Pathhead Review

The Pathhead ReviewArts, Science and the Meaning of Fife

Issue OneSpring 2011

ISSN 2046-0112

The Pathhead Review Issue OneArts, Science and the Meaning of Fife ISSN 2046-0112 Spring 2011

C O N T E N T S

Editorial: A Fife Renaissance? 04

Christopher Harvie: Reimagining Fife 07

Bob Purdie: Remembering Duncan Glen 13

Ian Nimmo White: Poems 17

Sculpture in Fife feature

William Hershaw: David Annand, Scottish sculptor 24

Kenny Munro: Discovering myself in Fife 28

Gordon Meade: Poems 37

Gordon Jarvie: Scotland’s Place Names 43

Lillias Scott Forbes: Border Forays into Fife 46

John Brewster: Poems 52

Science feature

R.P.M. Bond: Global Warming 58

Lillian King: Mary Somerville 62

Morna Fleming: Henryson’s Dunfermline – or Dunfermline’s Henryson? 68

Molly Rorke: Book Review: John Craig McDonald’s An Early Fall 73

William Hershaw: Three Edinburgh Poems 76

Notes on contributors and editorial team 80

EDITORIAL TEAM

Publisher: DAVID McHUTCHON MA MLitt

Editor: TOM HUBBARD MA DipLib PhD FCLIP

Editorial Board: R.P.M. BOND CChem BSc PhD FRSC STUART FARRELL BA AIFA FSA Scot BILL HARE MA DAVID W. POTTER MA BOB PURDIE BA MSc PhD ERIC SIMPSON JOHN WALLACE OBE MA FRSAMD FRAM FRCM FRNCM DLitt DMus ANN WATTERS MBE

Production editors (design and layout): MARK HOLDEN BA MSc CLAIRE HUBBARD

The Pathhead Review is published by David McHutchon atthe Ravenscraig Press,

Midnight Oil Books, 120 Commercial Street, Kirkcaldy, Fife, KY1 2NX, Scotlandwww.midoil.co.uk [email protected] [email protected]

© the contributors 2011.Opinions expressed by the authors are not necessarily those of the editorial team.

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E D I T O R I A L

A Fife Renaissance?ANDREA: Unhappy the land which has no heroes!GALILEO: No. Unhappy the land which needs heroes. BERTOLT BRECHT, The Life of Galileo

Clean pride and mucky pride

So : 2010 was Fife’s ‘Year of Culture’. Imagine France declaring a ‘Year of Culture’ in 2010: 2011 could then provide an excuse for storing Voltaire, Hugo, Cézanne and co, in the proverbial artists’ attic. 2011 will be Fife’s ‘Year of …’ what? The Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh made an important distinction between provincialism and parochialism. For him, provincialism was the mark of a locality which assumed that its own mental produce was inferior to that of the metropolis, to which it looked for direction: in Scotland we’d call that the Cringe. Parochialism, on the other hand, was a matter of unaffected celebration of local achievements. Yorkshire – as we’d expect – offers another source of good sense: in Charlotte Brontë’s novel Shirley there’s a thoughtful working man, William Farren, who contrasts ‘clean pride’ with ‘mucky pride’. The obverse of the cultural cringe is mucky pride – as in ‘wha’s like us?’ Sure, parochialism can also become too inward-looking, but it resists pretension: it favours ‘clean pride’. Fife at present suffers from provincialism: its cure is an outward-looking parochialism. In the local is the universal. Back in 1995 the artist-impresario Richard Demarco delivered a guest lecture at the then Fife College, on Adam Smith. He presented

not the Smith who is used as an excuse for money-grubbing, but a mind and that mind’s home-town, both of which looked to Europe – not cringingly, not seeking validation, but on terms of intellectual equality. Christopher Harvie takes up this theme in his essay, ‘Reimagining Fife’, in the following pages.

Regionalism and Dunfermline: Patrick Geddes, Robert Henryson

Related to parochialism is regionalism, a concept which again has been articulated by an Irish poet – this time by John Hewitt, an Ulsterman. Coming from a part of the world racked by contending ‘national’ loyalties, Hewitt found in the ‘region’ a space with which both Protestant and Catholic, Republican and Unionist, could identify. Such a summary suggests both an over-simplification and an over-optimism that Hewitt would not have intended. As aspirations go, though, you could find a lot worse. In Scotland, regionalism was at the heart of the city-design (as opposed to town-planning) philosophy of Patrick Geddes, who in 1904 drew up proposals for a revival of Dunfermline. These included an open-air auditorium, and folk museum exhibits on the Scandinavian model, together with educational spaces across the subject spectrum, in the context of a

transformation of Pittencrieff Park and its environs – while fully respecting the existing contours of the town, contours historical, geographical and cultural. Geddes’s ideas amounted to a people’s-university-plus, one might say, fit for the former capital of a nation of north-western Europe. Something of this spirit animated Elspeth King when she reinvigorated the Abbot House in the early/mid 1990s. In this first issue of The Pathhead Review, Dr Morna Fleming champions Robert Henryson, schoolmaster of Dunfermline Abbey, author of The Testament of Cresseid, and seriously considered by many to be the greatest tragic poet between Dante and Shakespeare.

Local Heroes or Prophets Without Honour?

Robert Henryson was absent from the recent Fife Council ‘Local Heroes’ display in Kirkcaldy’s Mercat Centre, as also was Lochgelly’s Jennie Lee, the founder of the Open University. They also failed to make the grade in the Fife Free Press’s 100 Fife heroes. The poet of ‘The Image o’ God’, Joe Corrie, gained admittance to both the Council’s and the Press’s temples of the worthy: pity that the FFP could adorn his entry with only a nondescript silhouette, as if the image o’ the man himself could nowhere be found. The BBC’s contribution to ‘2010’ (though not packaged as such) was far,

far worse. They dispatched a bland fellow, one Jonathan Meades, up to Jockshire – a land which, for the London media, is generally considered to be cartographically-challenged. It has to be said that Meades, an architectural historian, made a more than decent job of Aberdeen. The sparkling granite almost, if not quite, provoked a smile out of him. But then he came south, to oor airt, and for him Fife was no more than a sorry dump, post the titanic clash of the ’80s between Thatcher and Scargill. Poor victims, poor us.

P h R - s p e a k

Meades’s saving grace, if it could be so called, was that he was no PR-freak. That’s a role which we at The Pathhead Review would not savour: we would like our acronym to be PhR. We’re aiming to be unashamedly but accessibly intellectual (you won’t have to be a PhD to enjoy PhR), offering our readers scholarly journalism and creative writing. There will also be more formal specialist articles which we feel deserve a wider audience than their authors’ immediate peers. Generally we’ll pitch our material at the kind of people (and we believe they’re many) who are discriminating users of public libraries and independent bookshops, who provide the clientèle for university and college evening classes in the liberal arts and sciences, who enrol in the programs of the

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Workers’ Educational Association (WEA), of which we have an active branch in Fife. Welcome, then, to our first issue. We have Lillias Scott Forbes on the St Andrews days of her composer father Francis George Scott; Lillian King on Burntisland’s mathematician Mary Somerville; R.P.M. Bond on global warming; a feature on sculpture in Fife; a selection of work from some of our sharpest poets / makars. There are poignant tributes to the late Duncan Glen, adopted Fifer and prolific recorder of our literary and architectural riches. PhR will print not only Fife content by Fife-based (and non-Fife based) writers, but also non-Fife content by Fife-based writers. We offer what another Scottish composer, Ronald Stevenson, has called ‘the hospitality of the mind’.

TH

The earlier part of this piece draws on a presentation by the Editor to the 2008 Freudenstadt Colloquium on European regionalism, which is funded by the Friedrich-Ebert Stiftung, and held annually in the Black Forest town of Freudenstadt.

If there is a Fife cultural ‘renaissance’ in our time, how far back are its possible origins? In his characteristically wide-ranging style, CHRISTOPHER HARVIE, former Professor of British and Irish Studies at the University of Tübingen in Germany, and currently MSP for Mid-Scotland and Fife, discusses economic history, politics, literature and much else in the following survey, which is based on a talk given to the Fife Branch of the Workers’ Educational Association (WEA) on 3 November 2009.Professor Harvie’s most recent book is Scotland the Brief (Argyll Publishing, 2010).

I

There are some places, R L Stevenson wrote, that seem there to attract stories. This one is about civic and ultimately political imagination, and peninsulae don’t come any more imaginative than one that considers itself a Kingdom. Suppose that there’s something more than a literary conceit here, and that – in a country ruled by an amalgam of literary and political convention – Fife’s ‘force-fields’ are particularly fricative?

Kirkcaldy’s Gordon Brown talks much about douce Adam Smith, but Smith was also a rhetorician, a creator of a fictional factory more famous than Wedgwood’s Etruria or Ford’s Dearborn. Did that pin factory ever exist? Or was it a rhetorical folly – in the eighteenth century sense? And a virtual one – in ours? But there it is:

Christopher Harvie

maybe 40% proof but an industrial spirit!

Suppose we start at Ravenscraig Castle, louring down on where Kirkcaldy becomes Dysart. Dark, drum-like, almost out of Hitler’s Atlantic Wall, and built in 1460 on the same principle: to deploy and deflect artillery. James II built it only seven years after the fall of Christian Constantinople to the cannon-rich Turks. Its bombards, the first ‘weapons of mass destruction’, could sink a ship two miles off. A politics of mailed fist rather than invisible hand?

Visceral Fife was more recognisable to Smith’s realist friend Adam Ferguson of Raith, the mansion on the hill. Thomas Carlyle – in some ways a Fergusonian and in 1816-18 master at Kirkcaldy High School – thought

LEADING ARTICLE

Re-imagining Fife

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‘Gunpowder, Protestantism and Printing’ changed the Renaissance world and the economy of Scotland. Fife’s coast recalls the new land and mind. Think about Breughel’s ‘Fall of Icarus’ – the ploughman and shepherds high on the cliff-meadow, and Auden on

… the expensive delicate ship that must have seen Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

A world of force and magic – money as treasure and fantasy – reaches out through force, romance and history, giving Fife an eerie, displaced identity, contradicting Smithian simplicities, opening new boxes. Revisit fin-de-siècle Kirkcaldy, a bijou Cardiff with its cathedral-size St Bryce’s Kirk, ensemble of museum, college and town house (neo-classical) concert hall and police headquarters (baroque), sheriff court (Scots baronial) and hotel (art nouveau). Michael Portillo, of the Blyths of this parish, who owned a linen works and donated Glasgow Boys, William McTaggart, the Scottish Colourists – to the Gallery the Nairn family built. To that clan belongs Professor Tom Nairn, intellectual historian, disturber of the Scottish peace, Brown’s protégé in Red Paper days, turned the fiercest of his critics, lobbing missiles from the Melbourne Institute of Technology.

Adam Smith, as with factories, is fantasy-epical on trade: his conjectural history quite close to the creation-myth of the Scots, in the Declaration of Arbroath, 1320: a Levantine migration akin to the Scythian. When they arrived they magicked pawky cartels in hours of ‘merriment and diversion’, hoicking up prices. Smith speculated thus after viewing Langtonian shopkeepers and skippers on the links, or as ‘drouthy neebors’

in their taverns, attested to by his disciple Robert Burns on his only visit in 1787:

Up wi’ the carls o’ Dysart,And the lads o’ Buckhiven,And the kimmers o’ Largo,

An’ the lasses o’ Leven.

Hey ca’ thro’, ca’ thro’For we hae mickle a do. (repeat)

We hae tales to tell,An we hae sangs to sing:

We hae pennies to spend,And we hae pints to bring.

This endured in the democratic schoolteaching of R. F. MacKenzie (1910-1984), Kirkcaldy’s radical headmaster, disciple of A. S. Neill and dominie to the young Paul Foot when he was on the Daily Record in its literate days: ‘His passionate faith was that everyone mattered, especially the poorest and most disadvantaged, and that everyone was capable of understanding and enjoying what makes human life worthwhile.’

II

The Kingdom’s history was always insistent: the place is packed with Europe. At Kinghorn in 1285 Alexander III broke his neck, precipitating the succession crisis, the French alliance and Edward I’s invasion that would for 275 years drive Scotland and England apart and complicate the latter’s evolution. This left a short epitaph, bitter and complex, Scotland’s first great poem:

When Alexander our king was dedWho Scotland led in lauch and le,Away was sonst of meat and bread

Of yill and wax, of gamyn and of gle.Our gold was turned into lead.

Oh Christ concievit in infirmitie,Succour Scotland and remeid

That steyit is in perplexitie.

On a peninsula, off the Berwick-Stirling route that English invasions tended to follow, Fife became a regal, clerical redoubt, with the palaces at Dunfermline and Falkland, Cathedral and University at St Andrews: nurturing that Stewart overreach of the ‘Crowne Imperiall’. Trade, with its inflected routes, brought in Protestantism, the destruction of Cardinal Beatoun, the Marian exiles, among them Knox. The University consumed the old Cathedral. In Burntisland’s new kirk in 1601 James VI, his southern inheritance in view, commissioned the translation of the Bible which would unite his realms culturally. Balgonie Castle was the seat of Alexander Leslie, Earl of Leven, Field Marshal in the armies of Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden which branded Germany in the Thirty Years War after 1618, then plotted the moves which ended the dictatorship of Charles I in 1641.

Mary Shelley, daughter of anarchist William Godwin and feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, holidayed in Balgonie as teenager and elderly lady, with the Baxter and Stuart families, and Kirkcaldy is twinned with Bavarian Ingolstadt, where her doomed supermedic Dr Frankenstein studied. In The Last Man she took the human race to its ultimate conclusion. Doom followed another innovator: Thomas Bouch, builder of the world’s first commercial train ferry connecting Burntisland and Granton in 1848, whose reputation crashed with the Tay Bridge in 1879.

Largo produced Alexander Selkirk, the thrawn Scots sailor made over by Daniel Defoe as Robinson Crusoe, prototype economic man: almost a metaphor from Hobbes’s ‘great mechanical man called the state, famous amongst all the beasts of the earth for pride’ carried on by Bentham and

Marx, and figuring at the back of Alasdair Gray’s camera-obscura view of central Scotland in Lanark (1982). Gray echoed Patrick Geddes, reared in Perth, who got his first chance as a town planner from Carnegie in Dunfermline. Geddes would have approved of Gray’s alternative to the nation-state – a commonwealth of small socialist republics, trading with each other. This also had Fife origins through Professor James Lorimer, creator of the ‘democratic intellect’ of the Scottish universities and their elected rectors, first advocate of a European Federation in 1884, and father of the vernacular revivalist Sir Robert Lorimer.

Economics, artillery, science fiction, European federalism, survival – a bit different from Edinburgh over there – based on a post-railway generation of payoff consumer-goods industries: wool, paper, canvas, steam-milled flour, distilleries, Wemyss pottery with its floral cats and pigs. Most notably the linoleum made after 1877 (partly the work of Michael Nairn’s astute and businesslike widow Catherine: Mary Shelley would have approved) from jute, cork and linseed oil, the ‘queer-like smell’ of which can still be caught from the one surviving, Zürich-owned, works. III

Another local minister’s son was more attuned to the ramifications of capitalist imperialism. Ravenscraig figures twice in the novels of John Buchan, whose father had the charge of Pathhead Free Kirk. On Kirkcaple beach John Laputa danced before his African gods at the opening of Prester John (1908): the ‘Black General’ who would prefigure Nelson Mandela, maybe Barack Obama. Ravenscraig’s owner, the Earl of Dysart and Huntingtower (1923), christened another Buchan adventure, introducing the Gorbals Diehards, sworn foes of meliorism:

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Class-conscious we are and class-conscious we stay,Till oor fit’s on the neck o’ the boorjwazay!

The Tory Buchan argued that there were things worse than communism: the sheer illegality released by the utopianism of the Bolsheviks. He put this in the words of Princess Saskia, oddly prefiguring Gordon Brown’s own involvement with the pretender to the Roumanian throne and the tides of Russian, oligarch-extorted wealth that after 1989-91 would tear through a future London. ‘Wild capitalism’ would be observed, ironically enough, by another Fife ex-lefty, John Lloyd of the Financial Times, though when he tried to interest Brown in Lampedusa’s great novel about political decay, The Leopard (1957), Lloyd drew a complete blank.

