Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics: The Bard of Contention (1914-2014) 9781399503471

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgements
List of Abbreviations
Introduction: Scotland’s ‘Bardocracy’
1. Explosive Memory: Burns Enters the Twentieth Century (1914–1919)
2. Renaissance, Iconoclasm and Burnsian Reformation (1920–1930)
3. Relic or Messiah? (1930–1940)
4. ‘See Yonder Poor’: The Bard of Welfare (1941–1948)
5. Into the Cold War: Checkpoint Rabbie (1948–1959)
6. Indigenous Dreams and Kailyard Politics: Burns after Empire (1960–1979)
7. The Bardic Politics of Scottish Devolution (1979–1999)
8. Rabbie for Yes? (2000–2014)
Epilogue: A Poetic Constitution
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics

8053_Malgrati.indd 1

06/03/23 10:55 am

À l’Écosse

8053_Malgrati.indd 2

06/03/23 10:55 am

Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics The Bard of Contention (1914–2014)

Paul Malgrati

8053_Malgrati.indd 3

06/03/23 10:55 am

Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com © Paul Malgrati, 2023 Cover image: Robert Burns as Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara © Atalanta, Glasgow, with thanks to University of the West of Scotland. Cover design: www.deanta.com Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road 12 (2f) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in 11/14 Adobe Sabon by IDSUK (DataConnection) Ltd, and printed and bound in Great Britain A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 3995 0345 7 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 3995 0347 1 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 3995 0348 8 (epub) The right of Paul Malgrati to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).

8053_Malgrati.indd 4

06/03/23 10:55 am

Contents

Acknowledgementsvi List of Abbreviations

ix

Introduction: Scotland’s ‘Bardocracy’

1

1. Explosive Memory: Burns Enters the Twentieth Century (1914–1919)35 2. Renaissance, Iconoclasm and Burnsian Reformation (1920–1930)53 3. Relic or Messiah? (1930–1940)

91

4. ‘See Yonder Poor’: The Bard of Welfare (1941–1948)

107

5. Into the Cold War: Checkpoint Rabbie (1948–1959)

131

6. Indigenous Dreams and Kailyard Politics: Burns after Empire (1960–1979)

151

7. The Bardic Politics of Scottish Devolution (1979–1999)

173

8. Rabbie for Yes? (2000–2014)

205

Epilogue: A Poetic Constitution

239

Bibliography257 Index269

8053_Malgrati.indd 5

06/03/23 10:55 am

Acknowledgements

First of all, I would like to thank Professor Colin Kidd and Professor Robert Crawford who supervised the PhD thesis on which this book is based. Nothing would have been possible without their patient guidance, enlightened advice and infallible trust. I am proud to have ranked amongst their students and I feel privileged to have benefited from their careful, erudite support over the years. The writing of my PhD thesis, completed at the University of St Andrews between 2016 and 2020, would not have been possible without a grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council as well as a studentship generously donated by Ewan and Christine Brown. I gratefully acknowledge their help and I thank them for having believed in my work. I would also like to thank the staff at the National Library of Scotland, the Glasgow Mitchell Library, Edinburgh University Library, Dundee University Library, Dundee Central Library and St Andrews University Library for their help and care which allowed me to research in the best possible conditions. Further thanks are also due to Professor Sally Mapstone, Professor Kirsteen McCue, Professor Murray Pittock, Professor Alan Riach, Professor Douglas Dunn, Professor W. N. Herbert, Dr David Hopes, Mr Jim Sillars, Ms Fiona Ross, Mr Murdo Fraser and Mr Billy Kay for lending me their time and sharing their knowledge and memories with me during the course of many stimulating interviews. After completing my thesis, I had to rely on the support of many scholars and editors who helped me turn my PhD into the present book. Alongside my supervisors, I am particularly indebted to my viva examiners, Prof Fiona Stafford and Dr Malcolm Petrie as well as to the anonymous readers who reviewed my book for Edinburgh University Press from Edinburgh University Press. Special thanks are also due to

8053_Malgrati.indd 6

06/03/23 10:55 am



Acknowledgements  vii

Professor Gerard Carruthers, Dr Craig Lamont and other colleagues from the University of Glasgow’s Department of Scottish Literature: Dr Rhona Brown, Dr Pauline Mackay, Dr Ronnie Young, Dr Van Heijnsbergern, Dr Corey Gibson and Dr Moira Hansen who provided me with kind, collegial and intellectual support during the difficult years of the COVID-19 pandemic. Many thanks are also due to my copyeditor, Audrey Scardina, and to my indexer, Joanna Penning, as well as to the staff at Edinburgh University Press, especially to Isobel Birks, Eddie Clark, Kevin Worrall and Kristian Kerr. This book would not be here without them. More broadly, I am grateful to the following scholars whose advice, support and input helped me complete the present book: Professor Nicholas Roe, Professor Pierre Carboni, Professor Aileen Fyfe, Professor Christopher Whatley, Professor Patrick Scott, Professor Roger Mason, Dr Gavin Bowd, Dr Amy Westwell, Dr Cailean Gallagher, Dr Blanche Plaquevent, Dr Michael Shaw, Dr Scott Hames, Dr Ian Johnson, Dr Sean Murphy, Dr Piotr Potocki, Dr Matthew Augustine, Dr Bernhard Struck, Dr Clarisse Godard-Desmarest, Dr Garry MacKenzie, Dr Sarah Leith, Dr James Barrowman and Dr Kevin Gallagher. I would also like to acknowledge the publishers, Faber & Faber, Carcanet Press, Bloodaxe and the authors Douglas Dunn and Liz Lochhead for authorising reproduction of copyrighted texts. Likewise, credit is due to the firm, Atalanta Advertising Limited for allowing us to reproduce their ‘Che Rabbie’ design on this book’s front cover. Many thanks are also due to Ian and Louise Dickson from the Irvine Burns Club, as well as to members of the Irvine Lasses Burns Clubs for their kindness and their hospitality. I am also grateful to Graham Ogilvy, Doreen Donald and members of the Dundee Burns Club for their support and lovely gift of a Burns bust. I would also like to express my fondest gratitude to my loyal friends, Scott Taylor and Ashley Douglas, whose aye-biding support and assistance have been essential throughout this project. I am also thankful to my Scottish and French friends, Duncan Mitchell, Rebecca Munro, Ariane Issartel, Marion Chantegay, Lucie Chenet, Léa Delmaire, Vianney Griffaton, Benn Brown, Kate Florence and Hugh Casey for their encouraging words and other cups o’ kindness that helped me overcome so many challenges over the years.

8053_Malgrati.indd 7

06/03/23 10:55 am

viii   Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics

I am also deeply grateful to my Scottish family, Ian, Kathryn, Anna, Percy and Peach Lyall, for their hospitality, warm heartedness and ever cheerful company. My heartfelt thanks go to Julia for her love, trust and patience towards a most clumsy, absent minded and lunar laddie. Finally, I would like to thank my brother, Hugo Malgrati, and my parents, Agnes and Gilles Malgrati, for their unfailing support and for tholing their son’s (and brother’s) absence overseas.

8053_Malgrati.indd 8

06/03/23 10:55 am

Abbreviations

Acc. Accession BC Burns Chronicle BFI British Film Institute BUF British Union of Fascists CPGB Communist Party of Great Britain Dep. Deposit Dir. Direction Ed. Edition GML Glasgow Mitchell Library HC House of Commons HL House of Lords ILP Independent Labour Party L1, L2 The Letters of Robert Burns, J. DeLancey Ferguson (ed.), second edition, G. Ross Roy (ed.), 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985). LGBT Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender NLS National Library of Scotland NPS National Party of Scotland P1, P2, P3 The Poems and Songs of Robert Burns, James Kinsley (ed.), 3 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968) PEN Poets, Playwrights, Editors, Essayists, Novelists Prod. Production SHRA Scottish Home Rule Association SND Scottish National Dictionary SNL Scots National League SNP Scottish National Party SP OR Official Report of the Scottish Parliament Trans. Translation

8053_Malgrati.indd 9

06/03/23 10:55 am

8053_Malgrati.indd 10

06/03/23 10:55 am

Introduction: Scotland’s ‘Bardocracy’

I AM a BARD of no regard, Wi’ gentle folks an’ a’ that; But HOMER LIKE the glowran byke, Frae town to town I draw that. Robert Burns, Love and Liberty (1785)1 Je suis la plaie et le couteau! Je suis le soufflet et la joue! Je suis les membres et la roue, Et la victime et le bourreau! Charles Baudelaire, ‘L’Héautontimorouménos’ (1857)2

On the night of 22 January 2018, the sound of the pipes echoed loudly as the ‘sonsy face’ of Scotland’s national dish – the haggis – appeared in the reception room of 10 Downing Street. Chef Gary Maclean, holding the ‘warm-reekin’ meal above his head, walked ceremoniously towards the great table under the avid gaze of sixty guests.3 Prominent Scottish business leaders from Stagecoach, Tunnock’s Teacakes and the Scottish Chambers of Commerce sat alongside the thirteen Scottish Tory MPs, recently elected in the 2017 General Election.4 Their host, Prime Minister Theresa May, garbed in a dark green tartan, smiled politely at Maclean, who left the ‘Great Chieftain o’ the Puddin Race’ at her side.5 May kept her opening speech brief.6 Her guests’ appetite was growing, and she had to spare her efforts ahead of the World Economic Forum in Davos two days later. She began by proudly welcoming her visitors to what was the first supper ever held in No. 10 in honour of Robert Burns, Scotland’s national bard. Although many Scottish

8053_Malgrati.indd 1

06/03/23 10:55 am

2   Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics

Prime Ministers, including several admirers of Burns, from the Earl of Rosebery to Ramsay MacDonald and Alec Douglas-Home to Gordon Brown, had resided in No. 10, May explained that, according to the records of the house, none of them had ever hosted a Burns celebration during the week that marked the anniversary of the poet’s birth.7 In the context of Brexit, however, where 62% of Scots had voted to remain in the European Union (in contrast with 53% of Anglo-Welsh leavers), the time seemed ripe for the Prime Minister to use Burns, a symbol of Scottish identity, in an attempt to cement the United Kingdom. Coming to the end of her speech, May insisted that Burns’s poetic genius accounted for part of Scotland’s ‘greatly valued contribution’ to ‘our enduring Union’ – a unity which the Conservative Party was committed to preserving.8 Amidst the applause of her (mostly) unionist audience, May returned to her seat. Next to her sat Scottish literature scholar Sally Mapstone, Principal of the University of St Andrews. The Principal, when recalling her polite discussion with the British Prime Minister, estimated that Mrs May ‘didn’t seem to know much about Burns’.9 Though she showed curiosity about the Scottish ceremony, the Prime Minister could not help ‘exhibiting a very English embarrassment at all the kind of stabbing’ which occurred shortly after her speech, as David Mundell – the Scottish Secretary of State – performed Burns’s ‘Address to a Haggis’:10 His knife see Rustic-labour dight, An’ cut you up wi’ ready slight, Trenching your gushing entrails bright       Like onie ditch;11

Rather underwhelmingly for May, Mundell had to rely on a script to get through Burns’s eight stanzas. Mapstone remembers: ‘You could see the Prime Minister looking over and wondering how long this might go on for’.12 Unfortunately for Mrs May, this was but the beginning of a rather elaborate two-hundred-year-old ritual, which owes much to Freemasonry, eighteenth-century male club culture and Victorian solemnity. It is unlikely that many of the 2018 diners at 10 Downing Street were aware that the ceremony of Burns Night was first established by Rev. Hamilton Paul five years after the poet’s death in Ayrshire in

8053_Malgrati.indd 2

06/03/23 10:55 am

Introduction  3



1801.13 From light-hearted poetry recitals to long-winded evocations of the ‘departed genius’, Paul’s Burns supper was faithful to Burns’s own experience as a keen Mason and lover of witty toasting and after dinner verses.14 This subtle blend of humour and gravitas paved the way for the popularity of Burns suppers throughout the rest of the century and gave rise to an increasingly standardised version of the ritual. Within just a few decades of Paul’s first celebration, the ‘Address to a Haggis’, the ‘Toast to the Lassies’, the ‘Loyal Toast’ to the Queen, the ‘Immortal Memory’ speech and the customary rendition of ‘Auld Lang Syne’ at the end of the night had become prerequisites of any grand-style celebration of the poet. Theresa May’s Burns supper conformed to this traditional order of ceremony. Kirstene Hair, Conservative MP for Angus, delivered the ‘Toast to the Lassies’, whilst a member of staff from No. 10 pronounced the ‘Immortal Memory’.15 Finally, after the last toast was sipped, and following a short pause, all the guests stood up. At the sound of the fiddle, they crossed their arms over their chests, held hands, and burst into the world-famous chorus: For auld lang syne, my jo, For auld lang syne, We’ll tak a cup o’ kindness yet For auld lang syne.16

The first Burns supper in the history of 10 Downing Street raises a crucial set of questions. Why did the British Prime Minister, though devoid of any particular interest in the Scottish poet, feel compelled to host what she called a ‘Burns dinner’ more than two hundred years after his death and only two days before the World Economic Forum in Davos? More generally, why does Burns’s memory count for so much that it could ever become a matter of state? A lot has already been written in recent years about Burns’s global reputation and the role of the Scottish diaspora in spreading his works overseas.17 As stressed by Murray Pittock, the ‘emergence of a Global Burns’ has been one of the most notable shifts in Burns studies since the beginning of the twenty first century.18 Indeed, to a large extent, the development of Burns’s afterlife has coincided with the transnational history of the British Empire and the Anglosphere. Clark McGinn, for instance, records more than 500 international

8053_Malgrati.indd 3

06/03/23 10:55 am

4   Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics

Burns suppers held in Sydney, Calcutta, Johannesburg, Washington and Nova Scotia between 1801 and 1851.19 Likewise, Cairns Craig stresses the role of Burns’s legacy in asserting the specifically Scottish characteristics of the Empire.20 This seemed most obvious, for instance, during the celebration of Burns’s Centenary, on 25 January 1859, when more than 800 Burns suppers took place simultaneously across the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. This event inaugurated the emergence, in Craig’s words, of a ‘Burnsian Empire’, united by a shared Scottish ritual – the Burns Supper.21 Certainly, this international factor still contributes to the poet’s (geo)political importance today. As Chapter 6 of this book will reveal, for instance, uses of Burns in Soviet Russia led Scottish culture to play an unexpected part during the Cold War. Similarly, in 2018, the ‘Immortal Memory’ speech delivered at May’s Burns supper stressed Burns’s role in the Special Relationship between the United Kingdom and the United States. 22 From American Burns statues and Burns clubs to Tartan Day and contemporary folk culture, No. 10 prided itself on the poet’s fame in the country of Abraham Lincoln and Donald Trump.23 Burns’s global reputation notwithstanding, however, the main purpose of Theresa May’s supper remained explicitly national. As expressed in her welcome address, the Prime Minister aimed to enlist Burns as a symbol of the British Union, stressing the importance of his legacy chiefly in a domestic, Anglo-Scottish context. Indeed, May’s concern for ‘our enduring Union’ highlights the poet’s role as a marker of Scotland’s political identity – a role which Burns’s memory has played for more than two hundred years, and which is increasingly palpable in the wake of the 2014 and 2016 referenda on Scottish independence and the UK’s membership of the European Union respectively. To paraphrase Hans-Georg Gadamer – one of the founders of Reception Theory – Burns Night stages ‘the conversation that Scotland is’; it marks a pause in time, during which the nation reaches out to its past and receives the texts of a dead poet.24 This ‘calendrically observed repetition’, in the words of anthropologist Paul Connerton, becomes an occasion of a ‘verbal and gestural re-enactment’ – a performance of cultural memory and national identity whereby Scotland’s ‘imagined’ community is, for a moment at least, embodied in both the word of Burns and the flesh of his haggis supper.25 Between repetition and reception, however, the performance of the

8053_Malgrati.indd 4

06/03/23 10:55 am



Introduction  5

ritual cannot escape its own temporality, which is that of the present. ‘The conversation’ that occurs, as a result, is likely to be marked by current affairs and split between different views of the nation’s past, present and purpose. In other words, whilst a keystone of Scottish identity, Burns Night is not a festival of national unity. Instead, it becomes an occasion for the nation, as a political entity, to ponder different definitions of itself through contradictory readings of its legendary, yet complicated, poet. In the light of this, and considering the singular situation of Scotland, which lacked a devolved Parliament until 1999, it might not be an exaggeration to describe the country around the time of Burns Night as a unique instance of a ‘Bardocracy’ – a stateless nation which has found both a representative and an ambassador in the shade of its national bard. To co-opt Burns, consequently, means laying claim to the heart of Scotland; it is an attempt to transform a particular viewpoint into the general identity of the nation. This is what the British Prime Minister tried to do in January 2018, stressing Scotland’s place as a constitutive part of the United Kingdom. Yet, May’s Burns supper was by no means an exception; in fact, most Scottish political movements, from right to left, have fought to appropriate Burns since the time of his death. Whilst the outcome of this struggle remains uncertain, the present study is an attempt to shed light on its past skirmishes, especially during the last century – a journey which will transport us to the crossroads of cultural memory, national identity, political history and literary reception studies. Interestingly, Burns himself was obsessed with the national function of the ‘bard’ – a poetic ambition seen elsewhere in late eighteenth-century Scotland, when the Gaelic myth of Ossian, the ‘Homer of the North’, was at its height.26 Following the success of Burns’s 1786 Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, the poet whom Henry MacKenzie praised as a ‘Heaven-taught ploughman’ began to develop a high regard for what he called his own ‘Bardship’.27 Although he could occasionally describe himself as a risible, demotic ‘bardie’, Burns insisted, in a 1787 letter to Mrs Dunlop, that ‘the appellation of a Scotch Bard is by far my highest pride’ and that ‘to continue to deserve it is my most exalted ambition’.28 With this in mind, during the following years, Burns decided to expand his bardic career by collecting and rewriting hundreds of Scottish folksongs for James Johnson’s Scots Musical Museum and George Thomson’s Select Scottish Airs.29 This

8053_Malgrati.indd 5

06/03/23 10:55 am

6   Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics

considerable task, which occupied most of Burns’s creative energy for the last seven years of his life, led him to conceive his most famous lyrics, from ‘A Red, Red Rose’ to ‘Scots wha hae’ and ‘Auld Lang Syne’. By the time of his death in 1796 his ‘Museum’, whilst incomplete, had granted his bardic wish – that of turning his oeuvre into a repository of national memory. According to Katie Trumpener, Burns’s collecting frenzy offers a typical instance of the kind of ‘Bardic Nationalism’ which was developing across the British Isles at the time.30 As she explains, folksong compilations, vernacular poetry and other ‘antiquarian’ activities, as practised by James Macpherson (1736–96) in Scotland, Edward Jones (1752–1824) in Wales and Charles O’ Connor (1710– 91) in Ireland, reacted to ‘Enlightenment dismissals of Gaelic oral tradition’ and ‘reconceive[d] national history and literary history under the sign of the bard’.31 In other words, by collecting lore and claiming the legacy of ancient Gaelic poets, eighteenth-century collectors, antiquarians and writers aspired to act as ‘the mouthpiece for a whole society’, embodying local resistance against ‘improvement’ and increasing anglicisation.32 Further still, their bardic performances, supported by a thriving print industry, reached across the country and transformed local traditions into a new national culture, shaping the ‘imagined community’ of a land devoid of independent statehood. 33 Aspects of Trumpener’s description certainly apply to Burns – the Ayrshire ‘bardie’, first published in Kilmarnock in 1786, reprinted in the Scottish capital in 1787, and on one occasion at least, crowned ‘Caledonia’s Bard’ by Edinburgh Masons in the same year.34 His poems came at the right time. On the one hand, the lustre of James Macpherson’s Ossian, though still bright, had begun to fade following accusations of forgery.35 On the other, Robert Fergusson, Scotland’s gifted vernacular poet, had died prematurely, aged 24, in 1774.36 Burns, by contrast, died in his prime and provided Scotland with powerful songs and poems, the authenticity of which could not be doubted since his ‘bardship’ did not depend on ancient texts. From 1786, the beginning of Burns’s poetic career, to his death in 1796, Scotland had a living bard-like representative – one whose poetic qualities were only matched by his artful self-presentation as an uneducated ploughman, in direct touch with the soul of his land and people.

8053_Malgrati.indd 6

06/03/23 10:55 am



Introduction  7

Yet, many contradictions sprang from reviving that Gaelic-derived tradition of the bard in the fast-developing and fast-anglicising Scotland of the eighteenth century. Whilst Burns longed for the northern aura of ancient poets and defended his nation’s language and identity, his poetic success, eighty years after the Act of Union of 1707, was also a product of the southward-looking Scottish Enlightenment. Burns spoke and wrote in Scots; yet he entertained his Edinburgh hosts and his many correspondents in the most eloquent English. He admired Ossian and protested that his heart was in the Highlands; however, he read classical French – not Gaelic – and wrote satires inspired by Alexander Pope. He relished primitivism; nevertheless, he enjoyed the company of the geologist James Hutton and Patrick Miller, the inventor of double-hulled boats. He sang the deeds of the seventeenth-century Covenanted martyrs; but he attacked obscurantism and railed against the orthodox, ‘Auld Licht’, wing of the Kirk.37 Burns’s ‘protean’ ambiguities, as described by Kenneth Simpson, allowed him to cultivate a diverse readership, but it also brought him enemies.38 Admittedly, whilst aspiring to merge the nation’s voice with his poetic verse, the bard could also endorse more divisive, partisan postures. For instance, the poet’s violently anti-clerical satires, ‘Holy Willie’s Prayer’ and ‘The Kirk’s Alarm’, which circulated privately during the 1780s–90s, hurt the faith of many Scots. Such repeated attacks against Scottish puritans, despite a more sympathetic treatment of Calvinist patriarchy in ‘The Cotter’s Saturday Night’, made him a controversial figure.39 To promote his works, in this religious context, was not merely a sign of sentimental Scottish pride, but also a marker of religious liberalism, hostile to the strict creed of Scotland’s Kirk.40 Indeed, Burns’s anti-puritanical stance was appealing particularly for the ‘moderate’ part of Scotland’s ruling class aiming to sway eighteenth-century church politics, as noted by Gerard Carruthers.41 This opposition between the ‘Moderate’ and ‘Popular’ (or ‘New Licht’ and ‘Auld Licht’) church parties originated from the 1711 Patronage Act, which had sapped the democratic roots of Scottish Presbyterianism by allowing local notables, or ‘patrons’, to appoint ministers to vacant parishes.42 Against the orthodox, ‘Popular’ party, which opposed hierarchy in church affairs, Scottish ‘Moderates’, combining a more liberal approach to theology with social elitism, had rallied in support of patronage. In other words, by

8053_Malgrati.indd 7

06/03/23 10:55 am

8   Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics

antagonising hard-line Calvinists, Burns appealed to a portion of the Scottish elite, which, from landed nobles to enlightened Freemasons, had gained both spiritual and social advantages through patronage.43 Unsurprisingly, these groups would become the key entrepreneurs of Burns’s memory in the decades that followed the poet’s death, by contrast with orthodox protestants who reviled him up until the late nineteenth century.44 However, whilst Burns’s anti-puritanical stance aligned with the spiritual agenda of Scottish notables, his convoluted politics proved a more complicated legacy for them – or anyone – to handle. The beliefs of the poet, who remained disenfranchised for his entire life and who once wrote that ‘politics is dangerous ground for me to tread on’, remain hard to pinpoint.45 Shaped by various influences, ranging from reactionary Jacobitism to radical Whiggism, and from the ‘Glorious’ to the American and French Revolutions, Burns’s politics lend themselves to all sorts of critical interpretations. For a time, Burns scholars, including David Daiches and Thomas Crawford, tried to divide the poet’s works between an early Tory phase, running throughout the 1780s, and a Jacobin Whig moment in the wake of the French Revolution.46 Admittedly, during the years 1786–7 the conservative creed of a poet who, in ‘The Author’s Earnest Cry and Prayer’, attacked the Whig leader Fox with ‘yon ill-tongu’d tinkler, Charlie Fox’, and who, in ‘A Dream’, praised the Tory ‘Willie Pitt’, whilst lamenting the fate of ‘the injured Stewart line’, appeared unambiguous.47 Such conservative crypto-Catholic feelings also seem to echo Burns’s simultaneous critique of Scottish puritans. Nevertheless, a dissenting protestant view of Burns’s early works remains possible. This approach is developed by Liam McIlvanney in his 2002 book, Burns the Radical, where he emphasises the Covenanting background of the poet’s native Ayrshire along with the ‘radical schooling’ he received under the Whiggish tutoring of John Murdoch.48 For instance, when considering Burns’s early social satire, ‘The Twa Dogs’, which condemns the corrupt, self-indulgent lifestyle of Britain’s upper-class, McIlvanney highlights the poem’s ‘affinities with Presbyterian moralising and the hellfire sermon’.49 Likewise, in ‘The Author’s Earnest Cry and Prayer’, McIlvanney reads not so much a critique of Fox than a broader indictment of Westminster, rooted in the Scottish tradition of democratic dissent.50 Addressing Scottish Parliamentarians in the House of Commons, Burns writes:

8053_Malgrati.indd 8

06/03/23 10:55 am

Introduction  9

Arouse my boys! exert your mettle, To get auld Scotland back her kettle! Or faith! I’ll wad my new pleugh-pettle,        Ye’ll see’t or lang, She’ll teach you, wi’ a reekan whittle,       Anither sang. . . . An’ L—d! If ance they pit her till’t, Her tartan petticoat she’ll kilt An’ durk an’ pistol at her belt,        She’ll tak the streets, An’ rin her whittle to the hilt,        I’ th’ first she meets.51

According to McIlvanney, Burns’s threat of insurrection in this passage, whilst conjuring tartan, Jacobite images, is a deeper reminder of the poet’s radical ‘horizon [which] allowed him to envisage a resort to arms when the covenant between people and government has broken down’.52 In other words, and despite the works of other critics highlighting Burns’s Jacobite, anti-Calvinistic sentiments, McIlvanney argues that the poet’s ‘Real Whig’ education allows for a subtler understanding of both his early satires and his later revolutionary verse. By contrast with such diverging approaches to Burns’s 1780s poems, the radical interpretation of his 1790s works is more widely accepted in current criticism. Certainly, this was not always true, and the rest of this book will reveal that the rise of a leftward understanding of Burns, in both Scottish politics and criticism, is a rather recent development. Yet today, most Burns scholars would agree, in the words of Carruthers, on stressing the poet’s ‘emotional involvement on the side of liberal causes during the 1790s’.53 As put by Trumpener, the years of the French Revolution marked a ‘brief political conjuncture between bardic and revolutionary brands of nationalism’.54 This statement can be applied to the Francophone Burns, who, after the storming of the Bastille, began to flirt with French Republican ideas. In 1792, he was accused of singing publicly the French sans-culotte anthem, ‘Ça ira’, in Dumfries Theatre, which led his superiors at the Board of Excise to open an investigation into his behaviour.55 Burns protested his innocence, acknowledging he

