‘Anent Hamish Henderson: Essays, Poems, Interviews’, edited by Eberhard Bort (Grace Note Publications)
Eberhard Bort, of Edinburgh University’s School of Scottish Studies, has already edited three collections relating to the life and work of Hamish Henderson: ‘Borne on the Carrying Stream: The Legacy of Hamish Henderson’ (2010), ‘Tis Sixty Years Since: The 1951 Edinburgh People’s Festival Ceilidh and the Scottish Folk Revival’ (2011) and ‘At Hame wi’ Freedom: Essays on Hamish Henderson and the Scottish Folk Revival’ (2012).
The publisher’s blurb for collection four describes its protagonist as ‘Scotland’s leading folklorist of the twentieth century, remarkable poet and songwriter, and political activist’. Even if this description is broadly accurate – and I accept that it is – a fourth volume in so short a time suggests the danger of over-kill, and in fact the amount that is new here is quite limited.
As its title indicates, ‘Anent Hamish Henderson’ is made up of different kinds of material. Of the 12 essays, only six are now published for the first time. Four are the texts of memorial lectures delivered in 2013 and 2014. One is a reprint of a chapter from a book published in 2013, and one is the script of a staged conversation (with songs) held in 2014. The provenance of the seven poems (about Hamish Henderson) is not clear, but they seem not to have been written explicitly for this book. Of the six interviews, five appeared between 1973 and 1997 in such locations as the New Edinburgh Review, Melody Maker, BBC Radio Scotland, and a book about contemporary Scottish verse.
Given such formal variety, inevitably there is a scrappy, loosely structured feel to the book. Equally inevitably, the exclusive focus on Hamish Henderson’s lifetime achievements makes it difficult not to see it as a pretty straightforward work of hagiography. One contributor (Ray Burnett) describes his essay as a ‘stone on the cairn’ to the memory of Hamish. This strikes me as a vivid and brilliantly accurate image for the book as a whole. But amid all the ‘fond reminiscences’, and other forms of celebration, there is much of interest here, and as I shall try to show, Hamish Henderson’s life and career remain richly meaningful in terms of Scotland today.
In relation to the role he came to play in 20th-century Scottish culture, I suspect that many readers – like me – will be surprised to learn that Henderson was educated at the prestigious Dulwich College in London, and went on to study modern languages at Downing College, Cambridge, just before the outbreak of the second world war. Again in terms of his later political activism, it is interesting that he quickly volunteered to join the British army and went on to become an officer in the Intelligence Corps. However, it was out of his military service in North Africa that his early, major poetic work emerged.
‘Elegies for the Dead in Cyrenaica’, a book-length collection, was written between 1942 and 1947, and published in London by John Lehmann in 1948. Three of the finest contributions to this book offer detailed readings and criticism of ‘Elegies’. Lesley Duncan writes perceptively of the parallels between Henderson as a poet-survivor of the second world war, and the Scottish-born Charles Hamilton Sorley as a poet-victim of the first. The contribution by John Lucas, a senior English academic, comes from his book on poetry of the second world war, but equally impressive is that from Richie McCaffery, a young scholar who recently gained his PhD from Glasgow University. The case that these writers make for the view that ‘Elegies’ has never received the critical attention it deserves is a compelling and important one.
What is striking, however, is that Henderson chose not to pursue his career exclusively as a poet. In 1951 he joined Edinburgh University’s new School of Scottish Studies and soon became its leading fieldworker and researcher. From this point on most of his energy went into what has become known as the Scottish folksong revival. Collecting and recording folk songs and folk music from all parts of Scotland, and soon collaborating with international collectors such as the American Alan Lomax, he also began to write his own ‘folk’ songs.
In 1960, in the middle of a lengthy flyting with Hugh MacDiarmid (see below), he went so far as to say ‘I have come to set greater store by my songs “in the idiom of the people” than by other kinds of poetry I have tried to write’. And there is no doubt that for the rest of his long career (he died in 2002) it was increasingly as a major preserver and promoter of Scotland’s traditional, popular, folk culture, that he became an eminently kenspeckle figure in Edinburgh and the Scottish cultural world more generally.