Big money, anyone? Canvassing Kirkcaldy in 2007 I found that Sir Michael Snyder of Kingston Smith, Finance and Resources boss of the City of London until 2007, owned a Fife house, convenient for golf at St Andrews – and for chats with the Chancellor? Big money holds out in landward Fife in classical mansions and converted tower-houses, yet its drive features in the transatlantic ‘best-seller’ art of the miner’s son Jack Vettriano. Like Edward Hopper, but on the wing: hotels and beaches, girls staring into cocktails, men staring at girls. Everywhere mobility, desire, discontent, to be assuaged by sex, cars or cash.

Sometime in the 1890s four young Liberal MPs climbed Raith Hill. ‘What a grateful thought,’ said Augustine Birrell to H. H Asquith, R B. Haldane and Ronald Munro-Ferguson (Kirkcaldy), laird of Raith, ‘that there is not an acre in this vast and varied landscape that is not represented at Westminster by a London barrister.’ Haldane (East Lothian) reorganised the British Army for a war-service competence unsuspected

by Germany. Asquith (East Fife) broke the power of the Lords. Birrell (West Fife) ignored the Irish enragés who in Easter 1916 started wrecking the British Empire.

Thanks to the Forth Bridge (1890), seven miles west, you could step on the midnight sleeping car at Kirkcaldy or Inverkeithing, and wake up in London, then as now.

IV

But by the 1990s the burghs had long conceded to Glenrothes: a New Town intended to serve a calamitous coal mine, the seat of Fife Council, ‘The People’s Republic’. By 2007 coal, shipyards, railways, linoleum, paper, even computers, had walked. The Silicon Glen clearances left the eerie bulk of an unopened Toshiba factory. Council and Fife NHS together made up 20% of jobs.

BiFab at Burntisland and Methil has done well in offshore wind power; Diageo at Cameron Bridge next to Lord Leven’s Balgonie, has the UK’s biggest distillery (romantic as an oil refinery) producing Smirnoff Vodka and Gordon’s Gin, in stills from Clerkenwell dating from William Hogarth’s day. Otherwise Fifers went over the bridge to Edinburgh’s commercial exurbia, sprawling west of the City and dominated by the Royal Bank of Scotland’s new campus at Gogar:

We hae cold calls to make,An’ we hae shelves to stack,

We hae burgers tae flipAn’ we hae wars tae fight!

might sum things up.

Plenty of young Langtonians could only get a respected job by enlisting in the Black Watch. Gregory Burke interviewed a selection and crafted a drama-documentary for the new National Theatre of Scotland,

where the scene shifted from local pubs to the desert war. Critics found ‘a relentless energy … a potent reminder of the prime of life, so quickly transformed into death, severe physical or mental injury’. But what would Adam Smith himself, that kindly, pacific soul, have made of it all, had industry and post-industry left the Fifers wiser than Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe? ‘When asked about their interactions with the population a soldier reacts with surprise: “Whit the fuck hiv the Iraqis got tae fuckin dae wi anythin’?”’

V

St Andrews in the 1900s was tiny: lived by selling women degrees Oxford and Cambridge wouldn’t give them. Jennie Lee founded something much larger, the Open University. The wife of Aneurin Bevan, creator of the NHS, was of the ‘Little Moscows’: Lumphinnans, Kelty, Lochgelly, Lochore: mining villages with their libraries, municipal Lenins, once-grand co-op stores, even co-op pubs, the famous Goths. From 1935 to 1951 they returned the UK’s one Communist MP, Willie Gallacher. The mines ended with the strike of 1984-5, and with them an eloquent blend of socialism and Scottish nationalism in Lawrence Daly, Communist until 1956 and General Secretary 1968-1982 of the National Union of Mineworkers, whose Fife Socialist League backed Home Rule early on. But in the 1990s Daly, shattered by a car accident which killed his closest relatives, far from home, drinking heavily – simply leaked out of history. He died after ten years of Alzheimer’s in May 2009. In a touching memorial address, Gordon Brown remembered the 1973 three-day-week tale of Daly reciting on Euston platform the whole of Act I Scene 2 of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar to his union general council. Cassius wins Brutus to the conspiracy, and Daly played all the voices.

The People’s Republic rescued Brown in the Glenrothes by-election in November 2008, when he seemed internationally the fireman against economic conflagration, but domestically a burnt-out case. His economics disturbed Fife at both ends of the scale. Lochgelly became in 2007 ‘the number one property investment location in the UK’: the grim ex-mining community was the last town with average house prices under £100,000. They rose 36% . The property boom had either conquered poverty, or passed beyond rationality.

Recover from that? By returning to Ravenscraig Castle and its WMDs? Rosyth housed Dreadnoughts, then broke them up. In 1993 it was to become the refitting base for Britain’s four ‘Trident’ missile submarines. The contract went for political reasons to Devonport. In 2006 Brown decided on a second Trident generation, and two 65,000 ton aircraft carriers at £5 billion: to be built in sections on the Clyde and at Barrow and welded together at Rosyth. Trident might cost £65 billion over 30 years, when the defence budget couldn’t sustain troops in Iraq or Afghanistan. The major driver was BAe: power-politics at its least restrained. Its lucrative trade haunted Brown in early 2009, with ex-ministers turning lobbyists. Then greedy Cityboys and gullible Scots did for the Dunfermline Building Society, Scotland’s biggest, on 29 March 2009.

Fife is semi-detached from Edinburgh. The Firth sunders and binds. The Borders, over the Moorfoots, are hours away and closing the gap by a new railway – in any European country a no-brainer – has to be fought for every week. Fife remains civic and at least potentially united: the bequest of the Kingdom. Near to Edinburgh and nearer with decent sea-links (another no-brainer) – it also looks out to Europe:

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practically and enduringly, if the ferry from Rosyth to Zeebrugge succeeds.*

Let’s think of Fife as a Kingdom and develop it as such. Attract Edinburgh ministries: make the Merchant’s House on Kirkcaldy Quay the HQ of Scotland’s European activities. Do we need a new road bridge – just before Peak Oil – or a high-speed rail route through the Kingdom, with tram-trains running from Dundee and St Andrews and Levenmouth to Stirling and the Central Belt? Our Kingdom must outlast the motor-car.

Think Holland, think Denmark, then re-imagine Fife. You get this European sense in our recent writing: Tom Hubbard’s Marie B., on the young Russian painter Marie Bashkirtseff (otherwise a few random lines in Eliot’s The Waste Land), standing for the realist moment in European (and particularly Scots) painting, Hubbard capturing this by using Braid Scots for the working people whom Marie wanted to portray. Georges Simenon’s sympathy (common to him and Adam Smith) is evident here. More obliquely in the ‘procedurals’ of Ian Rankin, though displaced by setting thrillers in Edinburgh with Glasgow villains: Rankinland comes dangerously close to Jeremy Rifkin’s ‘fourth sector’: that strange economy which coexists with the velvet breeks and silk hose of Speaker Martin in Glasgow North-East, but seems at least less obtrusive here. If we have a lot of reforming to do, Fife seems the place to start.

*The passenger service for this route was discontinued after December 2010.

- Ed.

Bob Purdie

Remembering Duncan Glen

In his ‘In memory of W.B. Yeats’, W.H. Auden has the lines:

The provinces of his body revolted, The squares of his mind were empty, Silence invaded the suburbs, The current of his feeling failed; He became his admirers.

Duncan Glen left us in September 2008, and the gap still aches. But if a life has been truly worthwhile, sorrow will be succeeded by a profound gladness that the life was lived. And the life will have made the lives of others more profound and meaningful. That is true of Duncan - he has ‘become his admirers’.

My personal memories of him are too few because, like him, I spent much of my life furth of Scotland, (and I know the significance of his achievement in contributing so much to our country while in exile). But my brother David explains the circumstances in which the two of us first met him:

In 1997, my brother Bob was in contact with Duncan Glen because he was doing research on Hugh MacDiarmid … . Bob was living in Oxford at the time and Duncan invited him to look him up in Kirkcaldy … . Bob asked if his twin brother could tag along and it turned out that Duncan knew my name and was enthusiastic about my work.

So it was that Bob and I drove over the bridge to Fife and were warmly welcomed into Duncan’s home. We had a most enjoyable blether… just

before we left, Duncan presented me with a copy of his Selected Poems 1987-1996, inscribed ‘to mark a meeting of poets, from Duncan, 4th July 1997’. I was tremendously flattered and have treasured the book and the memory of that meeting ever since.

I had one more meeting with Duncan, two years ago when I was in Kirkcaldy looking for a house, Duncan and Margaret welcomed me as if it had been ten days and not ten years. Although he was obviously frail and tired, we sat and talked for a couple of hours. We parted with promises of renewed friendship when I moved, which I did in the summer of 2008. But by the time I had settled in and got round to ringing up, Margaret told me he was in hospital. I never got to see him again, so this is my tribute to a friendship I valued all the more because of its brevity. I have collated here some reminiscences by people who knew him longer than I did.

Ian Nimmo White got to know him after taking up the editorship of Fife Lines Magazine,

‘I knew I was in the company of a great literary mind and a very fine human being. He was the most modest and helpful literary figure I’ve known since taking up writing.’

John Herdman backs this up. ‘In the combative atmosphere of Scottish letters in the ’60s and ’70s there were those who

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fell out with him, and this did sadden him. But I never came across anyone who had a bad word to say about Duncan as a man.’

Robyn Marsack expands:

Duncan Glen’s life had a rare coherence and integrity of purpose: it is impossible to make a conventional separation of ‘work’ from ‘life’, the two in his case being cut from one Scottish cloth. He was poet, artist, scholar, typographer, designer, printer, publisher, literary editor; a friend to poets and to libraries; a devoted husband, father to Alison and Ian, and grandfather.

It is for his work, and not just for his personality, that his memory will be treasured. If you rake through second hand bookshops, as I do, you will discover copies of that remarkable publication Akros. Robyn Marsack explains that the name was, ‘from the Greek root meaning “highest and furthest out”, which gives a clue as to its ambitions and scope, as well as his determination that it should cut across cliques.’

John Herdman adds that it:

… ran for more than 50 issues and was one of the key elements in the great ferment of Scottish letters in the 1960s and’70s. His astonishing energy and hard work, combined with a remarkable business acumen, made him a supremely effective mail order publisher. In all this Duncan depended crucially on the unremitting labours of Margaret, who, I believe, typed out the full text of every issue.

For Alexander Hutchinson Akros, ‘never appeared to rest on its laurels: like its editor it remained lively, judicious,

omnivorous, contentious, but generous in encouraging promising writers and artists of all stripes.’ And the editor, ‘while capable of passionate advocacy, was fair minded to a remarkable degree.’

I first made contact with Duncan from Oxford, because of our mutual interest in Hugh MacDiarmid. I had already written a couple of papers on the political ideas behind the great man’s 1927 polemic Albyn, and I had decided to expand this into a (still unfinished) book on his politics. I am a political historian, not a literary critic, and my approach was very different from Duncan’s. Nevertheless, at that meeting in 1997, he presented me with one of his pamphlets to, ‘welcome me into the company of MacDiarmid scholars.’ Like my brother, I appreciated the sincerity and generosity behind the gesture.

And Duncan’s scholarship has put the rest of us in his debt. As Robyn Marsack wrote, ‘Hugh MacDiarmid and the Scottish Renaissance, was a significant impetus to an appreciation of MacDiarmid, as were the poems he rediscovered and printed.’

Alexander Hutchinson agrees: Duncan’s,

… knowledge of and friendship with MacDiarmid was instrumental in confirming MacDiarmid’s worth and clarifying his vision. In his preface to the double edition of Akros magazine, which celebrated MacDiarmid’s work in his eighty-fifth year, Glen wrote: ‘That he is one of the greats of twentieth-century poetry is now recognised, and elucidation and exploration of his poetry is proceeding within that belief ’. Glen himself had been a main force in bringing about that state of affairs.

Duncan helped to retrieve for us the treasures of the Scots language, that MacDiarmid was instrumental in reviving. As Ian Nimmo White says, ‘anyone who writes in Scots and has studied MacDiarmid knows how fortunate they are to have opened a door to the boundless possibilities of Scots language and culture. Duncan knew that and took great comfort and joy from it.’

John Herdman values Duncan’s own poetic achievements,

A fine poet himself, whose work welled up from his intimate love of place and especially of his own roots at the meeting-point of industrial and rural Lanarkshire, he reached for the universal in the particular by developing a distinctive Scots idiom of his own, grounded, as he liked to say, in the language he heard in his head. This sense of linguistic freedom imparted itself to many of his younger contemporaries.

For Alexander Hutchinson,

Throughout his life and career - a large proportion of it lived outside Scotland - he has always maintained close ties with his origins, and the ‘dear-kent sites’ connected to his family. This powerfully rooted impulse, with all the mixed emotions that attach, is the source for such frequently anthologised pieces as ‘Innocence,’ ‘The Gullion’ and ‘My Faither’ - where the natural discrepancies and disappointments that may be created over time are offset by deep and lasting affection.

And Alexander Hutchinson also acknowledges his contribution to local history,

… such as the remarkable shift of perspective in his study: A Nation in a Parish; a new historical prospect of Scotland from the Parish of Cambuslang. Duncan Glen has always been able to switch between microcosm and macrocosm in a lively fashion, and his popular writing on the histories of Lanarkshire and Clydesdale, of Fife, and the literary haunts of Edinburgh gives evidence of his skills of selection and compression, and of his eye for detail.

As if all that wasn’t enough for one man, Hutchinson also notes Duncan’s contribution to design and typography, through his career lecturing in graphic design in Preston and Nottingham. He was elected a Fellow of the Chartered Society of Designers, ‘by virtue of professional standing and distinction of work’, and was appointed a member of the CNAA Graphic Design Board, which regulates standards within art colleges and polytechnics. ‘He completed a full length study of the history of type, which is set to become a standard text of reference - and may excite some controversy with its account of the pillaging of Scottish designed fonts (Caledonian being one aptly named) by operators in London and New York.’

Robyn Marsack remembers him editing the Scottish Poetry Library’s Newsletter, after his return to Scotland in 1987.

Planning the Newsletter, I found, involved a morning of talk ranging across typefaces, poetry, personalities, landscape … He seemed to hold in his head a directory of all the craftsmen he had ever met; they featured by name in his conversation as in his histories, given their due place. It was part of his generous ideal of the collaborative nature of art and craft. He was always open to change

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and encouraged the new, as long as practitioners were as committed and professional as he was himself.

It was a life well lived, and well worth remembering, but I will give the last word to my brother:

My most vivid memory was a show put on in Cambuslang, in May 2001, by The Merchants of Renoun to celebrate the Akros book, Four Scottish Poets Of Cambuslang, edited by Duncan. He offered to take us to see the ruins of Gilbertfield, where Lt. William Hamilton lived in the early part of the 18th century, when he engaged in his famous exchange of verse epistles with Allan Ramsay. It was in the middle of a ploughed field and the farmer who, I think, was fed up with literary types, directed us to the site which was like an army assault course. Our shoes and trouser bottoms were thick with mud (at least we hoped it was mud). After a while the farmer joined us from an easier direction, he was amused by the trick he’d played on us townies. When we got back to the car Duncan apologised profusely but it wasn’t his fault. In any case, I would happily have followed Duncan Glen through glaur oxter-deep. Oxter-deep anything in fact.

Ian Nimmo White

CLAY Unimpressed by wealth or status(a student of peacetime rebellion),he worked with those his textbooks upheldwere born into need and exclusion.

He joined a caring craft, in itshumanity seeking to differ,but found it nurtured its share of self interest like any other.

It didn’t matter, for work was king,but clients weren’t always impressed.Some talked of pride in povertyand distrust of those more blessed.

He missed a dozen chances,dodged most to be fair and true.For meaning and understanding,he ditched nine tenths of the jargon too.

Punters began to warmto the stranger they’d once known,his song being so much closerto the one by which they were weaned.

That some things couldn’t changewas a truth in time he’d see.But the balance ended in credit,and the best change of all was he.

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THE BEST GIFT OF ALL

All the goodwill you could wish for:a state of the art timepiece,a rocking chair (of course),

and a garden water feature – a little buddha crossleggedon an upturned terracotta pot.

Eyes down, not fixing me,and speaking without speakingin his sphinxlike way,

he has me mulling overwhat kind of worker I wasand what I’ve come to now.

Gave me the chills first off,but like many things in time,I’ve warmed to him;

sit him out when it’s fine,and when wet I feel badat his confinement in the shed.

Mornings, I bow my head to him,just an inch or so, you know?Last thing at night as well.

What would neighbours going to churchthink of me, if they evercaught me in communion with a stone?

