theatre certainly makes an unanswerable case for change. But by placing John Maclean, Glasgow’s Bolshevist consul, at the heart of the drama, the argument goes beyond penal reform into social analysis, identifying crime as a product of capitalism and projecting a utopian future where no one need lose their liberty. Sympathisers who wimp out of the complete package are liable to find themselves straddling 1,500 volts. Devised by inmates of the special unit and drama students at the RSAMD, the play is a collage of songs and scenes which betrays its collaborative origins by never quite forming an organic whole. This is both its failure and its strength, allowing the polemic to be subverted by odd moments of raw truthfulness. Tony Curran, all milk white skin and sinew, eyes glittering like some medieval martyr, does his best to bring Maclean’s words to life, but they’re no match for the best of the contemporary dialogue. The most powerful scenes in the play concern the pressure prison places on emotional relationships, the interplay of love and resentment, the longed for visits passed in bickering or silence. Both Stephen Cooper and James McHendrie make uncomfortably plausible hardmen, ‘saft as shite’ with their women until crossed, then petrifying into fist clenching domestic tyrants. Archetypes abound in this production: hardmen with soft centres, feisty, yet self sacrificing wives. It’s easy to dismiss this as crude stereotyping, but it is a cliche of life, not art. For me it provides one of the play’s more interesting insights: the lifeline between myth and powerlessness, the sustaining but ultimately limiting comfort of the old roles. The Glasgow hardman is simultaneously deplored and celebrated, at once the brutalised product of the system and a magnificent challenge to it. Never mind the contradictions: when capitalism crumbles we’ll have a whole new ball game. Which is fine as long as you can wait for the revolution. Director Irvine Allan can afford to ignore such cavils; he knows his audience and, to judge by the foot stomping applause and fulsome tributes at the public discussion afterwards, they loved it although, amid the praise, some questioned the relevance of John Maclean to prison life 70 years after his incarceration. But then, isn’t that that the crux of No Mean Fighter, whether you’re inside or outside the wire: the world has moved on, but the message hasn’t? The play ends with the entire cast belting out a rousing anthem complete with clenched fist salutes and the chorus line ‘Why don’t they get to fuck and leave us all alone?’ Not, I fear, a realistic blueprint for political change.” (8)
During the 1993 run of the play, Loudon Wainwright III visited the Special Unit and performed with the cast, inspiring a wonderful review of the event by Keith Bruce in The Herald:
“The tall American singer-songwriter propped his battered leather guitar case against the treadmill. Over a 20-year career, it was the first time he had ever been asked play in a prison. […] In his rugby shirt, denims and horn-rim glasses, Loudon Wainwright III looks more like a lecturer in film and TV studies. He is best known for singing about dead skunks, golf, and not being Bob Dylan, but for his appearance at Barlinnie’s Special Unit he dredged up an oldie, Samson And The Warden, about the trials of being shaved and shorn for jail. If he forgot the words it didn’t matter — his audience knew them all. Wainwright was between two sell-out performances at the Renfrew Ferry as part of Mayfest. […] He […] lent his guitar to another visitor, Derek Lang, who was joined by members of the Cat A Theatre Company for songs from the play No Mean Fighter, co-written by [Billy] Elliot. […] Over his stay, Wainwright spent more time listening than playing, and his fans were as keen to tell him about their creativity as to compliment him on his. ‘I had trouble understanding what they were saying, but I get the enthusiasm,’ he drawled. ‘It was a powerful experience, but I don’t want to trivialise it with words …’. A song on the next record will do fine, Loudon.” (9)
Loudon Wainwright III’s Johnny Cash moment was just one of many highlights on the road with No Mean Fighter. He had more than one relevant lyric in his locker too. In 1976 he had released a song entitled ‘California Prison Blues’. But perhaps the most significant song was the one he released 20 years after visiting the Special Unit, a cover of “The Prisoner’s Song” by Vernon Dalhart, first recorded in 1924, a year after John Maclean’s death. The closing lines capture something of the spirit of No Mean Fighter:
“Now if I had the wings like an angel
Over these prison walls I would fly
And I’d fly to the arms of my darling
And there I’d be willing to die.”
The story doesn’t end there. No Mean Fighter became the first part of a trilogy that would include Dirt Enters At The Heart (1993) and Doing Bird (1995). Cat A., under the direction of Irvine Allan, went on to do more than a decade’s worth of work with prisoners and young offenders. If they didn’t quite inherit the mantle of 7:84 that was partly because the funding landscape for theatre became bleaker as the 1990s progressed. Times change, but not that much. The ghost of John Maclean invoked in the play, and played beautifully by Tony Curran, was also conjured up in a song by Derek Lang, “The Ghost of John Maclean”, that captured the spirit of the piece:
“I can feel your heartbeat next to mine
Though we live in different times
Oh how times have changed
But in Peterhead, they’re still the same
I can feel your pain
Tell me who you are, John Maclean
John Maclean …
I can feel your anger towards me
Johnny can’t you see
No-one knows like me
What it’s like to be insane.
I can hear you breathing in my sleep
Pacing up and down will you greet
You were just a working man trying to lend a hand
I understand.
There is no answer I can give to you
They lock you up for what we do
Knock you black and blue
Yes that’s what they do, well it’s true.
I can feel your heartbeat next to mine
Though we live in different times
Oh how times have changed
But in Peterhead, they’re still the same.”
No Mean Fighter wasn’t my only involvement in collaborative theatre in 1992. From the Calton to Catalonia, the play that prompted Billy Elliott to call me in the first place, was revived for the Edinburgh Fringe. The Lions of Lisbon, the comedy I co-wrote with Ian Auld about Celtic winning the European Cup in 1967, roared from Mayfest through the Arches and the Tron all the way to the Pavilion in September of that year, playing to 10,000 punters in the process. As well as these three plays I was involved in co-writing, I had another iron in the fire that summer. I was at Glasgow Arts Centre during the 6-week rehearsal period for Rain Dog’s dazzling production of Macbeth, directed by Robert Carlyle, and was credited as “Academic Advisor” in the company’s publicity. But 30 years down the line, No Mean Fighter retains a special place in my heart. It came out of the blue and made a huge impact, on audiences and on all those involved. It was traumatic as well as dramatic. Prison drama presents its own demands, and working with prisoners serving life sentences for serious crimes was something that was new and challenging for all of us, but rewarding too. The play’s the thing, and in the end what was produced was a model of collaborative theatre in action.
2023 sees the centenary of the death of John Maclean. It will be an opportunity for a timely reassessment of his outstanding contribution to international class struggle. Maclean’s arguments for socialism and revolutionary internationalism remain as relevant as ever. 2023 will also, coincidentally, witness the 50th anniversary of the unique penal experiment that was Barlinnie Special Unit. Who knows, maybe No Mean Fighter, a prison drama that turned political theatre inside out three decades ago will get another outing. (10)
REFERENCES
(1) Joyce McMillan, ‘The Evil That Good Men Do’, The Guardian (8 May 1992).
(2) Scotland on Sunday (May 24, 1992).
(3) John Linklater, review of No Mean Fighter at the Demarco Gallery, Edinburgh, The Herald (1 September 1992), p.11.
(4) Joanna Coles, ‘Edinburgh Festival: From the Obscure to the Vicious: The Highs and Lows of the Edinburgh Festival’, The Guardian (September 5, 1992), p.24.
(5) Jackie McGlone, ‘That Was the Fringe That Was’, The Herald (September 5, 1992), p.9
(6) George Byatt, ‘Lean, Mean Theatre from Behind Bars’, The Scotsman (2 April 1993).
(7) Stewart Hennessey, ‘No Holds Barred. Mean Fighter, Tron Theatre, Glasgow’,
The Herald (April 1, 1993), p.14.
(8) Ajay Close, ‘There’s No Room for Indecision on a Visit to Cat. A Theatre’, Scotland on Sunday (April 4, 1993).
(9) Keith Bruce, ‘The Not-Bob-Dylan Show Gets a Special Welcome’, The Herald (May 10, 1993), p.7.
(10) The title of the play is taken from a biography of one John Maclean’s comrades, Harry McShane: No Mean Fighter, by Harry McShane and Joan Smith (London: Pluto Press, 1978). There were also echoes of No Mean City: A Story of the Glasgow Slums, by Alexander McArthur and Herbert Kingsley Long (London: Longmans, 1935).
The Beatles knew a thing or two about being banned. “A Day in the Life”, one of their finest songs, and the highlight of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, was banned by the BBC in May 1967, and their last Number One, “The Ballad of John and Yoko”, was banned by many radio stations in the United States two years later. Drugs and religion were taboo subjects. (1) “A Day in the Life” was banned because the BBC was all ears when it came to any references to drugs that might be getting sneaked onto the radio under the radar: “The BBC rationalized the ban in part on how they read the song’s verbal text: references to smoking, dreams, and turning on all sent warning signals to people who were not exactly sure what was being said.” (2) The BBC was tuning into subtext having reached the conclusion that references to drugs and sex were hiding in plain sight in contemporary music, and John Lennon might be turning on more than the radio as Paul McCartney went into his daydream: “At the BBC, a committee reached its own interpretations after […] listening to ‘A Day in the Life’. They concluded that they would not broadcast a recording that alluded to drug use, even if the reference proved relatively obscure to the vast majority of their listeners.” (3) The Beatles heard the news just as Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was being launched. The best track on the latest album by the world’s greatest band was greeted with a ban: “That evening (Friday 19 May) at manager Brian Epstein’s flat in Belgravia, the Beatles learned of the ban at the album’s press release party.” (4) As Gordon Thompson remarks: “The banning of ‘A Day in the Life’ was a remarkable event, not only because it was the first Beatles recording to receive such treatment in Britain, but also because that decision came in the context of the social and political events of those momentous months of the summer of 1967, the so-called ‘Summer of Love’.” (5)
John and Yoko: Some Time in Derry City
Fifty years ago, John Lennon wrestled with his conscience as a pacifist and as a person of Irish descent distressed by the news from Ireland. He spoke at a rally in New York six days after Bloody Sunday, on Saturday 5th February 1972, where he gave his name and said “you know the rest”. His genealogy, his family history, was its own explanation of affiliation. Names can tell people who you are, and where you’re coming from. Clearly more comfortable with Civil Rights than armed struggle, speaking of nationalist and republican resistance, Lennon remarked: “I understand why they’re doing it, and if it’s a choice between the IRA and the British army, I’m with the IRA. But if it’s a choice between violence and nonviolence, I’m with nonviolence. So it’s a very delicate line […] Our backing of the Irish people is really done through the Irish Civil Rights, which is not the IRA. […] I’m always getting accused of hopping from subject to subject – ‘one minute he’s on meditation, the next he’s on peace’ … Well, the Irish thing isn’t new for me. I was always on the Irish thing’”. (6) In 1972, Lennon (with Yoko Ono) released his third post-Beatles album, Some Time in New York City (Apple/EMI). John Weiner calls both the Irish songs on that album, “Luck of the Irish” and “Sunday Bloody Sunday”, “failures”, and says of Lennon’s brief involvement with Irish politics: “He should have done more.” (7)
Weiner quotes American feminist Kate Millett, a friend and supporter of John and Yoko – she wrote a letter opposing their proposed deportation – who said of Lennon’s Irish songs: “It takes being there a while – and with political people – before you can claim this cause which has been creeping up on you forever. He must have felt a certain foolishness: ‘Liverpool Irish, what’s that?’” (8) As well as sounding patronising – as if the “Liverpool Irish” weren’t as valid a diaspora as any other, especially given that many of them are in Liverpool because of the Famine and British imperialism – it implies that there are “political people” who matter more than politically-minded and motivated working-class songwriters. Ironically, one of John and Yoko’s statements after Bloody Sunday was: “We ask for the American Irish to wake up to their responsibility in the same way the Jewish people respond to the problems of Israel”. (9) Nobody said: “American Irish, what’s that?”, though they might have said, “Do you mean Irish American?”
Speaking of the song “Sunday Bloody Sunday”, Lennon said: “Most other people express themselves by shouting or playing football at the weekend […] But me, here I am in New York and I hear about the thirteen people shot dead in Ireland, and I react immediately. And being what I am, I react in four-to-the-bar with a guitar break in the middle. I don’t say ‘My God what’s happening … we should do something’.” (10)
Lennon “reacted immediately”, as an activist and an artist with an Irish connection:
“Well it was Sunday Bloody Sunday
When they shot the people there
The cries of thirteen martyrs
Filled the Free Derry air
Is there any one amongst you
Dare to blame it on the kids?
Not a soldier boy was bleeding
When they nailed the coffin lids.”
John Lennon/Yoko Ono, ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’, Sometime in New York City, Apple/EMI, 1972.
Lennon never lived to see the tenth anniversary of Bloody Sunday, never mind the fiftieth. He never lived to see peace being given a chance in Ireland. He’d have been on the march and in the news.
McCartney and the New McCarthyism
John Lennon and Paul McCartney had been together in New York the day before Bloody Sunday. As McCartney recalled: “It was a meeting at which we more or less agreed to stop sniping at each other”. If Lennon answered the call for action and solidarity, or at least for artistic reflection and understanding, then Paul McCartney, waiting in the wings, got in on the act too with the song “Give Ireland Back to the Irish”, co-written with Linda-McCartney. Released on 25 February 1972, it spent eight weeks in the British charts despite being banned by the BBC:
“Give Ireland back to the Irish
Don’t make them have to take it away
Give Ireland back to the Irish
Make Ireland Irish today.”
Paul McCartney/Wings, ‘Give Ireland Back to the Irish’, EMI, 1972.
McCartney appears to have enacted a self-censorship of sorts in 2001 when “Give Ireland Back to the Irish” was not included in a double CD retrospective, Wingspan (2001), despite being a top twenty hit on its initial release.
Roger Friedman, reviewing the release of the double CD Wingspan in 2001, gloated over the omission of McCartney’s Irish song: “Also gone, obliterated now from Wings history, is McCartney’s one attempt at a protest song, ‘Give Ireland Back to the Irish,’ from 1972. It was after John Lennon eviscerated McCartney on his Imagine album with the song “How Do You Sleep At Night?’ that McCartney hit back with this political number. ‘Give Ireland back to the Irish,’ he sang, ‘Don’t make them have to take it away/Give Ireland Back to the Irish/Make Ireland Irish today.’ Of course, in 2001, Paul McCartney is a prominent member of the British upper class. He’s been knighted and fêted. ‘Give Ireland Back to the Irish,’ which actually charted all the way up to the top 20 in 1972, would not be so amusing now. Another verse goes: ‘Tell me how would you like it/If on your way to work/You were stopped by Irish soldiers/Would you lie down do nothing/Would you give in, or go berserk?’ The single is a collector’s item, although it was included on a rare import version of the Wings Wild Life album.” (11)
According to Marilyn Flood: “the BBC banned political songs, including ‘Give Ireland Back to the Irish’ by Paul McCartney and Wings, because the mention of the title implied the station had a political position on Northern Ireland […] The banning meant that the name of the song, which occupied a high position on a weekly list of best-selling songs, had to be omitted by any disc jockey. He or she would merely state that position ‘x’ on the list was occupied by an unspecified Paul McCartney song”. (12) Occupied indeed. Martin Cloonan alludes to “the ban on the Beatles’ ‘A Day in the Life’ in the context of the drug scare of 1967”, and adds: “But while some bans seem inane years later, bans on such records as ‘Give Ireland Back to the Irish’ […] can become more pertinent when seen in the light of moves such as the British government’s 1988 ban on the broadcast of statements by ‘terrorists’”. (13)
Banned on the Run?: Wings Over Ireland
Recalling the controversy, McCartney remarked: “‘Give Ireland Back to the Irish’ was written after Bloody Sunday. British soldiers had fired at a crowd of demonstrators and there were deaths. From our point of view, looking at it on the TV news, it was the first time people questioned what we were doing in Ireland. It was so shocking. I wasn’t really into protest songs – John had done that – but this time I felt that I had to write something, to use my art to protest. I wrote ‘Give Ireland Back to the Irish’, we recorded it and I was promptly phoned by the chairman of EMI, Sir Joseph Lockwood, explaining that they wouldn’t release it. He thought it was too inflammatory. I told him that I felt strongly about it and that they had to release it, and he said, ‘Well, it’ll be banned’. And of course it was – the BBC could not play it. But it was number one in Ireland, and in Spain for some reason. It was just one of those things you have to do in life because you believe in the cause. And protest was in the context of the times. I knew ‘Give Ireland Back to the Irish’ wasn’t an easy route, but it just seemed to me to be the time. I had to say something. All of us in Wings felt the same about it. But Henry McCullough’s brother, who lived in Northern Ireland, was beaten up because of it. The thugs found out that Henry was in Wings.” (14)
Despite its initial reception, McCartney hasn’t disowned the song. “Give Ireland Back to the Irish” is in the news again, and The Beatles are back on the front page. Watching Peter Jackson’s monumental documentary about The Beatles makes you realise how recent and alive the past is a half-century on, and how memorable the dead can be, how vivid and vibrant they are when restored to brilliant colour. We saw “Get Back”, the title track, being plucked like magic from the air, starting out as a protest song about immigration and morphing into something else entirely.
The release of Peter Jackson’s documentary coincided with the publication of Paul McCartney’s two-volume magnum opus The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present, produced in conversation with celebrated Irish poet Paul Muldoon, who has cast an arched eyebrow over Irish history and the poets who attempt to engage with it, often awkwardly. Like the Get Back documentary, The Lyrics is a hugely ambitious project, revisiting McCartney’s output over a 65-year period, a lifetime’s achievement in lyrics. The epigraph is from Shakespeare – “To thine own self be true”, the advice Polonius gives to his son Laertes in the tragedy of Hamlet shortly before they both die. Beyond the epigraph there are many Shakespearean echoes – “Let It Be” has the ring of “To be or not to be” about it – and McCartney’s claim to be a kind of modern Shakespeare is borne out by the sheer range and quality of the poetry on show here. If McCartney is Shakespeare maybe John Lennon was an early collaborator, like Christopher Marlowe. Six pages of McCartney’s The Lyrics are devoted to “Give Ireland Back to the Irish”, in striking text and images. (15) The song still stands as testimony to a moment in time when one of the world’s foremost songwriters and artists responded to an event that shook the world. McCartney speaks of his own Irish heritage: “My mother’s father, Owen Mohan, was from Tullynamalra in County Monaghan. At some point he moved to Liverpool, where he worked as a coalman. I’m not quite sure precisely where my paternal grandfather was born in Ireland but I do know his family were Protestants. My brother and I were baptised Roman Catholic at the insistence of my mother, but we were raised nondenominationally. So, our household represented in microcosm the Irish political and religious divide”. (16)
McCartney’s song was treated harshly on its release. The record company didn’t like it. The BBC banned it. The critics tried to bury it, and later claimed it was an embarrassment omitted from a back catalogue so vast it could let such a damp squib quietly drop. But songs have wings and since the centenary of the Easter Rising in 2016 there is arguably a more open and honest re-examination of the past. One of the most insidious aspects of censorship is not the harm it does at the time to an individual work or artist, or the deadening impact on public discourse and debate, but the cumulative effect it has on the tendency to self-censor. Artists and audiences internalise bans and it’s the censor in the head that proves to be the state’s most effective filter. “Give Ireland Back to the Irish” is back in the news again. Lennon’s on sale and onside again. The old story that claimed McCartney was just a copycat trying to compete with his former songwriting partner by writing a protest song doesn’t hold up. The art of the protest song has changed in the transition from folk to rock to pop to punk to rap. John Lennon was certainly steeped in movement politics before the Beatles broke up, drawn to causes, particularly peace movements. But Paul wasn’t hanging on to his old pal’s coattails by recording a protest song. Two Liverpool Irish lads with so much in common – like mothers lost at an early age – continued to find common cause after they separated as a team. They may have rushed their paces, but they picked up their guitars while others picked up guns, or carried the dead and wounded off the streets. The Beatles, in Peter Jackson’s mesmerising restoration of their January 1969 rehearsals, are almost psychedelic in their rejuvenated brilliance, brought back to life in loving detail, there in the room with you, lucid on the screen like diamonds as they craft the songs that would make their way onto Abbey Road and Let It Be. By contrast the black and white footage of Bloody Sunday shot three years later is otherworldly in a different way. A priest waving a white handkerchief. “Father McKenzie/Wiping the dirt from his hands as he walks from the grave/No one was saved”.(17)
REFERENCES
(1) See Martha Bari, ‘Taking It to the Streets: John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s 1969 War Is Over! Campaign’, in Eric J. Schruers and Kristina Olson (eds.), Social Practice Art in Turbulent Times: The Revolution Will Be Live (New York: Routledge, 2019), 33-44. See also Nathan Timmons, ‘John, Paul, Jorge, and Ringo: Borges, Beatles, and the Metaphor of Celebrity Crucifixion’, The Journal of Religion and Popular Culture 23, 3 (2011): 382-396.
(2) Gordon R. Thompson, ‘Banning the Beatles: “A Day in the Life” at the BBC and the Creation of Radio 1’, Popular Music History 11, 2 (2016): 107-120, at 109. For an example of how a day’s news might impact on the world in different ways see Miguel De Larrinaga, ‘“A Day in the Life’: A Tomogram of Global Governmentality in Relation to the “War on Terror” on November 20th, 2003’, Geopolitics 16, 2 (2011): 306-328.