8053_Malgrati.indd 9

06/03/23 10:55 am

10   Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics

had once been an ‘enthusiastic votary’ of France before ‘alter[ing his] sentiment’ in agreement with the British Constitution, which he held ‘to be the most glorious Constitution on earth’.56 Nevertheless, at the same time, Burns wrote secret lines in defence of Paris. In ‘When Princes and Prelates and het-headed zealots’ (December 1792), he mocked the European monarchs united against ‘Republican billies’, including ‘Auld Kate’ of Russia, Frederic of Prussia and the ‘Bauld’ Duke of Brunswick.57 Similarly, Burns’s ‘Address to General Dumouriez’ is a scathing attack against the French officer who defected to the Austrians ‘despots’ in March 1793. This proves the poet remained a fervent advocate of France even after its declaration of war with Britain a few weeks earlier. Further still, in January 1795, Burns told his friend Mrs Dunlop that he approved the execution of the ‘perjured Blockhead’ Louis XVI and the ‘unprincipled Prostitute’ Marie-Antoinette.58 ‘Entre nous (tran. between us), you know my Politics’ Burns concluded, in an elusive, French-sounding manner. Unfortunately for him, such bon mot would estrange his loyal friend and mother-in-law of two royalist émigrés. The French Revolution allowed Burns to develop a more dynamic, enthusiastic view of Scottish history. As already noted by McIlvanney, Burns’s earlier political poems could occasionally build on Scotland’s insurgent tradition, from the 1638 National Covenant to the 1745 Jacobite Rising, to envisage future upheavals. This tendency became stronger after Burns adopted France’s Jacobin vocabulary. In 1794, he reassessed Scotland’s Covenanted past: The Solemn League and Covenant Now brings a smile, now brings a tear. But sacred Freedom, too, was theirs; If thou’rt a slave, indulge thy sneer.59

In contrast with Burns’s earlier satires of Scotland’s old faith, it seems that French events forced him to reconsider the legacy of Scottish Calvinism, which could provide impetus for liberal struggles in the present. More fervently still, in ‘Robert Bruce’s March to Bannockburn’ (a song better known as ‘Scots wha hae’), written at the height of the French Revolution in August 1793, Burns famously merged the memory of Robert Bruce and William Wallace, the medieval Scottish

8053_Malgrati.indd 10

06/03/23 10:55 am

Introduction  11



patriots, with Jacobite rhetoric against the ‘usurpers’ and the Jacobin motto ‘Liberty or Death’:60 Scots, wha hae wi’ WALLACE bled, Scots wham BRUCE has aften led, Welcome to your gory bed, – Or to victorie. – . . . Lay the proud Usurpers low! Tyrants fall in every foe! LIBERTY’s in every blow! Let us Do – or DIE!!!61

Two years later, in 1795, this combination of Scottish and French radical themes defined, once again, Burns’s egalitarian anthem, ‘Is There for Honest Poverty’ (‘A Man’s a Man’), whose messianic notes, For a’ that, and a’ that, It’s coming yet for a’ that, That Man to Man, the warld o’er, Shall brothers be for a’ that. –62

reminded Marilyn Butler of the Jacobin song ‘Ça ira!’ (trans. ‘it’s coming’ or ‘it’ll be fine’).63 For all this, however, the dominant, radical interpretation of Burns’s 1790s politics still faces a number of issues. Doubts remain regarding the extent of the bard’s revolutionary zeal. Whilst Burns’s letters voiced his adherence to the British Constitution, at length, and in plain prose, there is no similar text to substantiate the Jacobin sentiments of his well-known songs. Recurrent attempts to extend the Burns canon with more developed proto-socialist pieces have been made. But none of these poems, including ‘The Tree of Liberty’ or ‘Why Should We Idly Waste Our Prime’, can be attributed without reservations.64 This lack of evidence is further complicated by Burns’s volatile commitments in local politics throughout the 1790s. As Colin Kidd notices, Burns’s radical verse jarred with his endorsement of rather conservative candidates at the Dumfries Burgh elections of 1790 and 1795 – a sign that the poet flourished in the grey area of

8053_Malgrati.indd 11

06/03/23 10:55 am

12   Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics

‘an age when clear ideological demarcation between political parties was in abeyance’.65 Even more confusing from a radical perspective, was Burns’s enlistment at the end of his life into the Royal Dumfries Volunteers, a militia group preparing for the defence of the country against the threat of a French invasion. In 1795, the same year Burns wrote ‘A Man’s a Man’, he seemed to recant his republican sympathies with a disconcertingly loyalist tribute to his new regiment: ‘Does Haughty Gaul Invasion Threat’. This song summons Britons to remain ‘united’ and cries: The wretch that wad a Tyrant own, And the wretch, his true-born brother, Who would set the Mob aboon the Throne, May they be damn’d together! Who will not sing, GOD SAVE THE KING, Shall hang as high’s the steeple; But while we sing, GOD SAVE THE KING, We’ll ne’er forget THE PEOPLE!

Burns’s ambiguous piece – unionist, royalist, yet populist – bewildered contemporary radicals and remains, to this day, a crux of the debate on the poet’s politics.66 Unfortunately, Burns’s rapid decline and death following his enlistment mean we lack the kind of first-hand evidence to gauge the sincerity of his later writings.67 Combined with Burns’s earlier, apparently Tory, poems along with his satirical sneers against the ‘Popular’ party of the Kirk, ‘Does Haughty Gaul Invasion Threat’ has fed conservative readings of Burns since the time of his death. Such views of Burns are also reinforced by the bulk his apolitical songs. By contrast with ‘Scots wha hae’ and ‘A Man’s a Man’, which present an insurgent vision of Scottish history, the plangent lyrics of ‘Ye Banks and Braes’, the loving insouciance of ‘Corn Rigs’, the private passion of ‘Ae Fond Kiss’, the nostalgia of ‘Auld Lang Syne’ and the defused Jacobitism of ‘Highland Laddie’ all provide inoffensive, sentimental depictions of Scotland’s feudal past. With this in mind, Burns has often been seen – especially during the nineteenth century – as the precursor of Sir Walter Scott, the Tory author of Waverley; or, ’Tis Sixty Years Since (1814), whose ‘entire oeuvre’, according to Ann Rigney, contributed to ‘mak[ing] the past irrelevant as an active force in the present’ of capitalist and

8053_Malgrati.indd 12

06/03/23 10:55 am

Introduction  13



unionist Scotland.68 At a time when the violent episodes of Scotland’s independent history had become an embarrassment even for Scottish antiquarians, the more sentimental and harmless aspects of Burns’s works made him a suitable, and relatively safe, candidate for the status of ‘national bard’.69 Indeed, far from weakening Burns’s myth, his ambiguities reinforced it. His tergiversations reflected the state of Scotland in the post-Union era. ‘The life of Burns’, claims Pierre Boudrot, reads as a metaphor of his nation’s fate and possible salvation . . . Burns enabled Scotland to substitute the humiliating loss of its independence with the possibility of a fruitful conciliation between its aspirations and allegiances. His figure conflated the survival of Scottish identity with British assimilation.70

In similar vein, Robert Crawford notes that the range of Burns’s intricate language, caught between Scots and English, proved a strength in his eighteenth-century context. Following the political Union of 1707, Crawford explains that the bard’s poetry ‘operated a British union of Scottish and English diction’, turning Burns, ‘linguistically’, into ‘the most brilliantly distinguished eighteenth-century example of a British poet’.71 Just like Burns’s politics could appeal to both Tories and radicals, his vernacular virtuosity in ‘Tam o’ Shanter’ and, for instance, his Augustan ‘Prologue, spoken by Mr. Woods at Edinburgh’ could unite Scots and English readers. Yet Crawford also warns that Burns’s more radical and nationalist texts allowed for a ‘potentially explosive’ kind of identity – able to either construct or deconstruct Scotland’s Britishness.72 Such productive ambiguities, embodied in the many episodes, places and monuments associated with the poet’s life, allowed Burns and his work to become one of the most obsessive ‘lieux de mémoire’ (‘sites of memory’) in modern Scotland.73 Certainly, Burns stands as a landmark in the Scottish pantheon, alongside the legends of William Wallace, Robert the Bruce, Mary Queen of Scots, John Knox and Bonnie Prince Charlie.74 Yet, unlike these figures, remembered for their roles in Scotland’s pre-Union past, Burns comes to mind for his versatile verses, which influenced the modern reception of that history whilst encompassing, all at once, the range of the nation’s tongues (Gaelic excepted), the shifting modes of its memory, and the

8053_Malgrati.indd 13

06/03/23 10:55 am

14   Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics

space of its political contradictions. In other words, Burns’s ambivalent approach to Scottish history, languages and politics during his lifetime framed the cultural politics of his afterlife. This became evident a few decades following the poet’s death, when Burns’s complicated legacy was turned into a symbol of Scotland’s equally ambivalent ‘unionist-nationalist’ ideology.75 From ‘Scots wha hae’ to ‘Does Haughty Gaul’, Burns’s works helped fasten Scottish pride to Union and Empire. More specifically, ‘unionistnationalism’, as defined by Graeme Morton, became the dominant worldview of Scottish nineteenth-century elites, who, from noblemen and parish ministers to businessmen, town councillors, journal owners and politicians, benefited from the restricted suffrage and laissez-faire economics of Britain’s union state. In the words of James Coleman: ‘The flexible legislative framework of central government allowed sufficient space for the everyday business of governing society by the “enfranchised bourgeois” to take place’.76 Part of this ‘business’ included a projection of a national memory in which Burns’s works emerged as a fitting resource to justify upper-middle class control over Scotland’s infrastructures.77 Building on the poet’s contradictions, and oblivious of the more radical aspects of his legacy, Scottish elites reshaped the bard into their own image: proudly Scottish, adroitly unionist, meritocratic, mildly reformist, imperialist, masculinist and sentimental.78 Such uses of Burns might explain why the poet’s legacy never fuelled the kind of romantic pro-independence movement which was common across the rest of nineteenth-century Europe. Unlike the poems of Adam Mickiewicz (1798–1855) in Poland, Taras Shevchenko (1814–61) in Ukraine and Sandor Petöfi (1823–49) in Hungary, which all spearheaded radical nationalism in their respective countries, Burns’s myth served the advancement of Scottish elites within the status quo of the Union.79 This, according to Tom Nairn, marked the real specificity of Burns’s national legacy during the Romantic era.80 His ‘bardship’, often compared with that of Shakespeare, did not spark momentum for lyrical independence but, instead, encouraged a serene kind of ‘subnationalism’.81 This point was refined by Christopher Whatley in a recent study about Burns’s political legacy in nineteenth-century Scotland.82 Immortal Memory: Burns and the Scottish People can be read in tandem with the present volume. In his book, Whatley studies the

8053_Malgrati.indd 14

06/03/23 10:55 am



Introduction  15

combined efforts of Romantic Tories and the Victorian bourgeois in drawing a unionist, counter-revolutionary portrait of Burns ‘which owed much to Walter Scott’.83 As researched by Whatley, ‘the initial impetus to commemorate and celebrate Burns came from Scottish aristocrats and others of relatively high social standing – bankers, merchants, lawyers, and other professionals, whether in Scotland, England, or parts of Britain’s overseas Empire’.84 This is evident, for instance, when considering the erection of the first Burns monuments in the 1810s, in Dumfries, Ayr and Edinburgh, all sponsored by landed nobles, including for instance, HRH the Duke of Sussex, the Earl of Selkirk, the 7th Marquess of Queensberry and Alexander Boswell, Lord Auchinleck: the son of diarist James Boswell and a Tory friend of Walter Scott as well as the creator of a scheme to fund a memorial at Burns’s birthplace.85 Alongside aristocrats, Scottish bourgeois were also key in initiating early Burns Clubs in Greenock, Ayr, Paisley and Edinburgh.86 For the most part Freemasons, these gentlemen, who included Rev. Hamilton Paul – the inventor of the first Burns Supper – would have enjoyed Burns particularly for his free-spirited, anti-Popular verse. Overall, Whatley interprets elite’s uses of Burns in the Romantic era as a ‘self-preserving’ attempt to control popular narratives about the poet whilst displaying ‘unionist credentials’.87 Certainly, until the 1850s, almost all official celebrations of Burns shaped him in a socially conservative British way. For instance, in 1818 the Ayr and Edinburgh Burns Clubs both held annual meetings in Edinburgh’s Nelson’s monument as a tribute to Burns, the British volunteer.88 Twenty years later, the Burns monument inaugurated on Edinburgh’s Calton Hill further commemorated Scottish soldiers who had died fighting Napoleon.89 Such British nationalisation of Burns was also backed by the dominant kind of reactionary criticism at the time. Drawing on James Currie’s biography of the poet, which ‘thought prudent to avoid all political allusions in the life’, literary critics from Blackwood’s Magazine and scholars from Scottish Universities, including Professor John Wilson in Edinburgh, tried to disprove – or disqualify – Burns’s radical leanings.90 Finally, according to Whatley, ‘the high-water mark for Scotland’s Tories’ association with Burns was reached in 1844 at the giant Burns Ayr Festival.91 This considerable event, sponsored by the Conservative Earl of Eglinton and designed by the archTory Sir Archibald Alison, featured a 2,000-strong procession of local

8053_Malgrati.indd 15

06/03/23 10:55 am

16   Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics

peasants, Borders shepherds, Highlanders and soldiers, who, under the sign of the Union Jack, paid homage to the author of the pious ‘Cotter’s Saturday Night’.92 Certainly this paternalist exercise, inspired by Walter Scott’s vision of history, aimed to lock Burns’s memory into the safe of Scotland’s pre-industrial past. However, the tune of ‘A Man’s a Man’ which accompanied the march of Scottish soldiers during the festival hinted that all participants did not subscribe to such Tory views.93 A few days later, sharper opposition was voiced in the Chartist newspaper, The Northern Star, where radicals tackled the festival organisers as the kind of aristocrats who ‘feasted upon the poet’s grave . . . having first starved him into it’.94 Certainly, 1840s Chartists were building on the more subterranean, revolutionary reading of Burns which had developed across Britain from the 1790s. From Scotland to Ulster and Northern England, a flurry of working-class Burnsians, unwelcome at fancier Burns Suppers, had adopted the role of local bards in their communities.95 Inspired by Burns’s plebeian verse, they produced a vast amount of literature voicing their disenfranchised worldview – the wealth and variety of which has recently attracted the attention of Victorian scholars.96 Most significant amongst these were the weaver poets of Scotland’s West Coast, including Paisley’s Robert Tannahill (1774–1810), Alexander Rodger (1784–1846), who penned the Burns-inspired piece, ‘The Twa Weavers’ (1819), and Robert Nicoll (1814–37), author of Poems Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, Illustrative of the Feelings of the Intelligent and Religious among the Working-Classes of Scotland (1836).97 In 1820, the year of the Radical rising, dissident Burnsians from Kilbarchan went as far as to create a ‘New Burns Club’ in reaction to the upper-class Paisley Burns Anniversary Society. Opened to humbler folks and serving only bread, cheese and water, this club appeared as an original counter-cultural attempt by local workers to challenge the dominant narrative of upper-class Burnsians.98 Yet despite such efforts, radicals failed to push their views into Scotland’s Victorian mainstream. In January 1859, Burns’s centenary marked a climax in his nineteenth-century afterlife, with more than 1,200 Burns Suppers held across Britain’s Empire and the United States.99 As noted by Whatley, social tensions surfaced during the commemorations, especially in Edinburgh, Glasgow and Dumfries where local notables attended separate Burns Suppers, away from the

8053_Malgrati.indd 16

06/03/23 10:55 am



Introduction  17

more inclusive, popular kinds of banquets.100 Unsurprisingly, these various events yielded different styles of commemoration. In Edinburgh’s Dunedin Hall, for instance, the ‘Working Man’s Festival’ featured a Burns-inspired song, ‘Ye Sair Wrought Sons o’ Daily Toil’ followed by a vibrant rendition of ‘A Man’s a Man’.101 By contrast, the fancier dinner chaired by Lord Ardmillan in the capital’s Music Hall praised the ‘Cotter’s Saturday Night’ and finished with a harmless rendition of ‘Auld Lang Syne’.102 Such nuances, however, never altered the broader imperialist framing of the centenary. At most events, and throughout the press, emphasis was put not on social divisions, but rather on the unity of Britain’s Empire and of the Anglosphere. Ann Rigney has, for instance, studied how the exchange of telegrams between Burnsians from Edinburgh to London and from Montreal to New Orleans, shaped perceptions of the event ‘as a sort of worldwide happening that involved people across the globe and their imagining “one world” of globalized simultaneity made possible by Burns and reinforced by modern technologies’.103 Burns’s centenary, Rigney contends, allowed for a rare experience of imperial immediacy, whereby the ‘embodied communities’ of Burns diners, across social classes, and across the Empire, felt connected with each other as part of a broader ‘imagined’ network.104 In other countries, celebrations of a disenfranchised poet where less than 20% of men could vote might have stirred civil unrest. But in Scotland, despite twenty years of Chartist activities, it seemed imperial pride could harmonise even the most strident dissonances in Burns’s political canon. Certainly, in the decades that followed 1859, Burns’s legacy remained firmly under enfranchised control. Whatley highlights the rise of a ‘liberal bourgeois hegemony’, which, throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, ‘kept the lid on the Burns genie’ in a manner not ‘unfamiliar to the Tories’ Burns’.105 Unlike Romantic reactionaries, however, Liberal Burnsians felt less nostalgic for the social order of the pre-industrial era and, rather, they insisted on their own economic, imperial, political and patriarchal empowerment. Their memorialisation of the poet, through statues and Burns clubs, reflected their ‘infrastructural’ power over Scottish cultural politics. In typical Victorian fashion, they did not rely on the British state but, instead, resorted to public subscriptions and private philanthropy to finance their commemorations of the poet.106 This was

8053_Malgrati.indd 17

06/03/23 10:55 am

18   Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics

exemplified in 1884 at the inauguration of London’s Burns statue (a replica of Dundee’s statue), funded by a wealthy Glaswegian, and unveiled in the Victoria Embankment Gardens by the liberal Earl of Rosebery to the sound of the National Anthem.107 In the audience stood Colin Rae Brown (1821–97), a man whose life summarises the history of the Burns movement in the nineteenth century.108 Rae Brown, a press magnate from Glasgow, delegate at the 1844 Tory Burns festival and founder of the Burns Club of London in 1880, was instrumental in creating the Burns Federation in 1885: an umbrella association, with Masonic overtones, regrouping Burns clubs across Scotland, America and the Empire.109 With eighty three affiliated clubs in 1892, the Federation soon became the main shareholder in Burns’s memory and one of the most powerful cultural organisations in Scotland (despite having its leading club in London).110 The middle-class politics of the Federation were unambiguous. As a liberal and a Freemason, Rae Brown enjoyed Burns’s calls for universal brotherhood and chose ‘A Man’s a Man’ as the motto of the Federation.111 However, as Whatley explains, the Masonic conception of brotherhood was not necessarily democratic, and, instead, often referred to the exclusive bond between fellow ‘brothers’.112 This definition certainly applied to many Burnsian ‘brothers’ of the 1880s Burns Federation whose organisation excluded women and avoided plebeians: The lout who’d shirk his daily work, Yet claim his wage and a’ that, Or beg when he might earn his bread, Is not a man for a’ that.113

This Burns pastiche, read by Rae Brown’s friend Charles Mackay at the inauguration of the London Burns Club in 1880, illustrates the antisocial creed of many bourgeois Burnsians – a stance firmly maintained by the three Tory activists who successively presided over the Federation after its creation: Peter Sturrock (President from 1885 to 1899), David McKay (1899–1907), and Duncan McNaught (1910–23).114 Indeed, despite real differences between the reactionary Tories and the meritocratic Liberals, Scotland’s Burnsian establishment seemed to agree on broad, unionist, imperial and counter-revolutionary values throughout the Victorian and Edwardian eras. This even applied

8053_Malgrati.indd 18

06/03/23 10:55 am

Introduction  19



to the many liberal-leaning Scottish home rulers who began to organise at the fin-de-siècle. As described by Colin Kidd, the Scottish Home Rule Association (SHRA), formed in 1886, valued decentralisation ‘less as an end in itself but as a means to preserve the cohesion of the Empire’.115 Such imperial outlooks were strengthened by the overseas background of many key members of the Home Rule movement. Amongst them, for instance, was Theodore Napier: the Treasurer of the Scottish National Association of Victoria, Australia.116 He was also a keen reader of Burns. In 1895, his ‘Appeal to Scots from a Victorian’ in the Banffshire Advertiser called ‘fellow-countrymen’ to fight for a Scottish Parliament. Napier backed his argument with a quote of Burns’s scathing dirge, ‘Parcel of Rogues in a Nation’, rueing ‘the extraordinary one-sided Treaty of Union’ of 1707: The English steel we could disdain, Secure in valor’s station; But English gold has been our bane, Such a parcel of rogues in a nation! 117

Such a nationalist cry, however, did not mean that Napier advocated Scottish independence. Three years earlier, in An Appeal to Scotsmen in Australia, he had argued firmly against those who thought his politics ‘implied separation from the united body’ of the British Empire.118 Instead, like most nineteenth-century home rulers, Napier presented his position as a more authentic kind of unionism, aiming for a partnership of equals against the hypocritical, ‘pseudo-unionists’ who conflated English supremacy with the British project.119 In other words, from romantic Tories to hot-headed patriots, it seemed Burns’s nineteenth-century legacy could pave no other way than that of Union and Empire. More than a hundred years later, in 2018, Theresa May’s Burns supper seemed rooted in this unionist-nationalist tradition inherited from the Victorian era. A celebration of Scotland’s place in postBrexit Britain, the Prime Minister’s event also emphasised Burns’s role in shaping the once imperial Scottish diaspora. Furthermore, May’s supper at No. 10 conjured the social exclusivity of many nineteenth-century Burnsians. Admittedly, twenty-first-century Tories had little in common with their feudal reactionary forbears. They were now reconciled with universal suffrage as well as keen promoters

8053_Malgrati.indd 19

06/03/23 10:55 am

20   Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics

of free-market economy and bourgeois meritocracy. Yet the Prime Minister’s well-to-do guests, including four aristocrats, ten MPs, and ten CEOs could not help but summon the memory of Victorian elites who used Burns’s cultural authority as a mirror of their own social dominion.120 Unfortunately for May, however, the mainstream of Scottish political culture in 2018 had changed beyond recognition since the nineteenth century. After one hundred years that saw two World Wars, the end of Empire, fifty years of Scottish Labour rule and the rise of Scottish nationalism, the Prime Minister’s decision to hold an openly unionist Burns supper, with pomp and solemnity, in her London house proved highly controversial. Back in Scotland, news of the event prompted mostly negative reactions. The National, a pro-independence daily, ran a piece entitled: ‘The UK’s terrible Burns Supper would make the Bard turn in his grave’.121 Likewise, Bella Caledonia, a popular nationalist blog, mocked May’s supper and asked, sarcastically, whether her conservative guests would have heartily sung ‘Scots wha hae’ and ‘A Man’s a Man’.122 Even the pro-union Daily Record derided No. 10 for misspelling the names of five Scottish guests; a blunder, which, according to the newspaper, hinted that ‘Tories were out of touch with Scotland and its culture’.123 This critical line was further echoed on social media where countless reactions assimilated May’s guests to the ‘Parcel of Rogues’ described by Burns in 1790.124 The hostile reception of May’s 2018 supper illustrates a profound shift in Scottish patriotism and, more broadly, in Scottish cultural politics since the nineteenth century. Unionist-nationalist and liberal-conservative celebrations of Burns which achieved consensus amongst Victorians, now appear incongruous to a significant proportion of Scots who, instead, embrace a more markedly separatist, and often more socially democratic, standpoint on the bard. In the 1890s, Scottish home rulers could quote ‘Parcel of Rogues’ and still boast their credentials as unionists. In 2018, however, the crowd of Scottish ‘cybernats’ identified with Burns’s lyrics in ways which seemed irreconcilable with the British project. Such a backlash against May’s attempt to revive Burns’s unionist lustre highlights the gap that separates her from the ‘banal’, organic demonstrations of cultural unionism that prevailed a century ago.125 The purpose of this book, focusing on the last hundred years, is to analyse the deconstruction of Burns’s Victorian myth through the

8053_Malgrati.indd 20

06/03/23 10:55 am

Introduction  21



development of increasingly radical, critical or nationalist readings of the poet’s verse. Whilst nineteenth-century elites emphasised the complementary nature of Burns’s acerbic satires, mawkish songs, rousing Scots and eloquent English, twentieth- and twenty-first-century readers, by contrast, often stress the irreconcilable aspects of those ambiguities. Following the electoral reforms of 1884, 1918 and 1928, newly enfranchised Scottish voices revived the country’s iconoclastic tradition and detonated Burns’s ‘explosive Britishness’ in both politics and literature. The poet’s vernacular radicalism, in other words, was turned against his more loyalist and sentimental facets.126 The strength of Burns’s memory in the twentieth and twentyfirst centuries stemmed from its capacity to be both the perpetrator and the victim of a new iconoclasm. Similar to Charles Baudelaire’s ‘Héautontimorouménos’ (the ‘Self-Tormentor’) quoted in the epigraph, Burns’s radicalism became the ‘knife’ into the fault of his own established nineteenth-century bust. A symbol of national consensus during the Victorian era, the poet’s equivocal verses progressively turned into the mirror of the country’s social, constitutional and linguistic divisions. Herein lies a major difference between the legacies of Burns and Walter Scott. Although Victorians worshipped both writers, only Burns remains widely popular today. Rigney outlines ‘the speed with which “Scott and all his works” went out of favour’ during the twentieth century.127 ‘Once the Great Unknown’, Rigney claims that ‘Scott has largely become the Great Forgotten’ – an outcome which stems from Scott’s own approach to Scotland’s past:128 [Scott] showcased the past; but only in order to provide the imaginative conditions for taking leave of it: he defused its capacity to disrupt the present by turning it into an object of display. Since Scott thus incorporated transience into the very principle of historicization, his own obsolescence was part and parcel of his continuing legacy. His being so quickly forgotten was paradoxically a sign of his influence.129