Let them. This wee chap keepsmy head and feet, sometimes at least,in the place where they belong.

TWO YEARS DOWN THE LINE

Back then, though not quite rattling in chains,the end dragged on like a sentence.I played at countdown maths:One year, one month and one week- two hundred and fifty working days

With the middle finger of my left handI worked my song and dance PC.With my right hand, the good ’un,I scribbled my foolish poetrybelieving no-one noticed.

When it comes back, it’s like watchingthe History Channel, and having watched,thanking God for the time you live in.But on the odd lonely dayI do miss that dreadful place:

The leanings of younger colleagues, unknowingtheir guru was sailing blind;boxing clever with bourgeois bosses;and oh! – those homemade truffles at teabreak,just about now I’d say.

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AS WAS, IS AND WILL BE

In a knuckle chill wind,you hug the ladder as you climbto place each box just so.

Then days of ruthless raindampen your hopes. What’s more,your guests are no fools,

the nibbles left untouchedin time becomeintransigent.

First dry day, a scout,small as an ice cream scoop,is sent ahead to suss things out,

and later when you’re busy elsewhere,the grills get pepperedby marauding hordes of assorted breed.

Old Freud was so wrong:survival’s the thing,and some know it as King.

A DOORSTANE CONFABBLE

MP Ye’ll be pittin yir croass i the ushal pless, eh Wullie?

Voter Ah’m no shair, whit Ah mean is, Ah’m no shair aboot you

MP Ye mean thon stooshie, the wan aa ower expenses?

Voter Ay ! Yir saicont mortgage, the duckhoose, and aathin ailse

MP Dinnae tak tent o it, Wullie. Ah wis jist gaun bi the rules

Voter Oh ay ? And whun ye stertit up, did ye hae a guid swatch it thim ? Ye musta thocht aa yir birthdays hud fa’en on the wan day, eh ?

MP Ah hae served this toon for damn near twinty year, Wullie

Voter Well dinnae bother buikin a snug for a bash. Naebdie’ll show. Awa ya twa-faced scrounger ! And tak the chauffeur’n’limo wae ye

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INCOMER IT YULETIME

Unner Kirkaady’s stanebiggit hames,Barnet’s Vennel rinsfrae Esplanade tae High Street.

Ther the beggars coorie doon,bit no wae the luck theh hud afore:Theh’re efter dosh for drugs,

say thaim as hauds by, thir haunsthrist intae poackets for waarmth alane.Can you get me a job? she speired

in a clipped East European tongue,whill sat on her hunkers,rainwatter poolin aroond her.

A wifie leuked ower dumfoonert,a fag steeked on tae her nether mull.It wisnae a leuk o guidwill.

Twa polis cam on tae herwae smertlik jotters and pincils.Can you get me a job? she beseeked.

Theh scrieved a wheen o blethers,then mairched her tae the caur park.I the gloamin the rain wis leashin,

and jingles rang oot even on.Bit the echo stoondit i the narra vennel:a job – jo – ob – o – o – ob ?

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First of all, this is not an objective piece of art criticism. I am a fan of the artist’s work and this is an attempt to explain why. Secondly, I have no formal qualifications or technical nouce to speak of on the subject of public art. I know what I like and that’s that.

I came across David Annand’s sculpture first in the pages of The Scots Magazine. The July 1992 issue had a picture of his nine foot high Deer Leap at the entrance to Dundee’s Technology Park. About a year or so later I saw the gravity defying thing close-hand. I had gone up to Dundee to buy an Applemac computer and suddenly, there it was, coming right at me – three black horned deer glistening in the rain smirr, crashing over a metal fence toward me. It had all the energy and surprise of a Ted Hughes’ poem. But it’s one thing arranging a slab of dead words into a poem - quite another imbuing heavy intractable metal with grace and life and meaning. Poetry would remain a connection though.

One dark winter’s night in windy Auld Reekie I took part in a poetry reading at The Netherbow. George Philp, inveterate and veteran Scots Language activist, life-long stirrer and inventor of ploys, whispered in my lug. He had a plan to have a statue of Robert Fergusson erected to honour Edinburgh’s tragic young bard and inspirer

FEATURESculpture in Fife: David AnnandWilliam Hershaw

David Annand, Scottish Sculptor: A Personal Appreciation

of Burns. Not one of those stuffed imperial numpties on a plinth bedecked with pigeon shit. This would be Fergusson reborn on the pavement, breaking out from the confines of his grave-cage in the Canongait mool, a young poet in his prime, heading down the causeyside to go winching, drinking, see the Hibs, create mayhem or give that hauf-wey house of Miralles a piece of his mind. David Annand would be the sculptor. But first a goodish sum of grudge-given siller would have to be raised. I took part in a poetry reading upby at the Cooncil Chambers along with Eddie Morgan and Jimmy Robertson to help do just that.

The Fergusson statue remains my favourite. Having bought my CD’s from Avalanche Records and my pamphlets from the Scottish Poetry Library and had a pint of Hoegaarden somewhere in between, I love to sit on that bench in the summer holidays under the cherry blossom tree and watch the Royal Mile tourists pass and warily eye Mr Fergusson. I look at the statue and I wonder what his life must have been like. His coat tails are at a jaunty angle and he looks determined to do something.

Then there was that massive steel hoopla outside Woolies in Perth. And the two fellaes within its compass, the blindfolded one risking a hernia by the

In this article, the weill-kent Fife poet and makar responds to the work of an artist with whom he has made a notable collaboration…

David Annand’s ‘The Prop’ in Lochgelly

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looks of it, holding it up, the other with a complacent grin on his face letting his pal take all the strain. What was Annand saying? I’m always slow to see things. It was the third or fourth keek before I realised there were words cut on the steel ring. Not words. Nae Day Sae Daurk by William Soutar. Poetry again. Annand liked poetry – Scots poetry.

Then one day an email: The regeneration of Lochgelly was taking place. The circus was in town. European money to stop the old place looking so miserable and dreich. The focus would be a David Annand sculpture. Could I knock up a poem to be inscribed on it? My wee heart started fluttering like a pit canary overcome by Black Damp. Perhaps not always a good idea to meet an artist you admire though?

It was. I met David Annand for a pint in Torley’s and he spoke about his career and I gleaned something of what he was aiming for in his sculptures. Things I had already seen: wit, stoicism, nature, mystery, art for everybody (not just a clique), balance, proportion, collaboration (with poets and poetry), looking at things as they are, capturing the soul without any hint of sentimentality, perfection, Scottish. Mr Annand had high expectations both of himself and the poets he worked with. He was no respecter of reputations whether it be Heaney (whom he had worked with on a piece for the Marie Curie Centre in Belfast and later, on a ‘Peatman’ akin to the Lochgelly ‘Coalman’) or this unknown local eejit, Hershaw. To paraphrase John Lennon, this was an artist who said ‘Aye’. No unmade beds or coos cut in hauf, thankfully. Over the next few months David sent me numerous emails of potential drawings and mock ups – all of them, to me, astonishing. David’s quest for perfection worried me considerably because I knew I would have to work gey hard to produce a worthy poem.

eyesore?’ David Annand told me that in all of his experience of installing sculptures, often in areas of worse social deprivation than Lochgelly, it was the only place where drivers would stop their cars, roll down their windows and shout abuse at him. When the poll closed, 75% indicated that they liked The Prop. Mind you, many of them were my aunties who I had entreated to vote twice.

Eventually, The Prop emerged. A man made of coal, his body made of layers of black carbon, the figure knotted and twisted. He looked like he had burst up from the mineral heavy earth. The seamed man seemed to be straining to push up six pit props. He was trying to create order from chaos, building a bit of time and space to survive in. Thinking of Joe Corrie’s famous ‘The Image o God’ I wrote a six line poem, ‘God The Miner’.

God (i the image o a miner) God is a miner, for aye is his shift, heezan his graith, he howks i the luift.

God is a miner, thrang at his work, stars are the aizles he caws i the mirk.

This collaboration was to offer me further insights into the world of public art. Post-Thatcher Britain contains many wastelands of former industrial communities. The reservation boundaries are often defined by something appropriate: a winding wheel, a coal wagon with pansies planted in it, a brave little Ramsay MacDonald figurine with a hard hat and Davie Lamp. In Lochgelly, the ageing rump of old Labour’s soft right, still fighting lost battles and guilty consciences about who did what in ’84, and trying to come to terms with the abhorrent prospect of Fife being run in Glenrothes by an SNP-led coalition, decided they hadn’t been consulted about the sculpture and wanted The Prop dismantled and sold for scrap. Jennie Lee would have been better, or a likeness of Gordon Brown or maybe both, doing a Highland Fling. They were egged on by the local newspaper and an online poll put forward the fair -minded question, ‘Do you think that the Lochgelly sculpture is an

And that ends the personal appreciation to date. Obviously, there ismore. There are the portraits of Scottish poets. There is the graceful grey heron taking off in the Botanic Garden at Inverleith. Much more to see. Reading over this personal appreciation, I realise just how personal it is. I have probably written more about myself than David Annand. Is there another way to approach art?Go and see for yourself, in person.

Model for ‘The Prop’

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Discovering Myself in FifeThe creative energy of a place attractsKenny Munro

That shadow my likeness that goes to and fro seeking a livelihood, chattering, chaffering, How often I find myself standing and looking at it where it flits, How often I question and doubt whether that is really me.

- from Walt Whitman, ‘That Shadow my Likeness’

After running a sculpture studio for twenty-eight years, near Ormiston, I moved to the Royal Burgh of Kinghorn with its stunning views of the Firth of Forth.I had a sense of returning.

This is an area with distant echoes of shipwrights, linen weavers’ shuttles and foundries casting propellers and golf clubs. Much of this activity was given impetus by the railway which arrived in the 1840s.It is still a vibrant community which has always had associations with writers and travellers. It now possesses a magnetic appeal for artists - as well as for ecologists and, of course, golfers.

The rail link is still a vital aspect of Fife’s transport network, giving the town a special character and provides a crucial link to the national service with the station just within walking distance for most folk in the burgh. Fate and a sense of shared history has brought me to Kinghorn; a place with so many historic and international connections plus its inspiring coastline to explore. Particularly notable is the site

of the old Abden shipyard which over the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was extremely productive and, at times, employed over a thousand folk who created magnificent vessels. The collaborative skills and creative sensibilities in these shipyards embraced ambition with technology to form an international awareness, often now ignored. Here were built all shapes and sizes of ships destined for Australia, South America, China, the Marquesas Islands and for the outposts of the British Empire. Paddle steamers were made for Britain’s waters which also plied their trade across the Forth; indeed many still remember the famous ‘Willie Muir’ which brought many folk on holiday, including my own family, to Burntisland and then on to Kinghorn by train. It was here that my great-grandparents, Agnes Sutherland and Charles Paris, set up their home as carers at Providence House on the Harbour front in Kinghorn, to assist with managing the accommodation run by the Church of Scotland in the 1920s and 30s. Family photos of relatives playing on the beach evoke a sense of enjoyable local holidays, and remind us of the

Fife Coastal Path Bronze, North Queensferryatmosphere here before World War II when virtually everyone arrived by train and ferry. (Archive movie footage reveals the convivial mood of the time.) Further scrutiny reveals how significant ports like Pettycur and Burntisland were major transport hubs in centuries past, before the opening of the Forth Rail Bridge in 1890.This was graphically illustrated when I was researching the life of my ancestor James Blacklaw. A tinsmith who joined the army in the 1830s, he served first in Canada, then survived the Crimean War before an adventure to the North West Provinces of India with the Black Watch from 1862 - 68. After concluding his military tour of duties he travelled back from Afghanistan with his wife Janet (Binnie) and young daughter via Bombay, Suez, and Alexandria, docking at Portsmouth where they transferred from the troopship Serapis to the Urgent en route to Scotland. They arrived safely and disembarked not at Leith but at Burntisland on 7 March 1868 where, we think, they then travelled on by train to Perth then Stirling for demobilisation, finally settling back in Edinburgh. Despite his service medals for 20

years of military duty over three continents, we had some difficulty in tracking him down, but - with the help of detective John Rennie - we eventually located him in an unmarked communal grave in Morningside. This genealogical awareness forced me to think more deeply about the paths which our ancestors forged and to what extent we unwittingly intersect with their challenging journeys through life. Who knows if the ‘genes of travel’ are implanted at birth or just grow with personal circumstance? However, my desire to travel has grown not ‘just for the experience’, as Paul Theroux puts it, but more from a yearning for meaningful communication, a need to reach out and exchange ideas in order to create the basis of a tangible project. This has shaped my own creed; informing diverse interests which are often driven by international partnerships inspired by the paths and ambitions of Scots explorers and pioneers. My first foray into Fife as an adult was in the 1980s when I attended a residential Jazz summer school. This was an intense and hugely enjoyable experience which resulted in a ‘big band’ performance at Lochgelly.

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One of the attractions was to be a guest appearance of Joe Temperley, as tutor, but he was indisposed and I found, on the night, that I had to pinch myself as I was sitting on the stage beside saxophonist Tony Coe of ‘pink panther’ fame! Within a year I was back at Lochgelly; this time conducting a bronze casting sculpture class. But my real arts focus on Fife was initiated in 2002, with a project entitled Going Forth. This launched my first international engagement with river communities, and that continues as a major influence today. Then I was focusing on the importance of the River Forth and how it had moulded the communities along its length from source to sea. The theme of rediscovery lay at the heart of the project, fuelled by research into the life of Cockenzie-born Francis Cadell (a contemporary of Dysart’s famous son John MacDouall Stuart). An ancient painting and photograph revealed that Cadell’s famous canoe, with which he had surveyed over eight hundred miles of the Murray River (Australia) in 1852, had been brought back to Scotland. (The enigmatic canoe, like Cadell, disappeared under mysterious circumstances.) As a millennium project, it was supported by East Lothian Council which enabled me to reconnect the communities of Cockenzie

with Goolwa (South Australia) in this new collaboration. I decided to make a replica of the seven-metre canvas canoe, Forerunner, with the intention of raising a crew to paddle it from the upper reaches of the Forth, near Aberfoyle, and to bring it down from ‘source to sea’; working with communities on the way to produce a series of ‘sculptural markers’, each of which would celebrate their contribution. The full extent of this ambition was never realised, due to lack of funds, but localised events over a six year period took over a hundred folk onto the river in Forerunner. This inspired two trips to Australia where the Murray river community in Goolwa created their own beautiful version of the Forerunner canoe which was formally launched in 2001 as part or their Centenary

Federation celebrations. I was fortunate to be able to travel to Australia on a bursary from the Friends of the Royal Scottish Academy. Cadell’s Canoe was featured in this year’s Three Harbours Festival, in East Lothian. I should at this point declare my interest in the work of ecologist Sir Patrick Geddes (1854-1932) and how the influence of his holistic philosophy has driven much of my creative fieldwork, taking me and many others on quests to review his many achievements - firstly to the south of France to survey the remains of his ‘symbolic gardens’ in his Collège des Ecossais at Montpellier - and to interpret the ecological ideas of a great educator, humanist and ‘visual thinker’ who worked in many countries, leaving creative legacies which are still valued today. The French expedition to the site of his Scots College in 1991 provided my first stimulus, enabling events and reciprocal exhibitions with Scots and French artists and architects to take shape. On reflection, I would maintain that the 1990s were a time of great cultural reappraisal in Scotland and believe that all the Geddesian events and publications during that period reinforced public confidence, determination and empowerment – all of which helped to secure Scotland’s Parliament.

When Geddes lived in Perth, from 1857 to the 1870s, it is said that his discovery of the stunning view of the River Tay, from the summit of Kinnoull Hill, profoundly informed his ecological thinking and recognition that rivers, and access to water, are at the core of virtually all cultures. Scottish Natural Heritage, Fife Council and Edinburgh City Council invested in the project Going Forth and this enabled workshops to be held at several schools, including Kinghorn, also contributing to town gala days. Moreover, a valuable introduction to the Ecology Centre at Craigencalt was made possible in 2004.

Cadell’s Famous Canoe ‘Forerunner’ - Port Seton Harbour

In 2003 the river project was punctuated with a sculpture commission which helped launch the extensive Fife Coastal Walkway. This involved working with North Queensferry Primary school to create a bird finial and series of bronze panels for the wall which flanks the start of the marvellous coastal path. It commences directly below and in the shadow of the Forth Rail Bridge, following the Kingdom’s coast as it meanders round toward the East Neuk and up as far as the Tay Bridge.