(3) Thompson, ‘Banning the Beatles’, 113.
(4) Thompson, ‘Banning the Beatles’, 114.
(5) Thompson, ‘Banning the Beatles’, 118.
(6) Cited in Jon Wiener, Come Together: John Lennon in His Time (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1991; first published New York: Random House, 1984), 210. Weiner, Come Together, 210.
(7) Wiener, Come Together, 211.
(8) Kate Millett, cited in Weiner, Come Together, 211.
(9) Weiner, Come Together, 210.
(10) John Blaney, John Lennon: Listen To This Book (Guildford: Paper Jukebox, 2005), 114.
(11) Roger Friedman, ‘Sir Paul McCartney omits Ireland protest song from new CD’, https://www.foxnews.com/story/sir-paul-mccartney-omits-ireland-protest-song-from-new-cd.
(12) Marilyn J. Flood, ‘Lyrics and the Law: Censorship of Rock-and-Roll in the United States and Great Britain’, New York Law School Journal of International and Comparative Law 12, 3 (1991): 399-445, at 439, and note 428.
(13) Martin Cloonan, ‘Popular Music and Censorship in Britain: An Overview’, Popular Music & Society 19, 3 (1995): 75-104, at 100.
(14) Mark Lewisohn (ed.), Wingspan: Paul McCartney’s Band on the Run (London: Little Brown, 2002).
(15) Paul McCartney, “Give Ireland Back To The Irish”, in The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present, edited by Paul Muldoon (London: Penguin, 2021), Volume 1, 216-221.
(16) McCartney, The Lyrics, 217.
(17) Just over a decade after the events of 30 January 1972, when U2 released “Sunday Bloody Sunday” on the album War (1983), it was easier to take a step back, even when your back was against the wall. Like Lennon in “Revolution 1”, and unlike the later Lennon of “Sunday Bloody Sunday”, Bono refused to be drawn into the conflict, taking stock rather than taking sides:
“Broken bottles under children’s feet
Bodies strewn across the dead-end street.
But I won’t heed the battle call
It puts my back up, puts my back up against the wall”.
U2, ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’, War, Island Records, 1983.
Writing shortly after the release of U2’s take on Bloody Sunday, Julian Vignoles compared Bono’s stadium rock anthem unfavourably with the honesty, urgency and immediacy of John and Yoko’s earlier protest song: “‘War’, the title and theme of their third album is vague, as is the only song that refers to a tangible event. ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’ is always introduced by Bono as ‘not a rebel song’. In John Lennon’s angry song of the same title, there’s a line: ‘Not a soldier boy was bleeding when they nailed the coffin lids …’ But U2’s message, ten years later, is more like detached frustration: “I can’t believe the news today/I can’t close my eyes and make it go away/how long, how long must we sing this song.’ The sentiments in the U2 song are commercial, mainly because they’re simple and the fact that they mention something emotive, war and conflict, without having a very definite view about it.” (Julian Vignoles, ‘What Is Irish Popular Music?’, The Crane Bag 8, 2 (1984): 70-72, at 72.) U2’s song is subtle too, because ‘”I can’t believe the news today” contains an echo of the opening line of “A Day in the Life”: “I read the news today, oh boy.”
Other critics at the time were equally scathing about Bono’s revisionist response to the events of Bloody Sunday: “In fact, far from appearing as a slogan […] the words ‘Sunday, Bloody Sunday’ are presented through the I of an individual who has disengaged himself in space (the distance from Derry to Dublin) and time (more than ten years) from the mass emotions aroused by the event named. When sung by Bono in 1983, these words are, of course, quotation of an Irish republican catchphrase. But U2 are not the first band to quote it. John Lennon and Yoko Ono wrote and recorded a song of the same title in New York in March 1972: it was released while the memory of the event itself was still vivid. It opens with an account of the shooting of ‘thirteen martyrs’, and asks, ‘Is there anyone amongst you, Dare to blame it on the kids?’ and concludes, ‘Repatriate to Britain, All of you who call it home, Leave Ireland to the Irish, Not for London or for Rome!’” (Barbara Bradby and Brian Torode, ‘To Whom Do U2 Appeal?’, The Crane Bag 8, 2 (1984): 73-78, at 75.) The conclusion these critics reach is that U2’s version of events replaces one pious discourse with another: “While the equation of Ireland with Christianity is hardly new […] U2 substitute for this feminine spirituality a militantly masculine image. Clearly their ‘ecumenical’ call is limited to the Christian population. The new meaning of ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’ turns out to be as exclusive as the old one, though now on a world, rather than a local, sectarian scale”. (Bradby and Brian Torode, ‘To Whom Do U2 Appeal?’, 77).
THE SPANISH EMPIRE
Robert Burns took a great interest in world affairs. In his “Elegy on the Year 1788” he notes that “The Spanish empire’s tint a head”, an allusion to the death of King Charles III of Spain on 13 December that year. Spain had fought with France against Britain, and in 1763 had swapped Florida for Havana in an imperial peace deal with Britain. This was at the end of the Seven Years War, also known as the French and Indian War. Charles had brough back the Inquisition, which nobody expected. The Spanish Empire, founded on 17 April 1492, soldiered on for another 200 years after it lost its head in 1788, suffering a major loss in Spanish Morocco on 2 March 1956, finally dying with another despot, Franco, on 20 November 1975, although others say it ended on 12 October 1968 with the declaration of Spanish Guinea as an independent republic renamed Equatorial Guinea. But as Burns well knew, “rank is but the guinea’s stamp”, and class and colonialism are closely connected. If the seeds of fascism in Spain were planted in Morocco in the 1920s with the formation of the Spanish Legion and the Army of Africa, then they sprouted on Spanish soil in the 1930s. (1) Empire was, as Paul Preston has shown, a major driver of fascism. The Spanish Civil War was a colonial war: “the right coped with the loss of a ‘real’ overseas empire by internalizing the empire … by regarding metropolitan Spain as the empire and the proletariat as the subject colonial race”. (2) The British Empire and the Spanish Empire were both virulently anti-communist. Caught between a rock and a hard place, the British imperial monarchy viewed Franco as the lesser of two evils. Gibraltar was a bargaining counter for Franco’s fascist state. (3) Don’t touch the rock and your system’s safe with us. (4) As well as Gibraltar, Spain also had the Canaries up the leg of its drawers. (5) It was from his outpost in Tenerife on the Canary Islands that Franco made his way to Las Palmas de Gran Canarias to board the plane on 15 July 1936 that would take him to Tetuán in Spanish Morocco in advance of the military rising against the democratically elected government of Spain on 18 July. A secret meeting of the British Cabinet at the end of 1936 discussed “The Situation in Spain” and noted that: “If General Franco had won the war earlier, no great difficulties would have arisen”. (6)
HEY GRINGO
The influence of Robert Burns was felt across the Spanish-speaking world. Burns made his way to Spain through the book trade from an early date. As John Stone notes, “in the 1780s, maritime trade with Scotland could keep John Hunter abreast of William Creech’s edition of Robert Burns’s poems, to which he and two other Cádiz Anglophones subscribed. Cádiz- and nearby sherry-merchants continue to appear on British subscribers’ lists well into the nineteenth century; and sons were regularly schooled in British Catholic institutions”. (7) But the link appears tenuous at times. Nigel Leask examines the evidence for one suggested source: “During the U.S. invasion of Mexico from 1846 to 1848 (itself prompted by the U.S. annexation of the newly independent republic of Texas in 1845) a favorite marching song for the U.S. troops was Robert Burns’s “Green Grow the Rashes O” – hostile Mexicans quickly dubbed the invaders “Gringos,” parroting the opening words of their marching song. There may be some truth in this – the OED records its first usage in 1849, on the U.S./Mexican border – and the Mexicans certainly had good reason to be bitter, given that fifty-five percent of their sovereign territory was ceded to the U.S. government at the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848. But if the story is true, it is ironic that Burns’s tender love lyric in praise of the female sex should have been converted into a marching song, and then provided ammunition for Mexican resentment of their northern neighbours”. (8)
This threadbare etymology was unpicked some time ago by Father Charles Ronan, an expert on the colonial period of Latin American history: “While the story of the song-singing and the name-calling may be true, the etymological explanation is incorrect. The word was in use at least a century before the outbreak of the conflict of 1846. The word gringo was mentioned in Spanish literature as early as the eighteenth century. In his famous Diccionario compiled before 1750, Esteban Terreros y Pando, a Spanish Jesuit states that gringo was a nickname given to foreigners in Málaga and Madrid who spoke Spanish with an accent, and that in Madrid the term had special reference to the Irish. The pertinent passage in the Diccionario reads (in translation): ‘Gringo – in Málaga, what they call foreigners who have a certain kind of accent which prevents their speaking Spanish with ease and spontaneity; and in Madrid the case is the same, and for the same reason, with respect to the Irish’”. (9) Ronan acknowledges that the origins of “gringo” have been kicked into the long grass: “Scholars are not in agreement about the correct etymology of the word. According to one opinion, gringo is a corrupted form of griego, as used in the ancient Spanish expression hablar en griego – that is, to speak an unintelligible language, or to speak ‘in Greek’”. (10)
There are certainly ties between Burns and Mexico in the nineteenth century. That country’s national poet of the time, Guillermo Prieto (1818-1897) was lauded as a Burnsian Bard: “The most popular poet in the republic is the venerable Guillermo Prieto, who […] has […] been called the Robert Burns of the republic, and, like the Scottish poet, he sings the songs of the people. Identifying himself with them in feeling, he is able to express their every emotion, and in their own tongue.” (11) By the end of the nineteenth century Burns was becoming a byword for popular poetry, poetry of resistance, radicalism, and republicanism.
BURNS AND LORCA
Federico Garcia Lorca, the Spanish poet killed by Franco’s forces in 1936, has been compared with Burns on several occasions and has been translated into English with Burns in mind: “For Philip Cummings, author of the first English version of Canciones, Lorca’s status as an Andalusian Robert Burns complicates the translation of his poems: ‘Just as Robert Burns needs interpretation for the non-Celt, so does Lorca require much explanation to the reader … The innate pattern of a people can only be fully comprehended by that folk [and] this is usually disaster for the translator’”. (12) Another translator of Lorca, the Hemingwayesque pro-Franco, anti-communist catholic convert and all-round eccentric Roy Campbell also invoked Burns: “We are reminded, in Lorca’s American venture, of Burns when he went into high society at Edinburgh and started to write like a courtier and gentleman of the world. It was a fiasco. Lorca’s talent is not cosmopolitan, and it did not flourish far from the scent of the orange groves of the South”. (13) Going back to “gringo” for a moment, influenced by Burns, a later translator of Lorca’s “Gypsy Ballads” renders “Verde que te quiero verde” as “Green grows my love, my love grows green”. (14) The translator concedes that he has “scoured the English tradition of Robert Burns” for suitable analogues for Lorca’s verse. (15)
BURNS AND COMMUNISM
Burns, as the people’s poet, has been associated with communism and socialism for a long time. Marx was a great admirer: “Dante and Robert Burns ranked among his favourite poets and he would listen with great pleasure to his daughters reciting or singing the Scottish poet’s satires or ballads”. (16) If the French Revolution had made its mark on Burns then the Russian Revolution impacted on his twentieth-century admirers: “Robert Burns in the highly esteemed translations by Samuil Marshak became ‘a Russian’ […] According to the catch phrase by Aleksandr Tvardovskii ‘On sdelal Bernsa russkim, ostaviv ego shotlandtsem’ [He made Burns a Russian while keeping him a Scot]”. (17) From 1917 onwards the Scottish socialist reception of Burns was picking up steam. (18) In 1930 a pamphlet appeared from the Scottish Office of the Communist Party in Glasgow, entitled Burns Belongs to the People. This short booklet, just 24 pages, covers a lot of ground, part biography, part history, part criticism. It claims Burns as an internationalist: “Burns is much more than a National Poet. He is international in his appeal, and one of the greatest Lyric Poets of all time. To-day, in Russia, he ranks next to Shakespeare among foreign poets, and that must be very pleasing to Robert if his Shade has been watching what has happened in that great country since the Revolution”. (19) Interestingly, the pamphlet makes no claims for Burns as a socialist, seeing this as out of step with the period in which he lives and wrote: “The question, ‘Was Burns a Socialist’, has been asked ever since there has been an active Socialist Movement , and there have always been foolhardy propagandists prepared to answer it in the affirmative. Naturally much of Burns’ work contains angry protests against the social injustices of his day […] But protests against the inequalities and injustices of a class society have been common in all ages and do not add up to Socialism. Burns was a radical democrat, living in the era of the American and the French Revolutions, who used his poetry as a vehicle for his progressive opinions”. (20) The pamphlet concludes with a vision of a future that places the specific national predicament of Scotland in an international frame: “There cannot, of course, be a flourishing Scotland in the midst of an oppressed and disintegrating world; that is why Burns was interested in the great international events of his day – the American and French Revolutions. But that ought not to mean that we are not to tackle any Scots problems until the world has been finally put right. Because of the character of its industries, Scotland will face a more difficult transitional period than many other countries, and its workers must begin now to demand from the Government a policy that will prevent the country going down in a welter of mass unemployment”. (21) And the booklet ends with a verse of Burns’ chosen for its rousing finale: “Scotland’s working-class representatives must be foremost in the fight against those who would prevent Scotland from taking her true place in the new world order of peace and brotherhood –
‘Now, for my friends’ and brethren’s sakes,
And for my dear loved Land-o’-Cakes,
I pray with holy fire,
Lord, send a rough-shod troop o’ hell,
O’er a’ wad Scotland buy, or sell,
To grind them in the mire’.” (22)
This closing call to arms sums up a certain view of the poetry of Burns as a rallying cry for popular protest.
Scottish anarchist Stuart Christie was certainly radicalised at school by Burns: “To me, Burns expressed, in its most succinct form, the ideal and the essence of socialism – which had to do with justice, liberty and the overthrow of tyranny […] nothing […] could match Burns’ spine tingling call to liberty and resistance to oppression in Bruce’s Address to his army at Bannockburn. Equally, who could grow up to be anything but a class war socialist on reading Burns’ clarion call to egalitarianism in A Man’s A Man For A’ That”. (23) Christie was arrested in Madrid in August 1964, aged eighteen, and charged with being part of a plot to blow up Franco at the Santiago Bernabéu Stadium during the final of the Generalissimo’s Cup. The penalty, had it been carried out, was death by garrotte, which involved slow strangulation by an iron collar, topped off by a bolt through the back of the neck. But not all readers of Burns grow up to be class war socialists.
Leading Burns scholar Murray Pittock takes a dim view of the communist version of Burns: “The intensity of sentiment and dislike of repression evident to many in Burns’s poetry did not prevent him from being used as an instrument of Communist repression, however, in a Russia familiar with Burns translations since 1800. The Communist Party office in Scotland issued Burns Belongs to the People in 1930, and it is perhaps a moot point whether this text was influential on the rapid development of the poet’s popularity in the Soviet Union, where Samuel Marshak’s translations (published 353 times between 1938 and 2006) became dominant. They portrayed a poet who was indeed the voice of the people, and was indeed a political poet: but his voice was that of the proletariat devoted to Marxist-Leninist ideology. […] For a poet used as a tool of Soviet ascendancy, the successor states of the USSR and the freed countries of Eastern Europe continue to be home to many published translations of Burns, with sixty-nine appearing in these countries since the fall of Communism, despite the official Russian view apparently remaining that Burns was a ‘socialist poet.’ Burns’s association with Stalinist propaganda has not damaged his standing as a writer linked with the national independence of former Communist bloc countries, a collection of his poetry in translation being published early in the days of in an independent Croatia.” (24)
This triumphalist tone is not merely the dying embers of Cold War rhetoric. In the 1930s, many Catholics in Scotland – and in Ireland – supported Franco, with fascism viewed as preferable to communism by the Catholic church, pulpit and press. Calling something “Soviet” or “Stalinist” may be a convenient shorthand, even for an academic, but those terms are no more straightforward than, say, “Scottish”, which covers a multitude of sins and sinners, or “Burnsian”, which might embrace the most egalitarian republican and the most conservative nationalist, or even “Catholic”, which can embrace imperial monarchists and socialist republicans. The complexity of taking sides on the Spanish Civil War as a catholic can be captured by the fact that radical Roscommon priest Father Michael O’Flanagan was a vigorous opponent of fascism, while Brendan Kielty from Belfast, a veteran of the Irish Republican movement, signed up with the Blueshirts and went off to fight for Franco, rejoining the IRA on his return. Nothing is black and white when it’s blue and green and red. (25)
Transnational Francoism was certainly a notable phenomenon, with the Friends of National Spain (FNS) formed in London in October 1937, quickly followed by a matching outfit north of the border: “Less than six months after the FNS was officially established in England, a Scottish branch was inaugurated in Glasgow under the gaze of General Franco’s portrait. An Edinburgh branch followed in June 1938. Echoing the objects of the London-based FNS, the Scottish branch explained that the society aimed at spreading the ‘true facts about the present conflict in Spain and thereby defend the Christian religion against the attack of the anti-God campaign’”. (26) Despite the best efforts of Scottish socialists like John Wheatley in the 1920s to characterise Catholicism as “the church of the proletariat”, the hierarchy in Scotland and in Ireland consistently came out against the radical left. (27) Tom Gallagher noted that “By the end of the 1920s, it was becoming apparent that in Scotland the new atheistic and marxist CPGB was gaining many of its recruits from among Catholic workers”. Gallagher, ‘Scottish Catholics and the British Left, 1918-1939’, 34. Gallagher says of the fight against Franco: “While it lasted, the Spanish civil war had a destructive effect on the fabric of politics in the west of Scotland. It divided Catholic families in a city which gave more recruits to the pro-republican International Brigade than any other in these islands. More importantly it produced disillusionment with the aims of socialism, the triumph of authoritarianism in 1939 being only the latest in a series of body-blows which had included the 1926 general strike and Macdonald’s betrayal of the 1931 Labour government. But a severance of the relationship between Catholic voters and the Labour party was avoided after 1936 because those disaffected with the left over Spain had nowhere else to go”. (28) The British Catholic press – The Catholic Herald, The Month, The Tablet, The Universe – had come out in support of Franco, but that did not stop Scottish catholic socialists, republicans, and internationalists from going to fight the fascism that the leaders of their faith were backing. (29)
Douglas Woodruff, editor of The Tablet, declared on 11th February 1939 that “no sane and instructed man would hesitate to prefer Fascism to Communism […] and it is the plain duty of the Catholics, for the sanity of their fellow-countrymen, not to join or encourage this antiFascist crusade”. In Britain as a whole it’s been claimed that fascism drew its strongest support from Catholics, reflected in membership of the Blackshirts: “The closest to a concrete estimate of the number of Catholics in the movement comes from a Blackshirt article in May 1935 which claims that they made up 12 per cent of the leadership”. (30) And then there were the Blueshirts. Christy Moore’s great song about the International Brigades nails beautifully the effects of reactionary right-wing religious indoctrination: “Many Irishmen heard the call of Franco/ Joined Hitler and Mussolini too/ Propaganda from the pulpit and newspapers/ Helped O’Duffy to enlist his crew/ The word came from Maynooth: ‘Support the Fascists.’/ The men of cloth failed yet again/ When the bishops blessed the blueshirts in Dun Laoghaire/ As they sailed beneath the swastika to Spain.”
In Scotland, Willie Gallacher, Communist MP for West Fife, was heckled at meetings in his constituencies by Catholic supporters of Franco. (31) A very vocal Scottish Friends of National Spain organisation held a banquet at the Grosvenor Restaurant in Glasgow on 2 February 1939 to celebrate the fall of Barcelona to Franco. Charles Sarolea, Belgian-born Professor of French at the University of Edinburgh, and voluble anti-Communist was guest of honour. (32) Elsewhere, International Brigader and ILP member David Murray warned that with Franco’s victory: “Spain would be pushed back to the time of Columbus […] Spain under clerical-fascist domination […] will be a mass cemetery”. (33) But despite the propaganda from the pulpit very many working-class radicals brought up in the faith defied the church to fight for the Spanish Republic. International Brigaders from Ireland and Scots from Irish-Catholic backgrounds fought for the British Battalion of the XVth International Brigade. My father, James Maley, was among them, and although I was brought up outside of the church he always said to me when I told him everyone assumed I was a Catholic: “Just let them stew in their own juices”.
Personally, I prefer the image of a radical Burns as envisaged by Robert Crawford, who writes of Burns with a poet’s sensitivity as well as with a mind open to European and wider democratic movements: “We should see Burns as part of the mind of Europe not least for his incipient republicanism”. (34) According to Crawford, “Being bardic meant being bolshie”, and Burns produced work with “a bolshie political edge”. (35) Crawford insists on seeing Burns as a poet of radicalism and resistance: “Burns’s glory as a political poet lies in a democratic impulse subtly inflected in ways that are republican and Scottish nationalist. This makes him awkward for a British establishment which has constantly tried to tame him”. (36) The kind of poet Crawford imagines Burns to be is quite in keeping with the impact he had on Scottish socialists in the 1930s and after: “Relishing a sense of his rebellious past, Burns’s conversation moved readily from Jacobite convictions to Jacobin, republican ones”. (37) For Burns, “the Scottish muses were all Jacobites”, and as Crawford says, “Jacobites were generally opposed to the 1707 political Union between Scotland and England”. Crawford, The Bard, 26. Crawford remarks that “It takes a tin ear and narrow mind to miss the sense of conviction and protested radical idealism in” Burns’ poetry. (38) But tin ears and tinfoil hats abound in Burns studies.