Unlike Scott’s oeuvre, aspects of Burns’s poetry, though by no means his entire works, allow for a powerful, inspiring relationship between past and present struggles. This radical side of the bard’s legacy found new momentum in the kind of ideologies which, from the early twentieth century onwards, competed to bury the old Victorian order – one which established Burnsians had paradoxically helped to edify. Whilst

8053_Malgrati.indd 21

06/03/23 10:55 am

22   Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics

Scott’s fame decreased, Scottish socialists, feminists, nationalists, literary (post)modernists and folk revivalists both deconstructed and reshaped Burns’s afterlife. This shift in the reception of the poet was by no means linear, however. Burns’s poetic ambiguities also affected those seeking to change his conventional image. Indeed, whilst twentieth-century left wingers could sing ‘A Man’s a Man’, they occasionally quoted ‘Does Haughty Gaul’ for the union of British workers. Likewise, founders of the Scottish National Party enjoyed the Jacobin undertones of ‘Scots wha hae’ but, similarly to romantic Tories, they often preferred the Jacobite ‘Charlie Is My Darling’ over the riotous ‘Jolly Beggars’. Moreover, as seen in the case of Theodore Napier, the politics of Scottish home rulers crooning ‘Parcel of Rogues’ in hope of a fairer union, was often convoluted. Certainly, further paradoxes were also palpable in the literary field, where Scottish modernists, generally keen on socialist or nationalist ideas, often rejected Burns’s political songs as embarrassingly hackneyed. Nevertheless, by addressing these apparent contradictions, the following pages aim to shed light on Scotland’s constitutional present. In 1999, the singer Sheena Wellington performed ‘A Man’s a Man’ to inaugurate a Scottish Parliament composed of mostly Labour and SNP MSPs. After a century of divisions, and despite clear disagreements about the meaning of Home Rule, social-democratic and patriotic versions of Burns combined to provide Scotland – and Britain – with a new settlement. Certainly, it is still doubtful whether devolution secured British unity or cleared a path for a full-bodied Scottish nation-state. The 2014 referendum campaign on Scottish independence, which featured frequent debates about Burns, has left this question pending. What is sure, however, is that the conflation of Burns’s legacy with social-democratic devolution reveals a profound shift in Scottish cultural politics. Away from the imperial, elitist construction of Burns during the nineteenth century, devolution served the creation of a new myth whereby Scotland’s ‘ploughman poet’ expressed, if not essentialised, his country’s demotic, egalitarian voice. Overall, whilst Britain’s union endures, the symbolic devolution of Burns’s legacy seems rooted in the broader decline of Scotland’s literary Britishness. The role of both Scottish writers and political elites in fashioning a complex yet workable British identity was arguably one of the most paradoxical achievements in Scottish cultural history.130

8053_Malgrati.indd 22

06/03/23 10:55 am



Introduction  23

Throughout the nineteenth century, and up until the interwar years, the memorialisation of Burns participated in this specifically Scottish kind of unionist-nationalist effort. Yet the end of Empire as well as major shifts in British class power, from the creation of the Welfare State to 1980s Thatcherism, have changed the face of Scottish patriotism. Burns’s national myth, surviving the ‘strange death of literary unionism’, illustrates this new trend, keen on the reinvention, protection and international furthering of Scotland’s distinctive identity.131 Until now, Burns studies have only skimmed through the poet’s eventful political afterlife during the last century. Whatley’s work on the nineteenth-century reception of Burns, for instance, provides but a slim overview of the poet’s legacy after 1914.132 This is also the case with Clark McGinn’s rich history of Burns suppers, fast-tracked through a twentieth century with ‘limited development in terms of the format Burns Supper’.133 Whilst both Whatley and McGinn introduce contemporary, social-democratic and pro-independence readings of Burns, their studies lack the level of depth and contextualisation which they applied to their nineteenth-century subjects. For instance, Whatley analyses Burns’s reception by early Scottish socialists during the 1890s and the 1900s, but does not continue his study beyond the Great War, at a time when Labour became a dominant political force in Scotland.134 Likewise, McGinn mentions uses of Burns in Soviet Russia but does not emphasise the poet’s role in Scotland’s own revolutionary culture.135 As discussed in the following pages, these aspects are key to understanding the decline of Burnsian unionism and the rise of a more egalitarian, nationalistic reading of the poet in recent decades. More generally, few studies about Burns’s legacy have aimed to combined elements of political history with a critique of modern Scottish literature.136 Certainly, literary reception and memory politics can often seem incompatible. The short-term eventful rhythm of public life, requiring ad hoc use of literary references, jars with the long-term intellectual maturation and affiliation of individual writers. Yet in a Scottish context, where the bard’s romantic shade encompasses poetic brilliance, national voice and radical prophecy, such convergences between poetic and partisan agendas are not rare. This is perhaps nowhere more explicit than in the life and work of Christopher Murray Grieve, better known as Hugh MacDiarmid (1892–1978). MacDiarmid’s political alignment and poetic

8053_Malgrati.indd 23

06/03/23 10:55 am

24   Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics

development, from Labour to nationalism and from English to Scots verse, were both tied to his complicated, obsessive relationship with Burns, whose work he admired but whose admirers he despised.137 However, as detailed in Chapter 2 and 3, MacDiarmid was by no means alone in his obsession. Whilst his infamous, vitriolic attacks against the ‘Burns Cult’ spearheaded the ‘Renaissance’ of Scottish literature, they also overshadowed works by several other midtwentieth-century Scottish writers who shared Grieve’s interest in Burns. Amongst them, the nationalist William Power (1873–1951), the critic Edwin Muir (1887–1959), the controversial Catherine Carswell (1879–1946), the miner playwright Joe Corrie (1894–1968) and the communist novelist James Barke (1905–58) all explored radical Burnsian themes, bridging the gap between literary imagination and political commitment. Likewise, Scottish literary scholars have only just begun to appreciate Burns’s renewed influence beyond MacDiarmid in the era of Scottish devolution. Scott Hames has recently explained how Scottish writers of the 1980s–90s, following the failed 1979 referendum on devolution and Margaret Thatcher’s subsequent rise to power, refashioned themselves – consciously or not – as democratic prophets, mouthpieces of the nation’s wounded working-class identity and harbingers of virtuous parliamentarism.138 In this context, Burns’s ‘bardship’ emerged as a symbol for Scotland’s literary condition, whereby poetry could assume the perhaps illusive role of polity. From the literary republic of Hamish Henderson (1919–2002), Edwin Morgan (1920–2010), Douglas Dunn (b. 1942), Robert Crawford (b. 1959), W. N. Herbert (b. 1961) and Liz Lochhead (b.1947) to the devolutionary rhetoric of Labour and the SNP, Burns had soon turned into the very icon of Scottish Home Rule. Such interplay between literary ambition and political situations lends itself to an interdisciplinary study of Burns’s afterlife in the last hundred years. The present book achieves this by combining various types of records, archives and secondary materials, including records of political parties and political speeches, articles from Scottish journals and newspapers, archives of film, television and social media, minutes of Burns clubs and Burns suppers, extracts from Hansard and the Official Report of the Scottish Parliament, private papers, manuscripts, and correspondence of writers, as well as interviews with scholars, curators, politicians and contemporary poets.

8053_Malgrati.indd 24

06/03/23 10:55 am



Introduction  25

This comprehensive survey raises broader aspects of Burns’s legacy in relation to gender, religion, race, global culture, scholarship and literary forms. Such issues, however, are considered only insofar as they contribute to politicising the figure of Burns domestically, that is in the Scottish public sphere. Certainly, Scottish ideas about Burns did not emerge in a vacuum, and the role of international Burnsians, from North America to Soviet Russia, is mentioned when relevant. But this book is not an attempt to repeat the already rich scholarship on that topic.139 Similarly, issues surrounding Burns’s masculinity and male exclusivism in the Burns movement are highlighted, especially when debated by Scottish feminists. Yet a fuller study of Burns’s heavily gendered afterlife remains needed to understand the shaping of his still dominant masculinist portrait. A further subject lying beyond the scope of this book is the thorny topic of Burns’s role in Scottish (and British) schools. Admittedly, most Scots experience the poet’s work for the first time in primary education, where Burns competitions, often sponsored by the Burns Federation, have become a sort of Scottish rite of passage since the mid-twentieth century. By contrast, however, and despite postdevolution reforms in Scottish education, Burns remains marginal in the high school curriculum.140 This situation has triggered surprisingly few political, literary – or even scholarly – debates in the last hundred years and, as a result, curricular politics appears secondary in the present volume. Yet a study of Burns’s canonicity in the Scottish (and British) school system would be crucial to measure his impact on Scottish society more broadly. It is hoped future scholars of education will tackle this important topic. The book which follows is divided into nine chapters, arranged chronologically to help readers understand historical shifts in the reception of Burns’s politics. Beginning in 1914, Chapter 1 introduces the tense Burnsian battleground of Great War Scotland. It reveals how modern warfare reinforced the poet’s unionist, jingoistic legacy whilst feeding a more combative response from Burns’s left-wing, pacifist and early nationalist admirers. Such a radical critical reaction against British Burnsian elites, which developed into a broader iconoclastic movement after the war, is further analysed in Chapters 2 and 3. Linking Scotland’s literary ‘Renaissance’ with 1920s–30s party politics, I argue that this interwar ‘reformation’ of

8053_Malgrati.indd 25

06/03/23 10:55 am

26   Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics

Burns’s memory ended the middle-class, liberal-conservative consensus, which defined the poet’s legacy from the Victorian era. Chapter 4 continues this discussion into the 1940s, describing the left-wing capture of the Scottish Burns movement during the Second World War. Such a turnaround enabled Labour to rebrand the old unionist-nationalist vision of the bard, rallying Scottish support for the British project of the Welfare State. Yet as described in Chapter 5, the divisive context of the Cold War in post-war years weakened this new compromise. Unlike the 1859 celebrations, basking in imperial glory, Burns’s 1959 bicentennial took place in a bipolar world, where enthusiastic uses of Burns by both Scottish leftists and the Soviet Union contrasted with the relative disinterest of Britain’s post-imperial elites. As described in Chapters 6 and 7, the consequences of decolonisation, combined with the rise of the Scottish Question during the 1960s–70s, accelerated the decline of old-style Burnsian unionism during the latter part of the twentieth century. From the 1960s Scottish folk revival to the second literary ‘Renaissance’ of the 1980s–90s, and from the 1979 referendum to the 1996 bicentenary of Burns’s death, political uses of the poet increasingly collided with debates on Scottish devolution. This sequence was concluded in July 1999 at the inauguration of the new Scottish Parliament, when Burns’s ‘A Man’s a Man’, sang by Sheena Wellington, became the ambiguous symbol of Scottish self rule. Finally, Chapters 8 and 9 focus on Burns’s political afterlife in the early twenty-first century. These chapters demonstrate how, despite the political truce of the 2000s, the election of an SNP majority in 2011 heralded Burns’s return in the struggle over Scotland’s constitution. Three years later, the 2014 referendum on Scottish independence turned the poet’s contradictory politics into an image of Scotland’s internal conflicts. More recently, still, the 2016 referendum on Britain’s European membership, combined with contemporary concerns about gender, race and ecology have put increasing emphasis on Burns as an ambivalent symbol of Scotland’s devolved state. Further than ever from the old Victorian consensus, the twenty-first-century myth of Burns, I conclude, derives its energy from the nation’s fecund divisions. These nine chapters outline an arc in the eternal return of annual Burns commemorations. All rituals are subject to change and Burns’s

8053_Malgrati.indd 26

06/03/23 10:55 am



Introduction  27

versatile legacy is anything but an exception to the rule. Even Theresa May’s Conservative Burns supper, hosted in 2018 by a female leader for a mixed-gender crowd of guests, would have seemed subversive for 1950s social-democrats. Although iconoclastic and radical ideas have enriched the Burnsian tradition for more than a century, many Scottish commentators, each 25 January, continue to deprecate the ‘Burns cult’ as if its influence, values, and rites, had remained untouched since the Victorian era. Such a trend might reflect that hackneyed sense of Scottish self-deprecation which would rather lampoon the country’s alleged passéism than acknowledge the nation’s ever-changing modes of memory. The following pages tell a very different story – that of a country which has proved capable of querying its own myths and adapting the legacy of its national bard to democratic trials throughout the modern and contemporary eras.

Notes  1. P1, ll. 208–11, p. 206.   2. ‘I am the wound and the dagger! I am the blow and the cheek! I am the members and the wheel, Victim and executioner!’ in Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil, trans. Aggeler, ll. 20–4, p. 56.  3. Glasgow Herald, 23 January 2018.  4. Daily Record, 23 January 2018.   5. Interview with Sally Mapstone, 20 July 2018.  6. Ibid.   7. No evidence could be found to contradict May’s statement.  8. Glasgow Herald, 23 January 2018.   9. Mapstone, 20 July 2018. 10. Ibid. 11. P1, ll. 13–6, p. 311. 12. Mapstone, 20 July 2018. 13. Clark McGinn, The Burns Supper, pp. 37–51. 14. Ibid. p. 23–33. 15. Mapstone, 20 July 2018. 16. P1, ll. 5–9, p. 443. 17. See for instance: Pittock (ed.), Robert Burns and Global Culture The Reception of Robert Burns in Europe; Alker and Davis (eds), Robert Burns and Transatlantic Culture; Szasz, Abraham Lincoln and Robert

8053_Malgrati.indd 27

06/03/23 10:55 am

28   Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics Burns; Sood, Robert Burns and the United States of America; Murphy, ‘Broadly Speaking: Scots Language and British Imperialism’. 18. Pittock, Robert Burns and Global Culture, p. 23. 19. Clark McGinn, The Burns Supper, p. 79. 20. Cairns Craig, The Wealth of the Nation, pp. 76–7. 21. Ibid. pp. 76–7. See also Rigney, ‘Embodied Communities’, pp. 71­–101. 22. Mapstone, 20 July 2018. 23. See Alker and Davis (eds), Robert Burns and Transatlantic Culture. 24. ‘The conversation that we are’ was Gadamer’s common phrase to describe the nature of hermeneutics. See for instance Truth and Methods p. 386. See also Eagleton, Literary Theory, pp. 61–­5. 25. Connerton, How Societies Remember; Anderson, Imagined Communities. Regarding the concept of ‘embodied communities’, see Rigney, ‘Embodied Communities’, pp. 71­–101. See also Brown and Carruthers (eds), Performing Robert Burns. 26. The phrase ‘Homer of the North’ was first coined by Germaine de Staël in De la literature. See Kristmannsson, ‘Ossian, the European National Epic’. See also Stafford, The Sublime Savage. 27. Crawford, The Bard, p. 155. 28. Robert Burns’s letter to Mrs Dunlop, 22 March 1787, L1, p. 101. 29. Pittock (ed.), The Oxford Edition of the Works of Robert Burns. Volume II and III; McCue (ed.), The Oxford Edition, IV. 30. Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism. 31. Ibid. pp. xi–xii. 32. Ibid. p. 6. 33. Ibid. p. 23. 34. Whether Burns was inaugurated Poet Laureate of the Canongate Kilwinning Lodge No.2 on 1 March 1787 remains a matter of debate. What is certain, however, is that on 12 January 1787, Edinburgh’s St Andrews Lodge toasted him as ‘Caledonia’s Bard’. See Mackay, A Biography of Robert Burns, pp. 274–5. 35. The debate over the authenticity of Ossian had run high since Samuel Johnson in his Journey to the Western Highlands of Scotland (1775) had claimed that ‘the poems of Ossian’ had ‘never existed in any other form’ than that presented by Macpherson in his Fragments of Ancient Poetry (1760). See ‘The Response to Ossian’ in Stafford, The Sublime Savage, pp. 163–83. 36. See Wilson, The Other Robert. 37. McGinty, Burns and Religion. 38. Simpson, The Protean Scot. 39. Carruthers, ‘Religion’ in Robert Burns, pp. 25–­42. 40. Carruthers, ‘Thomas Muir and Kirk Politics’ in Carruthers and Martin (eds), Thomas Muir of Huntershill, pp. 142­–3.

8053_Malgrati.indd 28

06/03/23 10:55 am



Introduction  29

41. Ibid. 42. Ibid. pp. 149­–53; Heron, Kirk by Divine Right, Church and State. 43. These ideas are to be expanded in Carruthers’s forthcoming monograph on Burns and patronage, currently under development. 44. See Whatley, ‘“The Kirk’s Alarm”’, pp. 1–20. 45. Robert Burns’s letter to Mrs Dunlop, 3 April 1789, L1, p. 392. 46. Daiches, ‘Robert Burns and Jacobite Song’ in Low (ed.), Critical Essays on Robert Burns, p. 141; Crawford, Burns: A Study of the Poems and Songs, pp. 236–56. See also Donaldson, ‘The Glencairn Connection’, 61­–79. 47. P1, l. 109, p. 188; P1, l. 55, p. 267. The last quote is from ‘Lines on Stirling’ (1787), P1, p.348, l.7. 48. McIlvanney, Burns the Radical, pp. 38–63. 49. Ibid. p. 78. 50. Ibid. pp. 82–3. 51. Quoted in McIlvanney, Burns the Radical, p. 83. 52. Ibid. 53. Carruthers, Robert Burns, p. 61. 54. Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism, pp. 10­–11. 55. Crawford, Boswell, Burns and the French Revolution, pp. 96­–7. 56. Letter to Robert Graham of Fintry, 5 January 1793, L2, pp. 173–4. 57. P2, ll. 10, 11, 22, pp. 668–9. 58. Letter to Mrs Dunlop, 12 January 1795, L2, p. 334. 59. P2, p. 803. See Carruthers, Robert Burns, pp. 25–6. 60. Crawford, Bannockburns, p. 91; Pittock, The Invention of Scotland, pp. 81–2. 61. P2, pp. 707­–8. 62. P2, ll. 37–40, p. 763. 63. Butler, ‘Burns and Politics’, in Crawford (ed.), Robert Burns and Cultural Authority, pp. 102. 64. In fact, many of them can be attributed to other eighteenth-century radical poets. See Carruthers, ‘New Bardolatry’, and Norrie Paton, ‘Why Should We Idly Waste our Prime’, in Burns Chronicle (Kilmarnock, Winter 2002), hereafter BC, pp. 2–13, 47­–8; Andrews, ‘Radical Attribution’, pp. 174–90. The problems raised by the ‘Lost Poems’ controversy in Hogg and Noble’s Canongate Burns will be addressed in Chapter 4. 65. Colin Kidd, ‘Burns and Politics’, in Carruthers (ed.), The Edinburgh Companion to Robert Burns, pp. 68, 71–2. 66. Ulster radicals criticised Burns for his apparent volte face. See McIlvanney, Burns the Radical, pp. 23­–8. 67. These many attempts to interpret the ‘Dumfries Volunteers’ will be described over the course of the present study.

8053_Malgrati.indd 29

06/03/23 10:55 am

30   Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics 68. Rigney, The Afterlives of Walter Scott, p. 4. See also Kelly, Scott-land. 69. Scottish historians’ awkward relationship with Scottish history during the eighteenth century was studied by Kidd, Subverting Scotland’s Past. 70. Boudrot, ‘Robert Burns, héros de la nation écossaise’, p. 203. My translation. 71. Crawford, Devolving English Literature, pp. 108–9. 72. Ibid. p. 109. 73. Nora (ed.), Les Lieux de Mémoire. 74. The national significance of William Wallace and the Stuart dynasty were studied respectively by Morton, William Wallace and Pittock, The Invention of Scotland. 75. Morton, Unionist Nationalism, pp. 56­–63. 76. Coleman, Remembering the Past, p. 25. 77. Morton, Unionist Nationalism, pp. 130–2, 173­–5. The notion of Scottish ‘infrastructural powers’ within the Union was first developed by McCrone, Understanding Scotland, pp. 204–5. 78. Ibid. pp. 204–5. See also Finlay, ‘The Burns Cult and Scottish identity in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries’, in Simpson, Love & Liberty, pp. 69­­–78. 79. Looby, ‘Adam Mickiewicz’ pp. 135–41. 80. Nairn, The Break-up of Britain, p. 145. 81. Ibid. pp. 145, 163. 82. Whatley, Immortal Memory. 83. Ibid. p. 13. 84. Ibid. p. 29. 85. Ibid. pp. 27–8. 86. Ibid. p. 37. 87. Ibid. p. 38. 88. Ibid. p. 37. 89. Ibid. p. 35. 90. Whatley, Immortal Memory, pp. 36­–7. Currie, The Life of Robert Burns, p. 9. 91. Whatley, Immortal Memory. p. 51. 92. Ibid. pp. 46–8. 93. Whatley, Immortal Memory. p. 48. See also Whatley, ‘“It is said that Burns was a Radical”’, pp. 639–66. 94. Quoted in Whatley, ‘The Political and Cultural Legacy of Robert Burns in Scotland and Ulster, c. 1796–1859’ in Kirk et al. (eds), Cultures of Radicalism, p. 90. 95. Whatley, ‘The Political and Cultural Legacy’. pp. 83–4. Whatley, Immortal Memory, pp. 69–70.

8053_Malgrati.indd 30

06/03/23 10:55 am



Introduction  31

 96. Blair, Working Verse, 35, pp. 57–8, 103–5.  97. Whatley, Immortal Memory, pp. 72­–3.   98. Ibid. p. 65.   99. This figure is given by McGinn, The Burns Supper, p. 146. 100. Whatley, Immortal Memory, pp. 81–3. 101. Ibid. p. 82. 102. Ibid. 103. Rigney, ‘Embodied Communities’, p. 75. 104. Ibid. p. 93. 105. Whatley, Immortal Memory, pp. 103, 124, 133. 106. The importance of subscription as a vehicle for bourgeois power in Victorian Edinburgh was analysed in Morton, Unionist Nationalism, pp. 97­–132. See also Whatley, ‘Robert Burns, Memorialisation and the “Heart Beating” of Victorian Scotland’ in Pittock (ed.), Robert Burns in Global Culture, pp. 224–60. 107. The Scotsman, 28 July 1884. 108. Ibid. 109. Whatley, Immortal Memory. p. 80. 110. BC 1, 1892. 111. McGuinn, The Burns Supper, p. 117. 112. Whatley, Immortal Memory, p. 59. 113. Quoted in Whatley, Immortal Memory, p. 141. 114. Their profiles were studied in Boudrot, L’écrivain éponyme, p. 42. 115. Kidd, Union and Unionisms, p. 276. 116. Ibid. p. 276. 117. P2, ll. 13–6, p. 610; Banffshire Advertiser, 7 February 1895, quoted by Shaw in The Fin-de-siècle Scottish Revival, p. 46. Regarding the content of Burns’s accusations, see Whatley, ‘Burns and the Union of 1707’, in Simpson (ed.), Robert Burns for a contextualisation of his song. 118. Napier, Scotland’s demand for home rule, p. 11. Quoted in Kidd, Union and Unionisms, p. 280. 119. The literal unionism of early Scottish nationalists was also described in Morton, Unionist-nationalism. 120. See May’s guestlist shared by Nick Eardley on Twitter on 22 January 2018. Available at (last accessed 23 May 2019). 121. The National, 23 January 2018. 122. Mike Small, ‘A Profligate Junto’, in Bella Caledonia, 23 January 2018. Available at (last accessed 23 May 2019). 123. Daily Record, 23 January 2018.

8053_Malgrati.indd 31

06/03/23 10:55 am

32   Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics 124. See, for instance, the comments under Nick Eardley’s Tweet. Available at

(last accessed 23 May 2019). 125. Colin Kidd coined the phrase ‘banal unionism’ in Union and Unionisms, p. 23. 126. Crawford, Devolving English Literature, p. 109. 127. Rigney, The Afterlives of Walter Scott, p. 10. 128. Ibid. p. 10. 129. Ibid. p. 4. 130. On this subject, see Crawford (ed.), The Scottish Invention of Scottish Literature and Colin Kidd, ‘Union and the Ironies of Displacement in Scottish Literature’, in Kidd and Carruthers (eds), Literature and Union, pp. 4­–40. 131. Carruthers, ‘The Strange Death of Literary Unionism’, in Kidd and Carruthers (eds), Literature and Union, pp. 351–62. 132. Whatley, Immortal Memory, pp. 167­–85; McGinn, The Burns Supper, pp. 117–57. 133. McGinn, The Burns Supper, p. 118. 134. Whatley, Immortal Memory, pp. 143–66. 135. Whatley, Immortal Memory, p. 178; McGinn, The Burns Supper, pp. 145–50. 136. Neither Whatley nor McGinn focus on the development of modern Scottish literature as part of their study. Likewise, edited books about Burns’s literary reception, including Crawford (ed.), Robert Burns and Cultural Authority and Stafford and Sergeant (eds), Burns and Other Poets do not include socio-historical perspectives on the poet’s legacy. More recently, Sood’s Robert Burns and the United States offers a closer example of a Burnsian study straddling literature and politics. 137. Despite their focus on social history, Whatley and McGinn have both confronted MacDiarmid’s reception of Burns (see Immortal Memory, pp. 172–75 and The Burns Supper, pp. 159–64). Yet they tend to dismiss his criticism of the ‘Burns cult’ merely as that of a political extremist instead of analysing the wider intertextual context in which he wrote. Other studies on MacDiarmid’s Burns can be found in Riach, ‘MacDiarmid’s Burns’, in Crawford (ed.), Robert Burns and Cultural Authority and in Crawford, ‘MacDiarmid, Burnsians, and Burns’s legacy’ and in Sergeant and Stafford (eds), Burns and Other. See also Malgrati, ‘MacDiarmid’s Burns’, pp. 47–66. 138. Hames, The Literary Politics of Scottish Devolution. 139. See endnote 17 in Chapter 1.

8053_Malgrati.indd 32

06/03/23 10:55 am



Introduction  33

140. At the time of writing, Burns features only as one of the 14 optional Scottish authors set for Higher English courses. He is not a part of the National 5 Curriculum. See ‘Scottish Set Texts for National 5 and Higher English Courses’, Scottish Qualifications Authority. Available at (last accessed on 14 February 2022).