India : Rivers which Connect

Recently I was invited to contribute to Bashabi Fraser’s book From the Ganges to the Tay (Luath Press, 2009). Her epic poem forms a symbolic dialogue engaging with the historical and cultural importance of the River Tay and its links - real and imagined - to its aquatic sister the River Ganges. The book is illustrated with photographs by Bashabi and myself. This and previous publications such as Kolkata Connects (Edinburgh Review), A Vigorous Institution (also Luath Press) and Kolkata Book City by Jennie Renton, all contributed to a fresh perspective on Geddes, in general, and to my particular collaborative project work in Bengal. The footsteps of Geddes and his survey trips to India have been followed by many, who are reminded where he and his family made a profound contribution to city planning and thus earned an enduring place in contemporary Indian culture. These new Scots connections with India have generated a creative momentum. (As an example it’s worth noting that the ‘Scottish Cemetery’ in Kolkata is currently being assessed for a programme of restoration and long term care.) My first trip to Bengal was supported by the Scottish Arts Council in 2002 and from that experience I was able to

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Geddes with Students in India

establish partnerships with artists and communities to explore environmental awareness, adopting the arts as a catalyst. I was hugely fortunate to be introduced to a family which runs a vibrant community enterprise: The Green Wave Art Centre Kolkata. This all resulted in schools exchanges with Kolkata and the celebration of river communities planned to coincide with the 150th anniversary, in 2004, of the birth of Sir Patrick Geddes at Ballater. I befriended Indian artists Tandra Chanda and Pulak Ghosh, directors of that art centre in the wonderfully exciting city with historic Scottish trading links. Looking back I realise I had embarked on one of the most stimulating periods in my life. Two engagements with the art centre enabled me to work with about a hundred of their students, aged seven to eighteen years, exploring cultural connections and making artworks for a large procession to celebrate these links, including dance and music, all driven forward by exuberant Bengali bagpipers. A special boat was to become the central icon of that project, with a sense of connecting Scotland and India ‘across the water’, both past and present. We specially commissioned a four metre river boat constructed in a village on the outskirts of Kolkata, a complex

city which supports over fourteen million people. The village and boatyard was, by comparison quiet and almost relaxed, with small open wooden hulled ferry boats traversing the river, children swimming and women washing clothes. A larger vessel was undergoing restoration at the waters edge. I filmed the boat construction and this episode which can be viewed on DVD, and on the website www.kennymunrosculpture.com (The timeless scene reminded me of Rumer Godden’s epic story entitled ‘The River’, which is immortalised by Jean Renoir’s 1951 film which her book inspired.) The small vessel was completed with two paddles carved and complemented by a hardwood mast and a wooden pulley-block to raise the sail, all created with a loving attention to detail. With great surprise, we discovered that the carvel built vessel undertook its initial voyage of thirty kilometres to the school in Kolkata, not on the Hooghley River, but as conveyed by two men who put it on the back of their tricycle rickshaw and peddled it through the night to the school. They had made this choice to earn the transportation fees. This is how the life and journey of Sonar Tari started its eccentric voyage en route to Scotland. It was beautifully decorated, by

Greenwave Art Centre Kolkata - Bengal river boat on back of Rickshaw

the Bengali students, with environmental symbols and Rabindranath Tagore’s poem ‘Golden Boat : Sonar Tari’ painted in Bengali script before the vessel was shipped to Ballater (Aberdeenshire), via Sri Lanka and Felixstowe! Coordinated with its arrival a team of Indian and Scots artists conducted a Bengali festival to celebrate the birth of Patrick Geddes, a hundred and fifty years before, at Ballater. Community groups and schools were at the heart of the activities which culminated with a grand procession and launching of the ‘un-tested’ Sonar Tari on Loch Kinnord. It was a success but required continual bailing which provided no little entertainment

for those spectators on dry land.

Bring on the Rickshaws - Alternative transport tour of Aberdeenshire and Fife

In 2005 we worked with the same school in Kolkata and engaged with the theme of alternative transportation. The Indian rickshaw was chosen as a challenging topic: two examples of these were procured in Bengal and brought to Scotland. (One was a tricycle; the other was in the older style of hand-pulled rickshaw with large wooden spoked wheels.) They were both beautifully decorated with eco-friendly symbolism and shipped to Scotland. The

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first tour was in Aberdeenshire, followed by a tour of ten primary schools in Fife. One of the forthcoming projects is to explore connections between Fife and India. Furthermore, there will be an opportunity to engage with the 150th anniversary celebrations, here in Scotland in 2011, of the birth of Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore who worked with Patrick Geddes and promoted the values of world cultures and humanitarianism. It is significant, too, that the life and work of D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson (St Andrews University) is being reviewed and celebrated in this 150th anniversary year. Focusing on Film > A moving document of past and present

Over the last ten years I have collaborated with Arran-based artist Ed O’Donnelly in creating a series of short films. Initially these have been projects with Australia, India and art / science initiatives, exploring historic community links and climate change. In 2007 we were commissioned by StAnza Poetry Festival to make a piece responding to Alastair Reid’s poem ‘Scotland’. This was projected on the buildings of St Andrews. It was an honour to meet Alastair who recalled strong connections to Fife and family holidays to Arran. His affection for the island was expressed when he told me he was a ‘Pirnmill Man’! I had a further meeting with Alastair, at which we discussed the scope for a film inspired by the sea, which would incorporate his translation of a Pablo Neruda poem.

Plankton Power >

I first explored this phenomenon during a residency on Skye, in 2000, then promoted with a bursary from the Scottish Association for Marine Science (Oban), which enabled the creation of a poetic pilot film on plankton. This was given special

encouragement and financial support by the Royal Scottish Geographical Society. There followed a short film to celebrate five hundred years of printing in Scotland. This work was commissioned by The National Trust and Museums of Scotland, and it continues to be presented at the NMS in Chambers Street, Edinburgh. This was the first of our projects to incorporate historic film sequences, courtesy of the excellent Scottish Screen Archive collection, now affiliated to the National Libraries of Scotland.Furthering this interest in historic film and contemporary poetry we worked with poet Maureen Sangster to make a film-poem, Echoes of Voices, which was launched at the Cupar Arts Festival in November 2009 and recently presented again at the Society of Scottish Artists annual exhibition in Edinburgh.

East Neuk Festival > a film memory of the ‘Holiday Line’, June 2010

Ed O’Donnelly and I were commissioned by the East Neuk Festival to create a film which focuses on the popular coastal rail network, closed in the 1960s, known as the ‘Holiday Line’ which conveyed thousands of folk to the East Neuk in the summer. This is a much missed local line which once served tourism and commerce between Leven, Lundin Links, Largo, Kilconquhar, Elie, St Monance, Pittenweem, Anstruther, Crail, before turning north to St Andrews. Our film presents an entertaining contemporary journey which blends strong archive film and contemporary location shots. It is informed by a series of interviews with folk who affectionately remember the line and the anecdotes connected to it. Viewings of the film, together with an exhibition, took place at Crail Community Centre over the weekend of 30th June to 4th July 2010. Most recently and in true Geddesian spirit I was fortunate to be invited to help a community group in Crossgates to

Detail of Crossgates tile mural in the new Community Garden

transform a derelict ‘gap site’ into a meeting place and garden, with artworks and mining artefacts to celebrate their identity in the centre of the town. This is a project which has received support from many quarters and is linked to Fife Cultural Celebrations in 2010. In particular I would like to mention the large tile painted mural ( 4metres x 3metres), fixed to a gable on the site, which was created with Crossgates Primary School. Funded by Awards for All it enabled a six month environmental arts project and working relationship with over 100 pupils, mainly P6. They explored the culture of the area, and expressed it as a vertical time-line symbolised by a Tree of Life, which also reflects the historic role of mining and the shafts which penetrate the bowels of the earth. Themes such as sustainable energy and archaeology were

addressed and examples of fossils found, influenced the design, within the rich geology of the region; giving a special distinction to the on-glaze mural which was kiln fired at Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop.

Poetry Paths >

Another emerging ambition for 2011 is to help create a series of Poetry Paths in Fife. and beyond, as a means of extending the scope of creative writing and public art. I’d like to think that the many ‘shadows cast’ by creative folk, now and in the future, will chime well with the philosophy of Whitman and Geddes. Further information is available from the author at [email protected] or visit Kenny’s

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website at www.kennymunrosculpture.com Gordon Meade

A DISEMBODIED VOICE

She has become little morethan a disembodied voice at the end of a line and I, a telephonist

whose only task, it seems, is to try and connect her to someone else. It is only a week since I saw her

last, but as things stand, one week might be long enough. I am glad we do not talk too much.

I can’t really ask her how she’s feeling and, anyway, she wouldn’t want to give me the stock reply.

Both of us know where this is going. I would rather see her in the flesh; rather sit with her for a while,

watching television together, with little said. Sometimes, someone’s physical presence is all we need. But tonight,

I fear, she is in danger of becoming even less than a disembodied voice, and I, even worse, an inattentive ear.

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LAST WORDS

Don’t you just love it when, at the end, the dying man or, in this case, woman, gives up all pretence and says exactly what she means

and to no-one. It doesn’t matter to her whether anyone understands what she is saying. If they can it may be of immeasurable benefit

to them, but to her it makes no difference.She is already talking from the beyond. Some might say speaking in tongues, others might call it

confusion. My daughter tells me all we have to do is listen and then, if we are really lucky, we might be able to make out the occasional word.

SHADOWS

The moth is the shadowof the butterfly. The bat is the shadow of the lark.The whirlpool is the shadowof the river. And a howl is the shadow of a bark.

The shark is the shadowof the dolphin. The raven is the shadow of the dove. The hyena is the shadowof the lion. And hatred is the shadow of love.

The pike is the shadowof the salmon. The spider is the shadow of the fly.A clearing is the shadowof a forest. And smokeis the shadow of fire.

The panther is the shadowof the jaguar. The Moonis the shadow of the Earth.A scream is the shadowof laughter. And deathis the shadow of birth.

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THE DRYAD

If we had been able to do so; if we had been given, if only for an instant, at the very moment of her death,

the powers of a god, would we have tried to turn her into something else; something still alive, something like a tree,

something we could visit, from time to time, and observe its changes through the years,something we could shelter underneath,

or lean against; pull the odd leaf from, or inscribe our names upon its bark. If we could have done this, would we? Or would we have,

as we had to, in the end, being merely human, and powerless in the ways of life and death, just stood and watched her die.

THE ESTUARY

The silvery Tay is lead today, or a sheet of ice in the process of melting. It is not moving.There is no hint of it flowing, as it should,

towards the sea. It is a bit like you and me,stuck in our different ways of mourning. As ever, I take the easy way out and pick up a pen;

what doesn’t get formed into a poem, at least will have seen the light of day before being binned. You keep your feelings hidden. When the sun-

light hits the surface of the water, suddenly all the clichés come true and it does turn to silver. On another day, gallons of the stuff will make

their way rapidly to the mouth. Maybe some day we too will be able to share the grief that for the moment, both unites us and destroys.

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THE PREDATOR

For starters, it takes the weight. What little of it was there in the first place just falls off her.

Then, with the help of the chemo, it takes the hair, the white blood cells and, for a day or two, her will to live.

Then, it starts in on her friends and family. It takes their beliefs; in the doctors, in religion, in alternative therapies,

in the myth of recovery, even in superstition. In the end, it alone is all that is left. And then, the perfect predator, it devours itself.

Scotland’s Place-NamesGordon Jarvie

After ‘American names’, by Stephen Vincent Benét (1898–1943)

I’m in love with the echoes of Scotland’s namesfor her hills and mountains both near and far:Schiehallion, the Saddle, the wee hill of Kamesand the sonorous grandeur of Dark Lochnagar,Braeriach, the Merrick, and Beinn Airigh Charr.

Mossgiel struck a chord in my youthful Kyle dayswith his Tarbolton lasses and fine Mauchline belles,his ‘Flow gently, sweet Afton’ and Maxwelton Braes,his Ballochmyle lass and his handsome Nell,‘Banks o’ Doon’, Highland Mary, and Miss Fontenelle.

Our famed golfing links are not meant for the frail.Our east wind can bite from the seashore at Elieand it fair sets you back at St Andrews or Crail!More champion delights are at Troon or Carnoustie,while inland sleep Rosemount, Gleneagles, Glenbervie.

I’ve raised a glass to whisky once beforeto reel off a stirring roll of Strathspey names,without mentioning Dallas Dhu or Cragganmore,forby no single reference to Islay’s sterling claims.So here’s to Bruichladdich, Bunnahabhainn, and Bowmore!

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Note. This item of light verse is inspired by Benét’s poem ‘American names’, with its famous last line: ‘Bury my heart at Wounded Knee.’ His 1920s poem compares the ‘new’ and vital American place-names with those of ‘old’ Europe, weighing the indigenous forward-looking US culture with the older inherited ‘foreign’ or European one of the immigrants. My poem’s first five stanzas take indigenous examples respectively from Scottish hills, from Burns, from golf, from whisky, and from the Border poet Will H. Ogilvie (sometimes termed ‘the Border Kipling’). These are balanced against the last two stanzas and their passing references to famous English poems by A E Houseman, Rupert Brooke, John Betjeman and Edward Thomas. So my poem is – like Benét’s – an attempt to balance the distinctive baggage of two sets of cultural references. For more on my obsession with place-names, see the magazine Fras, issue 12 (Spring 2010).

The hill road to Roberton: how can we forget it,meandering by Ale Water through his blue Border hills?Here the poet Ogilvie sang his song of Teviot,Ettrick, Jed and Yarrow among famous Tweedside rills.The poet’s cairn now marks the road past Burnfoot mills.

I shall not lie easy on Wenlock Edge,I shall not lie quiet in Aldershot sun.The umbered Surrey homestead in the Coulsdon woodlandsis – simply – not quite my idea of fun.Yes, I remember Adlestrop, Clunbury and Clun,but she’s not from my stable, Miss Joan Hunter Dunn.

Potter’s Bar and Wokingham? I’m sorry, not for me.Tunbridge Wells and Camberley? I’m sorry, not for me,but I wonder, I wonder – is there honey still for tea?

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Border Forays into Fife

In this article, the poet LILLIAS SCOTT FORBES recalls the St Andrews days of her father, the distinguished composer Francis George Scott (1880-1958), and his participation in the Scottish cultural revival of the early twentieth century.

I remember Kilcreggan - quite definitely not the place to be that unreliable summer of 1930. Memories of delightful sunlit holidays in the late twenties in and around Montrose, Johnshaven and St Cyrus still lingered: the flytings of Edwin Muir and his jousting partner Christopher Grieve; the Orcadian’s soft, lisping assertion and the Borderer’s more fiery retort, not to speak of the volley of sparkling wit as Edwin’s wife, Willa, crashed another shuttlecock over the badminton net, my sister Francise and I still in our early teens as we larked about with Willa in the big summer-house.