Henderson’s own most popular song is the rousing ‘The Freedom Come-All-Ye’ with these opening lines: ‘Roch the wind in the clear day’s dawin/ Blaws the cloods heelster-gowdie ow’r the bay/ But there’s mair nor a roch wind blawin/ Through the great glen o’ the warld the day.’
Originally performed around 1970, the song celebrates popular protest movements such as CND and the campaign against apartheid in South Africa. But its message remains potent, and a South African singer sang it at the opening of the Commonwealth Games last year. Writing in the Herald in January this year, Alan Taylor supports the idea that the work might become Scotland’s new national anthem. The song, he writes, ‘like its author’, is ‘nationalist by formation, internationalist in outlook, and socialist by inclination’.
As it happens, Henderson himself was against this idea: ‘I have always privately opposed the idea of “Freedom Come-All-Ye” becoming an anthem because if there’s one thing I don’t think would do that song any good at all would be for it to become official. The whole idea is that it is an alternative to “official” attitudes’. Henderson believed that the folk song revival in Scotland – and in America – essentially grew out of a rejection of the dominant political and economic establishment. ‘It sprang out of the period of the civil war in Spain…and out of World War Two…this folk song revival is part of this human defence against a gross assault on humanity.’
From the perspective of Scottish politics today, what is striking is just how perfectly Hamish Henderson emerges as an iconic, archetypal figure. He is what the SNP and a range of commentators tell us most Scottish voters have become: in Taylor’s formulation, ‘nationalist, internationalist, and socialist’. An admirer of Gramsci (whom he translated), political activist against imperialism, warmongering, racism, and nuclear weapons, Hamish Henderson seems to tick all the right boxes. Is he not worth four books – and perhaps a more permanent cairn?
Are there no dissenting voices? It is easy to identify at least one. In the 1960s the letters page of the Scotsman contained a series of vitriolic exchanges between Henderson and an even more dominant figure in Scottish culture: Hugh MacDiarmid. The subject was Scottish folk song and popular culture in general. MacDiarmid’s view is that Henderson vastly overrates the value of the folk song revival. At his most vituperative he writes: ‘Mr Henderson…seems…to wish to scrap all learning and all literature as hitherto defined in favour of the boring doggerel of analphabetic and ineducable farm-labourers, tinkers, and the like…unlettered ballad singers yowling like so many cats on the tiles in moonlight’. ‘Why’, he asks, ‘should we be concerned…with songs which reflect the educational limitations, the narrow lives, the poor literary abilities, of a peasantry we have happily outgrown?’
Less outspokenly, he suggests that ‘the present folksong cult plays into the hands of the great number of people who are hostile to all intellectual distinction and to experimental and avant-garde work generally’. Henderson responds to such attacks with almost equal vigour, and I suspect that in the end most readers felt he was marginally the winner on points of this long debate. Yet I must admit to some sympathy for MacDiarmid’s position.
A member of Edinburgh University’s department of English in the 1960s, I was familiar with the School of Scottish Studies – and always felt its name was rather misleading. American Studies – with which I was also familiar – focused on American history, literature, government, media – and a range of other areas including popular culture. Edinburgh’s Scottish Studies in contrast engaged only in Gaelic studies and the Scottish folk song tradition. (When the Scottish Government finally establishes Scottish Studies as a compulsory part of the school curriculum I’m sure the American Studies model will be the more relevant.)
There is much to admire and celebrate in Hamish Henderson’s lifelong commitment to the preservation of Scotland’s popular folk culture – but that tradition should never be seen as displacing or overshadowing the grander cultural achievements of the rest of Scotland. When Alex Salmond was declared the winner of the Gordon constituency in May’s general election he apparently quoted from Hamish Henderson’s best known song: ‘There’s a roch wind blowing through the great glen of Scotland this morning’. Fair enough perhaps, but it’s worth remembering that in Henderson’s original, it’s through ‘the great glen o’ the warld’ the rough wind is blowing.
for Bob Cant’s review of ‘Queer Voices in Post-War Scotland: Male Homosexuality, Religion and Society’ by Jeffrey Meek
By Andrew Hook | August 2015