8053_Malgrati.indd 33

06/03/23 10:55 am

8053_Malgrati.indd 34

06/03/23 10:55 am

Chapter 1

Explosive Memory: Burns Enters the Twentieth Century (1914–1919)

In the early hours of the 8 July 1914, news was made by two resolute ladies cycling on the dark roads of Ayrshire. Wearing tweed caps, and ‘garbed in tight fitted-trousers with their skirts tucked up to their waist’, the two women had pushed their bicycles down the streets of Glasgow and rode headlong southwards.1 From the chimneys of Scotland’s industrial heartland to the older rustic pastures of Ayrshire, theirs was an uncommon and suspect journey. After thirty exhausting miles cycling under a full moon, they put down their bicycles outside an old clay-covered house. They were in the village of Alloway, near Ayr, and the historic dwelling in front of them was the world-famous cottage where Robert Burns was born in 1759. Like the other 60,000 pilgrims who had visited the poet’s birthplace in 1913, the two tweed-capped women came to the back door and knelt solemnly.2 The romantic cliché was almost complete when moonbeams suddenly revealed their two canisters of gunpowder; this was a bomb. Trying to place it in the cottage’s gutter, the two ladies could not help making noises. These awoke the night watchman who, running out of his byre, went on to chase both women across the garden. Whilst one managed to escape, the other, screaming, was caught and pinned to the ground.3 She was Frances Parker, New Zealand-born activist and niece of Lord Kitchener, who had recently become a suffragette organiser in the West of Scotland. During the past two years, her comrades had committed militant acts to show support for the cause of women’s enfranchisement. Not least amongst these had been the burning of Leuchars Railway Station in June 1913. As a result, many suffragettes

8053_Malgrati.indd 35

06/03/23 10:55 am

36   Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics

were now convicts in Perth Prison where their attempts at hungerstriking had been met with ruthless force feeding. In protest, Parker and her friend, Ethel Moorhead, had decided to blow up a more important public symbol: Burns’s Cottage.4 Destructive as it seemed, however, this attempt was not claimed by its perpetrator as a hostile gesture against the memory of Robert Burns. On the contrary, when taken to the Ayr Sheriff Court a few hours after her arrest, Frances Parker quoted the final lines of Burns’ patriotic song ‘Scots wha hae’: ‘LIBERTY’s in every blow! / Let us DO or DIE!’ during her questioning. Aligning them with the militant dimension of her own commitment she stated, ‘You Scotsmen used to be proud of Burns; now you have taken to torturing women’.5 Burns, his poems and his memory, were not, in other words, Parker’s target. Instead, she asserted that his political radicalism, as expressed in the line she quoted, was incompatible with the mistreatment endured by her detained companions. Later that day, Parker’s sentiments were echoed by Helen Crawfurd, another prominent suffragette, otherwise active in the Independent Labour Party (ILP). Speaking at a rally in front of Perth Prison against the force feeding of women hunger strikers, Crawfurd decided to back the arrested Parker. Certainly, as a fervent Burnsian keen to promote women’s cause in a Scottish context, Crawfurd hesitated at first. ‘I did not know how I was to address the crowd that night – I saw myself being torn limb from limb’, confessed Crawfurd in her (unpublished) autobiography.6 At first, she explained to her 2,000-strong audience that the New Zealander Parker and the English-born Moorhead ‘were not aware of the reverence Scottish people had for Burns’.7 By contrast, Crawfurd expressed her ‘Scottish sentiment in being glad the destruction hadn’t been accomplished’.8 Yet despite Parker and Moorhead’s misjudgement, the socialist speaker interpreted their act as an authentic tribute to the bard’s egalitarian legacy. After all, Crawfurd went on, the author of ‘A Man’s a Man’ had also penned the lines: While Europe’s eye is fixed on might things, The fate of Empires, and the fall of Kings; While quacks of State must each produce his plan, And even children lisp The Rights of Man; Amid this mighty fuss, just let me mention, The Rights of Woman merit some attention –9

8053_Malgrati.indd 36

06/03/23 10:55 am



Burns Enters the Twentieth Century    37

If Burns ‘could have foreseen that the sacrifice of his house would form a stepping stone in the path towards freedom’, Crawfurd asserted that ‘none would have felt as glad and honoured as he by the offering of that sacrifice’. However shocking, Parker and Moorhead’s deed remained less outrageous than ‘the cold commercialism’ of Burns Cottage ‘whereby a limited company gathers in the people’s worship and devotion at so many pence per head [that Burns] would have scorned it with all the passion of his nature’, for it constituted ‘a real insult to his memory’.10 Concluding that the poet ‘would have been at one with [the rights for women] movement’, Crawfurd’s prudent yet inspired speech seemed to strike the right chord. Amidst applause, her exhilarated audience burst into ‘Scots wha hae’, replicating Parker’s defiant act before the prison wall.11 The following week, Crawfurd’s words were reproduced in Forward, the ILP’s weekly paper which supported votes for women and which had, for many years, been developing an egalitarian version of Burns along the lines of what the suffragist leader had proclaimed in the streets of Perth.12 Inspired by Keir Hardie, the co-founder of the party in 1892 who famously preferred ‘Burns and the Bible’ to the teachings of Karl Marx, the ILP praised Burns as the precursor of socialist thought.13 In 1910, William Stewart, a leading ILP journalist, used the party’s press to publish a long pamphlet, Burns and the Common People, depicting Burns as a radical hero.14 Stewart attacked ‘the thousand annual orations to the memory of Burns the patriot, Burns the poet of brotherhood, and Burns the naturelover’ which formed the ‘common conspiracy to becloud and hide the figure of Burns the rebel’.15 The bard’s conception of brotherhood, according to Stewart, was neither abstract nor sentimental. Instead, the journalist pre-empted Crawfurd in linking Burns with his own socialist ideas, affirming that the poet had prefigured the cooperative action of the Second Socialist International.16 A few years later in 1914, such statements had become commonplace in the pages of Forward. On the week of Burns Night, encouraged by the recent rise of the Scottish working class movement which held 109 strikes in 1913, the ILP’s journal asserted, once again, that ‘120 years ago Robert Burns expressed what is now known as Socialist sentiment’.17 This left-wing reading of the poet, which drew – to some extent – on the radical tradition of nineteenth-century Scottish weavers and

8053_Malgrati.indd 37

06/03/23 10:55 am

38   Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics

Chartists, provided Scottish Suffragettes with substantial support against accusations of profaning Burns’s memory. Such radical sentiments, however, contrasted with the rest of Scottish public opinion. Following Parker and Moorhead’s attempted arson, most headlines in the Scottish press condemned their ‘outrage’ as a ‘dastardly’ and ‘malicious endeavour’.18 In Ayr, a crowd gathered at the local jail where Parker was detained and insulted her as a ‘disgrace to her sex’.19 Similarly, an anonymous poem, published in the Daily Record a few days after the attempt, indicted the ‘hardly human’ and ‘graceless women’ whose ‘cause ha[d] been branded deep in everlasting shame’ for having tried ‘to wreck the place where our Scottish bard was born’.20 For Parker’s opponents, her act was less political than criminal, and few were those, outside socialist spheres, who stood up for her when news of her being force fed via both the mouth and the anus was released from Perth Prison where she had been transferred on 13 July.21 For many of her contemporaries, the suffragette’s attempt to dent Burns’s ‘immortality’ betrayed a desire to emasculate Scotland’s proud manhood and, by extension, precarious nationhood. Her crime, not even twenty years after the centenary of the poet’s death in 1896, made her salvation impossible in the eyes of the public. Parker’s commitment to women’s suffrage and her call for the humane treatment of jailed militants were drowned in a general suspicion of treachery – against both her country and a certain patriarchal definition of womanhood. Her inhumanity, in other words, was to have dared to blow up the house of the man revered by Scotsmen as mankind’s poet. In hindsight, it might seem surprising that a polemic about the natal home of a long-dead poet could stir Scottish opinion as Europe stood on the brink of total war. Yet due to its iconoclasm, Parker and Moorhead’s arson attempt appears the first significant political deed in Burns’s twentieth-century afterlife. Whilst liberals, conservatives and radicals had tried to hijack Burns since the time of his death, and whilst they had occasionally bowdlerised his works or accredited him with apocryphal texts, they had never gone as far as to claim the poet’s words by turning against his heritage.22 Such an irreverent act was in blatant opposition to the romantic and Victorian worship of Burns; this worship was a ritualised tradition whose ostentatious deference to the poet’s ‘genius’, which, as explained by Christopher

8053_Malgrati.indd 38

06/03/23 10:55 am



Burns Enters the Twentieth Century    39

Whatley, often served to ‘keep the lid on the Burns genie’ by defusing the fiery contents of his lifework.23 The Suffragettes’ attempt, in other words, opened a new sequence in the poet’s legacy. Three weeks before Britain declared war on Germany, it seemed that Burns’s explosive contradictions, between patriarchal nostalgia and radical egalitarianism, could also be detonated. Unfortunately for Scottish suffragettes and socialists, the outbreak of war would thwart further efforts to reform Burns’ legacy – for a time at least. The Great War brought to prominence a strongly patriotic and martial interpretation of the bard, which maintained a clear line between friends and foes, humans and barbarians, and orthodox and revisionist readings of Burns. Jingoistic use of the poet, as noted by Whatley, had already spread in Scotland at the time of the Second Boer War (1899–1902).24 The duration and scale of the First World War, however, would intensify this process, radicalising Scottish unionism and exacerbating the bard’s warlike Britishness. Such a weaponisation of Burns, contrasting with the often peaceable, sentimental Victorian portrait of the poet, would have lasting consequences. Whether loyalist or revolutionary, the 1910s version of Burns emerged as a fierce man of action. Right from the onset of hostilities, the flexible identifications of the poet with both Scottish nationality and the wider cause of individual democratic liberties served to invigorate Scotland’s martial spirit and commitment to the war effort against Germany’s barbaric ‘hordes’. In September 1914, the 15th Highland Light Infantry left Scotland to face the ‘Huns’ and their authoritarian Kaiser. On their way, they were harangued by Bailie Kirkland, convenor of Glasgow Tramway Department, who quoted the last line of ‘Scots wha hae’: ‘Let us do or die!’.25 The defiant words resounded once more but, this time, the tweed-capped lady of Alloway had been replaced by menat-arms. Indeed, most suffragettes and Labour activists were rallying behind the war effort. The time to dedicate one’s life to the workingclass or to women’s rights had seemed to pass. Whilst the insurgent message of ‘Scots wha hae’ could appeal to radicals, its celebration of Scottish martial prowess on the battlefield of Bannockburn also fuelled ‘King and Country’ patriotism. David Goldie has described how Burns’s song became Scotland’s war anthem during the autumn of 1914 – this also coincided with the sexcentenary of the battle of Bannockburn.26 Within a few weeks

8053_Malgrati.indd 39

06/03/23 10:55 am

40   Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics

from the outbreak of the conflict, ‘Scots wha hae’ was reprinted in many anthologies of war poetry, including Poems of War and Battle issued by Oxford University Press.27 Around the same time, Scottish Field, the Daily Record and the People’s Journal praised Burns’s song, respectively, as ‘our national anthem’, ‘the most patriotic anthem ever composed’ and ‘the battle-cry of the nation’.28 Such fervour explains how the Burns-flavoured myth of Bannockburn became, in Plain’s words, the wartime ‘“flag” of [Scottish] national identity’.29 Its emphasis on the continuity of Scottish martial pride, from Robert the Bruce’s spearmen to the Imperial Highland Regiments, secured Scottish patriotism and transformed the ‘history of conflict underpinning Anglo-Scottish relation’ into Britain’s martial might as a Union.30 In similar vein, army recruiters saw the potential of Burns’s poetry for propaganda purposes. For the first time in the poet’s afterlife, the British state broke with Victorian laissez-faire, and intervened directly in the making of Burns’s memory. In 1915, a poster featuring Burns as a drafting officer was issued by the British Parliamentary Recruiting Committee. It was designed to supply the thousands of volunteers requested by Lord Kitchener – Frances Parker’s uncle – for the war effort. The poster featured a cameo portrait of Scotland’s bard over an eye-catching yellow background. It stated: ‘What Burns Said – 1782, Still Holds Good in 1915’ and quoted Burns’s poem: O! why the deuce should I repine, And be an ill foreboder? I’m twenty-three, and five feet nine, I’ll go and be a sodger!31

Burns’s martial enthusiasm lent itself to the recruiting strategy of the British army. His catchy words, which soon spread on the walls of Scottish towns and villages, were easy to remember and shamed ‘shirkers’, the ‘white-feathered’ and other ‘ill foreboders’ who fell under constant pressure to enlist. This unusual state-led initiative was supported at a more local level by Burns clubs and their umbrella association the Burns Federation, which aided the warlike coloration of the bard. At the annual meeting of the Federation, in 1915, Scottish Burns clubs described themselves as ‘essentially patriotic bodies . . . endors[ing] the policy

8053_Malgrati.indd 40

06/03/23 10:55 am



Burns Enters the Twentieth Century    41

of the Government in its efforts to destroy for all time the arrogant Prussian militarism which seeks to trample underfoot the freedom of individuals, and nations’.32 Though a substantial number of clubs had interrupted their activities due to a shortage of members, many (older) Burnsians remained at home to celebrate Burns Night and hold charity events for wounded soldiers. This was the case, for instance, in January 1915, when the Musselburgh Burns Club organised a concert with the Scottish Red Cross.33 That same year, on 28 August 1915, scores of Burnsians converged to Ayrshire, in Mauchline, for the inauguration of Burns’s restored house. Eugene Wason, the Liberal MP for Clackmannan and Kinross who delivered the opening speech, drew expected parallels between the contemporary situation and the eighteenth century. Comparing the looming French invasion of the mid-1790s to the current German threat, he enjoined his audience to support Asquith’s coalition government; After all, at the end of his life Burns had rallied behind the Tory government of William Pitt by enlisting into a local, patriotic militia: the Dumfries Volunteers. In conclusion, Wason invoked a pastiche of Burns’s loyalism in ‘Does haughty Gaul invasion threat’: Does Germany invasion threat? Then let the loons beware, sir; There are ironclads upon our seas, And Terriers on shore, sir.34

Whatever the real amount of sincerity invested by Burns in his ode to the Dumfries Volunteers, his words were there and ready to be used by the recruiters and propagandists of the Great War. The combination of Scottish warlike patriotism in ‘Scots wha hae’ with the fiery loyalism of ‘Does haughty Gaul’ militarised the unionistnationalist reading of Burns which had prevailed in a more pacified form throughout the nineteenth century. This unionist reading also drew support, in a more sophisticated manner, from the ranks of academia. In October 1915, William Paton Ker, Professor of Literature at University College London, returned home to Glasgow to address the university’s Historical Society.35 Focusing on ‘The Politics of Burns’, his speech argued that ‘neither’ Jacobitism nor Jacobinism ‘made the real politics of the poet’.36 Instead, Ker quoted Walter Scott to explain that Burns was a loyalist

8053_Malgrati.indd 41

06/03/23 10:55 am

42   Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics

Tory and ‘a great Pittite’ during the 1780s, around the time he composed his Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect.37 His support for Pitt was evident, according to Ker, in poems such as ‘A Dream’ (1786), which defends ‘Willie Pitt’ against the Whig ‘Charlie Fox’, and ‘When Guilford Good’ (1787), which celebrates the Battle of Quebec and ‘Chatham’s Boy [Pitt]’ for his actions in Parliament.38 For the London professor, Burns’s enthusiasm for British affairs contrasted with his slim knowledge of Scottish history and meant that his ‘country . . . was not politically Scotland but Great Britain’.39 Though the French Revolution and his ‘laborious’ work as a song collector would ‘distract’ him during the following years, Ker concluded that Burns finally returned to his true unionist creed in 1795 when embracing the cause of the Dumfries Volunteers.40 Ker’s address, published in 1918, did not make direct mention of the war, but it certainly helped legitimise the warlike use of Burns which swept the country.41 Toward the end of 1915, as volunteers diminished and battle dragged on, this militarist version of Burns increasingly served to target ‘shirkers’ and pacifists on the home front. Popular newspapers spearheaded efforts at denunciation. On Burns Night 1916, for instance, in Dundee, a city marked by pacifist activism, D. C. Thomson’s People’s Journal organised a poetry competition – in the style of ‘Rabbie’ – aimed against conscientious objectors.42 Two of the winning entries, one imitated from ‘Scots wha hae’ and the other from ‘Does haughty Gaul’, are particularly telling: Men unworthy o’ the name, Trembling, hide their heads at hame, Theirs be everlasting shame, Regret and Misery. Scotland’s God look on them now; Licht within their heart a low; Send then forth resolved to bow, Nevermore to kneel.43 . . . Lads, why should you, like whipped curs, Stand back still undecided, Till branded by the conscript mark, Your from the men divided?

8053_Malgrati.indd 42

06/03/23 10:55 am

Burns Enters the Twentieth Century    43



Be Britons still: Be Britons true. Wake up now, be Attested! And teach the Huns that not by them Can honour be molested.44

The diction in these poems is reminiscent of the kind of attacks levelled at the Alloway suffragettes two years earlier. According to Burnsian doggerel, ‘shirkers’ became shameful disgraces to their sex, and subhuman ‘whipped curs’ were likened to the barbarian ‘Huns’. Now more than ever, Burns, as a recruited and recruiting poet, helped delineate the boundary between the noble and the outrageous, the friend and the enemy – either foreign or within. Similar sentiments were echoed by many Burns clubs. In 1917, the past president of the Govan ‘Ye Cronies’ Burns Club, who mourned the death of five club members in France, declared: I am sure no real Burnsite would like to see our brave young lads come home to a patched-up peace with scoundrels. Thank God there are no pacifists in Ye Cronies Burns Club, at least I don’t know of them.45

The following year, in June 1918, the Scottish singer and comedian Harry Lauder dined with the committee of the London Burns Club in the company of Lord Balfour of Burleigh and Ian MacPherson (Under Secretary of State for War). Launching into a patriotic plea, the comedian proclaimed himself ‘a fierce critic of those pacifists who were prepared to take the bloodstained hands of the Germans and treat them as brothers’.46 Amidst the applause of his distinguished audience, Lauder concluded his remarks with renditions of ‘God Save the King’ and ‘Auld Lang Syne’.47 Like many of his compatriots, Lauder did not see any contradictions between his jingoistic speech and Burns’s universal ode to friendship. Love, humanity, and brotherhood only applied to the side of civilisation and humanity – from which ‘Huns’ and ‘shirkers’ were jointly excluded. This approach was further epitomised in January 1917 by the 72-year-old Rev. Donald MacMillan, committee member of the General Assembly of the Kirk, who addressed the Glasgow Burns Association in St George’s Parish Church.48 In his speech, which was subsequently printed, MacMillan described Burns as the voice of ‘Nationality’, ‘Liberty’, ‘Humanity’ and ‘Progress’ – ‘the great principles of history . . . on [which] behalf the British Empire marshalled its

8053_Malgrati.indd 43

06/03/23 10:55 am

44   Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics

forces’.49 In the name of both ‘A Man’s a Man’, the hymn of civilised brotherhood, and ‘Scots wha hae’, ‘the greatest war ode of the world’, MacMillan invoked ‘the clarion notes of our great poet calling us to arms’. Victory was necessary to preserve mankind from the ‘Prussian hordes’ – harbingers of a new ‘Barbarous Age’ – and from conditions of living similar to the ‘darkest parts of Africa’.50 The purpose of the Great War, in other words, concurred with the bard’s universalist message. This was a conflict of civilisation, in which the frontiers of humanity stopped at the trench line. In the face of such a hegemonic view of Burns, promoted simultaneously by army recruiters, politicians, Burns clubs, popular comedians, mainstream newspapers, literary scholars and Kirk ministers, things were not easy for Scottish radicals and anti-war socialists, whose pacifist campaigns and heterodox views on Burns drew accusations of treachery. Their situation was especially complicated in the first half of the war, as revealed by the 1915 pamphlet, Burns: Poet of Peace and War by Dundee-based Forward writer David Lowe.51 Unusually defensive and moderate given its socialist author, this twenty-page booklet tried to appeal beyond ILP circles. Lowe insisted that ‘Burns was the poet of no class’ and that he could draw admiration from both ‘poverty-stricken or multi-millionaire’ readers.52 Having said that, the pamphleteer went on to make the case for a pacifist vision of Burns by quoting the poet’s 1790 lines: I MURDER hate by field or flood, Tho’ glory’s name may screen us; In wars at home I’ll spend my blood, Life-giving wars of Venus: The deities that I adore Are social Peace and Plenty; I’m better pleas’d to make one more, Than be the death of twenty.53

Rather surprisingly, however, Lowe acknowledged the weakness of his own argument when mentioning ‘Does haughty Gaul’. Indeed, he regretted that ‘Burns had failed as a complete Christian . . . after joining the Dumfries Volunteers’ – an act which led him to ‘compose a set of verses utterly unlike the poet of compassion and significant of the war’s demoralising influence’.54 Such a despondent

8053_Malgrati.indd 44

06/03/23 10:55 am



Burns Enters the Twentieth Century    45

tone was characteristic of the minority position of the ILP in late 1915, at a time when popular support for the war remained high and the government even indulged in censoring the party’s journal, Forward.55 The following year, however, the wave of anger and strikes which followed both the Military Service Act and the bloodbath of the Somme returned radicals to the national stage.56 This context encouraged the production of an updated, combative portrait of Burns by a certain John S. Clarke – socialist poet, lion tamer and conscientious objector on the run. Clarke’s Story of Robert Burns, published by the Clyde-based Scottish Worker’s Committee in 1917, was a revolutionary hagiography of the bard.57 Aiming to ‘rescue Burns, a worthy proletarian personality’ from ‘philistinism’ and state propaganda, it narrated the poet’s life through five evocative chapters: ‘The Proletarian’, ‘The Freethinker’, ‘Class Conscious’, ‘The Antimilitarist’ and ‘The Internationalist Rebel’.58 In these, Clarke denounced the ‘ruling class’ for printing a ‘frivolous’ recruiting poster of Burns in 1915, affirming, by contrast, that Burns, ‘if he had been living at this hour, [..] would have occupied a cell in Wormwood Scrubs’ as a conscientious objector.59 On this note, the pamphleteer also tackled the myth of the ‘Dumfries Volunteers’, claiming that it was Burns’s destitute and repressed situation which had forced him into enlistment.60 Loyalism, concluded Clarke, was not in the bard’s nature; the poet could only have committed to a ‘war waged by a people against their own oppressors’. Instead, in 1917, he would certainly have put ‘his virile brain’ to the service of ‘Ireland, Egypt, India and South Africa suffering under the heel [of the ruling class]’.61 Such words would be echoed at the end of the year when Forward reported that Burns’s ‘sansculottian revolutionary fervour’ had swept Bolshevik Russia.62 By enhancing the pre-war, social-democratic vision of Burns with a more revolutionary, anti-militarist twist, Clarke’s Story inspired a new generation of radical activists. The pamphlet found a vast readership, not just in Scotland but across the international Labour movement. Reprinted in 1920 in Glasgow, it travelled as far as the United States and Australasia where, according to Dougal McNeil, it became a significant reference for local socialists.63 This is evident, for instance, in the writings of Harry Holland, the post-war leader

8053_Malgrati.indd 45

06/03/23 10:55 am

46   Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics

of Australia’s Labour Party. In his 1922 poem, ‘One Big Union’, Holland built on Clarke’s pacifist criticism: One Mighty Union vile race-hatred spurns, Seeing the vision of bold Bobby Burns; Cannons all silent and war-flags all furled; Nations one great brotherhood all over the world.64

Holland would substantiate this view a few years later in his unfinished biography, Robert Burns: Poet and Revolutionist – a study which drew extensively on Clarke’s Story.65 Just like his Clydeside comrade, Holland thought Burns’s ‘world-stirring’ yet ‘realist’ voice could survive the shock of a war that had destroyed many romantic illusions.66 Burns, the poet who ‘learn[t] in suffering what he teaches in song’ remained a relevant model for twentieth-century socialism.67 Although radical views of Burns gained ground overseas, conservative Burnsians, held their own back in Britain in the wake of Armistice on 11 November 1918. Duncan McNaught, Conservative president of the Burns Federation, prefaced the 1919 Burns Chronicle with a victorious cry, ‘the trying period of heroic effort to thrust back the savage hordes which threatened the liberty of the world is an accomplished fact’.68 Time had now come to resume the ‘wonted activities’ of the Federation and consolidate a vision of Burns which could tighten the links between Scotland and Empire throughout post-war years. This was certainly the mission chosen by McNaught’s Conservative friend, William Will, president of the London Burns Club, who had just published a well-documented study on Burns’s commitment to the Dumfries Volunteers.69 Based on the Volunteers’ newly discovered minute book, Will’s study aimed to prove that the bard’s enlistment was not ‘a mere piece of hypocrisy meant to deceive or placate his superiors in the Excise’.70 The author provided many instances of Burns’s sustained assiduity in his local regiment and confidently concluded that the bard had become a volunteer ‘because he was opposed to the turbulent crowd who would have “set the mob aboon the throne” and wished to do his part in preventing social disorder’.71 Burns the volunteer was heavily toasted in the year that followed Victory. This was particularly true in the Empire’s capital, where Will’s local London Burns Club celebrated its Jubilee on Burns Night

8053_Malgrati.indd 46

06/03/23 10:55 am



Burns Enters the Twentieth Century    47

1919.72 The choice of the word ‘Jubilee’, which recalled both Queen Victoria’s 1887 birthday and Shakespeare’s 1769 festival, highlighted the unionist tone of the event – marked by a pre-haggis ‘Toast to the British Imperial Forces’ from Lord Morris, a former Canadian member of the Imperial War Cabinet. Morris congratulated the ‘Scottish race’ for its ‘very important part’ in ‘our Empire, especially in relation to the Imperial Forces, who have won and hold that great Empire of which we are the inheritors to-day’.73 After quoting Tennyson’s ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ (1854), the Canadian speaker went on to praise the ‘splendid patriotic feelings’ of ‘Scots wha hae’, which ‘must inspire the breasts and hearts and minds of a Scotsman as he marches to battle’. Morris’s sentiments were seconded, a few moments later, by General Ian Hamilton, commander of the Gallipoli campaign in 1915, who commended Will’s book on the Dumfries Volunteers and recalled the ‘exceeding great valour’ of his Scottish troops at the sound of ‘Scots wha hae’.74 ‘Speaking for myself’, concluded the General, ‘when I drain my own glass I shall be thinking most of Burns, the voluntary soldier’. However, that same evening, in the midst of the loud victorious cheers, Lieutenant-Colonel John Buchan, the celebrated novelist and unionist politician who had been Director of Information during the last two years of the war, raised concerns of a new kind. Buchan warned that Burns’s language, the Scots tongue, whilst adorning many warlike speeches, was in danger of extinction amongst newer generations. The ‘Scottish race’, of which Lord Morris had so eloquently spoken, ‘could not afford to lose its peculiar speech . . . a great and true language, akin to English but different from it’.75 ‘If we are to remain what we are’, Buchan insisted, ‘I should like to see good Scots used in every school – and I should like to see every candidate for Parliament heckled in Doric’. Buchan’s plea produced an immediate reaction. Within a few months, London Burnsians decided to create a ‘Vernacular Circle’ to ‘preserve the language of Lowland Scotland, in which the most important work of Robert Burns is enshrined’. 76 The Circle, founded in the spring of 1920, began its activities with a series of conferences on the Scots Language, inaugurated by Professor William Alexander Craigie in January 1921.77 Certainly, neither in the spirit of its originator, John Buchan, nor in the spirit of its chairman, William Will, did the Vernacular Circle have any Scottish nationalist connotations,