‘Yes, definitely’, decided my father, F.G., looking out on Kilcreggan’s menacing rain-clouds, ‘Let’s rope up the hamper again and get off to St Andrews’. ‘Hamper’ - dread word, envisaging the roping process and final triumphant padlocking enlisting the able-bodied of his offspring to contribute their virr and vigour to the operation. Of course the arrival of the Scott family by L.N.E.R. at the far-famed resort of St Andrews was heralded by brilliant sunshine, our holiday flat in South Street we found to be delightfully spacious, the ice-cream shop wasn’t far off, and beyond expectation we had spotted a big, gleaming piano in the sitting room. Holidays at St Andrews were soon to prove an elating experience. How my father came to revel in the vast seascape before him as he set out on his regular walks towards the Eden estuary and the lightly misted prospect of the Angus coast. No cars, or very few in those days: just this exhilarating exercise, perfect

escape route after the steamy intellectual encounters with last evening’s intelligentsia. At times, my father enjoyed some excellent company on those walks, notably that of Edwin Muir, who, having quitted the blissful haven of his native Orkney, had spent from 1912-14 in factory work in Greenock on Clydeside, following on a seven-year stint in a beer-bottling factory in Glasgow. One can easily imagine the relief and renewed confidence the sight of the Fife coast presented to this unassuming man. It took F.G. Scott, although well installed in his lectureship at Jordanhill Teachers Training College, a long stretch of time to erase the memory of his first school-teaching posts in underfunded Glasgow schools, filled with underprivileged and often unfed small children. The companionship of these two men was to thrive and prosper on this diet of the

Francis George ScottPhoto: Annand of Glasgow

L-R: John Tonge, F.G. Scott at 44 Munro Road, Glasgow

Trélon, France, c.1923/24. L-R sitting: the author, F.G. Scott, Francise Scott; L-R standing: William Burt, Burges Gray (Mrs F.G. Scott)

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salt-sea breezes and dappled farmland of Fife. However, those delightful excursions served rather more as a backdrop to the lively centre of the arts now taking shape in the quiet precincts of the east end of the town, within easy reach of the university. Among a group of colourful individuals who b r i g h t e n e d the otherwise somewhat sluggish treadmill of the douce University town we soon e n c o u n t e r e d James H. Whyte, a wealthy American with a property at No. 3, South Street, overlooking the Pends, to be opened for business as the ‘Abbey Book Shop’, bringing to public notice first editions, displayed as ‘Modern Scottish’, together with new offerings from European authors. Whyte had acquired further properties at Nos. 5-11 North Street, an impressive art gallery spanning the two flats at top level. Amongst the intelligentsia of the day frequenting those venues one might have come upon the weill-kent figure of Douglas Young, outstanding both in stature

and intellectual accomplishment, early champion in the infant National Party of Scotland, already finding its feet under

the patronage of Compton Mackenzie. Regarding the existence of such intellectual coteries Scott, the composer, was to write: ‘A time came when “personalities” began to count for more than the principles from which the movement o r i g i n a t e d ’ . In time, our family became acquainted with a number of the practising writers and artists of the day, many of whom enjoyed a succession of literary/musical evenings, often enlivened by poetry readings or the fashionable ‘mind games’, currently ‘all the rage’ in St Andrews academic circles and further afield, in the course of study sessions led by Dr Oscar Oeser, lecturer in Experimental Psychology at the university between 1935-40. The new theories of

Nietzsche, Hegel, Freud and Jung held great appeal for the younger generation and lofty discussions abounded at the parties hosted by J.H.Whyte in his South Street residences. Within this propitious milieu F.G.

irresistible demand - his art of song writing. However, he would still find time for the occasional lecture to the like of the New Art Club, home-from-home for touring orchestral conductors, artists like William Crosbie, Taylor Elder, J.D. Fergusson and Margaret Morris - these last two named proving a vital influence in the

hey-days of the Club. F.G. also enjoyed loyal support from the Saltire Society. By 1939, with the threat of war looming, Whyte was to cease his business activities in St Andrews, and return to the United States, later opening a new ‘Abbey Bookshop’ in Washington D.C. Throughout the years F.G. had never lost his fascination with the lyrics of his erstwhile pupil, Christopher Grieve, by now achieving recognition in various outlets, under varied n o m s - d e - p l u m e , chief of which, Hugh MacDiarmid, was to win him world-wide recognition. In the case of Scott, his

choice of texts suitable to be set to music included a rich seam of contemporary Scottish poetry, together with verses from French (Amy Sylvel) and German poets such as Heinrich Lersch, Stefan George and Else Lasker-Schüler. This was a period of intense creative output for composer and poet. Of course, almost inevitably, the contestants being prime examples of

Scott’s song settings found pride of place. James Whyte now brought out the first issue of The Modern Scot, a journal covering the arts in Scotland from 1932-1936. Two MacDiarmid lyrics set to music by Scott found publication in June 1934 and other of F.G’s songs were splendidly presented in later issues. Contributors to the journal included Hugh M a c D i a r m i d , William Soutar and Naomi Mitchison, the general p r e s e n t a t i o n enhanced with wood engravings by Agnes Miller Parker. A favourite remark of my father was: ‘You want to be “in” the crowd but not “of” the crowd’. Characteristically. when confronted by a motley crowd his response suggested his preference for privacy - on an occasion he might be taken for a quiet, reserved person until, that is, he took over the helm of the ship, as he was more often wont to do. Naturally, the composer was not a little attracted to the enfants terribles of the St Andrews circle - a novel relationship for him as he had as yet had few comings and goings with such groups in Glasgow (his home-base for some time to come), being since 1925 totally taken up by his school-teaching commitments and that other,

Rascals at ease: The Scores, St Andrews. The cousins F.G. Scott and William Johnstone

MS. of F.G. Scott’s early poem ‘Butterfly Love’

Programme for Glasgow concert featuringwell-known Scottish musicians

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ambitious, ego-centric, creative artists there came a rift in their relationship. MacDiarmid’s dependence on ‘the crowd’ became increasingly essential, among them well-known ‘celebrities’ of that day, not all appreciative of the poet’s ‘inner depths’, but ever ready with the camaraderie of the hangers-on. Entirely opposite was F.G’s attitude. The composer looked upon desultory meetings with aspiring youths bent on ‘making a break’ into the art world as wasted time. On the other hand, in the presence of a young person showing a genuine interest, with a degree of dedication behind it, he would address the problems and needs of youth unstintingly, offering a helping hand.

The pastiches of these groups’ intent on imposing an eclectic angle on the arts, willy-nilly, were at odds with his own vision of the integrity of the arts: ‘integrity’ - a word much favoured by MacDiarmid himself concerning the relationship of the artist to his art. Surely, we are reminded of Burns’s own misgivings of a like kind during his sojourn amongst the grand monde of Edinburgh. By the late thirties F.G. was already, to his way of thinking, uncovering cracks in the wallpaper. The general approach to the arts was far and away too cerebral - and that included poetry! He wanted rid of this disintegrating factor - for him the experience of setting a likely verse to music took on the delicate intimacy of a private ceremony, words and music, select and intensely personal, a mutual

understanding between poet and composer. A long road lay ahead, milestones on the way – ‘Milkwort and Bog-Cotton’, ‘I wha aince in Heivin’s Heicht’, ‘Crowdieknowe’ - all of them a breath of Border air, and in the middle, poet and composer, face to face, a perfect meeting of minds. Two episodes from their youthful days uncover the unexpected. In the first, an early photograph of an Empire Day 1914 procession through the otherwise peaceful Fife village of Ladybank we can pick out from the crowd the twenty-two-year-old Christopher Grieve with his then girlfriend, Minnie Punton, a copy-holder in Innes’s Printers and Publishers in Cupar. The couple have found a good view-point where they appear to be joining in the general show of goodwill. No trace of anti-war protest here, no whisper of conscientious objection. The borderlands, still mindful of the vile retribution after Flodden, yet supplied willing volunteers of young men eager to throw off the stagnating daily round of life in field and farm and explore the unknown attractions of foreign parts. Not only had Sir Walter Scott taken pains to romanticise life in both Highlands and Lowlands but he had helped to smooth the path for further infiltration of England’s domination after the Treaty of Union. In his role as Sheriff-depute of Selkirkshire he enjoyed a close relationship with the noble houses of the Scots aristocracy. The Borders, it seemed, was settling into a future, rosy with the promise of expanding business under a social system much in concordance with the dictates of the Westminster Parliament. Shortly after the publication of the above-mentioned photograph Grieve himself was to enlist in the Medical Corps where he saw service in the Gallipoli campaign. Recalling my own early days at first acquaintance with my father’s young friend from Langholm I seem to remember tracing a warm flicker of thoughtfulness native

to Christopher which I believe persisted behind all the facade of his vituperative writings. On occasions of personal meetings he often revealed this streak of caring for others - one can well imagine him evincing this same quality amidst the appalling conditions prevailing in 1915 in the Dardanelles sector of the Great War. A similar element of surprise emerges in the case of my father, F.G. Scott who, having left Hawick for the more enticing horizons of Edinburgh, was to matriculate for the University, entering the English class under the redoubtable Professor Saintsbury. At the end of the session he was delighted to learn of his success in winning the proxime accessit prize with his lengthy poem entitled ‘The New Century and the New Reign’. The first prize had gone to the author of a sonnet with a mere fourteen lines - a decision which left the young F.G. somewhat discomfited at the thought! Not surprising, since his own quasi-epic was full of

The older man had more than a streak of old-fashioned respect for quality and worth, a standpoint not always encountered in the art-lovers’ fraternity.

Willa Muir with her son Gavin at their home in Crowborough, Sussex

jingoistic plaudits for the Queen, the Empire and the conquests of far-flung territories! Of course we may find those patriotic displays somewhat strange bedfellows throughout the struggle for Scotland’s unification and identity. But with the passage of time there came about new prospects and possibilities as yet never envisaged and alongside these, totally diverse directions of thinking which were to colour the nation’s vision and put its political commitments to the proof.

With thanks to MARLENE SIM for providing the original digital version of this article.

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John Brewster

A BLESSIN FIR ST MONANS

Bairn o wave an sea-wind, nursed on star milk,cooried in wi blankets o pitch-black nicht;we thank ye. Thank ye fir yer stany licht,a caundle o canniness lit fir ilkan ivery wan o us. Nae sultan’s silkor maharajah’s satin cloot ti dichtawa yer tears. Jist honest weave, fish-bricht;stitched wi thraids o saut an saund an prayer whilkrin lik a luver’s fingers throu yer hair.St Monans, aince a holy man, a crawdreamin staundin-stane facin oot ti shore; an aye a hame fir fishin fowk an lore.But, in the beginnin, God’s bairn; a rawcry fae Hivin: a blessin ti the puir.

CAFÉ LATTE, ST ANDREWS STYLE

I see onlyone eyeand half of her mouthand the occasionalsensuous bulgeof her mediterranean nose

half-maskedby the peppered headand angled slumpand washed-out suedeof her fatheror professoror eccentric uncle

in the cappuccino heatof her twirling shadesand fingered hair

where the minutesin steamy slurpsand continental clatterhiss like tonguesof cool snakedown the desert skinof the air

and where Imaroonedamidst italianmacaroonsstoicallyscottishlydrink tea

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INTRODUCTION TOTHE TOAST TO THE LASSIES

I wrote a new poem for this toast, imagining a boxing bout between the poet Robert Burns and the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche over the question of women. As we know, Burns was a great admirer of women, but he expressed an understanding of their rights and status as well, as in his famous poem ‘The Rights of Woman.’

On the other hand, Nietzsche’s position was a lot more controversial and obtuse, with women being condemned as ‘sirens’ leading brave male philosophers astray. I thought it would be fun to have Burns and Nietzsche fecht owre the quines. J.B.

TOAST TI THE LASSIES

Nou that haggis an bard hiv been duly acknowledged,An afore we gan hame ti oor supper o porridge -Wi saut on, or sugar, or mebbe molasses -Let’s gie a bit thocht ti the question o lassies.

Ti aid oor debate we mist caa apon witnesses;Brocht bak fae the past ti judge fit an unfitnesses:On the modern dame an her guid-gates an ill-gates;O the twenty-first century quine’s luves an hates.

In the red corner is Rabbie, poet an luver,In the blue corner Nietzsche, German philosopher.Twa scrievers kent fir thir differences on women;Fae the cauld-hearted rant ti the rustic love-hymn.

Wance baith hiv taen in the job set afore them, it rings;The bell fir the first roond, an lik a bear, Nietzsche swings.‘Is this whit a hunder years o evolutionThraws up? Lattes, skinnies an Scots devolution?

Women wi tattoos an aa kinds o tribal piercin -Are ye shair thir no descended fae yer great chieftainO the puddin race? War-cry lik a scalded cat:Dae ye think thae half-price hot pants mak me look fat?’

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Nou Rabbie’s aff his seat faster than a blinkin ee,An swings a well-aimed hook at Nietzsche’s demented glee.‘Yir wrang, auld Germin, fir lass an laund hiv advanced,An A’ve been deid fir longer. Yer mad een jist glanced

At lassies an ma bonnie Scotlan, an didnae takAuchin in. Yir blind ti richts, ti women’s richts, that makOor fair warld fit fir the majesty o woman:Queendom o quines and quinedom o queens sae human;

Even thon braw quine wha is a metal porcupine! Mebbe eatin fousty bread saftened yer Prussian mind.Things change. Wance Marys and Jeannies fir fiancées:Nou, I’d be oot winchin Britneys an Beyonces!

Dae ye no miss a guid haund-fy o lassie, ya gowk?Wi a luve-song ti woo her an her husband ti jowk?’At this Nietzsche stummles an faas flat on the groond;Fecht owre atween poet an thinker in wan roond.

The ringside’s quiet nou the angels hiv stopped cheerin.God declares Rab the winner, thus endin the speirin.Rab winks at the women wi hivenly chassisses,Then says, ‘Tak yir gless, in a toast ti the lassies!’

THE BULL STONE

The bull stone,worn in the middlelike a mother’s aproned waist,strains againstthe tugging, pullingrope of my arms.

A deaf conspiracyof grass has grown thickover the dancing ground,over the few torn feetof swollen scarlet earththe bulls were baited on.

My tiny taurean hoovesslip through the wet green,untethered, pink and yielding.I climb up the bull stone,crowned in daisies,robed in bed-linen.

I am the white calfmy black brothers invoked.Their blood is my ink.My words are their horns.I will gouge the land with my poetry.I am ivory-skinned and unsacrificeable.

A spidery rain falls.The granite mouth of my great-aunt’s housecalls me in for my tea.I dismount myself, my bull stone,and snort at the lesser gods hiding in the sky.

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R.P.M. Bond

Global Warming: Science, belief or weapon of mass taxation?

As the year 1000 approached, people took to the hills to await the second coming and the end of the world. By 2000 technical sophistication had advanced and everyone huddled around their computers awaiting the virtual end. Neither came.

In 2000 plenty of IT consultants made lots of money ensuring that computers worked.

I do not doubt that in 1000 all the roast chestnut salesmen made a similar killing. Forget the computers, follow the money.

Now we have Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) to terrify us. AGW began as a scientific hypothesis and has evolved into a religious belief. We must all be grateful to Tim Nicholson for going to an Employment Appeals Tribunal to prove precisely that.

Is global warming science or belief? Science depends on its practitioners publishing their work and conclusions and having their peers comment on it forcefully and critically. The activity is mutual, every scientist looks out for dubious claims and/or experimental results in their field and, if they spot any, they pounce.

So when I read, for the umpteenth time, that the science of global warming is now settled and that the vast majority of scientists involved are of one mind,

I know for certain that whatever they are talking about, it ain’t science. The bear pit aspect of science is the only way that science gets refined and advances. It isn’t allowed to happen in AGW. Remember the howls of anguish that followed the Channel 4 programme The Great Global Warming Swindle? Both the title (though not the content) and the responses sounded more like cries of heresy than scientific discussion.

What is so sad about this is that it is so unnecessary. The scientists involved in global warming are so committed to an objective that they feel is noble, that they regard any criticism of their work as undermining that objective. This confusion between scientific hypothesis and political objective is disastrous for science and its ever fragile attempt to preserve objectivity, rationality and rigour.

AGW practitioners do not readily hand over their data when asked by other scientists. In the saga of the infamous hockey stick graph, which purported to show that temperatures had been level for over a thousand years until the late twentieth century, Dr Edward Wegman, the eminent US statistician appointed by Congress to investigate the spat between the authors of the hockey stick and its critics, said ‘we judge that the sharing of research materials, data and results was haphazardly and grudgingly done’. He

went on to say: ‘Mann’s [the senior author] assessments that the decade of the 1990s was the hottest decade of the millennium cannot be supported by his analysis.’

A reluctance to share information with their scientific peers was also manifest in the climategate e-mails.

Reluctance to release raw data to a fellow scientist is definitely not science.

Only by separating the hypothesis from the policies can there be any hope of saving science and its reputation.

Only if the science is treated as science and not as holy writ can the independence of science and the respect that it is accorded on that basis be preserved.

Only if that separation be made and the policies given an underpinning of several separate and independent justifications can the need for the policies survive whether the hypothesis be right or wrong.

During the sudden oil price leaps of the 1970s the energy input per unit output of GDP fell substantially in the major economies. Thus economies are possible and Economies are capable of quite rapid change when the price signals are clear.

In the early 1970s the Club of Rome published a study that told us that we were about to run out of many important raw materials. They were wrong then and now but, sometime, they will be right and we will need sustainable economic development. The question is how fast we should make the transition. If we do it too quickly it will cost too much. Too slowly and it might come too late. That is the vital political issue. Carbon trading and taxes are a dangerous diversion from that.

So politicians, in order to strive toward strategic energy independence and sustainability must (i) encourage every possible economy in the uses of energy (ii) encourage every possible economy in the use of all non-renewable raw materials (iii) fund research into realistic alternative sources of energy (iv) encourage appropriate and sensible recycling of raw materials (v) look to ways of ending the lunatic search for eternal economic growth without returning us to a far from idyllic past.