LAST SUPPER BEFORE JARAMA
Alec Piper spoke of the entertainment the International Brigades enjoyed at Madrigueras on the eve of Jarama: “The Popular Front authorities of the village have provided every facility for our training and recreation; they have lent the cinema for the concerts which we put on for our members. These are always very successful and have revealed a lot of talent among the lads, such as the Scottish comrades who celebrated their Hogmanay and Burns nights with traditional parties”. (39) The Burns Supper at the “Republican Café” in Madrigueras had songs and speeches, including a recitation of “A Man’s a Man for a’ That” by Peter Kerrigan: “The greatest social evening ever celebrated by the volunteers in Madrigueras was on January 25th, the night dedicated by all Scotsmen to Robert Burns, the people’s poet […] But next day nearly everyone had dysentery, and the English and Irish blamed it on to Burns”. (40) The supper may have been an issue, or maybe it was the drink that took its toll. The local vino was a new beverage to many of the men, and my father, James Maley, who was at Madrigueras at the time and was a teetotaller recalled having to carry some comrades wounded by the wine.
James Hopkins, in his excellent study of the Spanish Civil War, Into the Heart of the Fire (1998), remarks on the significance of the Burns Supper before the Battle of Jarama that would prove to be a last supper for many of the men who celebrated the bard that evening: “The large number of Scottish volunteers in the battalion ensured that the anniversary of Robert Burns’ birthday on January 25, 1937, would be celebrated with special exuberance, and with as much wine as could be obtained. […] Typically, there is a special meal, a Burns Supper, consisting of haggis, turnips, and potatoes. In the absence of these ingredients, the boisterous volunteers ate sardines with their bayonets. On this night, which would be the last such celebration for many Scots in the battalion, Peter Kerrigan remembered that Burns’ ‘lovely haunting love songs and folk ballads were sung. We even permitted the English, Welsh, and Irish to make their contributions, and right well they did’. Several Scottish brigaders actually wore kilts, much to the consternation of the Spaniards. The gravest difficulty arose, however, when no copies of Burns’ poems could be found. Nevertheless, some of the men remembered the words to his poems. And none of the more than 100 Scots celebrating the evening would have forgotten Burns’ poem, ‘A Man’s a Man for A’ That.’ Certainly not on this night […] To quote from and speak on Robert Burns was much more than an evening of cultural reminiscence. Burns was the poet laureate of Scotland’s poor, as well as any other reader who believed in the artificiality of Britain’s class distinctions and could agree with Burns that, ultimately, ‘rank is but the guinea’s stamp.’ Consequently, no one had to be prompted to emphasize the political importance of Burns to the volunteers. Victor Kiernan points out that in contrast to the English workers many volunteers from Scotland possessed an instinctive rather than an intellectual internationalism, attributing it to Scotland’s historically greater openness to continental influences and interests. But the Burns’ Night celebrated in Spain suggests that their poet spoke to his fellow countrymen of a world that was one because all men were brothers, a concept that was equally powerful to militants on both sides of the Tweed.” (41)
This claim for the comradeship and internationalism invoked by Burns is borne out by the correspondence of one English brigader: “David Crook wrote to friends in England of this January night in 1937. There were ‘excellent talks’ on Burns ‘as a poet of the poverty-stricken Scottish peasantry.’ Crook said that his comrades spoke powerfully on Burns’ ‘revolutionary equalitarianism, his support of the French Revolution and international outlook.’ With an astonished pleasure as he remembered those gathered for the occasion, Crook wrote, ‘All are honest to God British proletarian types.’ When Crook said, ‘Never has there been such a Burns night’, surely he was correct. Facing battle, could British soldiers previously assembled from different classes, ethnic backgrounds, and ways of life agree: ‘That man to man, the warld o’er / Shall brithers be for a’ that’? In less than three weeks many of those who attended this most extraordinary of Burns’ Nights would be lying dead or wounded a few miles away on their first and final battlefield.” (42) The influence of Robert Burns was felt in a whole Scottish radical tradition, one that saw the fight for the Spanish Republic as a key moment in the history of the Left. (43)
BURNS IN SPANISH
In an important article on Spanish translations of Burns, or their relative absence com pared to other writers, even allowing for censorship under Franco, Andrew Monnickendam remarks: “There are four […] reasons that might explain Burns’s low profile. First, and most obviously, is the problem of language. This initially seems the most convincing and material argument of all. Spanish readers found him difficult to read in the original. In addition, the lack of any translation until 1940, with the exception of individual poems, meant that Burns was inaccessible. […] However, if language was a barrier, there were translations in French. […] So Burns was available both in original editions and translations. Second is the question of periodization. Burns is applauded for his contribution to Romanticism, yet this is not necessarily commendable. […] Burns’s and Blake’s fates shows that Spanish culture, perhaps more than most, depends heavily on categorization, as no author, composer or artist, it would seem, can exist outside a period or movement. So, however great Burns is, he is always going to be located at the margins; or, to be able to fit in somewhere, the new category of pre-Romanticism has to be concocted. […] Third is the matter of canonicity. [The] Romantic, nineteenth-century canon is the standard one of English poetry. It is completely masculine and deeply conservative […] Within this intellectual framework, Burns has no place. Finally, there is the counterproductive influence of Scott. Burns would seem to be an ideal model for Spanish romanticism: both for national romanticism – Spain as a whole — or for its diverse autonomous regions. There are many reasons for this, but I will restrict myself to two, both related to language. With an emerging interest and respect for cultural difference, Burns would seem to fit the bill better than Scott. In addition, within Spain, there is also a tradition of collecting and publishing songs and ballads, or imitating them […] Although Burns would seem to be an equally relevant reference, Scott’s fame makes him unrivalled; there seems to be no room for any other Scot.” (44)
Sergi Mainer has written of the challenges facing those who sought to publish Burns in Spanish in Franco’s Spain, beginning with the pioneering translation of 1940: “Even more than other writers from the British Isles, Burns’s political, religious and personal views were the antithesis of Spain’s reinvention of itself as an authoritarian Catholic dictatorship. Politically, Burns was a fervent admirer of the American Revolution, an early sympathizer with the French Revolution and a later supporter of Republicanism […] Added to this, his language of expression, Scots, and culture were at odds with Franco’s unifying conception of the nation, in which minority cultures and languages were to be suppressed. Finally, Burns was a Calvinist who hated religious bigotry whereas the Spanish state defined itself as Catholic and acted according to a very conservative, narrow understanding of religion.” (45)
Mainer argues that the Spanish translation was an intervention into history, reframing Burns as a poet of minority voices and marginalised people: “In the 1940s publication of his poems by Yunque, Robert Burns is transculturalized and assimilated into the aftermath of the Civil War. His universal themes of freedom, human suffering and vindication of one’s culture are temporally and spatially recontextualized, potentially giving a voice to social, political and cultural minorities. In 1940 Spain, when Franco’s repression of dissident ideologies was at its peak, Burns’s poems challenge the official discourse by putting forward an alternative vision of war. Instead of celebrating the Nationalists’ victory and heroism, it contemplates a much more tragic perspective in which the horrors of war and the consequences of exile are expounded”. (46)
SECOND DEGREE BURNS, SIX DEGREES OF SEPARATION, MERRY MUSES & HAIL MALEYS
I began with Robert Burns, and I’ll end with another Burns, two in fact, a journalist and author by the name of Jimmy Burns, and his father, Tom Burns, a leading Catholic publisher and later editor of The Tablet (1967-82), who served the British government in Spain during World War Two. Jimmy is the author of splendid book entitled La Roja: A Journey Through Spanish Football. Like all the best books about football, La Roja offers a rich cultural and political history. Burns discusses the Spanish Civil War and the vicious nature of the fascist dictator who emerged victorious: “Franco was brutal on and off the pitch”. Born in Madrid in 1953, Jimmy Burns grew up with football and Franco: “During Franco’s dictatorship between 1939 and 1975, football was a pastime that was actively encouraged by the State – that is as long as it was not exploited by the enemy. And the enemy ranged from communists, Freemasons and freethinkers to Catalan and Basque nationalists, most of them decent human beings whose clubs were rooted in local cultural identities. It gave Spanish football, when I was growing up, its political edge, it separated us football lovers into democrats and fascists”. (47)
Jimmy Burns has a close connection to Franco. His father, Thomas Ferrier Burns (1906-1995), was educated at Stonyhurst College, a Jesuit boarding school in Clitheroe, Lancashire in the 1920s. One of Tom’s classmates was Pablo Merry Del Val, later Chief Liaison Officer for the foreign press under Franco during the Spanish Civil War, and later still Cultural Relations Consul of the Spanish Embassy in Washington, tasked with selling Franco to the Americans after the war, and afterwards Spanish ambassador to the United States. (48) The Merry del Vals were a fascinating family. The man who interrogated James Maley was one of the sons of Alfonso Merry Del Val, the former Spanish ambassador to Britain. Pablo Merry Del Val, educated at Stonyhurst College, a Jesuit boarding school in Clitheroe, Lancashire, was part of a prominent lineage of clerics and diplomats of Irish descent – ‘Wild Geese’ from Waterford. His brother Alfonso, also educated at Stonyhurst, was Franco’s unofficial representative in England at the time. Jimmy Burns wrote a memoir of his father. (49) Jimmy recounts the visit of Tom Burns to Guernica in the company of his former classmate: “Franco’s chief liaison officer with the foreign press, Merry del Val, offered Burns a tour of Gernika as part of the extended propaganda battle fought in print and on the wireless following the Basque town’s bombing. The two had been contemporaries at Stonyhurst, when Del Val’s father was Spanish ambassador in London. Del Val appears to have harboured few doubts that Burns, by now a director of the rabidly pro-Franco Tablet, would be receptive to whatever propaganda was laid before him”. Jimmy Burns quotes his father’s own words: “Pablo (Merry del Val) took us to Gernika and patiently explained that the extensive destruction of the main streets had been the work of the retreating Reds. Dynamite, not bombs of the German Condor Legion, was responsible”. The ploy didn’t work. Tom Burns was smart enough to see through the claims. The child of a Scottish businessman, David Burns, and Clara, a Chilean mother of English and Basque descent, he was an influential publisher who mentored great writers like Graham Greene. Tom’s Scottish Uncle Willie was a poor man and a poet. (50)
I have a sense of six degrees of separation with Tom Burns, and not just because we were both the seventh of nine children. You see, Tom Burns was a classmate – in every sense – of the man who interrogated my father at the Model Prison in Salamanca in April 1937. When Pablo Merry Del Val asked my father what religion he was, James Maley answered: “I’m a Catholic”, and recited a couple of Hail Marys, or as he put it in an interview, “Hail Maleys”: “I just said Catholic. I’m a Catholic. So he asked me to say […] one or two of the Hail Maleys and that you, I done that. I could say them. So that satisfied him.” Pressed on his attitude to religion in a later interview with Conrad Wood of the Imperial War Museum, my father said: “I wasn’t opposed to the Catholic church, well I mean I never mentioned religion, if people want to go, go, but I mean […] see when I was at school I realised that I was asked to become a priest a lot of times at school but I realised to become a priest well it wasn’t an easy job to become or do, I mean if you believed in religion then it was something you’d have to… be different from other people. I mean you’d have to be, live different from the ordinary person, whereas at the present time if I stood at the corner, I realised if I stood at the corner and watched people passing by, even where I lived I couldn’t say that’s a Catholic, that’s a Protestant. I mean there was nothing to define them, they all just lived the same. But to be a priest you’d have to live different. And that’s something, well, I wasn’t prepared to do.”
Like Tom Burns, James Maley was a cradle catholic, and in his working life he was often on the receiving end of anti-Catholic, anti-communist, and anti-Irish sentiment. Like Robert Burns, James Maley was an internationalist who spoke up for the downtrodden and dispossessed. My father went to Spain to fight for a socialist republic, not an imperial monarchy. Sadly, neither Spain nor Britain went down the road of socialism in his lifetime, but he never stopped believing that the cause of the Left was right road, and that he was in the right company: No. 2 Machine Gun Company, to be precise. As Dolores Ibárruri, “La Pasionaria”, said on the departure of the International Brigades from Spain: “Communists, Socialists, Anarchists, Republicans – men of different colours, differing ideology, antagonistic religions – yet all profoundly loving liberty and justice, they came and offered themselves to us unconditionally.”
No Pasaran!
References
(1) See José E. Alvarez, The Betrothed of Death: The Spanish Foreign Legion During the Rif Rebellion, 1920-1927 (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Publishing, 2001). See also See Don Alfonso Merry del Val, ‘The Spanish Zones in Morocco’, The Geographical Journal 55, 5 (1920): 329-349; & 55, 6 (1920): 409-419, and Arthur Hardinge and Alfonso Merry del Val, ‘The Spanish Zones in Morocco: Discussion’, The Geographical Journal 55, 6 (1920): 419-422.
(2) Paul Preston, ‘The Answer Lies in the Sewers: Captain Aguilera and the Mentality of the Francoist Officer Corps’, Science and Society 68, 3 (2004): 277-312, at 281.
(3) See Norman J. W. Goda, ‘The Riddle of the Rock: A Reassessment of German Motives for the Capture of Gibraltar in the Second World War’, Journal of Contemporary History 28, 2 (1993): 297-314; Norman W. J. Goda, ‘Franco’s Bid for Empire: Spain, Germany, and the Western Mediterranean in World War II’, Mediterranean Historical Review 13, 1-2 (1998): 168-194.
(4) See Nick Sharman, ‘The Second World War: Revival and Demise of Britain’s Informal Empire in Spain’, in Britain’s Informal Empire in Spain, 1830-1950: Free Trade, Protectionism and Military Power (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), 121-145. For a more recent view, see Maria Mut Bosque, ‘Brexit and the Commonwealth: New Challenges for Gibraltar’, The Round Table: The Commonwealth Journal of International Affairs 106, 4 (2017): 483-485. For the background see George Hills, Rock of Contention: A History of Gibraltar (London: Hale, 1974). See also Ian Jack, ‘Gibraltar’, Granta 25 (1988): 13-85. British Parliamentary Papers for 1856 include a reference to a “Report on the past and present state of Her Majesty’s colonial possessions at Gibraltar” and information on “1. State of the Colony; 2. Convict Establishment; 3. Trade and Shipping”. There is useful information too on the “Quantities of foreign and colonial merchandise exported to Gibraltar, 1851-1855”. For an excellent Scottish dramatic depiction of growing up in Gibraltar at the time of the Malvinas crisis see Gregory Burke, The Straits (London: Faber and Faber, 2003).
(5) See Marta García Cabrera, ‘British Geographic Intelligence during the Second World War: A Case Study of the Canary Islands’, Intelligence and National Security (2021): DOI: 10.1080/02684527.2021.2002208. See also Teresa Ruel, ‘Mapping the Cases: The Azores, Madeira and the Canary Islands’, in Political Alternation in the Azores, Madeira and the Canary Islands (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), 35-67. For a deeper historical perspective, see Mohamed Adhikari, ‘Raiders, Slavers, Conquistadors, Settlers: Civilian-driven Violence in the Extermination of Aboriginal Canary Islanders’, in Mohamed Adhikari (ed.), Civilian-Driven Violence and the Genocide of Indigenous Peoples in Settler Societies (London: Routledge, 2019), 31-60.
(6) Meeting of the British Cabinet held at 11am on Wednesday 16th December 1936, Cabinet 75 (36), 241.
(7) John Stone, ‘The Earliest Spanish Dickens? The 1844 Alborada Translation of Pickwick’s Madman’s Manuscript’, Dickens Quarterly 38, 2 (2021): 140-162, at 142. For connections between the book trade and the slave trade see Sean D. Moore, Slavery and the Making of Early American Libraries: British Literature, Political Thought, and the Transatlantic Book Trade, 1731-1814 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019).
(8) Nigel Leask, ‘Robert Burns and Latin America’, in Murray Pittock (ed.), Robert Burns in Global Culture (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2011), 149-164, at 134.
(9) Charles E. Ronan, ‘Observations on the Word Gringo’, Arizona and the West 6, 1 (1964): 23-29, at 23-4. For the original Spanish article, see Charles E. Ronan, ¿Qué significa gringo?, Historia Mexicana 8, 4 (1959): 549- 556.
(10) Ronan, ‘Observations on the Word Gringo’, 25.
(11) Fanny Chambers Gooch, Face to Face with the Mexicans: The Domestic Life, Educational, Social, and Business Ways Statesmanship and Literature, Legendary and General History of the Mexican People, As Seen and Studied by an American Woman During Seven Years of Intercourse With Them (London: Sampson Low & Co, 1890), 384-5. On Prieto as historian as well as popular poet see Malcolm D. McLean, ‘Guillermo Prieto (1818-1897), a Forgotten Historian of Mexico’, The Americas 10, 1 (1953): 79-88.
(12) Christopher Maurer, ‘Lorca, From Country to City: Three Versions of Poet in New York’, in Regina Galasso and Evelyn Scaramella (eds.), Avenues of Translation: The City in Iberian and Latin American Writing (Ithaca, NY: Bucknell University Press, 2019), 32-51, n.27, citing Philip Cummings, trans., Lorca: Songs, ed, Daniel Eisenberg (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1976), 171.
(13) Maurer, ‘Lorca, From Country to City’, n.27, citing Roy Campbell, Lorca: An Appreciation of His Poetry (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1952), 95. Campbell had apparently planned to write a book on Burns but it was never published. See Peter Alexander, review of Roy Campbell by John Povey, Research in African Literatures 9, 1 (1978): 129-134, at 134.
(14) Carl W. Cobb, Lorca’s Romancero Gitano: A Ballad Translation and Critical Study (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1983), 7.
(15) Cobb, Lorca’s Romancero Gitano, 70.
(16) Paul Lafargue, ‘Reminiscences of Marx’ (September 1890), cited in Lee Baxandall and Stefan Morawski (eds.), Karl Marx, Frederick Engels on Literature and Art: A Selection of Writings (St Louis/Milwaukee: Telos Press, 1974), 152.
(17) Nataliia Rudnytska, ‘Translation and the Formation of the Soviet Canon of World Literature’, in Christopher Rundle, Anne Lange and Daniele Monticelli (eds.), Translation Under Communism (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), 39-71, at 39-40, and 65 n1, citing Aleksandr Tvardovskii, ‘Robert Berns v perevodakh S. Marshaka’, Novyi Mir 4 (1951): 225-229, at 227.
(18) See Paul Malgrati, ‘MacDiarmid’s Burns: The Political Context, 1917-1928’, Scottish Literary Review 11, 1 (2019): 47-66. For a different perspective see Antony Howe, ‘Red History Wars? Communist Propaganda and the Manipulation of Celtic History in the Thirties’, Journal of the Sydney Society for Scottish History 13 (2010): 68-93.
(19) Burns Belongs to the People (Glasgow: Scottish Office of Communist Party, 1930), 5. University of Glasgow Library, Special Collections Broady A83. I am grateful to my colleague Dr Bob MacLean for helping me to access this work. For a later example of the Scottish Communist Party line on Burns see John Ross Campbell, Robert Burns the Democrat (London: Communist Party of Britain, 1991; first published by the Scottish Committee of the Communist Party in 1945).
(20) Burns Belongs to the People, 21.
(21) Burns Belongs to the People, 23.
(22) Burns Belongs to the People, 24.
(23) Stuart Christie, My Granny Made Me an Anarchist (Hastings, East Sussex: Christie Books, 2002), 85.
(24) Murray Pittock, “‘A Long Farewell to All My Greatness”: The History of the Reputation of Robert Burns’, in Murray Pittock (ed.), Robert Burns in Global Culture (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2011), 25-46, at 38.
(25) See J. Bowyer Bell, ‘Ireland and the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939’, Studia Hibernica 9 (1969): 137-163, at 148, n.27. I discuss Catholic support for fascism in ‘They Stood Beside the Spanish People’, The Irish Voice 18 (January 2015), 8-9. For an early discussion of Scottish Catholic support for fascism, see John McGovern, Why Bishops Back Franco: Report of Visit of Investigation to Spain (London: Independent Labour Party, 1936). For Irish responses see M. Le S. Kitchin and Fulton J. Sheen, ‘Storm over Communism’, The Irish Monthly 65, 766 (1937): 219-232, and Hispanista, ‘Should Irish Labour Favour Franco?’, The Irish Monthly 65, 767 (1937): 310-319. For an interesting perspective on one particular institution see Regina Whelan Richardson, ‘The Irish in Asturias: The Footprint of the Irish College, Salamanca, 1913-1950’, Archivium Hibernicum 65, (2012): 273-290. For modern criticism see David Convery, ‘Ireland and the Fall of the Second Republic in Spain’, Bulletin of Spanish Studies 89, 7-8 (2012): 215-225; Fearghal McGarry, ‘Irish Newspapers and the Spanish Civil War’, Irish Historical Studies 33, 129 (2002): 68-90; Fearghal McGarry, Eoin O’Duffy: A Self-Made Hero (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); and John Newsinger, ‘Blackshirts, Blueshirts, and the Spanish Civil War’, The Historical Journal 44, 3 (2001): 825-844. See more recently John Rodden and John Rossi, ‘Ireland’s Quixotic Cruzada: The Irish and the Spanish Civil War’, Society 58 (2021): 95-103.