8053_Malgrati.indd 47

06/03/23 10:55 am

48   Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics

at least in the political sense of the term. The Burns Federation was merely holding to its unionist-nationalist creed, and its cultural activism served to compensate for Scotland’s military commitment to Britain. Nobody, then, could have imagined that the revival of Scotland’s vernacular speech would ignite Scottish cultural politics for decades to come. A closer look at Scottish radical fringes, however, could have alerted London Burnsians to the minefield of language activism. In 1919, the radical portion of the Scottish Home Rule movement, inspired by Irish separatism, had decided to create the monthly newspaper Liberty to spread pro-independence and Gaelic revivalist ideas. The journal dismissed Burns clubs for complicity in the jingoistic projection of the bard and advocated a much deeper kind of linguistic renewal. Moreover, it invoked a socialist and ethnic type of nationalism that connected Burns with the ‘Celtic soul’ of Scotland – immune to ‘Anglo-Saxon’ militarism.78 To counter the ‘oratorical adulatory excesses’ of unionist ‘Burns supperers’, Liberty declared that the bard ‘would have made pungent remarks about the Highlands being turned into a happy hunting ground for American porkkings, Cockney profiteers, and foreign “kilties”’.79 Burns, the journal asserted, would have rallied to Highland crofters – ‘Scotland’s “hardy sons of rustic toil”’ – ‘who for nearly a century have demanded land on which to rear their families in health and plenty’. Further still, Erskine of Marr, co-editor of Liberty, wrote that Burns suppers were but ‘a mere occasion of whisky and haggis’ and that Scotland’s national poet would be better associated with the ‘themes and rhythm’ of the eighteenth-century Gaelic poet Duncan Ban Macintyre.80 Only this Celtic turn in the reading of Burns might make Scottish people understand the poet’s ‘political passion’, which was ‘to be found in the noble conception of a Scotland free and independent of all foreign control’. Such rhetoric introduced an important novelty to Scottish language politics: Burns’s tongue, whether Scots or inwardly Celtic, was deeply political and expressed not only the ‘soul’ of Scotland’s past, but also the country’s future aspirations.81 In the light of the Scottish vernacular movement, heralded at the same time by the Burns Federation, Erskine’s statement sounded a stark warning: there could be no neutral or balanced linguistic revival in a stateless country whose fading language was one of its few remaining markers of national

8053_Malgrati.indd 48

06/03/23 10:55 am



Burns Enters the Twentieth Century    49

identity. If Burns’s tongue was still to be understood, the country of his birth required a new storyline, one significantly different from jingoistic Union Jack waving. More broadly and despite masculinist undertones, Liberty’s approach to Burns was reminiscent of the Suffragettes’ 1914 act of iconoclasm. Similarly to Frances Parker and Ethel Moorhead, who had targeted Burns’s heritage to claim his egalitarian legacy, the nationalist paper defended a radically Scottish approach to the bard whilst attacking the staple of his afterlife, the Burns supper, as an anglicised, bourgeois feast. This kind of argument could also be read, around the same time in the ILP’s journal Forward, which attacked middle-class Burnsians who ‘fill[ed] themselves up with haggis and whisky’ before ‘going home to plot how they [could] reduce colliers’ wages’.82 Admittedly, the ILP’s focus on class power, whilst accommodating moderate demands for Scottish Home Rule, contrasted with Liberty’s ethnic separatism. Yet both critics of the established Burns movement seemed rooted in a broader reaction against British militarism as deployed during the Great War. By challenging Scotland’s social and constitutional order, the new wave of Burnsian radicals turned the poet’s fiery tongue against his own red-coated reputation.

Notes  1. Daily Record, 9 July 1914.   2. Figures given in The Scotsman, 9 July 1914.  3. Glasgow Herald, 9 July 1914.  4. Leneman, A Guid Cause, p. 268. The story of Parker and Moorhead’s attempt has attracted much attention in recent years. See, for instance, Shaw ‘The Suffragettes and Robert Burns’, as well as Murphy, ‘A Great Weyahaerin’, pp. 95–119.  5. Glasgow Herald, 9 July 1914.   6. Crawfurd, ‘Autobiography’.  7. Ibid.  8. Ibid.   9. Ibid. See also ‘The Rights of Woman – Spoken by Miss Fontenelle on her benefit night (1792)’ in P2, ll. 1–6, p. 623. 10. Forward, 18 July 1914. This journal stopped publication in 1960. 11. Ibid. 12. Ibid.

8053_Malgrati.indd 49

06/03/23 10:55 am

50   Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics 13. Stewart, J. Keir Hardie, p. 14. 14. Stewart, Burns and the Common People. 15. Ibid. p. 64. 16. Ibid. p. 53. 17. Kenefick, Red Scotland!, p. 123; Forward, 26 January 1914. 18. Glasgow Herald, 9 July 1914; Daily Record, 9 July 1914; The Scotsman, 9 July 1914. 19. Daily Record, 9 July 1914. 20. Daily Record, 14 July 1914. 21. Details of her mistreatment can be found in Pakrer’s criminal record: National Record of Scotland, HH16/43. 22. On radical misattributions of 1790s poems to Burns, see, for instance, Paton, ‘Why Should We Idly Waste our Prime’, BC (Kilmarnock: Burns Federation, Winter 2002), pp. 2–13 and Andrews, ‘Radical Attribution’, pp. 174–90. On puritanical attempts to bowdlerise Burns’s licentious verse, see Mackay, ‘“Low, tame, and loathsome ribaldry”’, pp. 433–48. 23. Whatley, Immortal Memory, p. 124. 24. Ibid. p. 130. 25. Glasgow Herald, 8 September 1914, quoted in Goldie, ‘Robert Burns and the First World War’, p. 7. 26. See Goldie, ‘Robert Burns and the First World War’, pp. 1–20 and Goldie, ‘Shades of Bruce: Independence and Union in First World War Scottish Literature’, in Plain (ed.), Scotland and the First World War, p. 217. 27. Goldie, ‘Shades of Bruce’, p. 217. 28. Goldie, ‘Shades of Bruce’, p. 217; Crawford, ‘Bannockburn after Baston’, in Plain (ed.), Scotland and the First World War, p. 110; Daily Record, 25 January 1915. 29. Plain (ed.), Scotland and the First World War. p. xiv. 30. Ibid. 31. Burns’s poem ‘Extempore’ is reproduced as it appears on the poster. 32. ‘Minutes of the 1915 Meeting of the Burns Federation’, BC 25, 1916, pp. 154–­5. 33. The Scotsman, 26 January 1915; BC 25, 1916, p. 137. 34. BC 25, 1916, p. 47. 35. Ker, Collected Essays, p. vi. 36. Speech reprinted in Ker, Collected Essays, p. 128. 37. Ker, Collected Essays, p. 130. This quote from Walter Scott was reported by Currie, The Life of Robert Burns, p. 143. 38. Ibid. pp. 139–40. 39. Ibid., p. 141.

8053_Malgrati.indd 50

06/03/23 10:55 am



Burns Enters the Twentieth Century    51

40. Ibid., p. 146. 41. Ker, Two Essays. 42. Mentioned in Kenefick, Red Scotland, pp. 133–50. 43. ‘A new double stanza to Scots wha hae’, People’s Journal, 22 January 1916. 44. By Thomas Anderson, Coatbridge, People’s Journal, 22 January 1916. 45. BC 27, 1918, p. 126. 46. BC 28, 1919, p. 112. 47. Ibid. 48. Macmillan, Burns and the War, pp. 3, 8. About Macmillan, see Scott, Fasti Ecclesiae Scoticanae, Vol. 3, p. 419. 49. Macmillan, Burns and the War, p. 7. 50. Ibid. pp. 7–8. 51. Lowe, Burns: Poet of Peace and War. 52. Ibid. p. 9. 53. Ibid. p. 12. 54. Ibid. p. 15. 55. Kenefick, Red Scotland, pp. 134–8; Goldie, ‘Robert Burns and the First World War’, p. 11. 56. Kenefick, Red Scotland, p. 155. 57. Challinor, John S. Clarke. 58. Clarke, The Story of Robert Burns, pp. 2, 16. 59. Ibid. pp. 11–13. 60. Ibid. pp. 14–15. 61. Ibid. p. 13. 62. Forward, 19 January 1918. 63. McNeil, ‘Bobby Burns and the Wallaby’, pp. 19–40; Holland, Robert Burns. 64. Published in Industrialist, 18 May 1922, and quoted in McNeil, ‘Labouring Feeling’, p. 7. 65. See Holland, Robert Burns, pp. 58, 73, 98, 104. 66. Quoted in McNeil, ‘Labouring Feeling’, pp. 4–5. 67. Ibid. 68. BC 28, 1919, p. 2. 69. Will, Burns as a Volunteer. This study was also reprinted in BC 29, 1920, pp. 5–31. 70. BC 29, 1920, p. 7. 71. Ibid. p. 14. 72. BC 29, 1920, p. 43. 73. Ibid. p. 48. 74. Ibid. p. 59. 75. Ibid. p. 64.

8053_Malgrati.indd 51

06/03/23 10:55 am

52   Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics 76. Minutes of the London Robert Burns Club, 7 June 1920, GML, Special Collections. 77. Ibid. and BC 30, 1921, p. 125. 78. Finlay, Independent and Free, p. 39. 79. Liberty, February 1920. 80. Liberty, February 1921. 81. Ibid. 82. Forward, 4 February 1922.

8053_Malgrati.indd 52

06/03/23 10:55 am

Chapter 2

Renaissance, Iconoclasm and Burnsian Reformation (1920–1930)

In Scotland’s heated post-war context, opposing jingoists and pacifists, conservatives and revolutionaries, mainstream unionists and marginal separatists, a thirty-year-old Montrose-based poet had recently returned from Thessaloniki, on the Salonica front. Though not yet as harsh as the left-wing journal Forward, which often lambasted bourgeois Burnsians, nor as nationalist as the journalists of Liberty, and certainly not as conservative as the committee of the London Burns Club, Christopher Murray Grieve, soon to be known as Hugh MacDiarmid, was both a left-wing home ruler and a hopeful member of the Burns Federation. These conflicting allegiances led Grieve to take an altogether singular position. A lot has already been written about MacDiarmid’s complicated relationship with the eighteenth-century bard.1 Certainly, it is worth studying Grieve’s work to understand how he shaped the critical, modernist version of Burns which remains influential even today. Nevertheless, and despite clear egotistical tendencies, Grieve’s verse did not appear in a vacuum. His reading of Burns was inspired by the broader ideological debate about the poet, burning since the nineteenth century and exacerbated by the First World War. Moreover, Grieve’s views were enhanced by several of his contemporaries, including John Buchan, William Power, Edwin Muir, Lewis Spence and Neil Gunn, whose writings about Burns have scarcely been discussed. Indeed, such intertextuality is also key to grasping Catherine Carswell’s seminal Life of Robert Burns (1930) – a controversial milestone in Scottish literary criticism which owed much to the context of post-war literary politics. The present chapter unravels those

8053_Malgrati.indd 53

06/03/23 10:55 am

54   Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics

various Burnsians links, providing a new political reading of the 1920s Scottish ‘Renaissance’ movement. The reason for Grieve’s first involvement in the affairs of the Burns Federation is a little disconcerting, in hindsight, for anyone acquainted with the poet’s later works. Indeed, in December 1921, his reaction to the creation of the London Burns Club’s Vernacular Circle, which aimed to preserve the Scottish tongue, was one of furious acrimony. In the Aberdeen Free Press, he rushed to denounce what he termed the ‘infantilism’, ‘sentimentalism’ and ‘insuperable spiritual limitations’ of the Federation’s project.2 Like his pre-war hero, Keir Hardie, who used his best English to spread Burns’s radical message across Britain, Grieve refused to waste time on a ‘dying language’ which the bard himself had shunned to assert that ‘man [was] a man for a’ that’.3 Moreover, as explained in Gregory Smith’s contemporary book Scottish literature (1919), Grieve knew that the unity of Scottish literature was not defined in terms of Doric or Gaelic, but by a common set of intellectual paradoxes.4 These considerations, in the eyes of the young poet, revealed the naiveté of Scots revivalism. Yet half a year later, in the summer of 1922, Grieve had completely changed his tune. Several commentators have tried to explain this transformation. As Alan Bold first suggested, Grieve may have been influenced by his respected friend Lewis Spence, a folklorist and Scottish nationalist, who, in February 1922, had revived sixteenth-century Middle Scots in two original poems sent to the Edinburgh Evening Review.5 But it was more than friendly emulation that so deeply affected Grieve’s development as a poet. Instead, as demonstrated by Crawford, the hopes he placed in a modernist reform of the Burns Federation had greatly contributed towards his change of mind.6 Although opposed to any Doric revival, Grieve was a committed member of the Montrose Burns Club, which sent him as delegate to the annual conference of the Burns Federation in September 1922. There, in Birmingham, where he was praised for his work as the editor of Northern Numbers and The Scottish Chapbook (launched in 1920 and August 1922 respectively), the young poet delivered a well-received speech in which he called on the Federation to follow the spirit of ‘A Man’s a Man’ and focus ‘on the solution of the great social problems of humanity’.7 Grieve was exhilarated by the acclamations of the Burnsians and returned to Montrose thinking the cultural revivalism of the Federation presented an opportunity

8053_Malgrati.indd 54

06/03/23 10:55 am

Renaissance, Iconoclasm and Burnsian Reformation   55



to fulfil his avant-gardist project. The re-election of the Conservative Duncan McNaught as President notwithstanding, the enthusiastic poet immediately wrote in his Scottish Chapbook that the ‘time ha[d] come for a drastic reorientation of the Burns movement’ and that ‘the struggle [was] real between those whose allegiance [was] to the letter of Burnsiana; and those who [were] filled with the spirit of Burns’.8 Dividing the Federation between its conservative and what he perceived as its modernising elements, the Montrosian announced an important reform of the Burns movement aiming to realise ‘the whole social and political program’ put forward by Scotland’s bard in his more revolutionary poems. Grieve understood socialist and nationalist critiques of the Burns movement, but at this stage he resolved to harness the Federation from within for avant-gardist purposes. In other words, a kind of radical entryism provided an option for the young poet. Grieve was convinced that the official Burns movement could be reformed. Forgetting his recent declarations, he swiftly identified the Vernacular Circle as the most innovative organ of the Federation. In October he proudly described his Scottish Chapbook as a ‘supplement [to] the campaign of the Vernacular Circle for the revival of the Doric’ and praised its ‘indefatigable secretary’ William Will, in spite of his recent pamphlet on Burns the volunteer..9 Simultaneously, Grieve wrote his first two poems in Scots, ‘The Watergaw’ and the ‘The Blaward and the Skelly’; the latter was, according to Bold, ‘virtually a redaction of the first song Burns is known for having written, “My Handsome Nell”’.10 Printed in the Scottish Chapbook, they appeared under a strange signature with Celtic connotations. In the rebellious alcoves of the Burns Federation, Hugh MacDiarmid was born. This ‘birth’ was celebrated in January 1923 with a special Burns issue of the Scottish Chapbook in which MacDiarmid called once again for the reform of the Federation. Denouncing the inferior followers of the bard who had made ‘Burns the curse of Scottish verse’, Grieve-MacDiarmid declared that: Hope resides in the fact that never has the intolerable unreality of the Burns cult – the process of syncretism whereby Burns has been identified with tendencies the very reverse of those with which he would have ever identified himself – been more acutely realised by a potentially effective proportion of its victims.11

8053_Malgrati.indd 55

06/03/23 10:55 am

56   Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics

These lines were followed by a series of Burns-related poems. Amongst them was a piece by the female poet, Jessie Annie Anderson, whose ‘Burns in Edinburgh’ echoed MacDiarmid’s politics, and who presented Burns as ‘the true Prometheus of our land’ who ‘reform[ed] Reformation’ and sang ‘the dignities of Labour’ despite the failures of his own nation, Scotland, which ‘loved his praise’ but ‘did him wrong’.12 Finally, MacDiarmid’s Chapbook climaxed with a leftist sonnet in honour of the Conservative Duncan McNaught. This piece was characteristic of MacDiarmid’s unusual position in the postwar debate on Burns. Whilst congratulating the old President of the Burns Federation ‘who hath established / a means to realise Burns’ noblest dream’, the poet conjured a ‘Burns international! The mighty cry / Prophetic of eventual brotherhood’ and finished with a quotation of ‘A Man’s a Man’.13 Under the poem was a summary of MacDiarmid’s intentions: ‘McNaught’s life-work has been to create the necessary machinery [the Federation]. His successor must be a man capable of employing that machinery to consummate the great ideals associated with the name of Burns’. Unfortunately for MacDiarmid, there were many in the Federation who refused to associate Burns’s ‘great ideals’ with socialism and literary avant-gardism. Disappointment loomed for MacDiarmid. It began in February 1923 when he gave a polemical lecture to the Vernacular Circle of London, criticising Burnsians’ conventionalism for ‘retaining the braid Scots in a kailyaird’.14 This reference to the late nineteenthcentury Kailyard School of Scottish fiction, famous for its idealistic depictions of Scotland’s rural life, was meant to act as an intellectual repellent. Summoning the Vernacular Circle to dismiss sentimentalised visions of the past, the poet ended the lecture by asserting his belief in ‘the possibility of a great Scottish literary renaissance’ based on a bolder approach to the Scots language. MacDiarmid’s critique of the traditional side of the Vernacular Circle, which was not as progressive as he had first thought, received bitter comments. The report of Grieve’s talk, printed in the 1924 issue of the Burns Chronicle, sternly concludes: ‘the lecture provoked greater criticism than any other lecture delivered to the Circle’.15 Just six months after his success at the Birmingham conference of September 1922, this was a hard blow for the Montrose poet. His disappointment soon turned to bitterness as he came to realise his intellectual isolation both inside and outside the Burns Federation.

8053_Malgrati.indd 56

06/03/23 10:55 am

Renaissance, Iconoclasm and Burnsian Reformation   57



Beyond the literary sphere, the partisan battle over Burns’s legacy, rejecting any compromise between conservatism and socialism, served to exacerbate MacDiarmid’s seclusion. In the elections of 1922 and 1923 – despite Conservative victories across the UK – the Labour Movement emerged as the largest party in Scotland on each occasion. Amongst the country’s new left-wing MPs were many cadres of the ILP: James Maxton, leader of the party; Thomas Johnston, editor of Forward; David Kirkwood and George Buchanan, prominent Clydesiders; and the Rev. James Barr, a United-Free Church socialist and home ruler made famous by his pacifist commitment during the war. Most of them admired the bard’s egalitarian image, as expressed a few years earlier by William Stewart and John S. Clarke.16 Inspired by Burns’s patriotism, they had also placed Home Rule at the heart of their programme. In January 1924, a few days after the formation of Ramsay MacDonald’s first government, George Buchanan introduced a Home Rule bill in the House of Commons. Momentum seemed to be behind him. One week before the second reading, in early May 1924, a rally for selfdetermination took place in Glasgow’s St Andrews Hall, where ILP MPs were hailed to the sound of ‘Scots wha hae’.17 Many thought the final act had come when, on 9 May, George Buchanan returned to Westminster and read his bill for the second time. His patriotic plea was seconded by Tom Johnston who invoked Burns’s 1787 letter to Dr Moore, declaring that ‘the story of Wallace [had] poured a tide of Scottish prejudice into [the poet’s] veins’.18 This was not enough, however, to convince fellow Labour MPs, many of whom disapproved of the ILP’s line. Despite David Kirkwood and James Maxton’s protestations, the closure of the debate was refused, and the bill was finally talked out.19 The propagandist effort of the ILP did not cease, however. In January 1925 John S. Clarke, now a Glasgow councillor, compacted several Burns-related articles and published two new pamphlets depicting the bard in positive terms as an ‘extremist’ and a social reformer.20 Clarke declared: If you would honour the memory of Scotland’s magnanimous poetreformer, then pay tribute of service to the good work he attempted to do alone – WORK and VOTE for the SUCCESS of LABOUR at the coming election.21

8053_Malgrati.indd 57

06/03/23 10:55 am

58   Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics

Clarke also tackled the conservatism of the Burns Federation. Against the ex-President of the Federation Duncan McNaught, who, in a 1914 article, had countered left-wing representations of Burns’s ‘honest poverty’ by showing that in 1795 Burns earned more than twice the income of a parish schoolmaster, Clarke retorted that such a ‘statistician’ exercise was beside the point.22 What mattered was that such a ‘genius’ had been forced by necessity to become an exciseman whilst ‘the Parliament was voting an additional £65,000 per head to this debauchee [the Prince of Wales] for his wedding’.23 Invoking Burns’s republican legacy, Clarke concluded that: If the study of Burns has not taught Dr. McNaught that worth and merit ought to come before mere blood that ‘has crept through scoundrels ever since the flood’ then the teaching of the poet has been lost on him.24

Such a stinging comment against the ex-President of the Burns Federation, – praised two years before in MacDiarmid’s Chapbook – did not go unnoticed. In the 1925 Burns Chronicle, McNaught answered Clarke and the ‘the huge army of open-air preachers of social reform’ whose intention was ‘to represent Burns as the outstanding Extremist of his generation’.25 Against them, McNaught asserted that Burns’s works ‘[would] be searched in vain for a single line that expresse[d] the slightest sympathy with the doctrines of Bolshevism, Communism, and Socialism’.26 Indeed, the bard’s true political creed ‘w[ould] be found in “Does haughty Gaul”, a composition which effectually dispose[d] of the mythical tradition that [Burns] was a disloyal subject and a Revolutionist’.27 Remembering the 1915 lessons of Professor Ker, McNaught added that Burns was a partisan of William Pitt, for ‘both were representatives of the genius of the nation which has always guarded against the volcanic eruptions of revolution by the safety valve of Constitutional reform’.28 McNaught’s point was clear: seven years after the war, the character praised by the Burns Federation was still a British volunteer more aligned with Stanley Baldwin’s new Tory Government than with the opposition party. Nor was Burns to be viewed as overly radical or nationalist in his use of language. With the Home Rule bill of 1924 still fresh in the memory, Sir Robert Bruce, the new president of the Federation, insisted, in a speech given to the Greenock Burns Club on 23 January 1925,

8053_Malgrati.indd 58

06/03/23 10:55 am



Renaissance, Iconoclasm and Burnsian Reformation   59

that ‘just as local patriotism [could] subsist within national patriotism and strengthen the foundation of the latter, so [could] the vernacular exist and enrich the common language of English-speaking peoples’.29 Unlike Scottish patriots in the ILP, the Federation and its Vernacular circle would not risk disturbing Britain’s constitution. Such ideological contention thwarted MacDiarmid’s wish to find a compromise between established Burnsian circles and his avantgardist aspirations. Marginalised within the Burns Federation as a radical firebrand, the ILP councillor from Montrose was also estranged within the wider Labour movement which ignored, if not resented, the Scottish revivalist impulse.30 John Smith Clarke, for instance, opposed Scots language activism. In Forward, he wrote, ‘If the movement towards a standard universal language is progressive – even if that language is to be English, then the attempt to preserve a decaying language [Scots], which is hopelessly corrupted is obviously reactionary’.31 In this hostile climate, MacDiarmid could nonetheless count on the encouragement of a few open-minded writers supportive of his reformist project. In October 1924, for instance, the Conservative poet John Buchan included Grieve’s 1922 poem ‘The Bonnie Broukit Bairn’ in his revered collection of Scots poetry The Northern Muse.32 Like MacDiarmid, Buchan’s views on the Vernacular Circle had grown more pessimistic since the London Burns Club Jubilee of 1919. He explained in his introduction that Scottish literature was doomed by a ‘vile sixpenny planet’ whose ‘baneful influence’ condemned any linguistic revival attempt to ‘pastiche’ and ‘sentimentalism’.33 Nonetheless, the negativity of Buchan’s forewords was compensated by the rest of his book. Whilst dismissing the possibility of a Doric revival, The Northern Muse encapsulated five hundred years of Scottish poetry and provided the few modern poets it included (Violet Jacob, Joseph Lee and MacDiarmid) with both a status and a stately heritage. The message was of importance for MacDiarmid. For the first time, a renowned author agreed with him in condemning kailyard ‘sentimentalism’ which had tinged Scottish poetry since Burns’s death. Although MacDiarmid’s buoyant views differed from Buchan’s gloomy vision for the future of the Scots language, the publication of the ‘Bonnie Broukit Bairn’ in The Northern Muse could be seen, by the Montrose poet, as a blessing for his literary endeavour.