AGW is not necessary for these policies, yet politicians remain wedded to it because the armageddonesque scenarios peddled by the Gore sales team and their acolytes sell taxes. Terrify ’em and they’ll pay up quietly, works; as UK airport departure tax proves. But follow the money: check up on how many of the major players in AGW stand to benefit from carbon trading.

Here the ‘science is settled’ and

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‘thousands of scientists agree’ liturgies are unquestionably rubbish. Within the body of AGW research the endless punch ups going on about how bad it might be if it should happen are many and various.

Outside the body of the kirk, there are plenty of high profile critics but they are not crying woe so the media ignore them and, if they are practising scientists, they risk their research grants.

So how are we laymen to sort it all out? There is a non-scientific test that should allow the reasonable taxpayer to make a judgement.

If Lord Stern is correct then the UK alone will have to pay £28 billion (about 2% of UK GDP) every year until 2050 to avoid the consequences of global warming. For all of us that’s a recession every year for 40 years! Those thousands of scientists who are of one mind about global warming and its seriousness ought to set an example and make demonstrable sacrifices of their own. If, as many have said, all that is needed to convince politicians to take action has been done, that area of research, though important, is not urgent. So these thousands of scientists could tell their governments to hand over their research grants for the next 10 years to those working on alternative energy technologies.

That would be an excellent test of how serious the problem is, whether for science, belief or taxes.

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Born in the Borders, raised in Fife, Mary Somerville (1780-1872) became one of the great scientific intellectuals of the nineteenth century. LILLIAN KING examines her life and career.

Prominent Women of Fife

Mary Somerville: The Most Extraordinary Woman in Europe

was reunified in 1859. A spectator at the coronation banquet of George IV, Mary was able to give an eye witness account of Queen Caroline’s sad attempt to disrupt the ceremony; she attended the coronation of Queen Victoria and, although a Presbyterian was presented to two Popes. Over and above all this, she was one of the foremost scientific writers of her time, whose admirers included some of the most famous men of the day and whose text books were used in Oxford and Cambridge universities for over a hundred years.

Martha errs on the side of modesty but Mary herself, on being asked to translate the work of a noted French scientist, wrote that she ‘naturally concluded that my self-acquired knowledge was so far inferior to that of men who had

been educated in our universities that it would be the height of presumption to write on this or indeed on any subject.’

Mary Fairfax was born on December 26, 1780, in the manse at Jedburgh, the home of her aunt and uncle. Mrs Fairfax was returning from London where she had accompanied her husband who was about to embark for service against the Americans in their War of Independence. William George Fairfax, a seafaring man who rose to the rank of Vice-Admiral, was connected by marriage to George Washington. During his service in the American war, Fairfax received an invitation to visit the president - which he declined - but was reprimanded for having correspondence with the enemy. He was knighted after the famous victory at Camperdown.

Mary was brought up in the family home in Burntisland. Her father’s naval career meant that he was absent for long periods of time and when Mary was about nine, Fairfax was shocked to find her ‘a little savage.’ She loved reading but had what her father considered to be an atrocious accent. In order to ‘improve’ this, he insisted on her reading aloud each day a chapter from the Bible and a paper from the Spectator magazine. The result was

Age, the last book written by her mother. But Mary Somerville lived through the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars when the fear of invasion was never far away; she travelled in Europe during 1848, the year of revolution; was acquainted with Cavour and was living in Italy when that country

‘The life of a woman devoted to her family duties and to scientific pursuits affords little scope for a biography. There are neither stirring events nor brilliant deeds to record…’ So Martha Somerville introduces Personal Recollections From Early Life To Old Mary Somerville’s House in Burntisland

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that, for the rest of her life, she refused to open the magazine again. At ten, Mary was sent to a boarding school in Musselburgh where her chief occupation was learning by heart pages of Johnson’s dictionary. At the end of a year, it was decided that the expense was not justified by results.

Her love of reading was frowned upon, which annoyed her. Why, she asked, should women have been given a desire for knowledge if it were wrong for them to acquire it. Mary’s interest in mathematics was sparked off by an algebra puzzle in a ladies magazine, and later by a remark by Alexander Nasmyth who taught landscape painting. He advised his students to read Euclid’s Elements of Geometry which he believed was the foundation, not only of perspective, but of astronomy and all mechanical science. Of course it was impossible for a girl to go into a shop and buy these books but, through her brother’s tutor, Mary acquired copies and began a course of private study which included Navigation, Algebra, Geometry and Greek. Privacy was essential because it was generally believed that ‘the strain of abstract thought would injure the tender female frame.’ Her father was so concerned for her health that he insisted her studies be given up ‘or we shall have Mary in a straitjacket one of these days.’

But it wasn’t all study, however. Winters were spent in Edinburgh and the family enjoyed a varied social life; girls then had more freedom than their later Victorian counterparts and, though Mary spent the hours between daybreak and breakfast studying, she had many friends, attended the theatre, balls and parties and ‘did not dislike a little quiet flirtation.’ Her first dancing partner was Gilbert Elliot, later the Earl of Minto, whose family fortune came from the Lochgelly coal mines. Very much aware that life was not so easy for everyone, Mary

would write later about the social distress of the time, the harsh punishments meted out to wrongdoers, mutinies in the navy and the constant fear of invasion by the French.

In 1804 Mary married her cousin Samuel Greig, a son of Admiral Greig, the founder of the Russian navy, and went to live in London. Samuel did not prevent her studying but had a low opinion of women’s capabilities and no knowledge of, or any interest in science.

Three years later, Mary returned to Burntisland, a widow with two little boys. The younger died young, the elder named Woronsow after Count Semen Vorontsov, the Russian Ambassador in London, eventually became a barrister, but now Mary was independent with a circle of friends who strongly encouraged her in her studies of mathematics and science. In particular John Playfair, then Professor of Natural Philosophy at Edinburgh, was very helpful, and through him she began a correspondence with William Wallace, Playfair’s former pupil, who was then Professor of Mathematics at the Royal Military College at Great Marlow. In this correspondence they discussed the mathematical problems set in the Mathematical Repository and in 1811 Mary received a silver medal for her solution to one of these problems. She also read Newton’s Principia and, at Wallace’s suggestion, Laplace’s Mécanique Céleste and many other mathematical and astronomical texts In 1812 Mary Greig married another cousin, William Somerville. He, unlike her first husband, was interested in science and very supportive of his wife’s desire to study. He had been appointed head of the Army Medical Department in Edinburgh so they settled there. In a visit to the Edinburgh Museum, Mary recognised fossil plants that she had seen

in limestone blocks at Burntisland docks and this set her on a study of mineralogy. With her husband she studied geology and they moved in a close circle of friends that included the physicist David Brewster.

William became a member of the army medical board in London in 1816, and on the way to their new home, they stopped at Birmingham in order to see the steam engines in Watt and Boulton’s factory. In London, they played a significant part in the intellectual life of the capital, becoming friends with, among others Sir William and Lady Herschel, Humphrey Davy, Faraday and Darwin, and corresponding with many scientists in Europe, including Pierre La Place. With the ending of the Napoleonic wars, travel became simpler and the Somervilles met many of the most influential writers, thinkers and scientists in Europe. They were presented to Pope Pius VII, and Mary describes him as ‘a handsome gentlemanly and amiable old man,’ and a great contrast to Gregory XVI ‘a very common-looking man’ whom they met many years later.

Etna had erupted shortly before their arrival in Naples and they explored its slopes, choking on fumes from the red hot fumeroles; they visited Pompeii where excavation was taking place, bought a bronze statue of Minerva and smuggled it into Naples.

Back in London, the country was buzzing with excitement about the quest for the North Sea Passage. The Somervilles were passionately interested in nautical science and Sir Edward Parry invited them to see his ships prepared for his third voyage and a three year stay in the Arctic. Mary made a large quantity of marmalade for the voyage and Parry gave the name Somerville to a remote island in the Barrow Strait. Further excitement was to be had in visits to Charles Babbage to watch him

construct what he called an analytical engine, now known as a differential machine and a forerunner of the computer.

Shortly after the death of their eldest daughter in 1823, William was appointed physician to Chelsea Hospital and the family went to live in ‘a government house in a very dreary and unhealthy situation.’

The turning point in Mary Somerville’s life came with a letter from Lord Brougham on behalf of the Society for Diffusing Useful Knowledge. They wanted her to translate, simplify and explain Laplace’s Mécanique Céleste to make it more readily understood. The work was so complicated that very few people in the whole country even knew about it let alone understood it.

Mrs Somerville was at first unwilling because she doubted her ability to carry out such a task. Nevertheless, she organised her family life in order to make time to write without their social life being diminished. Sir John Herschel was one of the first to read her manuscript and prophesied that she would ‘leave a memorial of no common kind’ and lamented the fact that La Place had not lived to see this illustration of his great work. One can only imagine the stir caused in the male dominated world of scientific discovery by the appearance of this book. In 1831, James David Forbes, later to become Principal of the University of St Andrews, wrote in his notebook:

‘Her conversation was very simple and pleasing. Simplicity not showing itself in abstaining from scientific subjects with which she is so well acquainted, but in being ready to talk on them all with the naiveté of a child and the utmost apparent unconsciousness of the rarity of such knowledge as she possesses, so that it requires a moment’s reflection to be

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aware that one is hearing something very extraordinary from the mouth of a woman.’

Almost the whole of the first edition of Mechanism of the Heavens, seven hundred and fifty copies, were bought by Cambridge University. Success and fame were guaranteed. Mary was elected an honorary member of the Royal Astronomical Society at the same time as Caroline Herschel; The Royal Society of London had a sculpture of her made and placed in its great hall. Other honours followed from the Royal Academy of Dublin; the British Philosophical Institution, and the Société de Physique et d’Histoire Naturelle of Geneva. Robert Peel, the Prime Minister, arranged a pension of two hundred pounds a year which later increased to three hundred.

Mary’s health deteriorated in Chelsea, so the family moved to Paris, where as well as being féted by Parisian society, including such luminaries as General Lafayette, Sir Philip Sidney and Fenimore Cooper, Mary worked on her next book, Connexion of the Physical Sciences. It was dedicated to Queen Adelaide, who thanked her personally. A second edition, dedicated to Sir John Herschel, went into nine editions and was translated into German and Italian. Mary presented a copy to the young Princess Victoria during a private audience with the future queen. This book, dealing with astronomy, physics, meteorology and geography, reached a wider audience. It was praised by James Clerk Maxwell and her discussion, in the sixth edition of 1842,

of a hypothetical planet perturbing Uranus, led John Couch Adams to his investigation and subsequent discovery of Neptune.

William became dangerously ill, and when sufficiently recovered, the Somervilles went to live in Italy where they spent most of the rest of their lives; here Mary worked on her book Physical Geography, and had more honours bestowed upon her, including memberships of various societies and the first medal ever awarded by The Royal Italian Geographical Society.

After her husband’s death in June 1860, Mary began work on Molecular and Microscopic Science. In her last years, she returned in spirit to the days of her youth with Personal Recollections From Early Life To Old Age, recalling memories of her childhood in Burntisland. Her memory and her intellect remained sharp and the day of her death was spent revising a treatise on the Theory of Differences written many years before.

Mary’s interests were not limited to scientific subjects. She supported the abolition of slavery, was a strong advocate of women’s education and women’s suffrage. When John Stuart Mill, the British philosopher and economist, organised a massive petition to parliament to give women the right to vote, he had Mary put her signature first on the petition. Somerville College in Oxford was named after her in 1879 because of her strong support for women’s education. Her public achievements should be set against private tragedy;

‘Her grasp of scientific truth in all branches of knowledge, combined with an exceptional power of exposition, made her the most remarkable woman of her generation.’

Sir David Brewster, inventor of the kaleidoscope, and a personal friend described her as ‘certainly the most extraordinary woman in Europe - a mathematician of the very first rank with all the gentleness of a woman ... a great natural philosopher and mineralogist.’

Today, a plaque in her home town provides a modest tribute to a great woman, but her books also remain as a permanent memorial of possibly one of the greatest women scientists of all time.

three of her six children died in childhood and her eldest son also pre-deceased her.

When she died in Naples in November 1872, obituaries appeared in newspapers and journals throughout Europe and America and The Morning Post called her the Queen of Science. It was said of her that:

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Henryson’s Dunfermline – or Dunfermline’s Henryson?He’s been claimed as Fife’s greatest poet of all time – but more than that, he’s a medieval Scots makar who attracts readers in mainland Europe, North America and the Antipodes. There is even a new American novel – see below – based on his life. So why is he generally uncelebrated in his ‘home’ county? PhR asked the Secretary of the Robert Henryson Society and co-organiser of the first ‘Henryson Supper’ in the Abbot House, MORNA FLEMING, to champion a figure who has suffered from being both elusive and eluded.

Traditionally, the fifteenth century poet Robert Henryson is associated with the city and royal burgh of Dunfermline. Historically, however, there is an unfortunate scarcity of evidence placing Henryson in this location. Whatever evidence we have is derived from literary and legal sources. The court poet William Dunbar, whose career possibly overlapped with that of Henryson, mentions him in his 1506 poem ‘I that in heill wes and gladnes’, usually known as ‘The Lament for the Makaris’:

In Dunfermelyne he hes done roune [Death has whispered] With Maister Robert Henrisoun.1

In view of this placing of Henryson’s mention in the poem, Matthew McDiarmid, one of the leading authorities on Henryson’s work, proposes that he must have died only a year or two before its composition.2

Robert Lekpreuik’s 1569 print of the Morall Fabillis cites the writer as ‘Maister Robert Henrisoun, Scholemaister at Dunfermeling’, and it is known that he was appointed to the position by Richard Bothwell, head of Dunfermline’s Benedictine abbey. McDiarmid considers it ‘beyond question’ that the same man is the Magistro Roberto Henrison publico notario who witnessed three of the charters of the new abbot, Henry Crichton (1472-82).3 The poet-schoolmaster, in his role as notary public, may have attended the King’s Council with the Lord Abbot, and may have assisted him in governmental negotiations. Henryson’s poems certainly show a very real knowledge of the court and the courtroom. This is a suggestion which caught the imagination of the American academic John McDonald, who has produced an imaginative reconstruction of Henryson’s later life in Among His Personal Effects, a novel which uses internal evidence from the poems to structure the developing narrative.4

1 Priscilla Bawcutt and Felicity Riddy (eds.), Selected Poems of Henryson and Dunbar (Edinburgh:Scottish Academic Press, 1992), pp. 147-151. 2 Matthew P. McDiarmid, Robert Henryson (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1981), p. 23 Ibid., p. 34 John McDonald, Among His Personal Effects (Waterford, Va., USA: Capstone Fiction, 2007)

Another of Henryson’s duties as servant of the Abbot would be to make regular visits to the leper hospital on the south side of the town, which doubtless gave the poet the insights into Cresseid’s terrible fate described in the Testament of Cresseid.5

McDiarmid proposes that Henryson took up the post as schoolmaster in Dunfermline around 1465, and lodged in the monastery there until the schoolmaster’s house, petitioned for by Abbot Bothwell in 1468, was built. If McDiarmid’s suggested birthdate in the mid-1430s is correct, then Henryson would have been a relatively young man, to our eyes, when he assumed the role in the grammar school. As it was the convention of the time to favour local applicants, and as there are many Henrysons in the historical records of Inverkeithing and Rosyth, it may be assumed that Fife was the poet’s home county that he returned to after many years of study, many of them spent in Europe.6

Henryson has left a relatively small, but generally perfectly formed body of poetry of various types, the major pieces being the Morall Fabillis, Orpheus and Euridices and the Testament of Cresseid. Although it is conceivable that the poems we know about represent the entire oeuvre, it is generally thought that there must have been some juvenilia which has been lost (or suppressed by the poet himself), leaving posterity the mature work only. As these major works were derived, respectively, from the fables of Aesop, known in Scotland through the Latin version by Gualterus Anglicus (Walter

the Englishman) and the French Roman de Renart; from Boethius’s Consolations of Philosophy; and from Chaucer’s Troylus and Criseyde, they were in a sense part of the mainstream of literary knowledge of the time, but each of them shows a very idiosyncratic mind at work, a very individual talent.