(26) Bàrbara Molas, ‘Transnational Francoism: The British and the Canadian Friends of National Spain (1930s–1950s)’, Contemporary British History 35, 2 (2021): 165-186, at 168-69. If communism gave the catholic Church a fright, at least in Europe, then fascism gave it a fillip and a focus.
(27) Cited in Tom Gallagher, ‘Scottish Catholics and the British Left, 1918-1939’, The Innes Review 34, 1 (1983): 17-42, at 29. See also W. W. Knox, ‘Religion and the Scottish Labour Movement c.1900-39’, Journal of Contemporary History 23, 4 (1988): 609-630.
(28) Gallagher, ‘Scottish Catholics and the British Left, 1918-1939’, The Innes Review 34, 1 (1983): 17-42, at 37.
(29) See Tom Villis, British Catholics and Fascism: Religious Identity and Political Extremism Between the Wars (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 41-76. For an example of the kind of propaganda that Franco’s spokespersons had a platform for in England see Alfonso Merry del Val, The Conflict in Spain: Communistic Misstatements Refuted (London: Catholic Truth Society, 1937).
(30) Villis, British Catholics and Fascism, 27.
(31) Daniel Gray, Homage to Caledonia: Scotland and the Spanish Civil War (Edinburgh: Luath Press, 2008), 132.
(32) Gray, Homage to Caledonia, 139.
(33) Cited in Gray, Homage to Caledonia, 152.
(34) Robert Crawford, ‘Robert Burns and the Mind of Europe’, in Murray Pittock (ed.), Robert Burns in Global Culture (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2011), 47-62, at 53.
(35) Robert Crawford, The Bard: Robert Burns, A Biography (London: Random House, 2011; first published by Jonathan Cape, 2009), 155, 354.
(36) Crawford, The Bard, 406.
(37) Crawford, The Bard, 396.
(38) Crawford, The Bard, 383.
(39) Frank Graham, The Battle of Jarama 1937: The Story of the British Battalion of the International Brigade’s Baptism of Fire in the Spanish War (Newcastle: Howe Brothers Ltd, 1987), 8.
(40) William Rust, Britons in Spain: The History of the British Battalion of the XVth International Brigade (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1939), 35-6.
(41) James K. Hopkins, Into the Heart of the Fire: The British in the Spanish Civil War (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 183-4, citing Victor Kiernan, ‘Labour and the War in Spain’, Scottish Labour History Society Journal 11 (1977): 4-16, at 10.
(42) Hopkins, Into the Heart of the Fire, 184.
(43) Tom Britton, ‘Faur distant: Burns, MacColl & the Spanish Civil War’, https://singout.org/burns-maccoll-spanish-civil-war/, accessed 22 January 2022.
(44) Andrew Monnickendam, ‘Robert Burns and Spanish Letters’, in Murray Pittock (ed.), The Reception of Robert Burns in Europe (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014), 143-153, at 152-3.
(45) Sergi Mainer, ‘Translation and Censorship: Robert Burns in Post-Civil War Spain’, Translation Studies 4, 1 (2011): 72-86, at 75. See Isabel Abelló and Tomás Lamarca, Robert Burns: Poesía (Barcelona: Editorial Yunque, 1940).
(46) Mainer, ‘Translation and Censorship’, 84.
(47) Jimmy Burns, La Roja: A Journey Through Spanish Football (London: Simon & Schuster, 2012), 1.
(48) See Neal M. Rosendorf, Franco Sells Spain to America: Hollywood, Tourism and Public Relations as Postwar Spanish Soft Power (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 14.
(49) Jimmy Burns, Papa Spy: A True Story of Love, Wartime Espionage in Madrid, and the Treachery of the Cambridge Spies (London: Bloomsbury, 2011).
(50) Tom Burns, The Use of Memory: Publishing and Further Pursuits (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 1993), 2.
“Even Dickens […] cannot draw the dreams of the […] Glasgow boy beyond the purlieus of his own city”. (1)
This is a ghost story, a story of hard times. It’s a tale of two cities, one inhabited by the privileged, another by the poor. It’s an old story that touches on industrialization, urbanization, the French Revolution, prisons, slavery, literature, capital punishment, public executions, theatre, medicine, the Glasgow Athenæum, and the University of Glasgow. This is not so much a blog as a series of sketches, character sketches and scene-setting, work-in-progress for a future drama. It’s a long read for a winter’s night, but for anyone interested in Possilpark, Glasgow, or Charles Dickens who has a year to spare there will be something here to ponder.
Some time in the late 1960s when I was around eight or nine my mother gave me her adult ticket for Possilpark Library and asked me to get her Dombey and Son, by Charles Dickens. I was fascinated by the title. It sounded like mother and son. It made me think of Steptoe and Son, my favourite thing on the telly at the time, and of “Matthew and Son”, a song by Cat Stevens I’d heard on the radio. Years later I found out that Dickens had visited my housing estate in the north of Glasgow in December 1847, when it was the site of a mansion house a couple of hundred yards from the public library from which I borrowed Dombey and Son. I shouldn’t have been surprised. Possil was always a bit Dickensian. You were more likely to meet Bill Sikes than Eric Sykes.
Walking home with that book in my hands, I wondered what it was about. “Dealings with the firm of Dombey and Son, wholesale, retail and for exportation” didn’t sound like much fun. I didn’t know that Dombey and Son was the book that Dickens had been working on at the time of his visit to Possil, or that the mansion he had stayed in had given its name to Mansion Street, where Granny Watt, my mother’s mother lived, a street I’d passed a hundred times without thinking about its name. Nor did I know that Possil House was a House of Books as well as a House of Pain, a house with an extensive library that was owned by a man whose family made their money from slavery and the sugar trade, or that its occupant, Dickens’s host, was also a leading advocate of slavery, a man who supported slavery in the West Indies and went on to back the Confederacy in the American Civil War. This was all in the future, as well as far in the past.
Dombey and Son is a book about many things, full of rich pickings like all Dickens’s books, especially in terms of class and education, two issues that would preoccupy me in later life, when I would encounter more than a few patronising characters like Mr Dombey:
“‘I am far from being friendly,’ pursued Mr. Dombey, ‘to what is called by persons of levelling sentiments, general education. But it is necessary that the inferior classes should continue to be taught to know their position, and to conduct themselves properly. So far I approve of schools. Having the power of nominating a child on the foundation of an ancient establishment, called (from a worshipful company) the Charitable Grinders; where not only is a wholesome education bestowed upon the scholars, but where a dress and badge is likewise provided for them; I have […] nominated your eldest son to an existing vacancy; and he has this day, I am informed, assumed the habit. The number of her son, I believe,’ said Mr. Dombey, turning to his sister and speaking of the child as if he were a hackney-coach, ‘is one hundred and forty-seven’”. (2)
Possil House was the address of Sir Archibald Alison (1792-1867), Sheriff of Lanarkshire and historian of the French Revolution. Charles Dickens visited Possil House and stayed there for two days during a trip to Glasgow to preside over the opening of a new Workingmens’ College, the Glasgow Athenæum, on Tuesday 28 December 1847. Dickens had visited Scotland before, but his visit in 1847 would be his first public appearance as a famous writer. (3) Dickens was by this time the celebrated author of Pickwick Papers (1837), Oliver Twist (1838), Nicholas Nickleby (1839), and A Christmas Carol (1843). He had been in Glasgow before, and would be back again, both as a novelist giving public readings, and as an amateur playing his part in a Shakespeare play. In visiting Possil House, the country estate on which the housing scheme was later built, Dickens was a guest of Sheriff Alison, a notable expert on penal affairs, an outspoken advocate of slavery, a celebrated historian of the French Revolution, a champion of free trade, and later Lord Rector of the University of Glasgow (1850-52), after which he was made a Baronet. (4) Alison and Dickens had overlapping interests even if they disagreed on some fundamentals. Dickens had emerged as a writer under the pseudonym “Boz”, publishing Sketches by Boz in 1836, and using the name again for the serialisation of Pickwick Papers. Boz was not a name that would go down well in the Possil in later years. Alison was author of several works on the criminal justice system in Scotland, including Principles of the Criminal Law of Scotland (1832), and Practice of the Criminal Law of Scotland (1833), so Boz was in safe hands.
The actual owner of Possil House was Colonel Alexander Campbell of Possil, who had purchased the Possil estate in 1808, the year of his father’s death, and enlarged it with the neighbouring property of Keppoch in 1838. Campbell was the eldest son of slaveowner John Campbell, and inherited his father’s sugar estates. (5)
Archibald Alison had moved into the property on 12 February 1835, finding it ‘unoccupied and to let furnished in the middle of winter’. (6) Alison was renting Possil House from Campbell. Alison’s own description of the property in his autobiography suggest that it was a creative hub rich in literary resources:
“Situated in a park of thirty acres studded with noble trees, some of which are elms of huge dimensions two centuries old, it had the advantage of fine gardens and perfect retirement, and was yet at a distance of only three miles from Glasgow. To walk in and out of town daily, was, to a person of my strength and active habits, no more than agreeable and healthful exercise; and ere long I discovered that the hour and a half spent daily in this occupation was most valuable, because it afforded time for solitary thought. The house consisted of an old mansion of a hundred and fifty years’ standing, and a modern addition containing public rooms, forming together a commodious house. The principal drawing-room opened into Mrs Alison’s boudoir, which soon became the habitual home scene, and it again led to the library – the dining-room of the old part of the mansion – which was ere long overloaded with books, and where the last eight volumes of my History were written. The rapid increase of volumes, in consequence of the extensive purchases rendered necessary by the progress of my work, soon outgrew its ample shelves; the bookcases in the boudoir were soon filled; and before many years had elapsed, we found it necessary to fit up, in addition, the entrance-hall as a library, where the books least in immediate request, or most ornamental in their binding, were placed”. (7)
A description of Possil House from the point of view of a passer-by is provided by Hugh MacDonald in his Rambles Round Glasgow (1860):
“After a few minutes’ walk, we find ourselves passing Port-Dundas, ‘the harbour on the hill,’ and emerging to the northward from the urban labyrinth by the Possil Road. The morning air is clear and cool, but the cloudless sky above gives abundant indication that a melting day is before us. A gentle breeze, however, is playing over the spiky fields of wheat, and rustling with a whisper sweeter even than that of lovers on a moonlit bank, among the graceful pannicles of the oat and the silky awns of the bearded bere. The walk from the city in this direction is exceedingly pleasant. About a mile out we pass Possil House, the residence of our respected Sheriff, Sir Archibald Alison, Bart., the learned historian of Europe, and the accomplished essayist and critic of Blackwood. The house is a large and substantial but withal plain edifice, and is surrounded by finely timbered policies of considerable extent. The locality, although within such a short distance of the city, has a quiet and retired aspect, and seems peculiarly adapted for the indulgence of those literary tastes in which the worthy Baronet finds his principal solace during the intervals of professional business.” (8)
Dickens was thirty-five at the time of his visit to Possil, and about to embark on David Copperfield, his most autobiographical book, and his own personal favourite, young Copperfield’s initials mirroring his own. In the 1869 preface to that novel Dickens wrote: “Of all my books, I like this best. It will be easily believed that I am a fond parent to every child of my fancy, and that no one can ever love that family as dearly as I love them. But like many fond parents, I have in my heart of hearts a favourite child. And his name is DAVID COPPERFIELD”.
How did Dickens, an abolitionist, get on with his slavery-supporting host in that book-lined mansion? Did their drawing-room discussions cover prisons, a topic which fascinated Dickens and about which Alison knew a great deal? Did they talk about the French Revolution, Alison’s area of expertise, which Dickens would treat ten years later in one of his finest novels, A Tale of Two Cities (1859)? (9) Thomas Carlyle said of Alison: “He is an Ultra Tory […] and therefore cannot understand the French Revolution”. (10) But reactionaries are often those afforded the time and space to write the version of history most acceptable to the ruling class. Dickens was not the only distinguished guest to be entertained at Possil House in 1847. As Alison recalled in his autobiography: “During the autumn of 1847 we had the honour of receiving at Possil Prince Waldemar of Prussia […] who remained with us two days, which were most delightfully spent”. (11)
For Dickens, Sheriff Archibald Alison offered access to prison visits that would help him with his research. Dickens paid a visit to the notorious North Prison in Duke Street with Sheriff Alison on December 29th, calling it “a truly damnable jail”. Dickens was fascinated by prisons. His life as a writer really began when his father was jailed as a debtor when Charles was twelve. The boy was sent to the workhouse, where he witnessed the tyranny of those in authority and the resourcefulness of the poor. The twin terrors of jail and debt loom large in his diction and fiction. His earliest piece on prisons, A Visit to Newgate (1836), one of the Sketches by Boz, looks inside Newgate Prison, and Dickens went on to explore prison life further in Little Dorrit (1857) and Great Expectations (1861). Dickens was also interested in the ways in which the shadow cast by the prison walls fell across other kinds of confinement and entrapment. In Dombey and Son he describes an apartment in a dilapidated mansion in terms that echo the captivity of inmates:
“The walls and ceilings were gilded and painted; the floors were waxed and polished; crimson drapery hung in festoons from window, door, and mirror; and candelabra, gnarled and intertwisted like the branches of trees, or horns of animals, stuck out from the panels of the wall. But in the day-time, when the lattice blinds (now closely shut) were opened, and the light let in, traces were discernible among this finery, of wear and tear and dust, of sun and damp and smoke, and lengthened intervals of want of use and habitation, when such shows and toys of life seem sensitive like life, and waste as men shut up in prison do.” (12)
Dickens wrote from Edinburgh on 30 December 1847: “We came over this afternoon, leaving Glasgow at one o’clock. Alison lives in style in a handsome country house out of Glasgow, and is a capital fellow, with an agreeable wife, nice little daughter, cheerful niece, all things pleasant in his household.” If Dickens was impressed with Glasgow then he was less taken by the monument to Sir Walter Scott recently erected in Edinburgh: “I am sorry to report the Scott monument a failure. It is like the spire of a Gothic church taken off and stuck in the ground.” (13)
At the time of his visit to Possil, there was, as Dickens put it, “tremendous distress at Glasgow”, which would later lead to riots in March 1848. Dickens wrote: “We lived with very hospitable people in a very splendid house near Glasgow, and were perfectly comfortable”. It’s ironic that Dickens found relief in Possil from a general bleakness of Glasgow. Dickens’s conversations with the proprietor of Possil House would have been particularly timely given the fact that at the time of his visit Dickens was putting the final touches to his seventh novel, Dombey and Son. The novel was being serialized from 1846, and Dickens had just finished the sixteenth number on 23 December 1847. It would be published in book form the following April, with a preface dated 24 March 1848. Dombey and Son was influenced by Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass An American Slave (1845). (14) As an advocate of slavery Alison would go on to back the South in the American Civil War. His support of slavery and his class prejudice make him a particularly unpleasant character:
“Archibald Alison (1792-1867), the lawyer and historian, was yet another enlisted in the West Indian cause. His 1832 introduction to ‘’he West India question’, employed by Gambles as further evidence of conservative historicism, is more striking for its condemnation of anti-slavery campaigning. ‘The great danger which has excited such extraordinary terror through all the West India Islands’, he wrote, ‘is the incessant efforts of Government, and ignorant individuals and societies, to interfere with the management of the slaves, with a view to their immediate or early emancipation.’ West Indian slavery, he argued, was ‘not only not an evil, but a positive advantage’ to the Africans in their civilizational progress. That Alison was pro-slavery in principle is clear.” (15)
Although Dickens’s own racial prejudices have been the subject of critical scrutiny he would have found Alison’s extreme opinions unpalatable. (16) In Dombey and Son, Dickens painted the city of London in its darkest shades, as a hungry beast that consumes its inhabitants: “Swallowed up in one phase or other of its immensity, towards which they seemed impelled by a desperate fascination, they never returned. Food for the hospitals, the churchyards, the prisons, the river, fever, madness, vice and death – they passed on to the monster, roaring in the distance, and were lost”. (17) Although “Dickensian” has become a byword for poverty of a particularly characterful and colourful kind, associated with Victorian kitsch, in his attitudes to class, language and the city, Dickens is the father of modern urban fiction, the literary great-grandfather of writers like James Kelman, who are profoundly influenced by novels such as Hard Times.
If Dickens was about to give birth to a new novel, his wife had a more important conception to manage. Kate Dickens was pregnant on the long journey north to Possil on the incomplete East Coast Line. She miscarried between Edinburgh and Glasgow on 28 December 1847. Fiction and fact combined in a tragic fashion:
“Charles and Kate spent what remained of the night of December 27 at the Royal Hotel in Edinburgh and next day caught a train to Glasgow. Some of the most popular music hall jokes then in circulation suggested that females in an interesting condition might precipitate labour by being jolted about on the railway. Dickens himself had thought the idea funny enough to rough out a sketch featuring Mrs Gamp in a train, on the look out for business. Between Edinburgh and Glasgow it ceased to be funny: poor Kate started a miscarriage. Fortunately, their sympathetic Glasgow hosts lived in a warm and comfortable house and Kate was put to bed and cossetted. Dickens went off to be acclaimed at the Athenæum.” (18)
Kate was later examined by the revered Scottish obstetrician Professor James Simpson, an advocate of pain-free childbirth, who argued for the use of chloroform for mothers, an argument he won when Queen Victoria had her eighth child on 7th April 1853 with the successful use of chloroform.
Reflecting on the adulation that Dickens received at the Glasgow Athenæum while his wife was recovering from a miscarriage in Possil House, Peter Ackroyd writes:
“Dickens went with Catherine to Scotland, the scene of his first public triumph, in order to attend a soirée for the Glasgow Athenæum. They travelled to Edinburgh, and then from Edinburgh to Glasgow; but on this later ride Catherine was suddenly taken ill and suffered a miscarriage on the train. She was put to bed and was compelled to remain there has her husband experienced ‘unbounded hospitality and enthoozymoozy”. He goes on, ‘… I have never been more heartily received anywhere, or enjoyed myself more completely’. Even though his wife was forced to remain in bed after her miscarriage. Is there not in the contrast between these two scenes of domestic life some warning for the future? They returned to London on the third day of the new year, 1848, a date which began the succession of what in his biography [John] Forster called Dickens’s ‘happiest years’. He was now wealthy enough no longer to need to worry about money, he was very famous and very well loved. The enthusiasm at Glasgow had been enormous”. (19)
Given the reason for his wife being unable to attend the opening of the Athenæum, Dickens’s letter to her sister, his sister-in-law, Georgina Hogarth (‘Georgy’), strikes an odd note, leaving aside the fact that Dickens liked to refer to himself in the third person as “the inimitable”:
“The meeting was the most stupendous thing as to numbers, and the most beautiful as to colours and decorations I ever saw. The inimitable did wonders. His grace, elegance, and eloquence, enchanted all beholders. Kate didn’t go! having been taken ill on the railroad between here and Glasgow.
It has been snowing, sleeting, thawing, and freezing, sometimes by turns and sometimes all together, since the night before last. Lord Jeffrey’s household are in town here, not at Craigcrook, and jogging on in a cosy, old-fashioned, comfortable sort of way. We have some idea of going to York on Sunday, passing that night at Alfreds, and coming home on Monday; but of this, Kate will advise you when she writes, which she will do to-morrow, after l shall have seen the list of railway trains. She sends her best love. She is a little poorly still, but nothing to speak of. She is frightfully anxious that her not having been to the great demonstration should be kept a secret. But I say that, like murder, it will out, and that to hope to veil such a tremendous disgrace from the general intelligence is out of the question. In one of the Glasgow papers she is elaborately described. I rather think Miss Alison, who is seventeen, was taken for her, and sat for the portrait.” (20)
One of those present when Dickens addressed the Glasgow audience at the Athenæum was the distinguished Scottish Physician John Brown, who, using Dickens’s nickname ‘Boz’, spoke patronisingly of him in a letter even as he praised his performance:
“‘Boz’ is doing no good – bodily & mentally he is going wrong – getting rotten. – & yet a fine, genial wonderful creature – but after all there is a want of reflectiveness of depth – of seriousness. He is a true cockney – an inspired cockney. A very different man from the one who made the best – the cleverest – the most telling speech at the Glasgow meeting.” (21)
Whatever his own physical or mental health, Dickens liked to keep the company of doctors, and not just to get from them descriptions of medical conditions for his characters:
“Dickens’ interest in social reform, children’s health and education, phrenology, water-cure, and mesmerism/ hypnotism, made him in close acquaintance with doctors and especially the Hospital for Sick Children, Great Ormond Street, London. His own early adulthood had been miserable and impoverished, he was outraged at the conditions of the urban working classes, to which many of his readers were oblivious.” (22)
We get some insight into Dickens’s character and the event at the Athenæum in a later account by James Kilpatrick, published in 1898. Kilpatrick is citing The Life of Charles Dickens (1872) by John Forster, Dickens’s first biographer:
“Sir Archibald was then Sheriff of Lanarkshire, and his love of literature, art, and the drama made him an excellent host when celebrities in these spheres of action visited Glasgow. Miss Helen Faucit , the great actress, had been his frequent guest , and he was now delighted to show his unbounded hospitality to Charles Dickens. At Possil House, indeed, Dickens was banqueted right royally, and at the great social gathering in the City Hall in connection with the opening of the Athenæum, they sat together on the platform. Dickens, who presided, was in excellent spirits. He was delighted with the idea of the Ladies’ Bazaar, which was being got up, under the patronage of the Queen, for the purpose of augmenting the library of the
Athenæum, and the romantic associations which the books would always have with their fair donors suggested to him some sprightly remarks.