8053_Malgrati.indd 59

06/03/23 10:55 am

60   Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics

Around the same time, MacDiarmid’s approach to Burns found further echo in the writings of Edwin Muir. In 1924, the young Orcadian had just returned from a two-year European journey and published his first collection of essays, Latitudes. The opening section offered a literary re-assessment of Burns.34 In this, Muir criticised traditional interpretations of Burns’s life, which ‘always have a touch of cant [sic] in them, something morally or socially superior’. By contrast, the young writer departed from mawkishness and interpreted Burns’s story as that of a ‘failed ladder climber’ who had been forced to return to his native Ayrshire after his ephemeral success in Edinburgh.35 This bewildering experience, Muir claimed, had affected the quality of Burns’s poetry, which was torn between the ‘worst’ sentimental pieces, such as ‘To Mary in Heaven’ or ‘Man Was Made to Mourn’, and the brilliance of ‘The Jolly Beggars’, in which Burns ‘indulged the flesh more riotously than any poet has done since’.36 Muir’s heterodox essay, which pointed out Burns’s failures and deprecated some of his most revered verses, mirrored MacDiarmid’s condemnation of Burnsian idolatry. In 1925, the intellectual proximity between both of these poets, which grew closer when the Orcadian stayed in Montrose in October of the same year, was celebrated in ‘The Farmer’s Death’, a poem dedicated to Muir in MacDiarmid’s first collection of Scots poetry, Sangschaw.37 This book was also prefaced by John Buchan, who praised its author’s ‘conservative and radical’ use of Scots.38 Like Burns, Buchan explained that MacDiarmid ‘borrow[ed] words and idioms from the old masters’ whilst treating Scottish vernacular ‘as a living language’. Simultaneously ‘conservative and radical’ was a fitting description indeed. In Sangschaw, a few pages before ‘The Farmer’s Death’, MacDiarmid’s lengthy poem the ‘Ballad of the Five Senses’ was dedicated ‘To Sir Robert Bruce, President of the Burns Federation, in appreciation of his efforts to foster a Scottish Literary Revival’. Straddling two worlds, the ILP councillor of Montrose still had to choose between his allegiance to the Burns Federation and his yearning for modernity and radicalism. A few months later, in early 1926, the publication of William Power’s Robert Burns and Other Essays and Sketches would afford new support for MacDiarmid’s reforming views.39 Like MacDiarmid, Power was an enthusiastic member of the Vernacular Circle of London, who nevertheless opposed the conservativism of the Burns

8053_Malgrati.indd 60

06/03/23 10:55 am



Renaissance, Iconoclasm and Burnsian Reformation   61

Federation. In Robert Burns, Power opens his study of the bard’s work and legacy with a damning depiction of the political constitution of the Burns movement: ‘the average Burns club’, he writes, ‘is solidly middle-class in composition and sentiment, and a proposer of “The Immortal Memory” would be reasonably safe in combining his laudation of Burns with a denunciation of Socialist doctrines’.40 Burnsian conservatism, according to the author, went hand in hand with a pernickety interest in obscure details of the poet’s life. This was unpalatable for Power, who denounced the ‘wrangling bench of poets, critics, ministers, doctors, judges, peers, M.P.’s, bailies, journalists, scribes and Pharisees, publicans and sinners, and deadheads and “buddies” and axe-grinders of all sorts’, who, ‘for nearly a century’ had been tearing the bard’s ‘poor corpse to pieces afresh at every Burns supper’.41 This ‘Pharisee-like’ behaviour reminded Power of Burns’s early poem, ‘John Barleycorn: A Ballad’ (1782): They wasted, o’er a scorching flame, The marrow of his bones; But a Miller us’d him worst of all, For he crush’d him between two stones.42

Power proposed to tackle such idolatry by broadening the spectrum of Burns studies and by comparing the bard’s poetry to both the verses of Scottish medieval Makars like William Dunbar and the themes of European poets, including Pierre de Ronsard and Heinrich Heine.43 This critical turn, the author concluded, could revitalise Burns criticism through exploration of the European roots of Scottish poetry. Interestingly, Power’s reformist thoughts were reflected, the same year, in his religious and intellectual commitment to the editorial board of the Scots Observer, the common platform of the reformed Scottish churches.44 This weekly newspaper, which heralded the reunification of the Kirk in 1929, became a vocal supporter of MacDiarmid’s Scottish Renaissance. Amidst the growing political tension in Scotland, which left it increasingly difficult for a socialist to dine together with dinnerjacketed bardolaters, MacDiarmid’s rising reputation amongst Scottish literati encouraged him to sever his ties with the Burns Federation. One month after the General Strike of May 1926, the Montrose poet published his second book of Scots poetry; the title,

8053_Malgrati.indd 61

06/03/23 10:55 am

62   Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics

Penny Wheep, was taken from Burns’s depiction of ‘small ale’ in his poem ‘The Holy Fair’. This new volume shunned any association with the Burnsian establishment. On the dust jacket of the first edition, a blurb (arguably written by Grieve himself) declares: ‘Mr M’Diarmid is one of the very few genuine poets who have used the medium of the Scots doric within the last 130 years . . . In doing so he has revivified the body of Scots poetry and put a spark of hope into its almost moribund heart’. These bold few lines, which indirectly dismissed the rest of contemporary Scottish poetry for its lack of authenticity, seemed to place MacDiarmid in direct line of descent from Burns, who had died 130 years earlier. This impression is strengthened by the last poem of Penny Wheep, ‘Your Immortal Memory, Burns!’ – a ferocious address to the bard which first appeared in the January 1923 Burns issue of the Scottish Chapbook. At the time, MacDiarmid’s irony was softened by his admirative tribute to Duncan M’Naught. Three years later, however, the poem was printed on its own and its attacks against Burns worshippers were left unhindered: Most folks agree That poetry Is of no earthly use Save thine – which yields at least this Annual Excuse! Other cults die: But who’ll deny That you your mob in thrall Will keep, O Poet Intestinal . . . A boozy haze Enchants your lays And Gluttony for a change Finds Genius within accosting range, And cottons on! – Thy power alone The spectacle attests Of drunken bourgeois on the Muses’ breasts!45

8053_Malgrati.indd 62

06/03/23 10:55 am



Renaissance, Iconoclasm and Burnsian Reformation   63

Building on the radical critique of middle-class Burns Suppers, this sarcastic poem echoes the lines of the collection’s dust jacket. Only a ‘genuine’ Scots poet, it seemed, could rescue Scotland’s national bard from philistinism. The salvation of Burns’s legacy was presented as MacDiarmid’s personal task as the leader of a reformist – and elitist – avant-garde. This was reiterated, once more, a few weeks later when MacDiarmid edited a small selection of Burns’s poems for the publisher Ernest Benn.46 His miscellany echoed Edwin Muir’s criticism, where he argued in the introduction that ‘the reputation of Burns and the distinctive arts of Scotland, ha[d] everything to gain by our “removing the rubbish”’.47 This applied to many of ‘Burns’s love songs’, whose ‘deadly sameness’ had been expurgated from Mac­ Diarmid’s selection. Expecting criticism, the author consoled himself ‘with remembering that Burns was a better critic of his work than most Burnsians, and . . . by the fact that [his own] ideas generally coincide[d] with [Burns’s], especially where these [were] at odds with conventional opinion’.48 In other words, MacDiarmid bypassed Burnsians to reach the excellence of the bard and converse with him on an equal footing, above the crowds and centuries. This lofty dialogue resulted in a rather original selection of poems, in which the classic ‘To A Mouse’ and ‘A Red Red Rose’ were printed alongside the rarer and unusual ‘Merry Hae I Been Teethin’ A Heckle’ and ‘The Lovely Lass o’ Inverness’. Apart from the Jacobite song ‘Awa Whigs Awa’, MacDiarmid had conspicuously omitted all of Burns’s political verse; even his old favourite, ‘A Man’s A Man’, was missing. Apparently, he had not thought it necessary to include a hackneyed piece which would have undermined his real purpose – that of advertising a different kind of Burns, infused with vernacular notion. MacDiarmid’s idiosyncratic and audacious interaction with the poetry of Burns culminated in the 1926 publication of A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle. This lengthy 2,680-line-long poem offers one of the most complex and compelling re-assessments of Burns’s legacy ever produced in the twentieth century. Whereas many scholars have commented on the poem’s infamously harsh lines against the ‘Burns cult’,49 fewer have stressed the role of Burns references in the internal progression of MacDiarmid’s epic.50 These deserve a new commentary. A Drunk Man begins under bardic auspices. As Kenneth Buthlay notes, its first line, ‘I amna fou’ sae muckle as tired – deid dune’, is a

8053_Malgrati.indd 63

06/03/23 10:55 am

64   Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics

reference to Burns’s refrain ‘We are na fou, we are na fou’ from his 1789 piece ‘Willie brew’d a peck o’ maut’.51 The presence of the bard’s shadow in the opening line introduces Burns as a source, a driving motif from which MacDiarmid’s poem derives its original impulse whilst simultaneously advancing its innovative quality. Indeed, the poet’s daring use of the dash – strengthened by the spondee ‘deid dune’ – breaks the rhythm of the traditional ballad stanza used to open his poem. This irregularity contrasts with the deferential reference to Burns’s song, announcing MacDiarmid’s intention to challenge the bard’s image. Burns’s influence is further revealed by the narrative of MacDiarmid’s epic. Just like the bard’s most famous drunkard, Tam o’ Shanter, the drunk man has enjoyed a night at the pub with his ‘drouthie neebors’, Cruivie and Gilshanquhar.52 Yet, as he attempts to cross the ‘lang Scots miles / that lie between [him] and [his] hame’, where ‘sits [his] sulky sullen’ Jean, the staggering Scot falls on a cold hillside.* Unable to rise, he beholds a gigantic thistle standing between him and the moon.53 This ‘unco sight’ conjures an intricacy of thoughts, recollections and contradictory images whose ever-changing face, from the thistle’s thriving masculinity to the moon’s eternal femininity, keeps him enthralled for the rest of the night. The similarity between MacDiarmid’s metaphysical trance and Tam’s bedazzled encounter with the witch Nannie is emphasised later in the poem, as the drunk man exclaims: Noo Cutty Sark’s tint that ana’, And dances in her skin – Ha! Ha! I canna ride awa’ like Tam, But e’en maun bide juist whaur I am.54

The connection between both poems is striking. But this passage also expresses a clear difference between Burns’s character and the drunk man. Whereas Tam escapes from the witch, the drunk man obstinately bides by the enchanted thistle and slowly fuses with it, before finally rising on his feet. Certainly, the drunk man’s immobile journey, which culminates in the line, ‘The thistle rises and forever will’ (l. 2231), reflects MacDiarmid’s own quest for a deeper kind of meaning – not least the capacity of the poet’s mind to overcome his country’s contradictions and herald a radical future for Scotland. *  ‘These famous quotes are taken from Robert Burns’s ‘Tam o’ Shanter’.

8053_Malgrati.indd 64

06/03/23 10:55 am



Renaissance, Iconoclasm and Burnsian Reformation   65

Although Burns’s shadow provided the initial motion for the poem, MacDiarmid needs to ensure that Burnsian sentimentalism will not sterilise his singular spiritual effort. In the third stanza, glancing at the sky after falling on the ground, the drunk man suddenly worries at the gloomy sight of ‘the vilest saxpenny planet’ (l. 12). This eerie star, or planet, had already appeared in John Buchan’s introduction to The Northern Muse, where it symbolised the decline of vernacular Scottish poetry. The expression originates in an 1817 letter written by Sir Walter Scott to Lord Montagu, which evokes how the unlucky star had led the poet James Hogg to financial ruin.55 In this case, however, the drunk man’s planet embodies a much gloomier threat than any foreshadowing of economic disaster. Referring to the ‘destitute’ (l. 20) state of ‘a’ thing else ca’d Scottish nooadays’ (l. 19), the ‘saxpenny planet’ foreshadows the deadly danger faced both by the drunk man and his country in their inability to stand and sing a new Scottish song. As it appears in lines 70–3, this dying sun is nothing else than the ‘The Star o’ Robbie Burns’ himself: I’m haverin’, Rabbie, but ye understaun’ It gets me dander up to see your star A bauble in Babel, banged like a saxpence56

‘The Star o’ Robbie Burns’ is the title of the unofficial anthem of the Burns Federation, played at many Burns suppers, whose refrain, famous in the 1920s, launches into: Let kings and courtiers rise and fa’, This world has mony turns But brightly beams aboon them a’ The star o’ Rabbie Burns.

The immobility of Burns’s star, shining despite all risings and revolutions, is precisely what MacDiarmid wants to tackle. Burns may have inspired A Drunk Man, but the gloomy star of the ‘Burns cult’ now stands in the poem’s way. It must be destroyed. Here begins the most famous, or infamous, attack suffered by the ‘Burns cult’ in Scottish literary history. The drunk man’s series of anti-Burnsian charges, aiming to free his poem from the ‘sixpenny’ influence of ‘Rabbie’s’ star, are striking in their radicalism and their

8053_Malgrati.indd 65

06/03/23 10:55 am

66   Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics

capacity to subsume, over less than one hundred lines (l. 37 to l. 120), the multifarious strands of criticism levelled at the Burns movement since the outbreak of the Great War. Blending the xenophobia of Liberty with the anti-imperialism of Forward, the drunk man’s charge starts aggressively: You canna gang to a Burns supper even Wi’oot some wizened scrunt o’ a knock-knee Chinee turns roon to say, ‘Him Haggis – velly goot!’ And ten to wan the piper is a Cockney. . . . Croose London Scotties wi’ their braw shirt fronts And a’ their fancy freens’ rejoicin’ That similah gatherings in Timbuctoo, Bagdad – and Hell, nae doot – are voicin’ Burns’ sentiments o’ universal love, In pidgin English or in wild-fowl Scots, And toastin’ ane wha’s nocht to them but an Excuse for faitherin’ Genius wi’ their thochts.57

The Chinese guest and the Cockney Piper illustrate the alienness of many self-proclaimed Burnsians, who, according to MacDiarmid, indulge in superficial representations of Scottish culture whilst ignoring most of the bard’s work. Not only does the drunk man denigrate Burns suppers as the celebration of kilted foreigners and philistines, but he also denounces their superficial internationalism as the scarcely concealed self-glorification of the Empire’s bourgeoisie. From Edinburgh to London and ‘Timbuctoo’, Burns Night toasts to the ‘Imperial Forces’ revealed the complicity between ‘braw’ middle-class Burnsians and their ‘fancy freens’ who made profits in the colonies whilst celebrating the bard’s ideal of ‘universal love’.58 The ensuing stanzas follow the same course. From lines 65 to 69, the drunk man renews his attacks against Burns’s worshippers – who should rather ‘haud their wheesht’ than sing ‘A Man’s a Man’. Those idolaters, according to MacDiarmid, are but ‘zoologically men’, whose subhuman nature prevents the poem and its author from salvaging Scottish literature and nationhood. In line 79, the attack

8053_Malgrati.indd 66

06/03/23 10:55 am



Renaissance, Iconoclasm and Burnsian Reformation   67

becomes personal: it targets G. K. Chesterton who ‘heaves up to gi’e / “The Immortal Memory” in a huge eclipse, / Or somebody else as famous if less fat’. This cruel comment against a well-known figure of London’s literary establishment is illuminating. In February 1923, MacDiarmid had praised one of Chesterton’s lectures, delivered at the Vernacular Circle of London, in which he debunked the reductive and pejorative myth of the ‘canny Scot’.59 Three years later, however, the drunk man’s acerbic comment revealed MacDiarmid’s firm intention to estrange his old acquaintance(s). Finally, the anti-Burnsian sequence of MacDiarmid’s poem climaxes in a meaningful Christian parable addressed to Burns himself: I’se warrant you’d shy clear o’ a’ the hunner Odd Burns Clubs tae, or ninety-nine o’ them, And haud your birthday in a different kip Whaur your name isna ta’en in vain – as Christ Gied a’ Jerusalem’s Pharisees the slip – Christ wha’d ha’e been Chief Rabbi gin he’d lik’t! – Wi’ publicans and sinners to forgether, But, losh! the publicans noo are Pharisees, And I’m no’ shair o’ maist the sinners either.60

In a fashion recalling William Power’s 1926 essay, the drunk man compares Burns worshippers with publicans turned into Pharisees and sinners. Blinded by religious zeal (if not by excessive alcohol consumption – as hinted by the pun on ‘pub-lican’), Burnsians have turned away from the bard’s lesson in political radicalism and literary temerity. Away from the ‘sixpenny’ Kirk of literary Pharisees, which MacDiarmid has failed to reform, Scotland, Burns’s legacy and Scottish poetry seem altogether in need of a complete reformation. Rounding off his attacks against the ‘Burns cult’, the drunk man finally declares, ‘A greater Christ, a greater Burns, may come’ (l. 120). The rest of the poem, which is only just beginning, will stage the second rising of a new Christ-like and Burns-like redeemer: the drunk man himself. Now that the ‘sixpenny planet’ is down, Burns’s legacy can be revived in light of the national and literary resurrection to come. Except for a brief evocation of Burns’s cabbage-like ‘bouquet’ – fenced

8053_Malgrati.indd 67

06/03/23 10:55 am

68   Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics

in a ‘kailyard wa’’ (ll. 723–30) – and the recollection of a Burns Supper whose ‘Damnation Haggis’ makes the drunk man ‘spew up’ (ll. 1565–72), Burns’s contribution to MacDiarmid’s poetical impetus in the second part of the poem appears more constructive. The time has come to transform Burns’s gloomy ‘star’ into a new Scottish sun. Burns’s purified and positive influence is first outlined in the poem’s recalling of the General Strike – an event during which the Scottish thistle and ‘the hail braid earth had turned / A reid reid rose that in the lift / Like a ball o’ fire burned’ (ll. 1164–6). The use of Burns’s most famous love chorus to evoke a failed uprising is significant. If the sentimental rendition of ‘A Red Red Rose’ is reprehensible when used to obfuscate Burns’s radicalism, the naïve comparison of the revolution with Burns’s refrain is accepted by MacDiarmid as a faithful reference to the bard’s sans-culotte politics. In similar vein, the drunk man tries to replace the Burns Federation’s fake cosmopolitanism with a genuine internationalist association. Translating the Comintern – the Communist International created in Moscow in 1921 – into an enthusiastic literary project, MacDiarmid ‘seeks the haund o’ Russia as a freen’ / In working oot mankind’s great synthesis’ (ll. 1567–8). The poet’s alliance with the country of socialism is celebrated by a five-hundred-line address to Fyodor Dostoevsky which culminates in a twelve-line poem depicting MacDiarmid’s intellectual encounter with the Russian novelist. Both writers appear as ‘puir gangrel buddies waunderin’ hameless’ (l. 2219) under a snowy sky illuminated by ‘stars [that] are larochs o’ auld cottages’ (l. 2220). This ‘gangrel’ (trans. ‘vagrant’) friendship with Dostoevsky, – replacing the drunk man’s vulgar ‘drouthie neebors’ – is an implicit reference to the ‘randie, gangrel bodies’ of Burns’s ‘The Jolly Beggars’.61 According to Kenneth Buthlay, the phrase ‘gangrel buddies’ also works as an accurate Scots translation of the Russian skitalets (trans. ‘wanderer’) – a term associated with a recurring theme in late nineteenth-century Russian literature, used by writers from Dostoevsky to Alexander Blok.62 By providing the phrase that best encapsulates their Scoto-Russian friendship, this quote from Burns allows for the drunk man’s swift encounter with Dostoevsky. Such outstanding friendship, affirming Scotland’s place within the canon of European literature, results in the climactic line of the poem: ‘The thistle rises and for ever will’ (l. 2231). Between the drunk man and the Russian novelist, MacDiarmid’s cult-free Burns retains a central place in this internationalist trinity of Scottish modernism.

8053_Malgrati.indd 68

06/03/23 10:55 am



Renaissance, Iconoclasm and Burnsian Reformation   69

After years of awkwardly languishing in the interstices of the Burns Federation, Home Rule, Labour and outright separatism, MacDiarmid achieved a complete distinction between Burns and his cult. Radicalising existing critiques of middle-class Burns clubs and ‘philistine’ Burns suppers, the Montrose poet now walked in the footsteps of the Alloway Suffragettes, turning the poet’s memory against his memorialisation. This fight, staged in the opening of A Drunk Man, allowed a regenerated version of the bard, liberated from conservative worship, to still act as a powerful impetus for modern, political and literary ventures. However, MacDiarmid’s masterpiece, whilst a work of remarkable poetic intensity, was also a fragile ensemble. As the author bluntly put it in his 1926 anthology of Burns poems, the bard’s verse was not altogether exempt from ‘rubbish’. Was the boundary between Burns’s works and Burns’s cult more porous than MacDiarmid and other radicals had first thought? The year 1927 soon brought political disappointments which would cause the modernist poet to distance himself from the drunk man’s compromise. Instead, MacDiarmid and his followers raised an angrier voice against Burns’s various shortcomings as a man and a poet. In May 1927, the Independent Labour Party and the Scottish Home Rule Association (SHRA) raised new hopes of convincing Stanley Baldwin’s Conservative majority to vote for self-government for Scotland. Hugh MacDiarmid, who ranked highly in both organisations, rallied the two Scottish National Conventions held ahead of the Second Reading of the Home Rule Bill in Parliament.63 On 13 May, James Barr, Labour MP for Motherwell and President of the SHRA, launched into an impassioned plea in the House of Commons. Barr quoted Burns’s letter from 10 April 1790 to Mrs Dunlop, which stated: ‘Alas, have I often said to myself, what are all the boasted advantages which my country reaps from the Union that can counterbalance the annihilation of her independence and even her very name’.64 The Labour MP went on to criticise the ‘wholesale bribery’ of the 1707 Act of Union, reciting Burns’s most patriotic song – a favourite of Scottish Home Rulers: The English steel we could disdain, Secure in valor’s station; But English gold has been our bane, Such a parcel of rogues in a nation!65

8053_Malgrati.indd 69

06/03/23 10:55 am

70   Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics

Unfortunately for Scottish patriots, Barr’s speech failed to convince Tory backbenchers. Frederic Macquisten, Conservative MP for Argyll, replied that although he shared Robert Burns’s ‘tide of Scottish prejudice’, he still thought the Union, in preventing endless wars, had been beneficial overall for the British Empire.66 Macquisten was followed by the Conservative majority which dismissed Home Rule. Back in Scotland, Home Rulers began to lose faith in Labour. MacDiarmid was embittered and gradually came to discard his ILP allegiance. In May 1927, a few days following Barr’s failure, he wrote a series of vehement articles for Roland Muirhead’s nationalist Scottish Secretariat which were published together under the title Albyn or Scotland and the Future.67 Advocating a ‘realistic’ pro-independence approach to nationalism as opposed to a ‘sentimental’ trust in deceiving home rulers, MacDiarmid’s book simultaneously contrasted the ‘magnificent potentialities’ of William Dunbar’s medieval Scots to the self-conscious vernacular of Burns, whose influence ‘ha[d] reduced the whole field of Scots letters to . . . a level that is beneath contempt’.68 In other words, Albyn broke with A Drunk Man’s attempt to save Burns from his cult and, instead, incriminated the bard and bardolaters alike. Certainly the Burns Federation and its Vernacular Circles were a ‘vicious circle’ that ‘any Scottish aspirant worth a bawbee [was] bound to recognize [as] hopeless’.69 Yet, according to MacDiarmid, Burns also shared responsibilities for this disastrous situation. The bard was now personally accountable for failing to retrieve Dunbar’s authentic language and for producing a ‘wholly negligible’ corpus of English poetry which had irreparably weighed upon nineteenth-century Scottish literature.70 From Burns’s work, MacDiarmid salvaged only the ‘vertiginous speed’ of ‘Tam o’ Shanter’ and a few authentically Scots poems.71 The rest of his work was ‘eighteenth-century conventionalism of a deplorable kind’.72 Rounding off his provocative argument, the author quoted his friend, the French scholar Denis Saurat, who explained that ‘to burn what we have hitherto adored [was] the prerequisite of the Scottish Renaissance’.73 Burns’s radical message was more than outweighed by his harmful influence upon the stunted development of Scottish literature and the creeping anglicisation of Scottish nationality. The time had come to celebrate, like Nietzsche, the twilight of idols, and to declare Scottish literature independent from Burns’s shadow. ‘Not Burns – Dunbar’: MacDiarmid had further distanced himself from his former icon.74

8053_Malgrati.indd 70

06/03/23 10:55 am



Renaissance, Iconoclasm and Burnsian Reformation   71

The poet’s famous slogan, soon hailed as a key ‘Renaissance’ mot d’ordre, was not entirely innovative, however. Back in the 1890s, several Scottish intellectuals, including the architect and Francophile Patrick Geddes, had already called for a fin-de-siècle ‘Scottish Renascence [sic]’, unearthing the buried legacy of medieval Scotland in arts, religion and politics.75 Besides, south of the border, a certain Algernon Charles Swinburne had once pre-empted MacDiarmid in his 1896 ‘Ode’ to Burns, praising the bard’s ‘fire of fierce and laughing light’ whilst acknowledging his inferiority to the ‘mightier vision’ of medieval geniuses such as Geoffrey Chaucer, François Villon and William Dunbar.76 Certainly, MacDiarmid’s blend of medievalism and reformism built on decades-old antecedents.77 That said, MacDiarmid’s eccentric approach to Scottish vernacular poetry, which he saw as the main instrument of post-war revivalism, exposed Burns’s cultural authority in unprecedented terms. Not until now had Scotland’s national poet been turned into a paramount obstacle to Scottish national fulfilment. This was a strident, irreverent turn, breaking with A Drunk Man’s conclusion and deconstructing the pre-war approach to literary tradition. Admittedly, this also clarified MacDiarmid’s intention to sway Scottish cultural politics by waging war not only on the Burns Federation but also on Burns’s legacy as a whole. Three months after James Barr’s failure, the rupture found concrete expression in MacDiarmid’s launching of a campaign to create the Scottish branch of PEN (Poets, Playwrights, Editors, Essayists and Novelists).78 The vast majority of Scottish Renaissance writers (William Soutar, Neil Gunn, Edwin Muir, Helen Cruickshank, Lewis Spence and William Power, amongst others) joined MacDiarmid in this new venture, which was the very opposite of the Burns Federation. On the one hand, the Federation was a Victorian creation, established in the rural areas of Lowland Scotland and with a reach into the most remote parts of the British Empire. With their shared liberal-conservative and unionist-nationalist views, members of the Federation celebrated Burns as an unsurpassable genius. On the other hand, Scottish PEN was assertively modern and Scottish in constitution, European in outlook, fiercely socialist, often nationalist and composed of a young, urban cultural elite which seriously intended to challenge Burns’s legacy. To make sure their opposition to the Burns Federation was noticed, members of Scottish PEN instituted ‘Makars’ dinners’ that aimed

8053_Malgrati.indd 71

06/03/23 10:55 am

72   Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics

to ‘commemorate great Scots poets other than Burns’.79 Unsurprisingly, the first of those dinners was held in honour of the ‘Immortal Memory’ of the medieval Makar, William Dunbar.80 At once imitating and deriding the codes of Burns suppers with a rather elitist twist, ‘Makars’ dinners’ distinguished the cultural politics of Scottish PEN from Burnsian traditions. Significantly, the Federation’s 1927 conference, which was held in Derby, overlooked the creation of the Scottish branch of PEN; no mention of the newly founded body appears in the minutes of the event.81 Whether this reflects disregard or hostility, such silence was grounded in obvious reasons. The creation of Scottish PEN was the first major act of an unprecedented ‘Burnsian Reformation’. It reveals how various attempts at promoting Burns’s social-radical message since the 1910s – from socialism to feminism, and nationalism to avant-gardism – were progressively transmuted by MacDiarmid and his followers as a means of directly contesting the established powers in the Scottish literary scene during the mid-1920s. Such antipathy would grow to a higher degree during the following Burns season. Speaking at the Glasgow branch of the nationalist movement on 21 January 1928, MacDiarmid pronounced the Burns Federation ‘impotent’ and useless for Scottish literature.82 Burns clubs, he explained, were only interested in paying for statues ‘destitute of artistic merit’ and for charitable activities unrelated to literature. Although the Burns Federation declared itself ‘at the van’ of Scotland’s literary revival’, Scottish writers ‘would certainly disavow any connection with [it] and deny having received any support of that body’.83 Further still, MacDiarmid insisted that Burns’s legacy had become redundant in 1920s Scotland. In contrast to Victor Hugo or Heinrich Heine, Burns seemed more like the Scottish comedian-musician Sir Harry Lauder when compared with the masterful voice of the Soviet opera singer, Feodor Chaliapin.84 The bard’s memory, MacDiarmid concluded, had to be forgotten for ‘at least one hundred years to give it a chance of realising the aims for which Burns wrought’.85 MacDiarmid’s nihilistic comments, which exacerbated the recent developments of his thought and poetry, caused great uproar throughout Scotland. Infuriated reactions soon filled the columns of the Daily Record, which had published extracts of the poet’s speech. Lieutenant Colonel Robert C. Anderson accused MacDiarmid of impertinence and dismissed his poetry as ‘a cyclopedia [sic] of Scots phrases ranking