While most educated people (and even some school students) have some knowledge of Aesop’s fables, have heard of Orpheus’s search for Euridice in the underworld, and understand the Troylus story as one of the greatest love stories of all time (possibly through Shakespeare’s version of the tale), knowledge of Henryson is extremely limited, and restricted to an academic community, often to be found far distant from Dunfermline and Scotland. The poet’s presence on the list of prescribed texts for the Scottish Advanced Higher in English has not encouraged his study beyond a small group of enthusiastic teachers, who have a hard task to convince contemporary students of the value of spending time on the hard shell of the language to get to the kernel of the literature and the thought within.

One finds the same lack of knowledge in Dunfermline generally. The city has undoubtedly changed a great deal since the late fifteenth century, but the centre retains a good sense of the ancient burgh, with the ruins of the palace at its south western edge, and the imposing abbey built on to the remains of the original building. The relatively recently restored Abbot House provides a heritage centre, and there is an imposing Presence Room

5 Denton Fox (ed.) Robert Henryson: The Poems (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), pp. 111-1316 McDiarmid, op.cit., p. 7

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within it, beautifully decorated with murals illustrating the Testament. A figure, purportedly Henryson himself, stands at a lectern, composing the first of the Fables. Study of old maps and records shows that the plan of the centre of Dunfermline is essentially unchanged since Henryson walked its streets, and it is fairly easy to establish a town map of the period where only the names of the streets may have changed. It may even be possible to identify the location of the leper hospital where Henryson imagined Cresseid being taken after her terrible judgement (perhaps where the present-day St Leonard’s primary school stands). A walk through the centre of Dunfermline, noting the remains of the Abbey Wall on the way to the abbey, can situate Henryson’s writings in a tangible space.

Scholars have also identified details of fifteenth-century life in many of the Fables. To name only two, ‘The Taill of the Vponlandis Mous and the Burges Mous’ differentiates the life of the wealthy in the city and the much harder experience of the country-dwellers, the former living at their ease on the proceeds of the countryside, while the producers go hungry and cold. The vponlandis mous has a difficult life, finding her food ‘quhyle vnder busk and breir,/Quhilis in the corne’ (166-7) and ‘... into the wynter tyde/Had hunger, cauld and tholit grit distres’ (169-70) to such an extent that a visit by her burgess sister to the seat of such privation is seen as a pilgrimage. Her own daily food is described with loving detail, cataloguing the contents of the well-to-do merchant’s larder of the time:

Baith cheis and butter vpon skelfis hie, Flesche and fische aneuch, baith fresche and salt, And sekkis full off grotis, meill, and malt. (264-6)7

‘The Preiching of the Swallow’ gives a panoramic picture of the Scottish rural year, with details that have been identified as authentic practices of tilling the fields, sowing and tending the crops, mending the boundary walls:

Sum makand dyke, and sum the pleuch can wynd, Sum sawand seidis fast frome place to place, The harrowis hoppand in the saweris trace … (1722-4)

Specifically for the central theme of the fable, is the description of the production of flax, which Henryson would have watched around Dunfermline:

The lyne ryipit, the carll pullit the lyne, Rippillit the bollis, and in beitis set, It steipit in the burne, and dryit syne, And with any bittill knokkit it and bet, Syne swingillit it weill, and hekkillit in the flet; His wife it span, and twynit it in to thread, Off quhilk the fowlar nettis maid in deid. (1825-31)8

7 Fox, op.cit., p. 148 Ibid., p. 68, p. 71

But Dunfermline in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries is not the city of Henryson; it is the city of Andrew Carnegie, Robert the Bruce and Malcolm III and Queen Margaret. You will seek in vain for any statue of Henryson or building named after him, unlike the statue of Andrew Carnegie in the park he donated to the city, the Carnegie Birthplace Museum and the Carnegie Dunfermline Library, and the newly re-named Carnegie College on the eastern edge of the city. The Abbey shows its proud allegiance to Robert the Bruce in the carved declaration round its tower, and the Bruce Festival in the town park each summer entertains natives and visitors alike with medieval pageantry. ‘King Malcolm’s Tower’ can be found in the town Glen, and Queen Margaret’s Cave is found off one of the central car parks. There was a Robert Henryson School, but there was no association with the poet other than the name, and it has now been demolished, and its name lost. The current exhibition of ‘Dunfermline Diamonds’ in the city Library celebrates the usual suspects, and the writers Dorothy Dunnett and Iain Banks, but, despite his being named as one of Fife’s ‘Local Heroes’ for Celebrating Fife 2010, and despite the presence in that very library of the Henryson Collection of books and articles painstakingly put together over the years, the is nary a mention in his local library of one of the greatest makars of the late medieval period.

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BOOK REVIEW

We asked MOLLY RORKE, a popular poetry performer at events of the Robert Henryson Society, to give us an account of a new historical novel set in sixteenth-century Scotland. Prof. McDonald has also produced a novel based on the life of Henryson; this will be reviewed in the next issue.

Not the Beautiful People

John Craig McDonald, An Early Fall. Waterford, Virginia: OakTara Publishers, 2008. $16.95.

ISBN 978 1 60290 151 3

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This is a book to be savoured. Most ‘historical’ novels depict psychologically modern characters dressed up in doublets or kirtles, with very little real insight into how characters of the period actually thought. But Craig McDonald, whose previous novel, Among his Personal Effects, is a powerful account of the life of Robert Henryson, has been immersed in the culture of the Scots Makars for nearly half a century – the history, literature, language and above all, the ideas. McDonald’s academic credentials demand the highest respect, for he is responsible for the final part of The Scottish Text’s Society’s edition of John Ireland’s Mirror of Wisdom: composed for the use of James IV king of Scotland, 1490, a major work of mediaeval Scots prose, a compendium of political and theological thought which had been languishing in MS. form for five hundred years. Whether James IV benefitted much from it is dubious, but somehow, by 1513 it had come into the possession of Sir Alexander Guthrie of that ilk, who, with thousands of his countrymen, was killed at Flodden.

This is the basis of the novel. But McDonald’s erudition is not displayed through ponderous details – it is a matter of soft focus and nuance. In his picture of September 1513 we can catch images that have been attached to Flodden for five hundred years: beguiling fortune; flowers, like grass, withering away; a Scottish knight broken and dying, impaled on a shivered spear. But above all, in this Dance of Death, we sense in our bones Dunbar’s conclusion, as he lamented for the Makars:

Best is that we for death dispone After our death that live may we.

The literature of the Makars permeates the book – Ireland himself, Henryson, Blind Harry, Gavin Douglas, the

beautiful lyric ‘Quia amore langueo’ ... all relevant to plot and theme, and sensitively rendered, in accessible English.

An Early Fall is a thoroughly engrossing mediaeval mystery story, though far more profound and considerably more economical than many in the genre. Indeed it is hardly longer than a novella. Nevertheless, by the end, our emotional involvement is so strong we are reacting physically - the description of the battlefield prompts a feeling of nausea; and the fate of the characters, distinctly damp eyes.

They are not beautiful people; the cast includes the lame, the halt, the disfigured, the simple minded, the lecherous, the prudish, even the elderly and overweight. As in a Shakespeare play, there are no unqualified villains, though, oddly enough, James IV comes close. He is not portrayed as the romantic hero we might have expected. Though capable of charm and generous gesture, he is also shown as autocratic, unappreciative, and in the end thoroughly irresponsible. How else would one describe a king who spends an enormous proportion of GDP on fashionable weapons of mass destruction, but seems not to have had the patience to study how to use them effectively? James’s deployment of his forces destroyed them. Many years before he had imparted to the Spanish ambassador his idea of kingship –that his subjects ‘serve him with their persons and goods, in just or unjust quarrels, exactly as he likes, and in return, he ought to be the first in danger if he begins any warlike undertaking.’ From that standpoint, presumably, James would have seen nothing to repent of in the Flodden campaign.

This Lyoun has sharp, cruel claws. Guthrie has arrived at the Ford Castle muster a day late, due to the inclement weather. Lady Heron, the chatelaine, and

James’s temporary bedfellow, remarks on the mask he wears, and James spitefully tries to mortify him by forcing him to remove it, revealing his hideously mangled face to the company, even though Guthrie’s wounds had been gained at Sauchieburn in James’s service. Lady Heron fares no better; after she has warmed the king’s bed for a few days, James’s parting shot is to burn her home over her head.

Pale saints do not feature either. Even the revered John Ireland (historically, by all accounts, a thoroughly combative Fifer) is presented as by no means devoid of sin. But though keeping the faith is for many of them a sair struggle, they are ready to show humanity - to succour one another as the tragedy sweeps over them, and ultimately to seek forgiveness for their faults, as they forgive others. And thus they ‘for death dispone’.

It is part of the writer’s skill that he can make the eternal life they strive for seem almost tangible. As he describes it, it is heaven, not hell, that is ‘other people’ - loved ones reunited for all eternity, and because he has allowed us to experience, imaginatively, how our ancestors thought, we modern readers are content to accept it.

We can still see the words that inspired this novel. At the very end of the manuscript of The Mirror of Wisdom, available for consultation in the National Library of Scotland, an unknown hand has added:

Alexander Guthrie, of that Ilk, Knight, and Alexander Strathachin of Balmady were slain

at the Battle of Branxton in Northumberland, the ninth day of the month of September, in the year of our Lord one thousand five hundred and thirteen. Pray for them.

It is McDonald’s triumph that even aggressive atheists, five hundred years later, can understand, at some deep level, exactly why we should.

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Three Edinburgh PoemsWilliam Hershaw

CRAIGLOCKHART

(1)

Listen -the wind is souching through the birks and the century is a trembling boy,as Owen lifts his kit bag, hails the porter at the gates - a peely-wally, sainless loun,wha gowffed and blethered wi Sassoon,and writes his ‘Anthem For Doomed Youth’.

An Empire sent its broken hauflins here:officers dumbfounert and demon-met, in deep despair, with their minds sapped, their sobs and screams,their waukrife dreams, play out again each night. Listen - their shell shock stouns here yet.

(2)

Listen -there’s new arrivals now, nuns,Irish starlings in the Hall ripping back the sick room blinds, letting the light of Education passexorcising bloody ghouls who won’t go back.God’s soldiers who work with a will to make‘thon oul fella, Knox, luik slack’.Through time, grandweans of Mayo navvies turn dominies, Scots middle-class.

There’s skeery young lassies alighting from trams at the foot of Craiglockhart Drive,laughing, bright as field poppies,fresh-faced from reeking raws - Lumphinnans, Carfin and Croy,rescued from service or picking out stones at a frozen pit-heid,the first wave fired back to fight on Presbyterian fronts.

See how they plan and teach and work,an emancipation act. They live longtill I am caught by the last of them.

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(3)

Listen - They will never retract:dragon-breathed biddies in their late wizened sixties who take my leave-piece penny for Africa,rax their bony knuckles in the small of my back and tax me till I pass eleven plus, sclim up the ladder few immigrants reach;O-levels and Highers. I read Owen, Sassoon,take an honours degree (Eng. Lit. M.A.)to manifest one daya long-haired goon in a leather trench-coat to chap on Sister Deirdre’s office doorto be taught how to teach.

One time I walked these long-haunted corridors,with my ghost-mates, all mad together,felt the surge of the past as a pressurethrob in my head like a spent shell burst.

Listen - the century was a shilpit old manwhen I wrote this down and prayed I had missed the worst.

STRANGER

I walk cauld causeweys like a ghaistwhaur the wind cuts sair as flint,tae find a lang forgotten face,for tae mind a time lang tint.

Is it thirty years or faurther -we twaa got fou in the Captain’s Bar,and sailed daurk Edinburghablaw the morning star ?

Heich on the lobby waathe gless hauds me in its stare:and I dinnae ken at aathe stranger staundin there.

IN THE ROYAL INFIRMARY

Old sailor, all washed up, in an unco port,your skinny and tattooed armsgey awkward at holding a paperback Westernin the Chest and Bronchial Ward.

You’ve brought insome driftwood of lifeto hold on to in here:golden and dreich the cuttings in Spanish -you being rescued from a sinking shipsomewhere off Buenos Aires.

Every passing nurse and visitoris shown - aye, right enough,that’s you again being hoistedfrom the brink,so hold tight now, old Jonah,dinnae sink.

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DAVID ANNAND: My work has grown out of a tradition of figurative representation exploiting the plasticity of clay. It deals with vitality, balance, gravity and irony. It is very important that my work should remain accessible to everyone i.e. realistic human or animal subjects, observed and modelled with discipline, set in a slightly incongruous composition, using the site as a plinth and often involving an abstract element in the composition. Think of a Richard Thompson song. It can be sentimental or traditional but then it is spiked with a guitar solo that is so abstract it is at the very edge of the genre. I wish I could achieve this in my sculpture. I suppose everything is abstract in a way.Looking back at my sculpture you’d think I am obsessed with giving gravity a hard time and taking my materials to the limit. It’s easy enough to make life-like sculptures, but, by nudging them off balance, in an awkward place - it makes them vulnerable, precarious; they get an urgency to be alive.

Dr R.P.M. (DICK ) BOND was born in Glasgow in 1936. He was educated at Alan Glen’s School and the University of Glasgow (B.Sc 1958; Ph.D. 1962); the studies for the Ph.D. included a year at the Universidad Tecnica Federico Santa Maria in Valparaiso Chile.

After a post-doctoral appointment at Northwestern University (Ill. USA) he worked as a research scientist in Shell’s laboratories in Sittingbourne, Kent. His main research interests were in steroid biosynthesis, enzyme mode of action and biological pest control.

He worked for Shell Chemical in Houston (Tex. USA) on chemical industry planning and created a computer model of the US chemical industry. And he worked on research strategy for Shell International in London.

After retiring from Shell, he worked with an industry-government liaison group (CEST) on technologies to address environmental issues.

At various times he: was a county councillor on Kent County Council; held a visiting chair at Strathclyde University; was chair of governors at a Kent Primary school; was on the board of governors of Cranbrook School (Kent); and was a governor of Wye College (University of London).

JOHN BREWSTER is a poet, writer and musician. He has published work in a diverse range of books and magazines through the years. He is currently working as a creative writing tutor.

Check out his writing website at www.writingvoices.com

STUART FARRELL B.A A.I.F.A F.S.A.Scot: I am a freelance archaeologist, a graduate of Sheffield University of nearly 20 years and working currently in the North of Scotland, though I have worked throughout the UK and in France, Greece and Ireland. I am an Associate of the Institute of Archaeologists and a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland for over 15 years. I lived in

Notes on Contributors and Editorial Board Members

Fife for over 30 years before moving north but still have close family connections and other interests in Fife; and have contributed a number of papers relating to Fife to a local archaeological journal. My academic interests in Fife are of the study and recording of gravestones and studies in local history though on a wider basis I am also interested in Fife’s industrial past. I am also involved in local family history research in Fife. After a lifetime in education, MORNA FLEMING has recently taken early retirement to concentrate on the things that matter in life: reading, writing, singing and running. She hopes to use the time now available to extend her researches in the varied fields of the writings of the time of James VI/I. As secretary of the Robert Henryson Society, she has an additional special interest in the works and times of the medieval poet of Dunfermline.

LILLIAS SCOTT FORBES: Second daughter of Scots composer, F.G. Scott, Lillias Scott found ready introduction to the coterie of lively musicians, writers and artists to be encountered on the cultural scene in Glasgow during the pre-war years – the family home in Langside became a haven for not a few notabilities: among those we remember R.F. Pollock, then working with Dumbarton People’s Theatre; William McCance, a Scotsman (as pointed out by Hugh MacDiarmid [Christopher Grieve]), brilliant innovator in typography and book production at Reading University and husband of Agnes Millar Parker, distinguished woodcut artist and book illustrator.

Lillias Scott commenced writing verses at an early age, inheriting her belief and approach in matters of the arts from her father and

her mother, a sensitive interpreter of her husband’s songs. F.G.’s impromptu ‘lectures’ to family and friends often began with bursts of rapturous passages ad lib across the keys, from, let us say, Berlioz or songs of Mussorgsky, all brought to a close with some heaven-borne swatch of Swinburne.

MacDiarmid valued the seeming simplicity of language and style in her early lyrics: her first collection, published by M. Macdonald, Edinburgh, carrying the poet’s own version of Christopher’s ‘Milk-Wort and Bog-Cotton’ as its cover illustration. MacDiarmid’s own foreword was to grace Duncan Glen’s publication of her second collection, while Calderwood Press – under the sensitive guidance of Colin Will – produced her third collection, A Hesitant Opening of Parasols.