‘I can imagine’, he said, ‘how, in fact, from these fanciful associations, some fair Glasgow widow may be taken for the remoter one whom Sir Roger de Coverley could not forget: I can imagine how Sophia’s muff may be seen and loved, but not by Tom Jones, going down the High Street on any winter day; or I can imagine the student finding in every fair form the exact counterpart of the Glasgow Athenæum, and taking into consideration the history of Europe without the consent of Sheriff Alison.’
At this sly reference to the historian, Forster tells us, no one laughed so loudly and heartily as the Sheriff himself, and, as they drove out to Possil House that evening, they chuckled over the incident again and again. It was a pleasant time for Dickens, and the Sheriff’s cordiality and homeliness delighted him.
‘Alison lives in style,’ he wrote to Forster, ‘in a handsome country house out of Glasgow, and is a capital fellow, with an agreeable wife, nice little daughter, cheerful niece, all things pleasant in his household. I went over the prison and lunatic asylum with him yesterday [December 29]; at the Lord Provost’s had gorgeous State lunch with the Town Council; and was entertained at a great dinner-party at night. Unbounded hospitality and enthoozymoozy the order of the day, and I have never been more heartily received anywhere, or enjoyed myself more completely.’” (23)
A history of the Glasgow Athenaeum describes its transformation from the Assembly Rooms with its dances and games into a place of learning for “busy commercial men” that opened its doors to members in its new guise on 13 October 1847:
“Thus the beautiful Assembly Rooms, which had been the scene of many a gay gathering, and which had often been thronged with airy and sylph-like forms, had, by one of those strange freaks of fortune which sometimes occur in the history of places as well as of individuals, been converted into a place of learning and a resort of busy commercial men. The quadrille and the minuet had been banished to make room for the paths of learning. The supper-rooms had become a storehouse of literature, and the card-rooms were transformed into lecture theatres and academic halls.” (24)
A TALE OF TWO SOIRÉES
On Monday 27 December 1847 the Glasgow Herald carried two notices about the next day’s event at the Athenæum with Charles Dickens, which appeared among many other items of news and announcements, from reports on the Glasgow Sugar Trade to an advertisement for “Bear Grease”, a product for the hair that based its authenticity on the fact that the Ojibbeway Indians of Upper Canada had tested it and declared it genuine. The notices about the Dickens event offer fascinating glimpses into civic culture:
“Athenæum Soirée. – The preparations for this interesting literary meeting are proceeding rapidly towards completion. The new gallery was inspected on Saturday last, by Mr. Carrick, Superintendent of Buildings who addressed a letter to the Directors of the Athenæum, of which the following is a copy:-
‘Gentlemen – I beg to certify, that I have this day carefully examined the gallery erected in the City Hall, and I am of opinion that it is perfectly safe for the purposes intended. I am, &c. (Signed) JOHN CARRICK.’
Decorators of various kinds are busily engaged in embellishing the Hall; and the arrangements for the reception of the vast concourse of visitors expected, are judicious and complete. To meet the wishes of several ladies and friends from a distance, the Directors have ordered that the principal departments in the Athenæum should be thrown open from the close of the proceedings in the City Hall until twelve o’clock. The list of speakers will include Charles Dickens, Esq., the Lord Provost of Edinburgh, Sir John Maxwell, Bart., Sir John M’Neill, the Lord Provost of Glasgow, the Lord Rector of the University, George Combe, Esq., Professor Aytoun, Professor Gregory, Sheriff Alison, &c., &c. Mrs. Charles Dickens, accompanied by several distinguished ladies, will also honour the meeting with their presence. We may inform our fair friends that ladies will not be specially required to appear in evening dress; they still be at full liberty to consult their own taste and the weather in the selection of their costume.
Bust of the Lord Provost. – On Saturday last, we had In the pleasure of inspecting the bust of our respected Provost and Representative in Parliament, which has just been placed in the hall of the Athenæum. Mr. Mossman, the sculptor, who modelled this bust, has, we believe, presented the Institution with this portrait of its president. The likeness is exceedingly happy; and, moreover, it is pronounced by good judges to be an excellent work of art. Through the kindness of a friend of the Institution, an original bust of Mr. Dickens, modelled by Mr. Park, is also about to be placed for a short time in the Athenæum. We understand that Mr. Park, and Mr. Ritchie have severally signified their intention of presenting the Institution with an original statue, so as to lay the foundation of a sculpture gallery.”
“ATHENÆUM SOIRÉE
TO-MORROW (TUESDAY) 28TH DECEMBER, 1847.
FINAL ARRANGEMENTS
THE DOORS of the CITY HALL will be OPENED at SIX O’CLOCK precisely. The Entrance to the Platform, Reserved Seats, Sections D and E, and the East Gallery, is from Albion Street. The Entrance to Sections A, B, and C, the New and West Galleries, from Candleriggs Street.
The Chair will be taken by CHARLES DICKENS, Esq., at Seven o’clock.
At the close of the proceedings Refreshments may be purchased in the Side Hall; and in order to allow Ladies and Strangers from a distance to see the ATHENÆUM, the principal Apartments, News Room, Reading Room, Coffee Room and Library, will be opened from 10 until 12 o’clock.
In reply to several inquiries, the Directors beg it to be distinctly understood that Gentlemen will not be admitted on presenting Ladies’ Tickets.
J. W. Hudson, Sec.”
A TALE OF TWO SUICIDES
The tail-end of the year is meant to be a time of celebration and joy, but for the poor it can be a time of debt and desolation. While Dickens was staying at Possil House and putting the finishing touches to his speech for the Athenæum a Christmas story of a different kind was being played out in another part of the city. Two reports under the heading “Suicide” in the Glasgow Herald on Monday 27 December 1847, on the same page as the announcements about Dickens’s visit, tell a tale of city life a far cry from the bright lights of the literary world and the big houses of the well-heeled. First, this account of a Gorbals woman who killed herself on Christmas Eve:
“On the evening of Friday last an elderly woman, named Burns, residing in Chapel Closs, Main Street, Gorbals, committed suicide in her own house, by hanging herself from a nail or spike in the wall, with several hanks of unwound yarn. She was first discovered by her husband, who is a weaver, on his going home at eight o’clock. He found her lying on the floor, upon which she had fallen, the yarn having broken with her weight, with part of the yarn round her neck and the corresponding part remaining on the nail. It was at first supposed that deceased had met with foul play; but, upon investigation, it appeared that the act was a premeditated one, the unfortunate woman having been heard to say that she would ‘make away with herself.’”
And in the same issue of the newspaper.
“On Saturday se’nnight, a young man residing at Howwood, attached to the Ayrshire Railway, committed suicide by drowning himself. He had been married on the Monday previous, and on the Saturday morning following word was brought to the house that something was wrong with the rails. He went out hurriedly, as if to ascertain what was wrong, but never returned. Search was made round the locality, and on Monday the body was found in Cartside Dam.”
A TALE OF TWO SPEECHES
Sheriff Alison recalled the scene when Dickens addressed the Athenæum audience in Glasgow:
“It was held in the City Hall of Glasgow, the largest room in Scotland, recently constructed by the magistrates for public meetings, and which, with the aid of a temporary cross gallery, erected for the occasion, held 4000 persons, all seated at tea-tables. The sight of so many human beings assembled together, and all animated with one common feeling of enthusiasm, was very striking.” (25)
Alison, who gave the vote of thanks after Dickens’s speech, was a dyed-in-the-wool right-wing historian. He was not a fan of fiction in general, nor was he familiar with Dickens’s work, which dwelt on the social classes that the Sheriff was used to rounding up or baton-charging, as he openly admitted in his autobiography. Alison preferred to write about kings and queens and emperors and aristocrats:
“I never had any taste for those novels the chief object of which is to paint the manners or foibles of middle or low life. We are unhappily too familiar with them : if you wish to see them you have only to go into the second class of a railway train, or the cabin of a steamboat. Romance, to be durably interesting or useful, must be probable but elevating; drawn from the observation of nature, but interspersed with traits of the ideal.” (26)
It’s amusing now to read Alison’s inflated account of his own life and poor judgment of Dickens’s strengths as a writer:
“Dickens, with his wife, had the kindness to be our guests for two days at Possil, on which occasion I had a large party to meet them, who were charmed with the suavity of his manners and the variety and brilliancy of his conversation. Indeed the flow of his ideas was so rapid, and his powers of observation and description were so great, that it appeared to me that his writings, celebrated as they were, gave no adequate idea of his talents ; and I could not help regretting that accident, or the necessities of his situation, had thrown him into a line of composition not altogether worthy of his powers, and for which I could not anticipate durable fame.” (27)
Sir Archibald liked the sound of his own voice in print and in person. Benjamin Disraeli dubbed him “Mr Wordy”. (28)
The Glasgow Athenæum in Ingram Street, later demolished to make way for an extension of the General Post Office, was a gathering point for the great and the expectant. It was there that Dickens met Edinburgh lawyer George Combe, an advocate of the controversial pseudo-science of craniology or phrenology, where the shape of the skull was used to judge character and mental capacity: “Combe’s first essay on phrenology was published in 1817 in The Scots Magazine; in 1828 he published The Constitution of Man, in which he popularized phrenology by making it applicable to personal philosophies as well as science.” (29)
Dickens’s speech was reprinted as part of the Athenaeum’s 50th anniversary celebrations, and given that his wife had just lost a child his choice of metaphor was interesting:
“Dickens addressed the company in a felicitous speech, in the course of which he said – ‘It is a great satisfaction to me to occupy the place I do in behalf of an infant Institution: a remarkable fine child enough, of a vigorous constitution, but an infant still. I esteem myself singularly fortunate in knowing it before its prime, in the hope that I may have the pleasure of remembering in its prime, and when it has attained to its lusty maturity, that I was a friend of its youth. It has already passed through some of the disorders to which children are liable; it succeeded to an elder brother of a very meritorious character, but of rather a weak constitution, and which expired when about twelve months old from, it is said, a destructive habit of getting up early in the morning; it succeeded this elder brother, and has fought manfully through a sea of troubles. Its friends have often been much concerned for it; its pulse has been exceedingly low, being only 1250 when it was expected to have been 10,000; several relations and friends have even gone so far as to walk off once or twice in the melancholy belief that it was dead. Through all that, assisted by the indomitable energy of one or two nurses, to whom it can never be sufficiently grateful, it came triumphantly; and now, of all the youthful members of its family I ever saw, it has the strongest attitude, the healthiest look, the brightest and most cheerful air. I find the Institution nobly lodged; I find it with a reading-room, a coffee-room, and a news-room; I find it with lectures given and in progress, in sound, useful, and well-selected subjects; I find it with morning and evening classes for Mathematics, Logic, Grammar, Music, French, German, Spanish, and Italian, attended by upwards of five hundred persons; but, best and first of all, and what is to me more satisfactory than anything else in the history of the Institution, I find that all this has been mainly achieved by the young men of Glasgow themselves, with very little assistance. And, ladies and gentlemen, as the axiom, ‘Heaven helps those who help themselves,’ is truer in no case than it is in this, I look to the young men of Glasgow, from such a past and such a present, to a noble future. Everything that has been done in any other Athenaeum, I confidently expect to see done here; and when that shall be the case, and when there shall be great cheap schools in connection with the Institution, and when it has bound together forever all its friends, and brought over to itself all those who look upon it as an objectionable Institution – then, and not till then, I hope the young men of Glasgow will rest from their labours and think their study done […] In this case the books will not only possess all the attractions of their own friendships and charms, but also the manifold – I had almost said the womanfold – associations connected with their donors. I can imagine how, in fact, from these fanciful associations, some fair Glasgow widow may be taken for the remoter one whom Sir Roger de Coverley could not forget; I can imagine how Sophia’s muff may be seen and loved, but not by “Tom Jones,” going down the High Street on any winter’s day; or I can imagine the student finding in every fair form the exact counterpart of the Glasgow Athenaeum, and taking into consideration the History of Europe without the consent of Sheriff Alison. I can imagine, in short, how, through all the facts and fictions of this library, these ladies will be always active, and that
‘Age will not wither them, nor custom stale
Their infinite variety.’
I am surrounded by gentlemen to whom I will soon give place, being at least as curious to hear them as you yourselves undoubtedly are; but before I sit down, allow me to observe that it seems to me a most delightful and happy chance that this meeting should be held at this genial season of the year, when a new time is, as it were, opening before us, and we celebrate the birth of that Divine Teacher who took the highest knowledge into the humblest places, and whose great system comprehended all mankind. I hail it as a most auspicious omen, at this time of the year, when many scattered friends and families are re-assembled together, that we should be called upon to meet here to promote a great purpose, with a view to the general good and a view to the general improvement. I believe that such designs are worthy of the faith we hold, and I do believe that they are practical remembrances of the sacred words, ‘On earth peace and goodwill toward men.’” (30)
After accepting Alison’s vote of thanks, Dickens declare: “I am no stranger – and I say it with the deepest gratitude – to the warmth of Scottish hearts”. (31) The day after his Athenæum speech, on 29 December 1847, Dickens visited the Glasgow Royal Lunatic Asylum at Gartnavel and Duke Street Prison in the company of Archibald Alison. Dickens then had lunch with the Lord Provost, Alexander Hastie, a noted opponent of slavery and a member of the Glasgow Emancipation Society.
A TALE OF TWO DRAMAS
In his memoir, Alison boasted of the fact that the troops he commanded as Sheriff of Lanarkshire kept striking miners in check. When Scotland faced a ‘universal strike’ in the West of Scotland in 1842-43, what Alison calls ‘The Great Strike’, he was determined to crush the workers:
“About 20,000 working men, involving with their families at least 70,000 souls, were engaged in this formidable conspiracy against property, which was the more to be dreaded that there was no police whatever in Lanarkshire, and the regiment of cavalry which usually lay at Glasgow happened at that very time to have been sent to Perthshire, to escort the Queen in going from Dundee to Blair Atholl for her autumn residence. Five dismounted invalids alone were left at the cavalry barracks, to guard the two guns which were stationed in Glasgow, and the chief depot of ammunition for the west of Scotland.”
Alison put in place a series of measures aimed at demoralising the strikers:
“I issued two proclamations – one to the miners, warning them of their illegal conduct, and the measures adopted to resist them; and another to the proprietors and justices of peace in the county, calling on them to raise the posse comitatus, or constabulary force of the county, for the support of the civil power and the maintenance of the public peace.” (32)
After six weeks of nocturnal rides along the Clyde while based at Airdrie and Hamilton, Alison came home to Possil to find all was well in the house that sugar and slaves built:
“The colliers around Possil, who were all out on the strike, not only, much to their credit, made no attempt on the house, but sent notice to Mrs Alison that she need be under no alarm; that they knew I was only doing my duty; and that she might rely upon it that I was the last man in the country to whom any violence would be offered. They were as good as their word; for although, during the six weeks I was out with the troops, I almost every day rode out in the forenoon, generally alone, and often passed through large bodies of the combined workmen, to whom I was well known, I not only never was exposed to any attack, but never once met with the slightest insult.” (33)
Smasher of strikes and supporter of slavery that he was, backer of the South in the American Civil War, not to mention writer of reactionary histories, inveterate gladhander and obdurate arse-licker, an anonymous review of Alison’s autobiography claimed for him the capacity to warm the cockles of the hearts of the downtrodden that he had trodden underfoot – “thank ‘e very kindly sir”, said his forelock-tugging underlings, apparently:
“He, the most uncompromising Tory, was followed everywhere with the applause of the Glasgow Radicals; and at his death the whole of the road between Possil House and Glasgow was lined with the poorest of the population, ‘all the mill-hands in the neighbourhood sacrificing half a day’s earnings to come and pay, with quiet respectful demeanour, the last tribute to the old Tory sheriff so well known to them for thirty-three years’.” (34)
The words quoted at the end of this passage are lifted from Jane Alison’s preface to her father-in-law’s autobiography. (35) Rose-tinted glasses may have been worn on that occasion. This same reviewer comments on Alison’s “efforts to ameliorate the artisans, who in those days spent some 70 per cent. of their wages in drink”. (36) The drinking habits of the poor were always a preoccupation of the ruling classes, often discussed over a good vintage from their wine cellars after a hearty meal.
The reviewer draws attention to a particular passage in Alison’s Autobiography: “the account […] of the execution of Doolan and Redding at Bishopbriggs is a grand piece of sustained description”. (37) This passage is of particular interest to me because I wrote a play called Gallowglass with my brother John in 1991 about the trial and execution of Irish railway workers Dennis Doolan and Patrick Redding in 1841, for the killing of English ganger John Green, the last scene-of-crime execution carried out in Scotland, and I did a podcast about it as part of Janice Forsyth’s ‘Unspeakable Scotland’ in January 2021. (38)
In his autobiography, Alison insists that Doolan and Redding, “sentenced to be executed on the spot where the murder was committed”, were “Ribbonmen” and that the murder they committed was racially aggravated by the fact that the “United Hibernian Labourers” objected to the appointment of an English overseer when they “insisted on one of their own countrymen holding the situation”. (39) In his account of the event Alison emphasizes the Catholicism and Irishness of the perpetrators. The public execution of Doolan and Redding on 14 May 1841 is worth dwelling on because it dovetails with Dickens’s later experience of another double hanging in London eight years later.
A TALE OF TWO SCAFFOLDS
“The sentence to be hung on the spot where the crime had been committed, was pronounced by the judges rather in conformity with the feelings of indignation excited by the details of a cold-blooded combination murder, as unfolded at the trial, than from a calm consideration of how such a sentence was to be carried into execution. The difficulties and risk attending it soon proved to be great. The united labourers on the railway line, ten thousand in number, made no secret of their intention to strike work the day before, and rescue the prisoners before they reached the place of execution; and the Irish Roman Catholics of Glasgow and its vicinity, above sixty thousand in number, strongly sympathised with these sentiments. On the other hand, the Scotchmen and Englishmen in the same neighbourhood were much excited against the murderers, and loudly called for an example which might check the lawless spirit spreading into Scotland from the sister isle. Under these circumstances there was little difficulty in finding a majority inclined to support the sentence; the great danger was that that majority would come to blows with the minority, who were not less resolute to prevent it. The national animosity of Great Britain and Ireland, of Catholic and Protestant, was here mixed up with the passions, already sufficiently fierce, of trades-unions against all who resisted their mandates. The great object was to carry the law into execution, and at the same time preserve the peace; and these ends could only be secured by an imposing display of military force. Government, now seriously alarmed, liberally placed the requisite means at my disposal. In addition to the regiments of infantry and cavalry stationed in Lanarkshire, with the artillery at Glasgow, the depot of another regiment was ordered up from Paisley, and six troops of horse were brought from Edinburgh. Altogether 1800 men were assembled in the neighbourhood – of whom 600 were horse – with two guns, in the evening preceding the execution, which was to take place at eight in the morning of the 14th May. The scaffold, an awful pile, was sent out overnight, under a strong guard, from Glasgow, amidst an immense crowd of spectators, and protected during the night by a company of infantry.
At seven on the following morning I went on horseback, with a troop of cavalry and two companies of infantry, to the jail of Glasgow to accompany the prisoners to the place of execution. The whole neighbourhood of the prison was filled by a sea of heads, awaiting in breathless expectation the appearance of the unhappy prisoners. So dense was the throng, that it was with difficulty even the cavalry could make its way through to reach the prison-gates. At half-past seven they were brought out, calm but deadly pale, and seated in the open carriage in which they were to be conveyed. By an involuntary impulse the whole multitude uncovered when they appeared, and the procession set out through the centre of the city for the place of execution. So deep was the feeling of all present, that, though at least 200,000 persons thronged the streets, windows, and roofs through which the procession passed, not a whisper was heard along their whole extent; and the only sound which met the ear amidst such a prodigious concourse of human beings, was the clang of the horses’ feet on the pavement. It reminded me of the descriptions of the French army entering Moscow. When we emerged from the city beyond the High Church, and began to defile through the fields, the scene was not less striking. The immense throng could not he contained on the road, which was in great part occupied by the carriages in the procession and the troops who accompanied it; and in consequence they spread over the fields to the distance of a quarter of a mile on either side, and advanced abreast of the carriages – an immense black close column, sweeping the ground like a huge rolling stone as it advanced.
At length we reached the fatal spot, where the ground was kept by the cavalry which had come up from Edinburgh and the infantry previously sent out. At least 150,000 persons were present, all in the highest state of excitement; but so strong was the military force that no attempt at a rescue was made. Doolan mounted with a firm step, though deadly pale; Redding with a little run, as if under the influence of nervous excitement. When the bolts were withdrawn, which they were with a loud noise, a universal shudder ran through the crowd: my horse, which was directly in front of the scaffold, started, as if conscious of the dreadful drama which was in the act of execution. Then, and not till then, I averted my eye from the terrible spectacle. My duty was done; all felt there was a Government in the country. Redding never moved – he had fainted, I think, before being thrown off; but Doolan struggled painfully for a minute or two. We returned with the dead bodies in the same imposing order in which we had gone out, and amidst the same prodigious concourse of people. But the din was now as loud as the silence had before been awful: emotion long pent up found vent, and so stunning was the roar, that in going down the High Street I could not by any exertion of my voice make the officer in command hear, who rode close at my right hand.