8053_Malgrati.indd 72

06/03/23 10:55 am

Renaissance, Iconoclasm and Burnsian Reformation   73



with charades and anagrams’, incomparable with Burns’s immortal verses.86 On a similar note, Rev. John McColl from the Glasgow Haggis Club denounced MacDiarmid ‘blasphemy to the name of our national bard . . . who, despite all his hardships, was not a class poet, although he was claimed as such by some of our misguided politicians of a fiery order’.87 The same argument was used by Sir Joseph Dobbie, the newly elected President of the Burns Federation, who opposed MacDiarmid by re-asserting the Federation’s liberal-conservative values. Dobbie explained that Burns had never wanted ‘a fierce conflict between two classes for a greater or smaller division of an ever-increasing commercial return, but a new industrial order in which sense and worth and honesty and social justice would count for much’.88 More remarkably still, Labour officials joined Burnsians against MacDiarmid. James Brown, Labour MP for South Ayrshire, encouraged Burns lovers to ignore the ‘disgruntled critics [who] sneer[ed] this annual worship at the shrine of the poet’s fame’.89 This was reinforced by the ex-Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald, speaking at the London Burns Club, who stressed that ‘Burns was too tenderly human and too sturdily manly ever to become remote from the living generations of Scotsmen’.90 As expected, MacDiarmid received support from his modernist friends. In the Scots Magazine Neil Gunn praised the Montrose poet and railed against those ‘Anglo-Scots . . . who toast Burns comically’.91 In the Daily Record, William Power exulted: at last, Burns was ‘becoming a reformed character’, fit for the modern world, and ready to swap a dram of whisky for a can of ‘iron brew’.92 One month later, Power deepened his argument and returned to the polemic with a new article in the Scots Observer. His text praised MacDiarmid and outlined his reformationist approach to Burns: A few years ago, the Burns club was becoming boring and ritualistic . . . It was just at this point . . . that the hypnotic spell was broken by the emergence of one who was not only an anti-ritualist but a heretic and an iconoclast. From his sea-beat fastness at Montrose, this Knox of literary criticism announced in strident tones that he didn’t believe in Robert Burns. Shocked to the heart, Scotsmen tried to stop their ears against such blasphemy. But it was of no use . . . [MacDiarmid] was excommunicated for breaching the Burnsian peace.93

Power stressed the need for a new reformation. ‘Worshipping Burns as a god’, he explained, condemned Scotland to ‘retrogression’,

8053_Malgrati.indd 73

06/03/23 10:55 am

74   Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics

reducing Burns’s work to ‘bunkum, clap-trap, sentimental mediocrity and blatant philistinism’.94 Certainly, it may seem surprising that MacDiarmid should have received support from the Scots Observer – a heavily spiritual protestant journal, heralding the reunification of Scotland’s Kirk in the late 1920s. Yet, in many ways, and as hinted by Power’s Knoxian reference, MacDiarmid’s attacks against the ‘Burns cult’ were reminiscent of the puritanical critics of ‘Burnomania’, who, as early as 1811, had rushed to condemn worshippers of the ‘sinful’, ‘profligate’ poet.95 Such intransigent Calvinism had declined throughout the nineteenth century. But the time when Free Church ministers riposted against the author of ‘Holy Willie’s Prayer’ remained in living memory.96 Although MacDiarmid’s antiBurnsian creed was not so much religious as political and aesthetic, his vitriolic attacks against Burnsian ‘Pharisees’ and ‘sinners’ might have entertained Scotland’s hard-line, protestant fringes. Overall, the Burns furore of January 1928 marked a turning point in the political evolution of many Scottish Renaissance writers. Labour’s rallying to Burns’s worshippers against MacDiarmid highlighted the gap that now separated Scotland’s literary vanguard from the left. In March of the same year, MacDiarmid decided to address this awkward situation. Writing for the nationalist Pictish Review, he denounced Scottish socialism – and the journal Forward in particular – for having ‘contributed nothing of the slightest consequence to Socialist thought’.97 The ILP, MacDiarmid claimed, had confined itself to progressive Calvinism and ‘Burnsian “A Man’s-a-manism”’ instead of embracing bolder styles of socialism, as developed in Lenin’s Russia and Mussolini’s Italy (which he welcomed as two different ways to renew socialism by the means of nationalism).98 Most representative of this dull Burnsian tendency, according to the author, was the ‘abominable’ John S. Clarke, whose ‘English nationalism’ went hand in hand with his poor literary tastes.99 Against his former party, MacDiarmid’s politics were in quest of a new home at the crossroads of extremes. Three months later, on 23 June 1928, the poet co-founded the National Party of Scotland (NPS) – a separatist and radical socialist amalgamation of the SHRA, the Scots National League and the Glasgow University Scottish Nationalist Association.100 This new formation brought together the nationalist members of Scottish PEN, such as William Power, Erskine of Mar, Compton Mackenzie,

8053_Malgrati.indd 74

06/03/23 10:55 am



Renaissance, Iconoclasm and Burnsian Reformation   75

Lewis Spence and R. B. Cunninghame Graham, who immediately took control of the party’s journal, the Scots Independent. Created by the Scottish Secretariat of Roland Muirhead in November 1926, the Scots Independent developed a vision of Burns that combined the socialist rhetoric of Forward with the nationalism of the old Liberty (which ceased publication in 1921). An illustrative example of this was published in January 1929 in an article by Rev. Walter Wash on ‘The Politics of Robert Burns. Nationality – Social Justice – Humanity’. According to Wash, the bard’s ‘sentimental Jacobitism deepened down into uncompromising Radicalism . . . rose by pure human sympathy into Social Democracy . . . and boiled over in Red-Republicanism’.101 Wash described Burns as a true JacobinJacobite – the continuator of William Wallace, Scottish Covenanters and Andrew Fletcher – whose ‘greatest ode’ to Scottish nationality, ‘Scots wha hae’, was not a ‘glorification of mere brute warfare’ but a ‘Song of Liberation’ and ‘a parable of the social and political victories yet to be achieved’.102 This social-nationalist approach to Burns’s legacy was characteristic of the left-leaning politics of the NPS, which drew many members from the ranks of Labour. Despite his recent calls to forget Burns, MacDiarmid could still appreciate the efforts of the Scots Independent. In February 1929, he committed a new piece to the NPS’s journal in which he regretted the lack of a comprehensive and modern biography of the bard. According to MacDiarmid, ‘most of the people who wr[o]te essays or books about Burns . . . cut themselves away from all literary standards and deal[t] with their material in a hopelessly demoded manner’.103 In this light, ‘the Burns cult ha[d] neglected its most obvious duties in an incredible fashion’.104 ‘The late Dr. McNaught and his innumerable coadjutors’, who had accumulated a mere ‘mass of facts’ about the poet, had failed to renew the Burns scholarship through a ‘psycho-critic’ and a ‘technical analysis of Burns’s work’.105 Dismissing the lifework of McNaught, whom he used to revere, MacDiarmid praised the recent studies of Edwin Muir in Latitudes and William Power in Robert Burns and other essays. These essays, MacDiarmid concluded, paved the way for a ‘full-dress Burns biography’ that would put an end to the ‘interminable process of making cauld kail hot again’.106 MacDiarmid ignored that the Scottish novelist Catherine Carswell was about to grant his wish. A mid-career writer, she had been

8053_Malgrati.indd 75

06/03/23 10:55 am

76   Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics

made famous by her 1920 novel Open the door!, and was a close acquaintance of D. H. Lawrence. Following in her friend’s footsteps – Lawrence having once hoped to write about Burns – Carswell aimed to tackle Scottish sentimentalism with a new, realistic and unchaste biography of the national bard.107 Surprisingly, perhaps, MacDiarmid’s first contact with Carswell proved inimical. On 17 January 1930, the poet published an article in the journal Radio Times.108 In this piece he reiterated his previous attacks, condemning Burns worshippers for ‘keeping Scotland ‘thirled’ to ‘that spirit of democracy which [was] being so comprehensively challenged’ in the rest of Europe by fascist and communist revolutions.109 One month later, Carswell countered MacDiarmid’s anti-democratic stance. Replying in Radio Times, she wrote that ‘no poet who maintains his place in the affection of the unliterary can at any period fail to inspire the interest and respect of the few critics who count in a generation’.110 Whilst dismissing the ‘Burns cult’ ‘with its absurdities, vulgarities, and sentimentalities’, she also blamed MacDiarmid for ‘confusing the cult with the poet’. Idolatry, she argued, should not deter Scottish writers from turning a fresher eye to Burns. On the contrary, Carswell claimed that in any other European country, ‘so remarkable a phenomenon’ as the ‘Burns cult’ – its drawbacks notwithstanding – would have led to a ‘constant discussion and re-examination’ of the bard’s oeuvre. This lack of ‘critical and biographical ground’, she concluded, had discouraged many talented writers – including D. H. Lawrence – from engaging creatively with Scotland’s national poet.111 In other words, Carswell regretted that the leader of the ‘Burnsian reformation’ prevented Burns from being sufficiently reformed. Disapproving the nihilistic turn MacDiarmid had taken since 1927 and the publication of Albyn, she sided instead with the softer iconoclasm of the Drunk Man who, back in 1926, still believed that a new version of Burns could escape the ‘vile saxpenny planet’ of the ‘Burns cult’. Carswell’s comments struck home. A few days after her piece appeared in Radio Times, she received a letter from MacDiarmid denouncing her ‘insensate jealousy’ and ignorance of his own unceasing requests for a re-assessment of Burns.112 It was true that MacDiarmid’s calls for a new biography of the poet had preceded Carswell’s intervention. Yet the novelist also had a point, putting her finger on her opponent’s contradictions between reform and destruction. The

8053_Malgrati.indd 76

06/03/23 10:55 am

Renaissance, Iconoclasm and Burnsian Reformation   77



time had come, it seemed, for the re-evaluation of Burns’s legacy to enter a more nuanced phase. In the summer of 1930, as Carswell was finishing her biography, a short novel appeared. Though little is known about its author, whose readership remained limited, Adam Kennedy’s Orra Boughs seconded MacDiarmid’s drunk man whilst setting the scene for Carswell’s Burns.113 Published in the Modern Scot, the literary organ of the Scottish Renaissance founded by James H. Whyte in January 1930, Orra Boughs drew inspiration from MacDiarmid’s line, ‘Yank oot your orra boughs, my hert’.114 Aiming to save Scotland’s heart, Kennedy’s modernist prose, which combined English and Scots, staged a nationalist and literary reawakening. The novella begins on Burns Night at a Burns supper during an ‘orgy of sentiment’, whose turpitude leads the main character to grasp the power of his own consciousness and to ‘beg[in] to think with the knowledge that he was thinking’.115 His sober realisation clashes with the idolatry of his fellow diners – those ‘Burns worshippers’ – who ignored that Burns’s power lay only in ‘the beauty of a few perfect lines’ that avoided ‘convention’ and ‘stretched out beyond life’.116 This inaugural thought triggers a long stream of consciousness – a ‘tortuous process of mental growth’ – taking up the entirety of Kennedy’s book and resulting in the character’s liberation as a true Scottish patriot and ‘litterateur’.117 The novella ends by execrating Burns orators who: could speak then on Robert Burns, ‘The Man and his Work’, on Robert Burns, ‘Man and Poet;’ on ‘The Poetry of Robert Burns;’ on ‘A Man’s a man for a’ that’; on ‘Burns and the Brotherhood of Mankind . . . PuirBurns! Tae hae a’body’s ill-cleckit gets o’ thochts faithered aff on him! Well, if his works were maybe a platitudinarian’s paradise there was aye a corner left tae be a satirist’s Sodom!118

Following MacDiarmid’s poetry, Kennedy’s prose called for a reform of Burns’s myth and a revival of national consciousness. As such, it prepared Scottish literati to receive Carswell’s biography. In mid-September 1930, Carswell issued the most controversial parts of her Life of Robert Burns through five instalments in the Daily Record. Two days before the publication of her first extract, the journal teased its readers about Carswell’s ‘twentieth-century frankness’, soon to ‘arouse a storm of challenge and controversy’.119 The Record expected a violent furore, outdoing the polemic caused

8053_Malgrati.indd 77

06/03/23 10:55 am

78   Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics

by MacDiarmid in January 1928. Carswell, aware of her book’s provocative tone, shared these expectations. A few months earlier, a certain Mr Shirley (from Dumfries Library) who had read the proofs of Carswell’s manuscript, had warned that ‘there will be controversy and anger over it I have no doubt . . . it definitely raises the standard and gets well away from the old sickening disapproving – worship – Covenanter regarding his penis’120. In other words, whilst MacDiarmid’s attacks against Burnsian ‘Pharisees’ could at least tickle the Presbyterian audience of The Scots Observer, Carswell shared with her subject a sense of erotic licentiousness deeply unnerving for Scotland’s religious public. Dedicated to the late D. H. Lawrence (who had died four months earlier), Carswell’s Burns was ready to brave the same kind of critics who had already censored Lady Chatterley’s Lover.121 Carswell did not shy away from provocation. In her preface (published in the Record’s first instalment) she challenges both: the Scylla of the established Burnsians, who guard their idol with a jealousy not unmixed with fears, and the Charybdis of the ordinary reader, whose indifference is too often tinged with a distaste for which I fear we Burns worshippers must bear some of the blame’.122

These comments then open onto a ‘Prelude’ featuring strident remarks on eighteenth-century Scotland. After decades of civil war, when Scottish military bravado was becoming a thing of the past, Carswell holds that eighteenth-century Scotsmen were only saved from ‘abjectness’ by their ‘inveterate love’ of ‘bawdry’ and ‘metaphysics’.123 Yet Carswell notes that Scotsmen could not ‘live by the heart, the head and the genitals alone’. Hunger and ruin, she summarises, had soon forced them to sign the Act of Union, which struck a ‘grievous blow at Scottish pride’.124 This scabrous view of Scotland’s manhood and nationhood, as driven together by faith, lust and money, framed Carswell’s biographical approach to Burns. Without underestimating the poet’s qualities, the author would not slip into hagiography. On the contrary, Carswell intended to bring Burns’s carnal and pecuniary appetites to the forefront of her book. As she put it: ‘With Robert the sublime and the sordid and the ridiculous always came treading on each other’s heels’.125 If Carswell’s ‘Prelude’ had already shocked the more puritanical readers of the Record, her following instalment, published on 15

8053_Malgrati.indd 78

06/03/23 10:55 am

Renaissance, Iconoclasm and Burnsian Reformation   79



September 1930, would focus the minds of most critics. The extracts dealt with Burns’s love for Jean Armour and Highland Mary. Speculating on the recent discovery of an infant’s remains in Mary’s grave, Carswell reaffirmed that the young woman was killed by the premature birth of her and Burns’s child.126 Cautious, the Daily Record distanced itself from such a conjecture, which it explained was the result of Carswell’s ‘own interpretation’.127 Whether Carswell’s supposition is true or not, her treatment of Highland Mary’s death was arguably less shocking to the 1930 common reader than her rendering of the young woman’s lust. Indeed, Carswell’s main rupture with the traditional biographies of Burns consists not in her daring speculations but in her original psychoanalysis of Burns’s lovers. Perhaps encouraged by Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley Lover, Carswell presents Jean Armour, Mary Campbell, Elizabeth Paton and Anna Park as active, sensual and resourceful women, deserving the internal focalisation of her narrative. Jean Armour, for instance, is described as an actively desiring being, who ‘wanted [Burns] even more than she wanted marriage’, and whose ‘endearing common sense’ incited her to ‘have her fill of love’ as a reward for her misfortunes.128 Similarly, Carswell’s description of Paton in the wake of her parting with Robert accounts for a transgression of traditional gender representations, alert to the plight of working-class women. Carswell writes: She had, it appeared, a clear – some called it masculine – outlook in life. She admitted that she had not been taken advantage of or misled by promises. She had merely been heartily, perhaps hopefully in love. If her face had been a little less plain, or if her hair had been a little fairer, or if her schooling had been more extensive, or if she had been able to sing, her story would have been different. Such is fate in Ayrshire and elsewhere.129

Desirous, pragmatic and even masculine, Burns’s amours take on a modern hue under Carswell’s pen. Similarly to 1920s garçonnes and ‘flappers’, Carswell’s sensual women depart from the conventionally prudish narrative of Burns’s life which even MacDiarmid had left untouched. Not only describing their roles in the poet’s life but also pointing out how Burns entered and sometimes upset theirs, Carswell let Elizabeth Jean and Mary play their independent parts. Modern critics of Carswell’s work, including Margery Palmer McCulloch and Gerard Carruthers, have avoided reading her Burns

8053_Malgrati.indd 79

06/03/23 10:55 am

80   Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics

as a feminist biography – at least by twenty-first-century standards.130 ‘Rather worryingly from a feminist’s point of view’, writes Carruthers, ‘Carswell’s book constantly entangles the celebration of Burns’s creative stamina and a recognition of his very male predatoriness’.131 Similarly, McCulloch notes that: there is in [Carswell’s] account little if any condemnation of Burns in matters sexual . . . Burns is portrayed with understanding and sympathy and her fictional accounts of the responses of his female partners, where given, characterises them not as victims, but as adoring and willing accomplices.132

In other words, Carswell’s book might be read as more Lawrentian than feminist, seeking the empowerment of sexual partners, irrespective of their gender. Carswell’s sympathetic treatment of Burns’s libido does not lend itself easily to second or third-wave feminist endorsements. Nevertheless, in the context of 1930, at a time when all British women had only just gained the right to vote (in 1928), and when Lady Chatterley’s Lover would still be censored for more than thirty years, Carswell’s book struck as a highly unconventional piece of work. Its descriptions of female lovemaking, combined with the national significance of its subject matter, foregrounded the role of sexuality in the Scottish public sphere. This, certainly, was a radical step, challenging Burns’s myth with feminine (if not feminist) audacity. As such, Carswell’s effort in broadening the scope of what could be thought, debated and remembered about Burns, comes to rank, alongside the suffragist deed of Frances Parker and the work of MacDiarmid, as a highly significant endeavour. Finally, the Daily Record’s last instalment of Carswell’s book was more straightforwardly political, disclosing the author’s views on Burns’s republicanism.133 Aligning herself with the Scottish radical tradition, Carswell thought Burns’s political stance during the 1790s was in no doubt: ‘he was for France, for Freedom, for Reform, for the People – all in capital letters’ and ‘neither rationalism not the decapitation of crowned heads (as such) shocked him’. 134 This led Carswell, like ILP commentators, to dismiss Burns’s ode to the Dumfries Volunteers. The bard’s unionist stanzas, she explains, were a mere ‘vindication and a peace offering’ to his conservative friend Mrs Dunlop, who had been shocked by his earlier declarations

8053_Malgrati.indd 80

06/03/23 10:55 am



Renaissance, Iconoclasm and Burnsian Reformation   81

in favour of Louis XVI’s execution.135 Certainly, these aspects of Carswell’s Burns were not original, and corresponded to the socialist interpretation of the poet. Yet the biographer innovated once more by blaming Burns for not having pushed his commitment further. The poet, she claimed, was a cowardly type of radical who hid his true beliefs from governmental authorities. Carswell judges that, in 1792, after Burns learnt that his political conduct would be examined by the Excise, his ‘humiliating panic’, ‘abas[ing] himself in disingenuous disclaimers’, undermined his many ‘protestations of “manly” independence’.136 Whilst, at night, he ‘resoundingly’ suggested that ‘the last King [should] be hanged in the entrails of the last priest’, the ‘next day – challenged by some young blood in uniform – he alleged in humble exaggeration his own “drunkenness” as an excuse, and protested his loyalty to his “idiot King”’.137 Such behaviour, according to Carswell, was ‘abject’, and struck another blow against Burns’s masculine legend. Carswell’s provocative comments on Burns’s sexuality, poetry and politics had alienated many readers of the Daily Record. Angry comments from Burns fans, puritans and socialists soon began to flood the columns of the newspaper. These contrasted with positive reviews of Carswell’s book by Scottish literati. Unsurprisingly, most of Carswell’s supporters came from the ranks of the Scottish Renaissance movement. On 19 September 1930, Lewis Spence was the first to praise her biography, which, he explained, was a ‘worthy [work] and show[ed] considerable thought’.138 More enthusiastically, William Power congratulated Carswell for her depiction of the ‘real’ Robert Burns, which successfully avoided ‘rhetoric [and] emotional gibberish’.139 Her ‘Prelude’ in particular was ‘a little masterpiece showing how Burns grew out of his nation’s history to become Scotland’s “representative man”’.140 A few days later, MacDiarmid seconded Power. Forgetting his earlier quarrel with Carswell, he claimed that her book would ‘outlive all these pumpuritans [sic] and common Burnsites and tower monumentally over the wastes of the interminable (and almost wholly worthless) annual orations and the bulk of Burnsiana in general’.141 According to MacDiarmid, Carswell’s Burns was the ‘best [biography ever] written presenting Burns the man “in the round” with a completeness and convincingness never before achieved’. This, the poet insisted, was a ‘real starting point to the real work the “Burns

8053_Malgrati.indd 81

06/03/23 10:55 am

82   Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics

Cult” ha[d] so far left undone’. As such, MacDiarmid welcomed The Life of Robert Burns as a key achievement in the modernist reformation of Burns’s legacy. Outside Renaissance circles, however, Carswell’s work came under heavy fire. Labour officials, amongst others, condemned her interpretation of Burns’s politics. Neil Maclean, Labour MP for Govan, wrote that ‘sometimes, especially on the last article [the last instalment published in Record about Burns’s politics], the writer ha[d] been too severe on Burns and trie[d] to make him appear as a sycophant in his last year of illness and economic stress’.142 Three days later, John S. Clarke, who was now the Labour MP for Maryhill, seconded Maclean and flew to the bard’s rescue. Clarke explained that Carswell’s biography ‘had been better unwritten’ for it ‘simply raked over the unpleasant accidents of [Burns’s] life’ and understated ‘the effect of Burns on the women he met’.143 Burns’s enlightened manliness, Clarke maintained, was unaltered by his avid lovers who ‘fell in love with him before he fell in love with them’ and whose ‘moral lapse was more their responsibility than Burns’s’.144 More crucially still, the Labour MP claimed that ‘Mrs Carswell [was] wrong’ in blaming Burns for publicly renouncing his Jacobin sympathies. For Clarke, Burns did not have a choice: He had no powerful trade-union at his back, no organised Labour party. He was absolutely alone . . . When he realised that Jean Armour and the little children, six of them, might be left unprotected, that they would suffer more than himself for his ideals, he did what a brave man would do. He renounced his principles. It takes more courage to do that than to preach socialism from a soap box.145

Further, Clarke also excused Burns’s enrolment in the Dumfries Volunteers: Suppose I were a Bolshevik, which I am not, I might admire the rebellion in Russia with all my heart, but as soon as it threatened to go to war with my country, I would enlist in the King’s army. Mrs Carswell simply doesn’t understand him there. She has been affected by the recent passion for realism, so-called. Yet, she is doing for Burns what ‘All Quiet’ did for the war. This resurrecting of the ghoulish remains of great men will probably go on.146

Clarke’s patriotic demonstration, combined with his negative comparison of Carswell’s biography to Erich Maria Remarque’s pacifist

8053_Malgrati.indd 82

06/03/23 10:55 am



Renaissance, Iconoclasm and Burnsian Reformation   83

novel All Quiet on the Western Front (1928), contrasts with his earlier struggle as a conscientious objector. According to the established Labour MP, Burns’s belief in family, patriotic values and social justice defined him as a ‘true man’ and saved him from Carswell’s sneers. If Carswell’s socialist critics were admonitory, their tone remained moderate in comparison to the vehemence of Burns club officials. Certainly, Carswell’s iconoclastic prose was unacceptable to those wishing to ‘keep the lid on the Burns genie’.147 After ten years of conflict between established and reformist Burnsians, Carswell’s attacks against the prudishly presented icon of a male dominated ‘Burns cult’ enraged the guardians of Burns’s memory. The first salvo was fired by Sir Joseph Dobbie, President of the Burns Federation. Published in the Record on the day following Carswell’s last instalment, Dobbie’s critique dismissed her work as a fake biography, based on its author’s mere ‘speculations’.148 In the same issue, J. Stewart Seggie, President of the Edinburgh Ninety Burns Club, evoked the ‘discussions’ provoked by Carswell at the Federation’s annual conference (one week earlier) and warned that her book ‘[would] be killed at the Burns festivals in January’.149 In fact, Burnsians would not wait until January to attempt their literary murder. Five days after Dobbie’s and Seggie’s moderate, yet dismissive, pieces, Captain Richie from the Royal Mile Burns Club launched into a contemptuous tirade against Carswell’s ‘sexual and matrimonial gossip’ that ‘rushed in where angels fear to tread’ in a manner that ‘no mere man could have written’.150 Richie’s sexist attacks were backed, three days later, by Alexander Mutch, President of the Aberdeen Scottish Literature Association and author of a militarist appraisal of Burns, ‘from a Soldier’s Standpoint’ written during the Great War.151 ‘Does Mrs Carswell represent the modern woman, or does she dare to think that her view of Burns is shared by the majority of her sex?’ Mutch asked, before answering that Carswell’s Life was a mere piece of ‘trash’ which ‘gloried in hearing of the seamy side of Burns’.152 This point was repeated, two years later, by Lauchlan Maclean Watt in the Burns Chronicle’s official response to Carswell. Watt, poet and minister of Glasgow Cathedral, noted that although ‘we can never tell what secret transactions have taken place between any soul and Infinite Grace’, nonetheless, ‘we should expect a woman to be at least kind’.153 Unfortunately, according to the minister, Carswell had failed to live up to this expectation. ‘Devoted to recording the names

8053_Malgrati.indd 83

06/03/23 10:55 am

84   Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics

and circumstances, dates and frailties of poor women who sinned’, such as ‘the poor Jean [Armour], who is said to have “been willing, with the willingness of a young heifer”’, Carswell’s ‘salacious’ book, was the ‘kind of record Satan might keep near the door of his dark abode’.154 In the morning of 23 September 1930, Carswell, who was finishing breakfast in her London flat, found an unusual letter wrapped inside her printed copy of the Daily Mail.155 The envelope contained a few words, signed by a mysterious ‘Holy Willie’, and a bullet ‘which she ‘was requested to use upon [her]self so that the world might be left “a brighter, cleaner and better place”’.156 Sixteen years previously, Frances Parker had endured severe punishment for her attempted assault on Burns’s birthplace. In September 1930, Carswell’s biography had replaced Parker’s bomb, and the anonymous bullet supplanted the jailers’ funnel, but, once again, the sacredness of Burns’s conventional memory was left in no doubt. Protected by the powerful interests of established Burnsians, keen to maintain their cultural influence across Scotland, Britain and the Empire, the ‘Immortal Memory of Robert Burns’ remained under close watch. Every January, most Scotsmen (more rarely women) kept toasting the bard during convivial, sentimental suppers which afforded a welcome escape from the hardships of post-war Britain. Certainly, the so-called ‘Burns cult’ was not ready to disappear. Even the most avant-garde groupings knew they still needed to engage with a poet whose popularity persisted from rural pastures to pitheads and shipyards. Nevertheless, after two decades of intense Scottish stramash, dissonance was now distinct in the general Burnsian narrative. The suffragette struggle, the rise of Labour, sporadic separatism and a whole new generation of Scottish writers had rallied against the chest-beating, couthie vision of Burns developed during the nineteenth century and heightened by the Great War. As hinted by William Power in 1928, the bard increasingly appeared as a ‘reformed character’, whose shifting image mirrored the democratisation and the social conflicts of interwar Scotland. This ‘Burnsian reformation’, which combined iconoclasm of form with radicalism of content, inaugurated a new era for Scottish literature and politics. For the first time since 1796, Burns’s intricate contradictions, from the red coat to the red hat, threatened to dislocate his own myth – and with it, the order of the nation.