After Art College in England BILL HARE studied art history at the University of Edinburgh and the Courtauld Institute in London. In 1985 he was appointed Exhibition Organiser at the Talbot Rice Gallery but also continued to teach art history with the University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh College of Art and the Open University. Since 1995 he has concentrated on teaching and curating, with a special interest in post-war Scottish art. He is now an Honorary Teaching Fellow in Scottish art history at Edinburgh University and Honorary Curator of the University’s Fine Art Collection. He has also been a part-time lecturer in modern art history and contemporary critical theory with Edinburgh College of Art for the past 30 years and has recently been appointed Exhibition Curator of the ECA Cast Collection. He has curated many exhibitions both in Britain and abroad, working with major artists such as Sam Francis, Alan Davie, Eduardo Paolozzi, Boyle Family and Craigie Aitchison. Recently he has curated two important thematic

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exhibitions-Divided Selves-The Scottish Self-Portrait from the 17th Century to the Present (2006) and Beyond Appearances-Painting and Picturing in Scottish Modern and Contemporary Painting (2007). Through out his career he has published extensively on Scottish modern art. He is the Scottish editor of Galleries magazine and the author of Contemporary Painting in Scotland (1992). He has just written a new monograph on Barbara Rae, published by Lund Humphries as well as another on Kurt Jackson for the same publisher. He is a board member for Art in Healthcare and a member of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA)

CHRISTOPHER HARVIE was elected list MSP for Mid-Scotland and Fife in May 2007 in the SNP interest. He was born in Motherwell in 1944, educated in the Borders and Edinburgh, where he also wrote a PhD in History on radicalism in the Victorian universities. He was a founder member of staff at the Open University from 1969-80 and then Professor of Regional Studies at Tuebingen until 2007; he still lectures and examines there. With Eberhard Bort he has run the Freudenstadt Colloquium on Regionalism since 1991.

Harvie has written or edited sixteen books, mainly on modern Scotland but also on subjects ranging from political fiction to transport and energy policy. His most recent is Scotland the Brief. His views (rarely complacent) on most aspects of contemporary Scotland won him the Herald’s ‘Free Spirit of Holyrood’ award in 2008 - before it was abolished in favour of ‘Councillor of the Year’.

Harvie was married to Virginia Roundell from 1980 until her death in 2005. His daughter Alison is co-ordinator of the Young

Foundation in London.

WILLIAM HERSHAW is a poet, musician and songwriter. Born at Newport on Tay in 1957, he studied English at Edinburgh University before becoming an Teacher. He is currently Principal Teacher of English at Beath High School. His early poems in Scots were published by the Aberdeen University Press in 1988 in Four Fife Poets along with John Brewster, Harvey Holton and Tom Hubbard. In 1998 the Scottish Cultural Press published The Cowdenbeath Man, poems in Scots and English. His work featured in the anthology Dream State - The New Scottish Poets edited by Donny O’Rourke and published by Polygon in 1994 and 2002. Fifty Fife Sonnets and Makars (tribute poems to the poets of the twentieth century Scots literary renaissance) were published by Akros in 2006 and 2007.

William Hershaw’s latest book is Johnny Aathin, a collection of prose and poetry describing the life of a Fife Mining Village. It is available from Windfall Books, 2 Railway Cottages, Westcroft Way, Kelty KY4 OAT or 39 McKenzie Crescent, Lochgelly, KY5 9LT. Priced £10, all proceeds are donated to Leukaemia Research.

William Hershaw will be guest editor of issue 2 of The Pathhead Review.

MARK KEITH HOLDEN - Design and Layout. Mark is an artist, filmmaker and screenwriter living in Fife. BA Hons. in Fine Art and MSc in Electronic Imaging from Dundee University. BA Hons. in Classics II from Durham University. Special Interest Foreign Language Films (particularly in German).

TOM HUBBARD, who edits this magazine, lives mostly in his native Kirkcaldy, but has taught at a number of overseas universities following his period (1984-92) as the first Librarian of the Scottish Poetry Library. In recent years he has worked in Scottish and Irish literary bibliography. His many publications include the poetry collection Peacocks and Squirrels: Poems of Fife (Akros, 2007), and the novel Marie B. (Ravenscraig Press, 2008), which is based on the tragicomic life of the nineteenth-century Ukrainian-French painter Marie Bashkirtseff. For the Spring Semester of 2011 (January to May), he is Lynn Wood Neag Distinguished Visiting Professor in British Literature at the University of Connecticut, and will continue to co-edit The Pathhead Review from there.

GORDON JARVIE lives in the East Neuk of Fife. His recent poetry appears in Lallans, The Red Wheelbarrow, The Herald, and Poetry Scotland, as well as in his most recent collection, Now and Then Poetry and an Ould Ballad (Harpercroft, 2010). The poem that appears in The Pathhead Review, ‘Scotland’s Place-Names’, shows his affinity for a topic that resonates in several of his poems – for other examples, see his recent article on place-names in Fras 12 (2010). He also writes on language and Scottish topics, and with his wife he edits and contributes to the children’s series of Scottie Books (National Museums of Scotland), now going into a second edition; their most recent titles are Robert Brusn in Time and Place, Greyfriars Bobby: a Tale of Victorian Edinburgh (both 2010) and There Shall be a Scottish Parliament (forthcoming, 2011).

LILLIAN KING, based in Kelty is a writer, editor and publisher. MA in English and History and diplomas in secondary and adult

education; creative writing and history tutor for fifteen years with the WEA. Her articles on a variety of subjects have appeared inter alia in The Scotsman, The Scots Magazine; The Times Educational Supplement, The Highland Railway Magazine and Workbox Magazine. She edited Fife Fringe magazine for four years, has written nine non fiction books and edited many more. Her novel The Cuckoo Wall, to be published next year, won the Scottish Association of Writers Constable Trophy for an unfinished novel. Her Windfall Books imprint specialises in poetry and local and Scottish interest ; it includes writers Jim Douglas, Morris Allan, David Lockhart RSA; Jill Bennett, Elizabeth Cordiner and Amy Baumann.

DAVID McHUTCHON was born in Kirkcaldy in 1982 and has run the secondhandand antiquarian bookshop, Midnight Oil Books, since 2005. By training a linguist and student of international relations, David has taken an increasing interest in legal studies over the past couple of years and has had a number of book reviews published on various aspects of Scots Law. As to interests, he enjoys cooking, eating and exploring the olderecclesiastical sites and stately piles in Fife and the surrounding counties. David currently works as the Publishing Editor of The Pathhead Review.

GORDON MEADE: lives in St. Monans, Fife. From 2008/2010 he was one of two .Royal Literary Fund Writing Fellows at the University of Dundee. Before taking up the above post he was involved in the development of a number of creative writing courses for vulnerable young people in

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schools, drop-in centres and hospitals in Fife and East Lothian. He has been w idely published in the United Kingdom, Ireland, Europe and Canada and has given readings and led creative writing workshops in Scotland, England, Belgium, Germany and Luxemburg. His most recent collection of poems, The Private Zoo, was published in 2008 by Arrowhead Press in County Durham. The six poems in the present issue of The Pathhead Review will appear in his collection The Familiar, which will be published by Arrowhead in the summer of 2011.

KENNY MUNRO was born in Edinburgh 1954 and has strong family connections in East Lothian and the Kingdom of Fife.

‘Almost’ living on the beach as a child, near Musselburgh, on the river Forth, has influenced his evolving passions for ‘creative fieldwork’ and outdoors arts initiatives over the last fifty years.

He embraced Sculpture at Edinburgh College of Art with post graduate studies at Oslo University and the Royal College of Art London. Family encouragement promoted expressive freedom and the language of art as a force for empowerment and communication . This has fuelled his local & international collaborations . Notably; Living Liquid Light 2000, Captain Cadell’s Canoe ( Australia 2001). His ‘discovery’ of Patrick Geddes in the 1980’s has profoundly driven his desire to initiate local and international exchanges which reinterpret the meaning of Creando Pensamus (By Creating we Think); using the arts as a catalyst and a tool to promote humanitarianism.Other projects such as ‘The Stones of Scotland, Plankton Power and Bengal Boats

and Rickshaw Roads, Language on Stone and Words fly from this Place; represent art/science engagements with significant partners. Some outcomes are delivered as physical land art and others emphasise the ‘process of group working’ with digital film for outdoor projection becoming the medium of delivery. The Words Fly video can be viewed on level 4 of National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh.

Most recently was commissioned to create films( Rail Time & Ear to the Line) for the East Neuk Festival 2010 which reveal the significance of rail travel and the old ‘holiday line’, incorporating archive film and contemporary interviews. This coastal rail link served the communities and promoted tourism and trade for over 100 years; enhancing culture life until the Beeching Cuts of the 1960s.

Currently he working on a series of DVD collaborations and promoting further exchanges with India.

website: www.kennymunrosculpture.com

DAVID W. POTTER M.A (Hons). Born in Forfar in 1948, attended Forfar Acadamy and St. Andrews University, studying Latin and Greek and graduated in 1970. He became a teacher in 1971 and taught Classics and Spanish at Glenrothes High School from 1971 until 2003, when he took early retirement but has worked part-time at Osborne House School in Dysart from 2003 until the present date. He married Rosemary in 1972 and has three grown up children and three grandchildren. He has written over 20 books, mainly on football. His hobbies are football (loves Celtic but hates sectarianism), cricket (umpire and Scorer for the Falkland club), drama (Auld Kirk Players) and walking the dog. Politics

are decidedly to the left of centre, although there is a tendency to veer to the repressive right on the issue of children behaving badly in school. Religion is “Christian values” with no tolerance of simplistic evangelical thinking on the one hand, nor of wishy-washy, pusillanimous Church of Scotland desires to close down Churches on the other.

BOB PURDIE BA, MSc, PhD.: Dr. Bob Purdie is an Honorary Research Fellow of the Research Institute for Irish and Scottish Studies, in the University Of Aberdeen.

He was born in Edinburgh in 1940, and has lived in Glasgow, Kirkcaldy, London, Kenilworth, Belfast and Oxford. A life long trade unionist, he came to live in Kirkcaldy in 1967, where he was shop stewards’ convener in an engineering factory on the Mitchelston Estate. He subsequently moved to London, but kept in contact with Kirkcaldy, where his parents lived, and he kept on returning during the years he spent teaching and researching in Belfast.

He has studied in Ruskin College, Oxford and the Universities of Warwick and Strathclyde and has published numerous essays and reviews on the political history of Ireland and Scotland. His PhD thesis on the Northern Ireland civil rights movement was published in 1990 as Politics in the Streets. He taught Politics and History in Ruskin College, Oxford, for twenty years. In 2008 he returned to Kirkcaldy, where he is writing a book on the politics of Hugh MacDiarmid.

MOLLY RORKE, M.A. (English Language and Literature) Dip Ed. (Edinburgh)M. Phil.(Scottish Studies) (Glasgow). Fellow of the Scottish Society of Antiquaries.

Research Associate, University of Glasgow, Department of English Language, with particular interest in mediaeval and early modern Scots language. At present working on the first and second editions of Dougal Graham’s History of the Rebellion, 1746.

Formerly teacher in Clackmannanshire and Central Region – secondary, special, and adult education.

Tourist guide – Dunfermline, Culross.

Research work for National Trust for Scotland; Moray McLaren; Ian Hamilton Q.C.Children’s Panel Member- original intake. Founder member of the Robert Henryson Society.

Presently active in the Scottish Society for Northern Studies.

Lives either in central Edinburgh, where there is a sufficiency of libraries, and/or in Dollar, where there are two grandchildren.

JOHN WALLACE attended Buckhaven High School, Fife, Scotland and King’s College, Cambridge. Until 1995, he was Principal Trumpet of the Philharmonia, a position which he held for nearly twenty years. With Professor Trevor Herbert he is co-editor of the Cambridge University Press Companion to Brass Instruments and he is currently finishing a history of the trumpet for publication by Yale University Press – From Jericho to Jazz.

Since first coming to prominence in 1981 - in front of his largest audience of 750,000,000 - duetting with Dame Kiri te Kanawa at the Wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer, to his most recently

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outing, being invited to play with the World Orchestra for Peace at this summer’s BBC Proms, John has long been acclaimed as a virtuoso trumpet player and musician of world renown. In 1995, he was awarded the O.B.E. in the Queen’s Birthday Honours in recognition of his distinguished services to music. In February 2002, he became the first orchestral musician to receive the ABO Award from the British Orchestras as the individual considered to have made the most outstanding contribution to orchestral life in the UK. In March 2003, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. In 2007 he became a Fellow of the Royal College of Music and in 2008 a Fellow of the Royal Northern College of Music.

In January 2002, John Wallace became Principal of the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama. Under his leadership, this institution has grown to become the number 1 institution in the UK for music in the 2008 Guardian League tables and is now the first Conservatoire of Dance, Drama and Music in the UK. John is also currently Chair of Conservatoires UK.

ANN WATTERS MBE: I was born Ann Douglas in England to Scottish parents from Edinburgh. I married a Fife dentist and came back to live in Scotland in Kirkcaldy where I have lived for over 50 years.

My schooling was partly in England and latterly in Fife. I went to London University and did a BSc in Science and later added a Psychology Honours degree. I started my career in scientific research and became a bacteriologist and when my family arrived opted for longer holidays with the family and became a teacher.

Later I became a Science Advisor in Fife, visiting all the schools and set up an

Environmental Education Field Centre with Manpower Service personnel, 80 in total most of whom moved into successful permanent jobs. The Centre was used by schools and colleges for nearly 20 years but over the past 15 years has been managed by the Save Wemyss Ancient Caves Society as a mini-Wemyss Museum. When I retired I took a local History Diploma. I was a local Councillor for over 20 years, first in the Central Kirkcaldy District and finally in the single tier authority. I have stood unsuccessfully as a Parliamentary Candidate three times.

I have been Chair of Kirkcaldy Civic Society for 26 of its 36 years, a Society involved in producing books and unveiling plaques on places of interest about people or buildings. For the life of Save Wemyss Ancient Caves Society for 24 years I have seen the Secretary. For University of the Third Age I have run a Local History afternoon for 16 years and have given many talks on that subject. I received an MBE from the Queen in 2008 for contribution to local history.

An article on Kirkcaldy Civic Society is scheduled to appear in issue 2 of The Pathhead Review.

IAN NIMMO WHITE: born Paisley, 1948. After training at Glasgow University and Jordanhill College, he moved to Fife In 1972 to start a career in youth and community service, a career which spanned 35 years until he retired in 2007. He started writing seriously in 1993 at the age of 45, having been bitten by the poetry bug. He couldn’t shake it off and remains infected to the present day.Ian writes in both English and Scots and has seen his work published in many literary magazines both north and south of the border. From 1998 to 2003 he edited Fife

Lines Poetry Magazine with a grant from the Scottish Arts Council, a publication which uniquely profiled the work of high school pupils alongside that of established names. He also ran the Alastair Mackie Quaich from 2001 to 2003, an annual award made to the best high school poet in Fife. He continues to work closely with schools, and currently he’s vice-chairman of Fife Book Fair Association. There have been three collections of his published poems : Memory and Imagination ( SBT and SPL ), Standing Back ( Petrel ) and Symmetry ( Joy Hendry and Trafford ).

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FORTHCOMING IN THE SECOND AND FUTURE ISSUES OF THE PATHHEAD REVIEW:

ANN WATTERS on the work of Kirkcaldy Civic Society

Adopted Fifer CAROL McNEILL on her native Kintyre

PAUL HARKINS on the Fence Collective and the New Folk Sound of Fife

BILL HARE on the Paintings of William McTaggart in Kirkcaldy Art Gallery

The Cupar Book Trade

The Two Gulls – a poem by MAUREEN SANGSTER and JACKIE GALLEY

KENNETH ROY on the controversial educator R.F. Mackenzie, a sometime heidie in Buckhaven

MORNA FLEMING interviews Jamie Reid Baxter, an authority on the early music and poetry of Fife

JOSH RICHARDS on the poetry of Edwin Arlington Robinson

Feature on Patrick Geddes and his vision for Dunfermline

Prominent Fife women: profile of Jennie Lee, founder of the Open University

LILLIAS SCOTT FORBES translates French-Canadian poetry

BOOK REVIEWS – LISTINGS OF NEW BOOKS ON FIFE AND BY FIFE WRITERS – THE FIFE BOOK FEST

FRONT COVER IMAGE: Y Bwa (The Arc) : detail from a sculpture (1995) by DAVID ANNAND, commissioned by Wrecsam Borough Council.

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