If the appearance and emotion of the people on this occasion demonstrated the vast effect of a public execution, when conducted with solemnity, and for a crime which had aroused the feelings of the community, in producing profound moral impressions on the people, the behaviour of the persons engaged with me in superintending it was not less characteristic of the weakness of human nature, amid the difficulties by which in critical times those intrusted with the administration of affairs are surrounded. The warrant for the execution was addressed to the Sheriff of Lanarkshire and Magistrates of Glasgow, the latter of whom, as magistrates of the city and ex officio justices of peace for the county, had jurisdiction both where the prisoners were detained and where they were to be executed. No sooner did the rumour spread as to the probability of a riot and attempt at rescue on the occasion, than they began on various pretences to excuse themselves from attending; and when I requested a meeting of them to concert measures for carrying the sentence into execution, I found that they had had a previous meeting by themselves, and they came prepared with a minute setting forth that, as magistrates of Glasgow, their duty was to preserve the peace of the burgh, and that they would best discharge this by taking post in the courtyard of the jail when the execution was going forward. There accordingly they were during the whole time, with the Lord Provost at their head: none of them could be prevailed on to accompany the procession even to the limits of the burgh, with the exception of one whom shame prevented from remaining back with his brethren. No sooner was the execution over, than the usual disputes began as to who was to bear its expense. The total cost was £250; of this the Crown would only pay one-half – alleging that the other half was a charge against, not the Government, but the county. This the latter resisted, maintaining that the Executive having ordered the execution, the whole expense should be borne by the Exchequer. In the meantime the persons employed on the occasion sent in their accounts to me, as the person who had given the orders. These I was obliged to pay; and I only got back the half from the county, after a considerable time and no small trouble, through the personal regard for myself of the committee to whom it was referred, at which the Commissioners of Supply expressed themselves most indignant at their next annual meeting. I made a narrow escape from losing £130 by being charged with the execution of a most disagreeable and responsible duty.
This painful event opened my eyes to the real cause which impels such multitudes to similar scenes, and the impossibility of hoping that in the most atrocious cases capital punishment can be completely dispensed with. It is terror of death which sends such multitudes in every age to see men die. As every one knows that he must depart this world himself, and every one has a secret awe, more or less strong, at its contemplation, all are desirous of seeing how in the last extremity the trial can be borne. Hence it is that two-thirds of the spectators at all executions are women; and that of men the most timid are most desirous to witness them. It is the same feeling which in former days led the Roman ladies in such crowds to the fights of gladiators, in the feudal ages to the tournaments of knights, and now impels the Spanish dames in anxious throngs to the excitement of bull-fights at Seville, or the English to Blondin’s perilous exhibition at the Crystal Palace. This passion does not diminish with the progress of civilisation and the humanising of manners; on the contrary it rather increases, because such changes render these exhibitions more rare, and excite the mind more powerfully, from its having become more open to vivid emotions, and from the thirst for passionate excitement being increased. If the laws would permit it, the same crowds in London or Paris would rush to see gladiators slaughter each other, as they ever did in imperial Rome; and the same disappointment would be evinced by the ladies, if the knights rung with the wooden end of the spear instead of the sharp, as was shown in the days of the Plantagenets or the Tudors.
As the mournful exhibition of death in its awful form approaching a human being is thus the most powerful of all spectacles to move the human mind, so it is one which can never to all appearance be dispensed with to check the great crimes which originate in as powerful desires. As revenge, jealousy, lust, the thirst for gain, are the strongest impulses which tend to the commission of great crimes, so it will always be found impossible to coerce them but by equally powerful restraining motives on the other side. Of these the terror of death is by much the most efficacious; secondary punishments are of service only by getting quit for a time, or in extreme cases permanently, of the criminal: as examples to deter others they have no effect whatever. No one either inquires or cares what comes of a robber or housebreaker after he has received sentence of penal servitude; and in most cases, from the impossibility of finding room for him in the crowded receptacles for criminals, he is soon found back in his old haunts and at his old practices, improved in skill and increased in audacity. Sentence of death should be confined to cases of the most serious crimes, and never carried into execution unless under circumstances in which the general opinion of mankind goes along with its infliction. When it is carried out, it should be with the utmost solemnity, and in the most public manner. Private execution in prison is pure judicial murder; for it is unattended with the only circumstance which can justify the taking away of life – the exhibition of an example which may deter others. I had already had experience of these truths: the cotton-spinners’ trial produced a prodigious sensation and stopped the dangerous conspiracy which it revealed; but the punishment inflicted, speedily remitted by Lord Normanby, had a directly opposite effect. But no words can describe the sensation and lasting effect which the execution of Dennis Doolan and his associate produced.” (40)
How would Dickens have viewed the public execution presided over by his host? Unlike Alison, Dickens was an opponent of public executions and we have evidence of his reaction to one that he witnessed in London a short time after his stay at Possil House. Dickens was present the execution of the Mannings, Frederick and Maria, husband and wife, on 13 November 1849. The Mannings were convicted for the so-called ‘Bermondsey Murder’, when the body of an Irishman, Patrick O’Connor, was discovered under the flagstones of their kitchen in a hole filled with quicklime. Dickens was so incensed by what he saw that he immediately wrote a letter to The Times urging Sir George Grey, the Home Secretary, to put an end to public executions. The letter was published in several other newspapers including The Scotsman, which reprinted it on 17 November, a few days after the event:
“Sir, – I was a witness of the execution at Horsemonger-lane this morning. I went there with the intention of observing the crowd gathered to behold it, and I had excellent opportunities of doing so, at intervals all through the night, and continuously from daybreak until after the spectacle was over.
I do not address you on the subject with any intention of discussing the abstract question of capital punishment, or any of the advocates of its opponents or advocates. I simply wish to turn this dreadful experience to some account for the general good, by taking the readiest and most public means of adverting to an intimation given by Sir G. Grey in the last session of Parliament that the Government might be induced to give its support to a measure making the infliction of capital punishment a private solemnity within the prison walls (with such guarantees for the last sentence of the law being inexorably and surely administered as should satisfy the public at large), and of most earnestly beseeching Sir G. Grey, as a solemn duty which he cannot ever put away, to originate such a legislative change himself.
I believe that a sight so inconceivably awful as the wickedness and levity of the immense crowd collected at that execution this morning could be imagined by no man, and could be presented in no heathen land under the sun. The horrors of the gibbet and of the crime which brought the wretched murderers to it, faded in my mind before the atrocious bearing, looks, and language of the assembled spectators. When I came upon the scene at midnight, the shrillness of the cries and howls that were raised from time to time, denoting that they came from a concourse of boys and girls already assembled in the best places, made my blood run cold. As the night went on, screeching, and laughing, and yelling in strong chorus of parodies on negro melodies, with substitutions of ‘Mrs Manning’ for ‘Susannah,’ and the like, were added to these. When the day dawned, thieves, low prostitutes, ruffians, and vagabonds of every kind, flocked on to the ground with every variety of offensive and foul behaviour. Fightings, faintings, whistlings, imitations of Punch, brutal jokes, tumultuous demonstrations of indecent delight when swooning women were dragged out of the crowd by the police with their dresses disordered, gave a new zest to the general entertainment. When the sun rose brightly – as it did – it gilded thousands upon thousands of upturned faces, so inexpressibly odious in their brutal mirth or callousness, that a man had cause to feel ashamed of the shape he wore, and to shrink from himself, as fashioned in the image of the devil. When the two miserable creatures who attracted all this ghastly sight about them were turned quivering into the air, there was no more emotion, no more pity, no more thought that two immortal souls had gone to judgment, no more restraint in any of the previous obscenities, than if the name of Christ had never been heard in this world, and there were no belief among men but that they perished like the beasts.
I have seen, habitually, some of the worst sources of general contamination and corruption in this country, and I think there are not many phases of London life that could surprise me. I am solemnly convinced that nothing that ingenuity could devise to be done in this city, in the same compass of time, could work such ruin as one public execution, and I stand astounded and appalled by the wickedness it exhibits. I do not believe that any community can prosper where such a scene of horror and demoralisation as was enacted this morning outside Horsemonger Lane Jail is presented at the very doors of good citizens, and is passed by, unknown or forgotten. And when, in our prayers, and thanksgivings for the season, we are humbly expressing before God our desire to remove the moral evils of the land, I would ask your readers to consider whether is not a time to think of this one, and root it out.
I am, Sir, your faithful servant,
CHARLES DICKENS.
Devonshire Terrace, Tuesday Nov. 13.” (41)
A TALE OF TWO STAGES
Dickens was an actor as well as an author: “It has been admitted by many who were in a position to judge that Dickens was one of the best amateur actors that ever lived”. (42) He has been credited with the invention of the modern stage ghost, such dramatic apparitions being a feature of Shakespeare’s great tragedies. (43) It has also been noted that his experience as a stage performer and his knowledge of the theatre made him a brilliant public speaker and reader of his own work. (44) Dickens was a great admirer of Shakespeare to the point of obsession and was soon regarded by some critics as being as accomplished and engaging a writer as Shakespeare, as universally celebrated and as popular. (45) Dickens was back in Glasgow for a touring production of Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor from 18-20 July 1848. The Glasgow Herald of Monday 26 June 1848 announced the news of Dickens’s planned dramatic entrance:
“GRAND AMATEUR DISPLAY AT THE THEATRE ROYAL
We feel the utmost pleasure in being able to state that everything is going swimmingly forward for the Grand Amateur Performance at the Theatre Royal here, with Mr. Dickens and his friends, in aid of the fund for the endowment of our old, warm-hearted, and much esteemed friend, Mr. Sheridan Knowles, as perpetual Curator of Shakespeare’s House.”
The two roles taken by Dickens were that of Slender, cousin to Justice Shallow in The Merry Wives of Windsor, and the Doctor in Animal Magnetism, for which Dickens also acted as stage manager. As stage manager Dickens was very hands-on. He drew up a set of instructions for the 1848 summer tour that included the Glasgow dates:
“Remembering the very imperfect condition of all our plays at present, the general expectation in reference to them, the kind of audience before which they will be presented, and the near approach of the nights of performance, I hope everybody concerned will abide by the following regulations, and will aid in strictly carrying them out […] Silence, on the stage and in the theatre, to be faithfully observed, the lobbies, &c., being always available for conversation. No book to be referred to on the stage; but those who are imperfect to take their words from the prompter. Everyone to act, as nearly as possible, as on the night of performance; everyone to speak out, so as to be audible through the house . And every mistake of exit, entrance, or situation to be corrected three times successively […] All who were concerned in the first getting up of ‘Every Man in his Humour,’ and who remember how carefully the stage was always kept then, and who have been engaged in the late rehearsals of the ‘Merry Wives,’, and have experienced the difficulty of getting on or off, of being heard, or of hearing anybody else, will, I am sure, acknowledge the indispensable necessity of these regulations.” (46)
Dickens usually played Shallow, but for this particular tour he took the part Slender. On Friday 30 June 1848 the Glasgow Herald reported that Dickens was coming to the city to perform a role quite different from the one he had fulfilled in opening the Athenæum, and he was coming to another Glasgow institution, the Theatre Royal, to act in two plays, a familiar one by Shakespeare and a popular farce by Elizabeth Inchbald:
“On TUESDAY EVENING, July 18, 1848,
Will be presented Shakspere’s Comedy of
THE MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR.
AND
ANIMAL MAGNETISM.”
Dickens also played the part of Sir Charles Coldstream in Irish playwright Dion Boucicault’s 1844 farce, Used Up, at the Theatre Royal in Glasgow on 20 July 1848. (47)
After Dickens issued a statement to The Times in June 1858 on the end of his 22-year marriage to Kate, the Scottish press went to town on him in advance of his visit there in the autumn as part of public speaking tour. (48) Dickens was nominated for the Lord Rectorship of the University of Glasgow and on the 15th of November 1858 the election took place. Dickens got 69 votes, Lord Shaftesbury 204. Bulwer-Lytton was elected with 217 votes. Dickens later said he had been put forward “against his express wish” and that “he did not seek election”. (49) Dickens gave readings in Glasgow from 6-9 October 1858 as part of a major tour, and again in 1861four readings from 3-6 December, and 17 and 19 December 1866, and 18 and 21 February 1867, and on the 9, and 15-18 December 1878, and 22 and 25 February 1869. Of Glasgow, Dickens remarked during a later visit in 1868:
“The atmosphere of this place, compounded of mists from the Highlands, and smoke from the town factories, is crushing my eyebrows as I write, and it rains as it never does rain anywhere else, and always does rain here. It is a dreadful place, though much improved and possessing a deal of public spirit.” (50)
In 1868 Dickens planned another reading trip to Edinburgh and Glasgow, where, against the advice of friends, he was determined to read the murder scene from Oliver Twist, and thought it would get a good audience in Scotland, where the atmosphere was just right, as he wrote from Edinburgh:
“As I have determined not to do the ‘Oliver’ murder until after the 5th of January, when I shall ascertain its effect on a great audience, it is curious to notice how the shadow of its coming affects the Scotch mind. It is a very, very bad day here, very dark and very wet. I am sitting at a side window, looking up the length of Princes Street, watching the mist change over the castle, and murdering Nancy by turns.” (51)
A TALE OF TWO ESTATES
The Mansion House of Possil House was certainly no Bleak House. Built by John Forbes, it was described as “a new house, well furnished, with good gardens and enclosures.” A short history of Possil House from construction to demolition was provided by David Small in By-gone Glasgow (1896):
“The estate of Possil has passed through the hands of several renowned Glasgow merchants during the past three centuries. The mansion was built about 1710, and was then reckoned one of the best country houses in the neighbourhood. In 1808 the estate was acquired by Colonel Alexander Campbell, one of the Peninsular heroes who fought under Sir John Moore at Corunna. He lived at Possil House for some time after the estate was bought by him, but subsequently he made his other estate of Torosay (now called Duart) in Argyllshire his chief residence. His death took place in 1849. Fifteen years before that date, Possil House had been let to Sir Archibald Alison, Bart., Sheriff of Lanarkshire, author of the History of Europe from the French Revolution till the Fall of Napoleon. Charles Dickens visited Sir Archibald at Possil […] The Sheriff resided there till his death in 1867. He was the last occupant of Possil House, having lived there for thirty-three years. Colonel Campbell had acquired the neighbouring estate of Keppoch-hill in 1838, and added it to Possil. His son and successor, John Campbell, feued a hundred acres on the Possil estate (including the mansion) to Walter Macfarlane of the Saracen Foundry. This foundry had been originally started in Saracen’s Lane, off Gallowgate, a small street beside the famed Saracen’s Head Inn. The business extended so much that it had to be removed to larger premises in Washington Street. In 1868 Mr Macfarlane decided to build an extensive work at Possil, and he acquired a portion of the estate, demolished the mansion, and erected the new Saracen Foundry. He laid out the ground near the works in streets, and before 1872 there were numerous tenements put up for the accommodation of his employees. At the present time Possilpark is a thriving suburb, built entirely on modern principles. Besides the Saracen Foundry there are three large iron works here, and also chemical works and white-lead works, while the Possilpark Station on the City and District section of the North British Railway makes the place of easy access from the centre of the city. The streets are so planned that Possilpark will ultimately be in direct connection with Ruchill on the west side and Springburn on the east.” (52)
Sir Archibald Alison died at Possil House on 23 May 1867. An obituary appeared in the North British Daily Mail, with an abridged version published in the Scottish Law Magazine:
“Sir Archibald was Provincial Grand Master of the Freemasons of Glasgow for about twenty years, and, as such, laid the foundation stone of many public buildings in Glasgow and the West of Scotland, and presided at nearly all the important masonic gatherings within that district – particularly at the funeral of the late Duke of Athole, at which he delivered an oration eminently befitting the occasion. But not only as a P.G.M., but as one far advanced in the degrees of masonry, was the late baronet held in honour by his brethren, and considering the great interest he manifested in all that concerned the craft, he was justly regarded as one of the foremost masons in Scotland.” (53)
The country estate Alison had lived in for thirty-two years, where he had written his controversial conservative histories of Europe, where he had forged friendships with various dignitaries and celebrities, was now a forge of a different kind. The imposing gates of Saracen Foundry opened at its new address at 73 Hawthorn Street and became world-renowned for its architectural and ornamental ironwork. Saracen Foundry went on to make, among many other things, the canopy at the entrance to Central Station. Dickens might have found some irony in the fact that the mansion house and grounds he had strolled around during those dismal December days in 1847 would become the site of an ironworks, the kind of dark satanic mill that figured in his books. More than iron was forged in the foundry. The character of a community was carved out. The ironworks are long gone now, but the iron age lives on.
When the demolition of Possil House turned a rural mansion into an industrial hub it led to pollution which in turn led to demands for a park to be established at nearby Ruchill. The sensible thinking at the time was that parks provided both fresh air and recreation for workers who tended to live in overcrowded areas close to the factories and forges where they worked (this was long before the city planners of the 1950s and 1960s decided that motorways rammed through the city centre were much better than fresh air). But as Irene Maver points out, there was irony to be found in an ironworks that produced not just smoke but wrought-iron gates and other features:
“There was […] a profound twist of irony in the debate about the smoke nuisance in the north-west. Although the Saracen Foundry in Possil was one of the leading culprits, its proprietor (Walter Macfarlane) had built up a world-wide reputation for his extensive catalogue, which included wrought-iron bandstands and other park embellishments.” (54)
A description in The Gazetteer of Scotland of 1882 describes Possilpark as a thriving community with a population of four and a half thousand.
“POSSIL PARK, suburb, 1¾ mile north-north-west of Royal Exchange, Glasgow. It covers the site of Possil House, the seat of the late Sir Archibald Alison, Bart.; it is all quite recent; it consists chiefly of streets crossing one another at right angles; and it has a post office, with money order department, under Glasgow, and a chapel-of-ease. Pop. 4594.” (55)
Yet three years later a novel by William Black entitled White Heather portrayed Possilpark as a district down on its luck:
“And indeed Ronald found it so strange to be going out without some companion of the kind that when he passed into the wide, dull thoroughfare, he looked up and down everywhere to see if he could not find some homeless wandering cur that he could induce to go with him. But there was no sign of dog-life visible; for the matter of that there was little sign of any other kind of life; there was nothing before him but the wide, empty, dull-hued street, apparently terminating in a great wilderness of india-rubber works and oil-works and the like, all of them busily engaged in pouring volumes of smoke through tall chimneys into the already sufficiently murky sky.
But when he got farther north, he found that there were lanes and alleys permeating this mass of public works; and eventually he reached a canal, and crossed that, deeming that if he kept straight on he must reach the open country somewhere. As yet he could make out no distance; blocks of melancholy soot-begrimed houses, timber-yards, and blank stone walls shut in the view on every hand; moreover there was a brisk north wind blowing that was sharply pungent with chemical fumes and also gritty with dust; so that he pushed on quickly, anxious to get some clean air into his lungs, and anxious, if that were possible, to get a glimpse of green fields and blue skies. For, of course, he could not always be at his books; and this, as he judged, must be the nearest way out into the country; and he could not do better than gain some knowledge of his surroundings, and perchance discover some more or less secluded sylvan retreat, where, in idle time, he might pass an hour or so with his pencil and his verses and his memories of the moors and hills.
But the farther out he got the more desolate and desolating became the scene around him. Here was neither town nor country; or rather, both were there; and both were dead. He came upon a bit of hawthorn-hedge; the stems were coal-black, the leaves begrimed out of all semblance to natural foliage. There were long straight roads, sometimes fronted by a stone wall and sometimes by a block of buildings – dwelling-houses, apparently, but of the most squalid and dingy description; the windows opaque with dirt; the ‘closes’ foul; the pavements in front unspeakable. But the most curious thing was the lifeless aspect of this dreary neighbourhood. Where were the people? Here or there two or three ragged children would be playing in the gutter; or perhaps, in a dismal little shop, an old woman might be seen, with some half-withered apples and potatoes on the counter. But where were the people who at one time or other must have inhabited these great, gaunt, gloomy tenements? He came to a dreadful place called Saracen Cross – a very picture of desolation and misery; the tall blue-black buildings showing hardly any sign of life in their upper flats; the shops below being for the most part tenantless, the windows rudely boarded over. It seemed as if some blight had fallen over the land, first obliterating the fields, and then laying its withering hand on the houses that had been built on them. And yet these melancholy-looking buildings were not wholly uninhabited; here or there a face was visible—but always of women or children; and perhaps the men-folk were away at work somewhere in a factory. Anyhow, under this dull gray sky, with a dull gray mist in the air, and with a strange silence everywhere around, the place seemed a City of the Dead; he could not understand how human beings could live in it at all.” (56)
How did Possil go from “Garden of the North”, as it was once styled, to “City of the Dead” in so short a space of time?
A TALE OF TWO UNIVERSITIES
Possil and the University of Glasgow have more in common than Sir Archibald Alison as former Rector or Dickens as unsuccessful Rectoral candidate. A procession of Glasgow Rectors paraded through Possil House. Sir James Graham, who succeeded Sir Robert Peel in the role of Rector, visited Sheriff Alison there in December 1838, where he met ‘the principal Professors’ of the University, as well as the Duke of Montrose and the Marquis of Douglas. (57)
Possil made a big impact on the city when a meteor landed there over 200 years ago:
“If you take the circular walk around Possil Loch, you will see a commemorative plaque marking the Possil High Meteorite, which fell nearby on the 5th April 1804. This was the earliest of only four known recorded meteorite falls in Scotland and the largest surviving fragment is held at the Hunterian Museum within the University of Glasgow.” (58)
When the University of Glasgow moved from the impoverished East End of the city at the end of the 1860s – taking flight from its medieval site – students on the new campus at Gilmorehill in the wealthy West End suburb that was to be its new home became involved in local charity work, and as Possil was a stone’s throw away and reminiscent of the old East End from which the University had fled, it became a place of interest:
“In 1889 the Glasgow University Students’ Settlement Society was formed with the stated object of carrying on social, educational and religious work. The Settlement consisted of a residence, club rooms and halls and was situated at 10 Possil Road, Garscube Cross. The work undertaken took various forms, including social clubs, Sunday meetings, a ‘Poor Man’s Lawyer’, medical dispensary and a savings bank. In the residence there was accommodation for fifteen students overlooked by a warden. The affairs of the Society were in the hands of a President, Warden, Sub-Warden, Secretary, a four-man General Committee and a five-man Finance Committee.” (59)
Possil has a more recent connection with the University. It is home to a major archive of scholarly resources:
“The Library Research Annexe contains important research material not in high demand. The collection holds runs of older journals and books as well as other materials including Parliamentary papers, microfilms and newspapers. The Library Research Annexe plays a vital role in storing valuable research material in a safe and secure environment. It has excellent on site consultation facilities and parking for visitors.” (60)
THE GHOST OF THE FUTURE?
What would Dickens make of Possil today, almost 175 years after his visit? As an actor and avid theatregoer, he might find intriguing the fact that the National Theatre of Scotland is now based close to Possil Road, near the site of the former Rockvilla Primary School. NTS is an institution Dickens would have embraced. (62) He would also be encouraged by community developments like Hawthorn Housing Association. (63) Dickens’s first publication was Sketches by Boz (1836), a pseudonym under which he observed London life. It was a nickname that served him well. The only sign of Dickens’s presence in Possil today is some graffiti at Saracen Cross that reads “Chasa Wiz Here”, and under that, “Big Boz is Pure Sketchy”.
Notes
(1) William Power, The World Unvisited: Essays and Sketches (Glasgow: Gowans & Gray Limited, 1922), 119.
(2) Charles Dickens, Dombey and Son, with illustrations by H. K. Browne (London: Bradbury & Evans, 1846-48), 44.
(3) I wrote about Dickens’s Glasgow visits in ‘A ghost of Possil past…: Charles Dickens’ investigation of the social condition in Victorian Britain took him to Possilpark’, The Herald (Weekend Living, 29 September 2001), 1; and in ‘Moulin Scrooge [on Dickens and Scotland]’, The Sunday Herald (Seven Days: Scotland’s Current Affairs Magazine, 16 December 2001), 11.
(4) On Alison, see Archibald Alison, Some account of my life and writings: an autobiography, by the late Sir Archibald Alison, ed. by his daughter-in-law, Lady Alison (Edinburgh: W. Blackwood and sons, 1883); Anon, ‘Sir Archibald Alison’, Scottish Law Magazine and Sheriff Court Reporter 6 (1867): 37-44; Anon, ‘Alison’s Autobiography’, London Quarterly Review 60, 119 (1883): 230-234; Michael Michie, Enlightenment Tory in Victorian Scotland: The Career of Sir Archibald Alison (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s Press, 1997). The first volume of Alison’s History of Europe was dated from ‘POSSIL HOUSE, LANARKSHIRE 8 October 1852’. Archibald Alison, History of Europe from the Fall of Napoleon in 1815 to the Accession of Louis Napoleon in 1852, vol. I (Edinburgh: W. Blackwood & Sons, 1852), xiii. In a letter to his sister dated 18 January 1857 Sir Gerald Graham gave an account of a visit to Possil House and described Sir Archibald as “a man of striking appearance, massive nose, high forehead, and dignified, kind expression” who “speaks with a broad Scotch accent”. R. H. Vetch (ed.), Life, letters and diaries of Lieut.-General Sir Gerald Graham … with portraits, plans, and his principal despatches (Edinburgh, London: W. Blackwood & Sons, 1901), 135-137. For his views on politics and economics see Archibald Alison, Free trade and Protection (Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood & Sons, 1844).
(5) On John Campbell senior of Morriston see T. M. Devine, ‘An Eighteenth-Century Business Élite: Glasgow-West India Merchants, c. 1750-1815’, The Scottish Historical Review 57, 163 (1978): 40-67; Anthony Cooke, ‘An Elite Revisited: Glasgow West India Merchants, 1783–1877’, Journal of Scottish Historical Studies 32, 2 (2012): 127-165; and Stephen Mullen, ‘A Glasgow-West India Merchant House and the Imperial Dividend, 1779-1867’, Journal of Scottish Historical Studies 33, 2 (2013): 196-233. For a brief biography of the son see ‘Alexander Campbell of Possil’, The Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery, https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/person/view/10482. Colonel Alexander Campbell had his portrait painted by Sir Henry Raeburn, as did his wife, Mrs Campbell of Possil. William Raeburn Andrew, Life of Sir Henry Raeburn, R. A., 2nd ed. (London: W. H. Allen & Company, limited, 1894), 107.
(6) Archibald Alison, Some account of my life and writings: an autobiography, by the late Sir Archibald Alison, ed. by his daughter-in-law, Lady Alison, 2 vols. Edinburgh: W. Blackwood and sons, 1883), Vol. I, 342.
(7) Archibald Alison, Some account of my life and writings: an autobiography, by the late Sir Archibald Alison, ed. by his daughter-in-law, Lady Alison, 2 vols. Edinburgh: W. Blackwood and sons, 1883), Vol. I, 342-3. On Alison’s library see also the recollection of the Reverend Frederick Arnold: ‘I procured an introduction to Alison from a near relation of his, whom I met in a country house in England. I had a very civil letter from him, in which he hoped to name a day when I should dine with him at Possil House. But nothing came of it. To the best of my recollection, I met him once, but he did not impress me as did Macaulay. He was called the Sheriff, and used to try cases. I was in his Court when he fined a man ten pounds for stealing a watch, which struck me as a very unusual sentence for a felony. He used to go to a large second-hand bookseller’s shop which I was fond of haunting. One day he bought an edition, in some half a hundred volumes, of the “British Essayists” or “British Novelists;” and the bookseller told me that he stipulated with him that the parcel should not be sent home, but that he should call and carry the books away gradually, by twos and threes, in his pockets – I suppose for domestic reasons.’ Frederick Arnold, Reminiscences of a Literary and Clerical Life, 2 vols. (London, Ward and Downey, 1889), I: 68-9.
(8) Hugh MacDonald, Rambles Round Glasgow: Descriptive, Historical, and Traditional, 3rd edition (Glasgow: John Cameron, 1860), 353.
(9) Alison was the author of the History of Europe During the French Revolution, 2 vols (Edinburgh: Blackwood; London: Cadell, 1833). Critics mention Archibald Alison in relation to Dickens without alluding to Dickens’s stay in Possil or dwelling on whether the conversations he had with Alison informed his fiction. See Mark Philp, ‘The New Philosophy: The Substance and the Shadow in A Tale of Two Cities’, in Colin Jones, Josephine McDonagh, and Jon Mee (eds), Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities and the French Revolution (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2009), 24-40, at 27; Gareth Stedman Jones, ‘The Redemptive Powers of Violence? Carlyle, Marx and Dickens’, in Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities and the French Revolution, 41-63, at 43; David R. Sorenson, ‘“The Unseen Heart of the Whole”: Carlyle, Dickens, and the Sources of The French Revolution in A Tale of Two Cities’, Dickens Quarterly 30, 1 (2013): 5-25; and Kurt Tetzeli von Rosador, ‘Metaphorical Representations of the French Revolution in Victorian Fiction’, Nineteenth-Century Literature 43, 1 (1988): 1-23.
(10) Cited in Clare A. Simmons, ‘Disease and Dismemberment: Two Conservative Metaphors for the French Revolution’, Prose Studies 15, 2 (1992): 208-224, at 208.
(11) Alison, Some account of my life and writings, Vol. I, 564.
(12) Charles Dickens, Dombey and Son, with illustrations by H. K. Browne (London: Bradbury & Evans, 1846-48), 537. The full title of his early essays on the London scene is Sketches by ‘Boz’, Illustrative of Every-Day Life, and Every-Day People, in two volumes, Vol. I (London: John Macrone, 1836).
(13) J. J. Stevenson, ‘Dickens in Edinburgh’, Dickensian 3, 10 (1907): 262-264, at 263. Dickens apparently declined to become an MP for Edinburgh in 1869. J. Stevenson, ‘Dickens in Edinburgh II’, Dickensian 3, 11 (1907): 293-295, at 294.
(14) Shannon Russell, ‘How a Slave Was Made a Woman: Dombey and Son and Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass’, Dickens Quarterly 38, 1 (2021): 29-53.
(15) Michael Taylor, ‘Conservative Political Economy and the Problem of Colonial Slavery, 1823-1833’, The Historical Journal 57, 4 (2014): 973-995, at 984.
(16) On Dickens and slavery see Arthur A. Adrian, ‘Dickens on American Slavery: A Carlylean Slant’, PMLA 67, 4 (1952): 315-329; Diana C. Archibald, ‘Many Kinds of Prison: Charles Dickens on American Incarceration and Slavery’, Iperstoria 14 (2019): 43-53; Brahma Chaudhuri, ‘Dickens and the Question of Slavery’, Dickens Quarterly 6, 1 (1989): 3-10; Andrew C. Hansen, ‘Rhetorical Indiscretions: Charles Dickens as Abolitionist’, Western Journal of Communication 65, 1 (2001): 26-44; Sean Purchase, ‘“Speaking of Them as a Body”: Dickens, Slavery and Martin Chuzzlewit’, Critical Survey 18, 1 (2006): 1-16; Harry Stone, ‘Charles Dickens and Harriet Beecher Stowe’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction 12, 3 (1957): 188-202; and Jonathan Daniel Wells, ‘Charles Dickens, the American South, and the Transatlantic Debate over Slavery’, Slavery & Abolition 36, 1 (2015): 1-25.
(17) Dickens, Dombey and Son, 341.
(18) B. Duncum, ‘Chloroform for Mrs Dickens’, Proceedings of the History of Anaesthesia 5 (1989): 31-33, at 32. Dickens would complain 20 years later that a journey on the Flying Scotsman to Edinburgh from London had given him 30,000 jolts. J. J. Stevenson, ‘Dickens in Edinburgh II’, Dickensian 3, 11 (1907): 293-295, at 294.
(19) Peter Ackroyd, Dickens: A Memoir of Middle Age (London: Vintage, 2002), 298. See John Forster, The Life of Charles Dickens (London: Chapman Hall, 1872).
(20) Mamie Dickens and Georgina Hogarth (eds.), The Letters of Charles Dickens: 1833 to 1856, Vol. 1 (London: Chapman and Hall, 1880), 184.
(21) Cited in Tom Johnstone, ‘Decidedly This Side Idolatry: Dr. John Brown and Dickens’, Dickensian 74, 385 (1978): 96-102, at 98.
(22) Avi Ohry, ‘“Shake me up, Judy!”: On Dickens, Medicine and Spinal Cord Disorders’, Ortop Traumatol Rehabil 14, 5 (2012): 483-91, at 484.
(23) James A. Kilpatrick, Literary Landmarks of Glasgow (Glasgow: Saint Mungo Press, 1898), 229-30. The whole speech is reproduced in Richard Herne Shepherd (ed.), The Speeches of Charles Dickens, 1841-1870 (London: Chatto and Windus, 1884), 109-115
(24) James Lauder, The Glasgow Athenaeum: A Sketch of Fifty Years’ Work (1847-1897) (Glasgow: Saint Mungo Press, 1897), 14.
(25) Alison, Some account of my life and writings, 567.
(26) Alison, Some account of my life and writings, 568.
(27) Alison, Some account of my life and writings, 568.
(28) Cited in Maurice Milne, ‘Archibald Alison: Conservative Controversialist’, Albion 27, 3 (1995): 419-443, at 419.
(29) Ohry, ‘“Shake me up, Judy!”’, 486.
(30) Charles Dickens’s speech at the Glasgow Athenaeum, cited in James Lauder, The Glasgow Athenaeum: A Sketch of Fifty Years’ Work (1847-1897) (Glasgow: Saint Mungo Press, 1897), 19-22.
(31) Quoted in Shepherd (ed.), The Speeches of Charles Dickens, 1841-1870, 115.
(32) Alison, Some account of my life and writings, 487, 488.
(33) Alison, Some account of my life and writings, 495.
(34) Anon, ‘Alison’s Autobiography’, London Quarterly Review 60, 119 (1883): 230-234, at 231.
(35) Alison, Some account of my life and writings, vii.
(36) Anon, ‘Alison’s Autobiography’, 233-4.
(37) Anon, ‘Alison’s Autobiography’, 233-4.
(38) Willy Maley, ‘The Crosshill Railway Murder of 1840’, Unspeakable Scotland episode 5, https://www.thebiglight.com/unspeakablescotland, accessed 21 December 2021. See John Maley and Willy Maley, Gallowglass: The Story of the Glasgow-Edinburgh Railway Murder of 1840 (Glasgow: Clydeside Press, 1991)
(39) Alison, Some account of my life and writings, 469-70.
(40) Alison, Some account of my life and writings, 470-72.
(41) ‘Mr Charles Dickens on the Execution of the Mannings’, The Scotsman (November 17 1849), 4. See also The Bermondsey murder: a full report of the trial of Frederick George Manning and Maria Manning, for the murder of Patrick O’Connor, at Minver-place, Bermondsey, on the 9th of August, 1849. Including memoirs of Patrick O’Connor, Frederick George Manning, and Maria Manning. With their portraits, and several other engravings (London: W. M. Clark, 1849).
(42) Frederick G. Jackson, ‘Dickens as Actor’, Dickensian 3, 7 (1907): 173-178, at 173.
(43) Marvin Carlson, ‘Charles Dickens and the Invention of the Modern Stage Ghost’, in Mary Luckhurst and Emilie Morin (eds.), Theatre and Ghosts: Materiality, Performance and Modernity (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 27-45.
(44) Leigh Woods, ‘“As If I Had Been Another Man”: Dickens, Transformation, and an Alternative Theatre’, Theatre Journal 40, 1 (1988): 88-100.
(45) See Paul Schlicke, ‘Dickens and Shakespeare’, The Japan Branch Bulletin of the Dickens Fellowship 27 (2004): 84-98. See also Edward P. Vandiver, ‘Dickens’ Knowledge of Shakspere’, The Shakespeare Association Bulletin 21, 3 (1946): 124-128.
(46) Cited in T. Edgar Pemberton, Charles Dickens and the Stage: A Record of His Connection with the Drama as Playwright, Actor, and Critic (London: G. Redway, 1888), 104.
(47) Michael Stanton, ‘Charles Dickens: Used Up’, Dickensian 84, 416 (1988): 142-152, at 146.
(48) Paul Schlicke, ‘“A Sort of Spoiled Child of the Public”: Dickens’s Reception in Scotland in 1858’, The Dickensian 111, 495 (2015): 26-33.
(49) Norman Page, A Dickens Chronology (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 1988), 102.
(50) J. J. Stevenson, ‘Dickens in Edinburgh II’, Dickensian 3, 11 (1907): 293-295, at 294.
(51) J. J. Stevenson, ‘Dickens in Edinburgh II’, Dickensian 3, 11 (1907): 293-295, at 294. Dickens apparently declined to become an MP for Edinburgh in 1869.
(52) David Small, By-gone Glasgow: Sketches of Vanished Corners in the City and Suburbs. Forty full-page drawings and twenty-three text illustrations by D. Small. With descriptive letterpress by A. H. Miller (Glasgow: Morison Bros, 1896), 173-4.
(53) Scottish Law Magazine and Sheriff Court Reporter 6 (1867): 37-42, at 40.
(54) Irene Maver, ‘Glasgow’s Public Parks and the Community, 1850-1914: A Case Study in Scottish Civic Interventionism’, Urban History 25, 3 (1998): 323-347, at 337.
(55) The Gazetteer of Scotland (Edinburgh: W. & A. K. Johnston, 1882), 377.
(56) William Black, White Heather, 3 vols., volume 2 (London: Macmillan & Co., 1885), 124-126.
(57) Alison, Some account of my life and writings, 442-3.
(58) ‘Glasgow’s Canals Unlocked’, https://www.scottishcanals.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/Unlocking-the-Story-Glasgows-Canals-Heritage.pdf, accessed 21 December 2021.
(59) Leslie Lawrence Forrester, ‘The University Of Glasgow 1910-1930 with emphasis upon its participation in the First World War’, MLitt Thesis, Department of Scottish History, University of Glasgow (May 1998), 14.
(60) University of Glasgow Library Research Annexe, https://www.gla.ac.uk/myglasgow/library/openinghoursandlocations/libraryresearchannexe/, accessed 21 December 2021.
(61) The National Theatre of Scotland, https://www.nationaltheatrescotland.com.
(62) For a fascinating account of recent efforts at regeneration in Possilpark see Joanne Sharp, ‘The Life and Death of Five Spaces: Public Art and Community Regeneration in Glasgow’, Cultural Geographies 14, 2 (2007): 274-292.
(63) Hawthorn Housing Association, http://www.hawthornhousing.org.uk, accessed 21 December 2021.
‘The scattered pages of a book by the sea
Held by the sand, washed by the waves
A shadow forms cast by a cloud
Skimming by as eyes of the past
But the rising tide absorbs them, effortlessly claiming’.
These lines from ‘Can-Utility and the Coastliners’ sum up Genesis for me: literary, historical and mythical landscapes characterised by bookishness and, in the title, a propensity for punning. The album from which this track is taken, Foxtrot, also features the Peak Prog classic ‘Supper’s Ready’, a twenty-three minute banquet of sumptuous synthesisers and apocalyptic lyrics. I want that song played at my funeral.
On Thursday 7th October 2021 I watched Genesis play The Last Domino at the Glasgow Hydro, within ten days of seeing former band member Steve Hackett at another venue in the city. The last time I had this much Genesis action was in 1980 when I saw Peter Gabriel (28 February), Genesis (28 April) and Steve Hackett (14 June) at the Glasgow Apollo.
‘YOU’VE GOT TO GET IN TO GET OUT’
Genesis – where did it all begin? It began when my sister heard ‘Carpet Crawlers’ on the John Peel show in early 1975. Hearing that haunting refrain – ‘We’ve got to get in to get out’ – got my sister her into Genesis. I found out later that John Peel didn’t just play ‘Carpet Crawlers’; he also reviewed the single for Sounds on 26 April 1975, describing it as ‘a slow and reflective work, repetitive and yet with a certain intensity’. Peel went on:
‘Despite myself I found that I was being drawn into it, hearing echoes of such diverse folk as Roger Chapman and the Strawbs as I listened. I’m not clear what a carpet crawler is, but “Carpet Crawler” is a most satisfying release – although not one likely to ensnare the Bay City Rollers and Goodies fans who seem to be taking over the country’.
For the record, I took carpet crawlers to be social climbers, the aspiring class who keep the system going:
“There’s only one direction in the faces that I see
It’s upward to the ceiling, where the chamber’s said to be
Like the forest fight for sunlight, that takes root in every tree
They are pulled up by the magnet, believing that they’re free
The carpet crawlers heed their callers
We’ve got to get in to get out
We’ve got to get in to get out”
Whatever the song’s meaning, hearing ‘Carpet Crawlers’ led my sister to buy the next Genesis album, Trick of the Tail, when it came out in February 1976. That’s when I first heard the song ‘Ripples’ and I was hooked straight away:
‘Sail away, away
Ripples never come back
They’ve gone to the other side
Look into the pool
Ripples never come back
Dive to the bottom and go to the top
To see where they have gone
Oh, they’ve gone to the other side’
Genesis became a real obsession from then on. You could say I blind tasted them, since I didn’t know what they looked like. They were faceless to me – just the music and vocals. I started to buy the back catalogue, backtracking all the way back from The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway (1974) through Genesis Live (1973), Selling England by the Pound (1973), Foxtrot (1972), and Nursery Cryme (1971), all the way to From Genesis to Revelation (1969), where the only song that really stuck in my mind was ‘Am I Very Wrong’. By the time I got to Trespass (1970) I knew I’d been right all along.
For someone used to singles the Genesis album covers were works of art. I found out later that the cover for Selling England by the Pound was an original painting called ‘The Dream’ by Betty Swanwick, an artist in the English mystical tradition whose works included a portrait of Tolkien. She was a perfect fit for Genesis. ‘I Know What I Like (In Your Wardrobe)’, the single from the album, is actually a lyrical expression of her painting. The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway was the first ‘concept album’ I listened to, and that was when I first really began to appreciate the visuals.
The cover was by Hipgnosis, the outfit who designed Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon (1973). It was a departure from the mystical-pastoral covers of earlier Genesis albums. With The Lamb I remember being struck by the gatefold sleeve, the black & white photographs, and the sleeve notes telling the story of Rael, Imperial Aerosol Kid. The male model who played Rael on the cover was credited as ‘Omar’. At first I thought he might be a band member, maybe Gabriel himself, since at this point I still hadn’t seen a photo of the group.
The first album I bought as a new release was Wind and Wuthering, in December 1976. I remember the slightly raised surface of the sleeve, the mist-shrouded tree shedding its leaves, and the by-now-familiar Mad Hatter logo of Charisma Records. The inner sleeve had the lyrics laid out lovingly with indented verses and italics. Genesis lyrics always looked like poetry to me, as well as sounding that way. There was a standout song on every album and on Wind and Wuthering it was ‘One For The Vine’, an epic tale of a follower who becomes a leader and then renounces both roles. That song got to me. When it came to Genesis I was a follower. I still know all the words by heart. Poetry in music. I bought a Wind and Wuthering sweatshirt in 1977, same design as the album cover but in different colours, a rich dark blue with that solitary tree now shedding red and brown leaves. When I was counting votes at Kelvin Hall for the General Election in 1979 an elderly gentleman who was invigilating saw my sweatshirt and said his son was a roadie for the band. I remember thinking that would be my dream job.
It wasn’t just the music. The band’s literary muse appealed to me. Wind and Wuthering, for example, drew on the gothic atmosphere of Emily Brontë’s novel Wuthering Heights (1847). I loved that book, especially the last lines in the graveyard: “I lingered round them, under that benign sky; watched the moths fluttering among the heath and hare-bells; listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass; and wondered how anyone could ever imagine unquiet slumbers, for the sleepers in that quiet earth.” The album included two instrumentals called ‘Unquiet Slumbers for the Sleepers…’ and ‘…In That Quiet Earth’. As a reader, I appreciated those literary allusions. ‘Cinema Show’, the standout song on Selling England By the Pound (1973), riffed on T. S. Eliot’s great modernist poem ‘The Waste Land’. In Genesis my two worlds of reading and music met.
Genesis became the single most important thing in my life in my late teens. It might seem odd that a boy from a notorious Glasgow scheme was drawn to a band full of public schoolboys, but I needed to escape and they were the getaway car. And I wasn’t alone. Our house was always full of music. With five big sisters there was a wide selection of records to choose from, and beyond Radio 1 there was Radio Caroline and Radio Luxembourg for alternative listening. Outside, in the scheme, punk had never made inroads – nobody seemed to want to dress poorer than they were – but soul, disco, glam rock, reggae and yes, prog rock, were popular forms.
At school I found a small group of like-minded individuals and we’d swap Pink Floyd, King Crimson and Supertramp albums. I bought some of these records too, but Genesis was my first love and in 1977 I joined the official fan club. I made up a folder and started collecting the newsletters and other memorabilia.
By this time, the line-up had changed again. I wasn’t aware of Genesis at the time Peter Gabriel quit the band in the summer of 1975 but I felt sad when Steve Hackett departed in October 1977, just as the live double album Seconds Out was released (1). Hackett seemed a pivotal figure in the band. I loved his short acoustic piece on ‘Horizons’, a beautiful solo guitar instrumental on Foxtrot. When I found out it took him a year to write, and that it was influenced by two great composers, William Byrd and Johann Sebastian Bach, I wasn’t surprised. Another song, ‘Blood on the Rooftops’, from Wind and Wuthering, has a lengthy acoustic prelude. The song is about a father and son and a home life where culture consists of light entertainment on TV:
‘Dark and grey, an English film, the Wednesday Play
We always watch the Queen on Christmas Day
Won’t you stay?’
The programmes namechecked in that song – Batman, Tarzan, Name Your Prize, Be Our Guest, The Streets of San Francisco – are familiar to anyone whose childhood encompassed the 1960s and 1970s. The key theme was that the father wants to escape reality – ‘Let’s skip the news boy, I’ll make some tea’. The point of the song was that the father wanted to be entertained, and needed to switch off from politics. My own father never missed the news and couldn’t switch off from politics. But for me Genesis were an escape, an outlet. Watching tv was never enough – I needed books and records to survive.
The next Genesis album, And Then There Were Three, was released in March 1978, its title alluding to the fact that only three core members remained: Tony Banks, Phil Collins and Mike Rutherford. The time had come to see them live before they dwindled further and became a solo act. My sister had friends in London and I’d heard through the Genesis newsletter that they were headlining at Knebworth that summer, Saturday 24th of June. The concert was billed as ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ and there was no way I was going to miss it.
The day of the concert the sun shone but it was bitter cold. Luckily the stage gave off a great glow. Devo, Roy Harper, Jefferson Starship, Tom Petty – these were just warm-ups for what would be the experience of a young lifetime. The hours dragged slowly and in the end Genesis came on later than anyone expected. For a lot of people that didn’t matter. They’d come prepared with tents or sleeping bags or late lifts arranged. But we had to catch the last train back to our digs. There was no way we could stay for the whole set. We had to make tracks and that meant missing tracks. We caught ‘Eleventh Earl of Mar’, ‘In the Cage’, ‘Burning Rope’, ‘The Fountain of Salmacis’, ‘Deep in the Motherlode’, and ‘Ripples’. But soon after that it was time for us to sail away. As we crossed the field heading for Stevenage station we could hear the first strains of ‘One for the Vine’ and then the chorus kicked in:
‘Follow me!
I’ll play the game you want me,
Until I find a way back home.’
My Knebworth experience was bittersweet but the fact that the concert was cut short for me only made me want more. I kept playing the albums, kept getting updates from the fan club, kept dreaming of more midsummer nights. The next album, Duke, appeared at the end of March 1980. That was a turnaround year for me. I saw Peter Gabriel at the Apollo on 29 February and caught Steve Hackett there on 14 June. In between, on 28 April 1980, I saw Genesis at the same venue, live and uncut. This time I had no worries about getting home and could stay for the encore. I’d had a letter via the Genesis fan club from a guy who followed them around the country and he asked if he could come up for the Glasgow gigs and kip on my bedroom floor in his sleeping bag. His ticket was for the first night – 27th April – so he was able to rave about them the night before I went. He’d been following them for longer than me, and in a more determined fashion. It amazed me that he could go from venue to venue like that so he knew the set inside out. He told me how Phil Collins had grown as a frontman, how easy he was with the audience. He’d seen them in their heyday with Peter Gabriel in his outlandish outfits so that stuck with me. My own experience was that Phil Collins was less of a showman but he had a great rapport with the audience.
LOSING THE INVISIBLE TOUCH
Genesis got me through my late teens, from fifteen to nineteen. I spent a lot of time reading, daydreaming, listening to music on the record player. Outside my window the scheme sounds of sirens and screams were never far away but inside the language was lyrical, and the melodies were mellow. Those were golden years for all things Genesis.
1980 was when it all ended for me. The big prog rock event of that year was Pink Floyd’s monumental double-album The Wall, and by then I was already into The Clash, The Police, The Pretenders, Blondie, The Beat, The Specials, Dexy’s Midnight Runners and so many other bands, and I was out and about, dancing and socialising, not moping in my bedroom. My four-year love affair with genesis ended with Duke. It wasn’t so much a concept album as a breakup album, and it put a stop to my relationship with the band. It was the last album of theirs that I bought. Duke is now known as Phil Collins’s divorce album, and at nineteen I was just too young to appreciate the mature melancholy of it all. I didn’t like the title or the cover art either. Compared to the earlier covers, which were artworks, collectors’ items, the image by French illustrator Lionel Koechlin appeared cartoonish rather than atmospheric or intriguing or arty. The spell had broken for me. Yet listening to it now I can see why the band thought it was the album that best captured the quality of their live act in the studio. Songs like ‘Heathaze’ get to me now in a way they never did back then:
“The trees and I are shaken by the same wind but whereas
The trees will lose their withered leaves
I just can’t seem to let them loose.”
From 1980 onwards I got more and more into The Jam. Their revival of the sounds of the sixties took me back to the music I’d listened to when I was younger, especially The Beatles. The Beatles were also a big influence on Genesis when they started out. I was always aware that music was much more joined up than the artificial boundaries of fandom would acknowledge. I did try to follow Peter Gabriel into the 1980s. ‘Solsbury Hill’ (1977) was a stunning song, but although I bought the solo albums right up until 1986, I remained much more strongly attached to his Genesis years. Same with Steve Hackett. I bought Spectral Mornings in 1979 and loved the title track but for me the story ended there. I bought Tony Banks’s solo album A Curious Feeling in 1979 and original Genesis guitarist Anthony Phillips’s Wise After the Event (1978). But these were afterglows. The real fire for me was in the Genesis albums of the 1970s, not the ‘prog pop’ that followed.
I heard Gabriel interviewed on the radio in the summer of 1980 after his third solo album came out. Paul Weller played electric guitar on one song, ‘And Through the Wire’, and Gabriel explained that he liked Weller’s open chords. He thought The Jam singer-songwriter had come much further than his punk roots. That confirmed my view that the branches of the family tree of rock were intertwined (2). On that same Gabriel album Kate Bush contributed vocals on two tracks, ‘No Self Control’ and ‘Games Without Frontiers’. She already had a connection with Genesis insofar as her first hit, ‘Wuthering Heights’ (1978), followed in the footsteps of Wind and Wuthering. In fact I had her poster next to the one for Seconds Out on my bedroom wall.
Genesis survived my departure, just as they’d carried on without Peter Gabriel and Steve Hackett. The depth of talent in the band was clear from the fact that Collins and Gabriel would go on to become two of the most influential solo artists and distinctive male vocalists of the 1980s and 1990s. In Gabriel’s case his pioneering work in terms of sound proved influential for many later artists (3). While I gave up on Genesis my brother Eddy took over the reins from me, starting with Abacab (1981). I remember him playing Invisible Touch (1986) and only half-tuning into it. It didn’t reach in and grab right hold of my heart the way that earlier songs had.
DON’T GIVE UP
Years passed. My pal Shug, expert on all things musical and literary, introduced me to a BBC mockumentary series about Brian Pern, former lead singer with fictional 1970s prog rock legends Thotch and the frontman who had ‘invented world music’. A good-humoured Peter Gabriel made a guest appearance as himself. Gabriel’s post-Genesis duet with Kate Bush, ‘Don’t Give Up’ (1986), was hilariously parodied. Brian Pern presented prog rock as an overblown dinosaur in need of deflation and by then I could kind of see why. I had always thought of prog rock as music that you listened to rather than danced too, classical-influenced and literary, and album-based rather than aimed at the singles market, but over the years prog rock had become a lazy label, shorthand for something stale, pretentious and past its best, ‘glum rock’ for loners in bedsits land.
Yet the story of progressive rock is as complex and varied as the music. As early as 1968 New York underground music magazine The East Village Other quoted community radio pioneer Larry Yurdin, who favoured free form music, where the DJ rather than the sponsor chose the playlist. For Yurdin: ‘The distinction between progressive rock and Free Form lies in the fact that progressive rock merely substitutes album cuts for singles while remaining in the context of the dry Top Forty format’. The East Village Other passed its own judgment on prog rock a few months later: ‘As progressive rock progresses out of the reach of its listeners, the rock-is-art schmucks try to turn their audiences into boring symphonic turds with tightly crossed legs and a polite handclap. The question of the music’s validity is being raised with an academic smugness that pigeonholes the sound into a dusty textbook’ (4).
I can see the force of these early criticisms. Prog rock’s artiness and its ostensibly uncommercial ethos concealed the fact that it was just another brand looking for an audience, but in the 1970s, I loved listening to the music and didn’t question its motives. For me it was about entering another world through long hours of listening. Since prog rock meant albums, not singles, it was less likely to be encountered on Radio 1, or on Top of the Pops, and more likely to be heard on The Old Grey Whistle Test. Genesis made their first appearance on TOTP with ‘Turn It On Again’ in 1980 from Duke, the beginning of a much more mainstream period and a shift away from prog rock as it had been envisaged in the late 1960s and 1970s.
Despite my gradual estrangement, Genesis still held a place in my heart, and it stung when British music journalists used the word ‘naff’ of Phil Collins. I take the same line on music as I do on culture generally: I hate snobs and sectarians, and most of all I hate people whose knowledge of the history of a particular artform stretches back only as far as the day before yesterday. I was glad so many American hip-hop artists sampled Phil Collins, and gave him the love his outstanding talent deserved. The only thing that’s naff is a cloth-eared or cultish attitude. Even though I hadn’t got into his solo stuff I could see what a talent Collins was as a singer-songwriter and as a drummer. As far as Genesis were concerned my fandom had been dormant, not dead.
It began to revive slowly. A few years ago, I heard that Genesis and Peter Gabriel were special subjects on Mastermind and that made me wonder how I’d have fared on the 1970s stuff. I’d not get many right answers on the later period. Around 2013, I started listening to Genesis again for the first time in years, on Spotify in the kitchen rather than on vinyl in my bedroom. The music sounded as good as ever. Then at the end of 2015 a friend got me tickets to see to see Genesisn’t, a tribute band that played the early stuff, at Òran Mór in Glasgow. It was the end of the year, that limbo time between Boxing Day and Hogmanay. When I walked into the venue with my sister I expected a very small audience because of the time of year and the fact that it was a tribute act, but the venue was absolutely rammed and the music was a revelation. When the band played the whole of ‘Supper’s Ready’, I realised just how much I’d missed the music. Genesisn’t? No, Genesis!
In October 2017 I heard that Bill Bruford was giving a lecture to music students at the University of Glasgow. I was really excited. I knew Bruford was a former drummer with Yes, King Crimson and, most importantly, Genesis. He now had a PhD in Music and gave a great lecture on percussion, examining the relationship between virtuosity and passion, expertise and creativity, discussing levels and types of drumming, using the example of the Australian Pink Floyd. It was fascinating but I had been drawn there as a Genesis fan. I felt like a groupie. I even managed to sneak a photo, the closest I’ve got to an invisible touch of Genesis. I look like I’m photobombing him.
In November 2019 I saw Steve Hackett play Selling England By The Pound at The Playhouse in Edinburgh. In 2020 my brother John bought me Mario Giammetti’s book, Genesis 1967 to 1975: The Peter Gabriel Years. It had interviews with all the original band members and in-depth reflections on all the albums of my favourite period in their history. I devoured it and laughed at some of the Brian Pern-like patter. For example, Tony Banks said of ‘I Know What I Like (In Your Wardrobe)’ that it ‘probably would have been quite a big hit if it hadn’t had this wardrobe in the title, which no-one could understand’. Gabriel got his own back: ‘I never really loved the chorus; it was one of Tony’s melodies and after a while I got very bored of it’ (5). Band bitching at its best, with former members trading polite percussive blows. Giammetti’s book put me on the trail of other critical material on Genesis and I realised there was a whole seam of scholarship on the band waiting to be explored (6).
My fandom revival continued to pick up pace and I eagerly bought tickets to see Genesis in 2020 for what looked to be their swansong tour, aptly named The Last Domino. Then the pandemic hit, leading to the concert being postponed, not once but twice. Finally, on Thursday 7th of October 2021, for the first time in forty-one years, I got to see the band that had lifted my spirits and kept me sane in my youth. Shug, the prog rock guru, had got me a T-shirt with Peter Gabriel as a flower, a nod to one of his stage costumes for Foxtrot, and I wore that for this last throw of the domino. The line-up was Mike Rutherford, Tony Banks, Phil Collins, Phil’s son Nic on drums, and long-time guitarist Daryl Stuermer, who had been with the band when I saw them at Knebworth in 1978 and at the Glasgow Apollo in 1980. It was a performance worth waiting for. Two and a half hours of pristine prog rock segueing into pulsating prog pop, starting with some songs from Duke, by now a record redeemed in my eyes and ears, some classics from the vintage years of the 1970s, including an instrumental section from ‘Cinema Show’, ‘Afterglow’, a new version of ‘The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway’, ‘Follow You Follow Me’, an excerpt from ‘Firth of Fifth’, and ‘I Know What I Like’. I liked the use of deconstructed songs and medleys to give a taster of stuff they didn’t have time to play in full.
What I appreciated most of all though was hearing some of the later stuff that had passed me by. While ‘Mama’, ‘Land of Confusion’, ‘Tonight, Tonight, Tonight’ and ‘I Can’t Dance’ still left me slightly lukewarm, as they had on first hearing, others struck me as beautiful and haunting, including ‘Home by the Sea’, ‘Fading Lights’, ‘That’s All’, ‘No Son of Mine’, and ‘Throwing It All Away’. Even ‘Invisible Touch’ finally got its hands on me. As an encore, the opening lines of ‘Dancing With the Moonlit Knight’, sounding very timely – ‘Can you tell me where my country lies?’ – gave way to the perfect ending, the song that started it all for me, the single my sister heard John Peel play way back in 1975, ‘The Carpet Crawlers’:
‘There’s only one direction in the faces that I see
It’s upward to the ceiling, where the chamber’s said to be
Like the forest fight for sunlight, that takes root in every tree
They are pulled up by the magnet, believing they’re free’.
Phil Collins took the role of MC and was engaging, relaxed, witty, responsive and generous. His teasing tambourine theatrics on ‘I Know What I Like’ were no match for the percussive dynamism I remembered from 1980 when he was playing throw-and-catch at the Apollo. But, sitting in his chair throughout, infirm but on form, Collins was the maestro. When he playfully tapped the tambourine off his elbow, knee and head I was reminded of Val Kilmer in Tombstone spinning that little whisky jug in front of Johnny Ringo. Collins riffed on the Domino Theory and invited the audience to demonstrate how it worked. We did, with increasing enthusiasm. As the last lines of ‘Carpet Crawlers’ rang out – ‘You’ve got to get in to get out’ – I felt time shift the way it did when I first heard that song, travelling from fifteen to sixty in a few minutes.
I began this blog, which is probably as overblown and self-indulgent as the music it celebrates, with a verse from Foxtrot (1972). I’ll end with one from We Can’t Dance (1991). It was an album I knew nothing about beyond that annoying single, ‘I Can’t Dance’. But when they played ‘Fading Lights’ from that album I heard echoes of ‘Ripples’, and felt a wavelet washing over me:
‘Like the story that we wish was never ending
We know some time we must reach the final page
Still we carry on just pretending
That there’ll always be one more day to go.’
I was fifteen when I first heard Genesis. I followed them, there and back again, from Trespass to Duke. I’m sixty now. ‘Ripples never come back’ runs the refrain. But they do, you know. That’s all.
NOTES
1. I soon realised that bands can survive breakups just as people do. See Ronnie J. Phillips and Ian C. Strachan, ‘Breaking Up Is Hard To Do: The Resilience of the Rock Group as an Organizational Form for Creating Music’, Journal of Cultural Economics 40, 1 (2016): 29-74.
2. See Sean Albiez, ‘Know History!: John Lydon, Cultural Capital and the Prog/Punk Dialectic’, Popular Music 22, 3 (2003): 357-374.
3. See Franco Fabbri, ‘“I’d Like my Record to Sound Like This”: Peter Gabriel and Audio Technology’, in Sarah Hill (ed.), Peter Gabriel, from Genesis to Growing Up (London: Routledge, 2010), 173-182.
4. Cited in The East Village Other 3, 34 (26 July 1968), p. 9; Bob Rudnick and Dennis Frawley, ‘Kokaine Karma’, in The East Village Other 3, 45 (11 October 1968), p. 7. See also Jarl A. Ahlkvist, ‘What Makes Rock Music “Prog”? Fan Evaluation and the Struggle to Define Progressive Rock’, Popular Music and Society 34, 5 (2011): 639-660; Chris Anderton, ‘A Many-Headed Beast: Progressive Rock as European Meta-Genre’, Popular Music 29, 3 (2010): 417-435; Edward Macan, ‘The Music’s Not All That Matters, After All: British Progressive Rock as Social Criticism’, in Jonathan C. Friedman (ed.), The Routledge History of Social Protest in Popular Music (New York: Routledge, 2013), 123-141; David Nicholls, ‘Virtual Opera, or Opera between the Ears’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association 129, 1 (2004): 100-142; and Jay Keister and Jeremy L. Smith, ‘Musical Ambition, Cultural Accreditation and the Nasty Side of Progressive Rock’, Popular Music 27, 3 (2008): 433-455.
5. Mario Giammetti, Genesis 1967 to 1975: The Peter Gabriel Years, trans. J. M. Octavia Brown (Kingmaker Publishing, 2020), p.178.
6. See for example Sarah Hill, ‘Ending it all: Genesis and Revelation’, Popular Music 32, 2 (2013): 197-221; Kevin Holm-Hudson, Genesis and the Lamb Lies Down on Broadway (Farnham: Ashgate, 2008); and Julian Wolfreys, ‘“Chewing through your Wimpey Dreams”: Whimsy, Loss, and the “Experience” of the Rural in English Music and Art, 1966-1976’, in Haunted Selves, Haunting Places in English Literature and Culture (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). For a herbicidal battering see Charles R. O’Neill Jr., ‘Giant Hogweed (Heracleum mantegazzianum): Poisonous Invader of the Northeast’, NYSG Invasive Species Factsheet Series 7.1 (2009): 1-4.