8053_Malgrati.indd 84

06/03/23 10:55 am



Renaissance, Iconoclasm and Burnsian Reformation   85

Notes   1. Riach, ‘MacDiarmid’s Burns’; Crawford (ed.), Robert Burns and Cultural Authority, pp. 198–215; Carnie, ‘Hugh MacDiarmid, Robert Burns’, pp. 261–76; Lyall, Hugh MacDiarmid’s Poetry and Politics of Place, pp. 157–9; Crawford, ‘MacDiarmid, Burnsians, and Burns legacy’, in Stafford and Sergeant (eds), Burns and other Poets, pp. 182–94; McGinn, The Burns Supper, pp. 159–64.  2. Aberdeen Free Press, 21 December 1921, in MacDiarmid, The Letters, p. 753.  3. Montrose Review, 16 December 1921, quoted by Crawford in ‘MacDiarmid, Burnsians’, p. 185.  4. Smith, Scottish Literature.  5. Bold MacDiarmid, pp. 12–9.   6. Crawford, ‘MacDiarmid, Burnsians’, pp. 182–94.  7. Montrose Review, 8 September 1922, in Crawford, ‘MacDiarmid, Burnsians’, p. 186.  8. The Scottish Chapbook, September 1922, p. 38.  9. The Scottish Chapbook, October 1922, p. 39; MacDiarmid, The Raucle Tongue, p. 46. 10. Bold, MacDiarmid, p. 137. 11. The Scottish Chapbook, January 1923, p. 2. 12. Ibid. pp. 14–16. 13. Ibid. p. 17. 14. BC 33, 1924, p. 122. 15. Ibid. 16. James Barr, David Kirkwood and Tom Johnston all evoke Burns as a key influence in their respective autobiographies, Lang Syne (1949), My Life of Revolt (1935) and Memories (1952). 17. Scottish Home-Rule, March 1924. 18. Hansard, HC Deb. 9 May 1924, Vol. 173, col. 800; L1, p. 136. 19. Hansard, HC Deb. 9 May 1924, Vol. 173, cols 870–4. 20. Clarke, Robert Burns and his Politics, p. 9. 21. Clarke, What Robert Burns Thought, p. 1. 22. McNaught, ‘Some Burns Fiction’, in BC 23, 1914, pp. 90–112; Clarke, Robert Burns and his Politics, p. 27. 23. Clarke, Robert Burns and his Politics, pp. 28–9. 24. Ibid. 25. McNaught, ‘The Politics of Burns’, in BC 35, 1925, pp. 60–5. 26. Ibid. p. 60. 27. Ibid. p. 61. 28. Ibid. p. 65.

8053_Malgrati.indd 85

06/03/23 10:55 am

86   Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics 29. BC 2, Vol. 1, 1926, p. 19. 30. Lyall, Hugh MacDiarmid’s Poetry, p. 101. 31. Forward, 6 February 1926. 32. Buchan, The Northern Muse, p. 371. 33. Ibid. pp. xxvi–ix. 34. Muir, Latitudes, pp. 1–12. 35. Ibid. p. 3. 36. Ibid. p. 8. 37. Butter, Edwin Muir, pp. 110–11. 38. Buchan, ‘Preface’, in MacDiarmid, Sangschaw, p. x. 39. Power, Robert Burns. 40. Ibid. p. 9. 41. Ibid. pp. 9–10. 42. Quoted in Power, Robert Burns, pp. 9–10. 43. Ibid. pp. 16–19, 27–30, 34, 41–2 44. Power, Should Auld Acquaintance, p. 121. 45. MacDiarmid, Penny Wheep, ll. 4–12, 40–8, pp. 27–8. 46. MacDiarmid (ed.), Robert Burns, 1759–1796. 47. Ibid. p. ii. 48. Ibid. 49. Amongst others: Bold, MacDiarmid, p. 189; Whatley, Immortal Memory, p. 201; Lyall, Hugh MacDiarmid’s, p. 103. 50. Riach, in ‘MacDiarmid’s Burns’, pp. 205–7, offers an interesting comparison between A Drunk Man and ‘Tam o’ Shanter’. 51. MacDiarmid, A Drunk Man, Buthlay (ed.), p. 52. 52. Burns, ‘Tam o’ Shanter’, l. 2. 53. Ibid. ll. 7, 9, 10. 54. MacDiarmid, A Drunk Man, ll. 830–4. This passage is also quoted by Bold in MacDiarmid, p. 190. 55. Walter Scott’s letter to Lord Montagu, 8 June 1817, quoted in Lockhart, Memoirs of Sir Walter Scott, Vol. 2, p. 242. 56. MacDiarmid, A Drunk Man, ll. 70–3. 57. Ibid. ll. 36–40, 44–52. 58. This sequence notwithstanding, MacDiarmid himself was not immune to Scottish imperialist tendencies. See Kidd, Union and Unionisms, p. 285. 59. Dunfermline Press, 3 February 1923, mentioned in A Drunk Man, p. 82. 60. MacDiarmid, A Drunk Man, ll. 84–92. 61. Burns, ‘The Jolly Beggars’, l. 8–10. 62. A Drunk Man, p. 208. 63. Bold, MacDiarmid, p. 228.

8053_Malgrati.indd 86

06/03/23 10:55 am



Renaissance, Iconoclasm and Burnsian Reformation   87

64. Hansard, HC Deb. 13 May 1927, Vol. 206, col. 871; L2, pp. 23–4. 65. Hansard, HC Deb. 13 May 1927, Vol. 206, col. 871; P2, ll. 13–16, p. 610. 66. Hansard, HC Deb. 13 May 1927, Vol. 206, cols 875–6. 67. Grieve, Albyn. 68. Ibid. pp. 19, 37, 43, 81. 69. Ibid. p. 42. 70. Ibid. pp. 18, 38. 71. Ibid. pp. 24, 38. 72. Ibid. p. 38. 73. Ibid. p. 46. 74. Ibid. p. 35. 75. See, for instance, Patrick Geddes’s 1895 speech, ‘The Scots Renascence’, pp. 17–23. 76. Swinburne, ‘Burns: An Ode’ (1896), quoted in Hogg and Noble (eds), Canongate Burns, p. 82. MacDiarmid was aware of Swinburne’s poem, which he later quoted in the pamphlet Burns, p. 61. 77. MacDiarmid’s fin-de-siècle antecedents is a key topic of Shaw’s recent book, The Fin-de-siècle. 78. Bold, MacDiarmid, pp. 227–78. 79. Power, Should Auld Acquaintance, p. 204. 80. Ibid. p. 166. 81. ‘Minutes of the Annual Conference’ in BC 2, 1928, Vol. III, pp. 164–­76. 82. Daily Record, 23 January 1928. 83. Ibid. 84. Ibid. See also Goldie, ‘Hugh MacDiarmid, Sir Harry Lauder’, pp. 1–26. 85. Daily Record, 23 January 1928. 86. Daily Record, 25 January 1928. 87. Daily Record, 26 January 1928. 88. Glasgow Herald, 26 January 1928. 89. Ibid. 90. Daily Record, 26 January 1928. 91. Scots Magazine, April 1928. 92. Daily Record, 25 January 1928. ‘Iron Brew’ is the old spelling of ‘Irn-Bru’. 93. Scots Observer, 4 February 1928. 94. Ibid. 95. Peebles, Burnomania, p. 9. See also Whatley, Immortal Memory, pp. 22–3. 96. See Whatley, Immortal Memory, pp. 89–91, 126–7, regarding anti-Burns Protestantism up until in the second half of the nineteenth century. 97. The Pictish Review, March 1928.

8053_Malgrati.indd 87

06/03/23 10:55 am

88   Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics  98. Ibid. Regarding MacDiarmid’s views on fascism, see Bowd, Fascist Scotland, pp. 131–5.  99. The Pictish Review, March 1928. 100. Finlay, Independent and Free, 25–35. 101. Scots Independent, January 1929. 102. Ibid. 103. Scots Independent, February 1929. 104. Ibid. 105. Ibid. 106. Ibid. 107. Pilditch, Catherine Carswell, pp. 106–21. 108. Radio Times, 17 January 1930. 109. Ibid. 110. Radio Times, 14 February 1930. 111. Ibid. 112. Letter to Catherine Carswell, 14 February 1930, in MacDiarmid, The Letters, p. 420. 113. ‘Adam Kennedy’ is probably the alias of John Stewart Buist (1904– 82), future Foreign Editor of The Times (1959­–63), who features under this pseudonym in the papers of Helen Cruickshank, University of Edinburgh Library, Special Collections, Gen 767/10. 114. MacDirmaid, A Drunk Man, l. 1057 115. Kennedy, Orra Boughs, p. 4. 116. Ibid. 117. Ibid. pp. 5, 56. 118. Ibid. pp. 57­–8. 119. Daily Record, 11 September 1930. 120. Quoted in Pilditch, Catherine Carswell, p. 129. 121. D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover remained censored in the United Kingdom until 1961. 122. Daily Record, 13 September 1930; Carswell, The Life of Robert Burns, p. viii 123. Carswell, The Life of Robert Burns, p. 7. 124. Ibid. p. 8. 125. Ibid. p. 146. 126. Ibid. pp. 205­­–7. Regarding the removal of Highland Mary’s Greenock Memorial in November 1920, see BC 30, 1921, p. 87. 127. Daily Record, 15 September 1930. There is still no evidence to confirm or dismiss Carswell’s supposition. See Mackay, A Biography of Robert Burns, pp. 223–7. This is further discussed in McCulloch, ‘Sexual Poetics or the Poetry of Desire: Catherine Carswell’s Life of Robert Burns’, in Simpson (ed.), Love and Liberty, pp. 289–97 and

8053_Malgrati.indd 88

06/03/23 10:55 am



Renaissance, Iconoclasm and Burnsian Reformation   89

Carruthers, ‘“The Procedure of Life”: Carswell’s biography of Burns’, in Anderson (ed.), Opening the Doors, pp. 165­–79. 128. Carswell, Burns, p. 191; Daily Record, 15 September 1930. 129. Carswell, p. 136. 130. McCulloch, ‘Sexual Poetics’, p. 290; Carruthers, ‘“The Procedure of Life”’, p. 170. 131. Carruthers, ‘“The Procedure of Life”, p. 170. 132. McCulloch, ‘Sexual Poetics’, p. 290. 133. Daily Record, 18 September 1930. 134. Carswell. Burns, p. 397. 135. Ibid. pp. 438–9. 136. Ibid. p. 400. 137. Ibid. p. 409. 138. Daily Record, 19 September 1930. 139. Daily Record, 10 October 1930. 140. Ibid. 141. Daily Record, 16 October 1930. 142. Daily Record, 20 September 1930. 143. Ibid. 144. Ibid. 145. Ibid. 146. Ibid. 147. This phrase is taken from Whatley’s Immortal Memory, p. 124. 148. Daily Record, 19 September 1930. 149. Ibid. 150. Daily Record, 24 September 1930. 151. Mutch, Robert Burns from a Soldier’s Standpoint. 152. Daily Record, 27 September 1930. 153. BC 2, 1932, Vol. VIII, p. 36. 154. Ibid. p. 38. 155. Catherine Carswell, letter to S. S. Koteliansky, 23 September 1930, British Library, Add. MS, 48975, no. 174. 156. Ibid.

8053_Malgrati.indd 89

06/03/23 10:55 am

8053_Malgrati.indd 90

06/03/23 10:55 am

Chapter 3

Relic or Messiah? (1930–1940)

In barely a decade, Burns reformers – from socialists to nationalists, to pacifists and republicans and modernists – had changed the course of the poet’s afterlife. Yet their movement, which was uncoordinated, motley and often conflicted, raised more questions than provided answers. Certainly, they opposed the British militarist interpretation of the bard that had triumphed during the Great War. Most generally, they rejected views like those of Sir Joseph Dobbie, President of the Burns Federation, who, in the 1930 Burns Chronicle, asserted that the Burns Movement had to ‘conform to the sentiment of the poet who wrote: Be BRITAIN still to BRITAIN true, Among oursels united! For never but by British hands Must British wrongs be righted!1

Beyond their common opposition to the Burns Federation, however, Burns reformers were strongly divided. What should the modern version of the bard be? There was no obvious route out of conventional bard-worship. Should the ploughman poet be depicted as a class-war propagandist, or, instead, as a herald of cultural independence? Could the eighteenth-century bard still offer creative and revolutionary impulses to contemporary writers and thinkers? Could his popularity across social classes serve to bridge the gap between Scottish intellectuals and the rest of society? Or, rather, should Burns be forgotten for at least a century as MacDiarmid had argued in January 1928? Of all these options, the latter most appealed to new Scottish writers. MacDiarmid’s iconoclastic approach to Burns’s legacy had

8053_Malgrati.indd 91

06/03/23 10:55 am

92   Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics

led modernist authors to declare their independence from worn-out traditions. A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle had wiped the slate clean, rendering further attacks against the ‘Burns cult’ superfluous. Likewise, there no longer seemed to be a space – or a desire – for more Burnsian polemics after Catherine Carswell’s Burns had set Scottish public opinion ablaze for several months. Instead, cultural change and social conflict in the wake of the American Great Depression provided Scottish writers with enough material to assert their originality. More interested in contemporary times than in the eighteenth-century bard, the second wave of Scottish Renaissance writers only deepened the gap between Burns lore and modern literature. Representative of this tendency was Leslie Mitchell – alias Lewis Grassic Gibbon – who published his first book in 1928 at the height of the battle between Burnsians and modernists.2 Five years later, in Sunset Song, the first opus in his trilogy A Scots Quair, Grassic Gibbon seconded MacDiarmid’s iconoclasm. As noted by Richard Price, the references to Burns’s songs and themes in Grassic Gibbon’s masterpiece systematically refer to the decaying culture of old rural Scotland – soon to be ravaged by the modern world of industry and total war.3 Grassic Gibbon’s first reference to Burns occurs in the Prelude of Sunset Song, where he introduces Kinraddie’s ‘worst stutterer’, the shoemaker Old Pooty: a ‘doitered old fool’ whose clichéd recitations of ‘Weeeee, ssss-leek-ed, ccccccowering TIMROUS BEASTIE or such-like poem’ were ‘fair agony’ to listen to.4 From the onset, Pooty’s ridiculous broken rendition of ‘To a Mouse’ presents Burns as a remote reference, on the verge of falling into oblivion. Yet later in the book, Burns becomes associated less with Old Pooty and more with the debonair pre-war pacifist Long Rob of the Mill. Unlike Pooty, Rob is a community role model whose honest work and jovial fiddle playing constitute excellent marriage material for the main character, Chris Guthrie. On several occasion, Rob lightens the narrative with simple, gleeful Burns songs, including ‘The Bonie Wee Thing’ and ‘The Lass that Made the Bed to Me’. All of these seem to reflect the character’s rustic good-heartedness, symbol of a safe pre-industrial world, undisturbed since the time of Burns.5 Nevertheless, Rob’s skills as a singer and a fiddler fail to attract Chris’s favours. At the end of the book, despite his pacifism, he dies unmarried in the mud of the trenches. Simultaneously, Old Pooty, the last Burnsian of the village, succumbs to dementia and

8053_Malgrati.indd 92

06/03/23 10:55 am



Relic or Messiah?   93

forgets his old repertoire. After Rob’s death, villagers try and fail to remember his ‘daft and old-fashioned’ songs, now replaced by music ‘right from America . . . and all about the queer blue babies that were born there’.6 Whereas in 1928 Power could still imagine Burns drinking a bottle of ‘Iron Brew’, in 1932 Grassic Gibbon asserts the incompatibility between the bard’s old songs and the riffs found in American blues. In many ways, Sunset Song accounts for the sunset of Burns’s star. The last reference to the bard in A Scots Quair occurs at the beginning of Grey Granite – the conclusion of the trilogy. As Chris and her son, Ewan, leave the countryside for the industrial city of Duncairn, Hairy Hogg, the local Provost who believes he is a descendant of Burns, tries to curse them with a quotation from the bard. However, he is interrupted by Ake Ogilvie, the joiner, who says, ‘you and your Burns! The gawpus blethered a lot of stite [sic] afore they shovelled him into the earth and sent all the worms for a mile around as drunk as tinks at Paddy Fair’.7 Burns is silenced as Grassic Gibbon’s trilogy finally departs from rural to industrial Scotland. No further reference to the bard appears in Grey Granite – the old song vanishes under factory noises and class war slogans. Other Scottish writer in the early 1930s shared this approach to Burns, characterising him as an anachronistic, pre-modern reference. The same year as Grey Granite was published (1934), Eric Linklater – the ill-fated NPS candidate at the 1933 East Fife by-election – published Magnus Merriman, an autobiographical, self-deriding novel, building on the author’s experience within the nationalist movement. Amongst Linklater’s many acerbic remarks on the NPS’s rank-and-files is his depiction of a ‘little fat man’ who quotes Burns during a rally in Fife.8 This nationalistic ‘Old Pooty’ distorts Burns’s ‘A Man’s a Man’ ‘into something as mealy-mouthed, as nauseatingly sentimental, as his own saps-and-treacle habits of thoughts’. 9 When the ‘little fat man’ finally ‘[sits] down in a mutter of apathetic applause’, Magnus (the fictional counterpart of Linklater) feels more disillusioned than ever. Linklater writes: ‘the lofty hortations [sic] that were in Magnus’s mind crumbled like dreams in the grey light . . . and his mouth was filled with dust’.10 Like MacDiarmid in 1928, Linklater rejected self-indulgent quotations of the bard in radical politics. However revolutionary or nationalist, references to the bard were better unspoken than used by mediocre orators.

8053_Malgrati.indd 93

06/03/23 10:55 am

94   Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics

Whilst Linklater’s ‘little fat man’ echoed Grassic Gibbon’s ‘Old Pooty’, the Scottish novelist George Blake, also a member of the NPS, drew on Long Rob of the Mill.11 In 1935, Blake published The Shipbuilders, a realist novel depicting the life of workers on the docks of interwar Clydeside. Initially one of the main characters, Danny Shields, appears as a kind of working-class Long Rob. He is described as a sturdy, joyful riveter, humming the words of ‘A Man’s a Man’ on Dumbarton Road amongst a crowd of ‘decent lads and their lassies’.12 Upon returning home, however, Shields finds his son Peter ‘nasally intoning one of those mournful songs of negroid love in which he delighted . . . [and] shuffling a dance for the entertainment of his friend’. Such a sight causes Shields’s ‘keenly feeling towards the world at large’ to turn into ‘a black contempt for that one young man – messing about with his fancy molls’.13 Like Rob’s old airs, Shields’s fond recollection of Burns is overtaken by contemporary American jazz and blues. There is no future for bardic feelings in the world of industry, revolution and radio. The same year, Edwin Muir further emphasised Burns’s unsuitability for modern times. Like most Scottish literati, Muir had recently toughened his assessment of Burns. In Scottish Journey the Orcadian writer recalls his disappointing visit to Burns’s birthplace: a cottage crowded by irritatingly long lines of philistine pilgrims. Muir writes: It was so unlike my expectation of a visit at the Burns’s cottage that I could hardly believe in it, and only when I was out again and had time to compose myself did I see that this was exactly what the cult of Burns worship was bound to turn into in a commercialised, newspaperreading, bus-driven, cinema-educated age. 14

Against the ‘grotesque’ throng of bardolaters who spoilt his journey, Muir concludes, ‘the best thing would be for the whole nation reluctantly and reverently to pull the poet’s birthplace down, on a day of decent mourning’. Such a hostile attitude towards Burns’s heritage – conjuring the deeds of 1914 suffragettes – highlights once more the iconoclastic mainstream of 1930s Scottish writing. Such views, however, left Scottish writers in a paradoxical position. As noted by Richard Price, Grassic Gibbon’s Scots Quair, whilst stressing the bard’s declining influence, still expected its readers to know their Burns when characterising Long Rob and Old

8053_Malgrati.indd 94

06/03/23 10:55 am



Relic or Messiah?   95

Pooty.15 Likewise, Linklater’s satire against nationalist activists could only affect an audience acquainted with Burns’s songs – and sharing some notion of what a terrible version of ‘A Man’s a Man’ might sound like. The same idea also holds for Edwin Muir’s iconoclasm, whose polemical effect relied on nationwide Burns-worship. In other words, 1930s Scottish writers needed Burns’s memory to survive– provocatively and paradoxically – in order to condemn its irrelevance in the modern world. In fact, Burns’s ‘Immortal Memory’ was in tolerable health during the early 1930s. Certainly, the late 1920s had witnessed a steady decrease in the number of visitors to Burns Cottage. Between the season of 1926–7 and that of 1932–3, attendance had dropped by approximately a quarter – from 68,000 to 49,000.16 However, during the following years numbers began to rise again, reaching 53,000 in 1934–5 (an average of 1,000 visitors a week – with a peak of 5,500 during the Glasgow Fair Week of 1935).17 Burns’s fame outside of Scotland was also increasing. As noted by Pierre Boudrot, the interwar years witnessed the most significant growth of Burns societies in the history of the Burns movement. More than 180 Burns clubs were created between 1919 and 1933 (30% of all Burns clubs ever founded), most of which outside Scotland, in North America and Australasia.18 This strengthened the position of the Federation as a key cultural institution of diaspora and Empire. Unlike Scottish writers, Scottish political parties could not afford to offend popular affection for Burns. Certainly, Scottish critics had successfully charted a way out of bardolatry, yet they had failed to erase Burns from national memory. Radicals, nationalists, or even moderates, although they sometimes agreed with Scottish literati, refused to follow the iconoclastic path in politics as MacDiarmid, Carswell, Grassic Gibbon and Muir had taken in literature. Burns still mattered for Scottish people. This meant political actors in Scotland had a vested interest in continuing the fight over his legacy. Already in the 1920s Scottish Labour officials – including the ex-Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald and the MPs Neil Maclean, James Brown and John S. Clarke – had sided with traditional Burnsians against MacDiarmid and Carswell. Labour’s experience of power, from Westminster to Scottish local government, had taught its members they could rely on the influential network of Burns clubs reaching into most Scottish towns and villages. Instead of antagonising those

8053_Malgrati.indd 95

06/03/23 10:55 am

96   Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics

in the Burns movement, as they had done until the mid-1920s, now, in the early 1930s, social democrats decided to support the activities of the Burns Federation. Between 1930 and 1935, John S. Clarke – once anti-bourgeois and anti-Burns clubs – became a prominent orator at traditional Burns suppers. In January 1931, he gave the ‘Immoral Memory’ for both the Glasgow Rosebery Burns Club and the Edinburgh Ayrshire Burns Association.19 A few years later, in 1934, he was once again the main speaker for the established Scottish Burns Club of Glasgow.20 Likewise in January 1932, Tom Johnston, former editor of Forward, spoke at the supper of the Alloway Burns Club where he congratulated the Burns Federation for supporting the revival of the Scots Language and for its project to edit a complete Scottish National Dictionary (SND).21 Indeed, the SND project, launched in 1929 by the Federation, had found a proactive advocate in Tom Johnston, who re-entered the House of Commons in 1935. This did not yet mean that the Burns Federation was turning left. Between 1930 and 1935, the Burns Chronicle noted the presence of sixteen different Parliamentarians at various Burns club events. Only three speakers were Labour (John S. Clarke, James C. Welsh, James Brown) compared with ten Tories (John Train, Joseph Hunter, William Templeton, the Earl of Home and his son Alec Douglas-Home, Douglas Jamieson, Sir John Maxwell, J. G. Burnett), and three Liberal (Alex Brown, John Wallace, Lord Buckmaster).22 Burns’s memory was still in the hands of its dominant centre-right shareholders. By contrast, nationalists of the NPS remained conflicted about the best attitude to adopt towards Burns clubs and Burns’s legacy in general. On the one hand, the need to claim a popular Scottish icon seemed vital for the nationalist cause. On the other, the party could not indulge in bardolatry without departing from the iconoclastic views of its literary figureheads (including MacDiarmid and Linklater). This resulted in the NPS’s original attempt to transform Burns into a modern, unsentimental, separatist hero. In March 1930, Rev. Walter Wash wrote in the Scots Independent that, in Burnsian matters, ‘the awkward squads of sentimentalism have too long had it their own way’. Unlike his bourgeois admirers, Burns was not a sentimentalist but a ‘realist’ and ‘time [was] more than ripe for bringing the dynamic energy of Burns into the movement for the national revival of Scotland’.23 Two years later, Lewis Spence provided an instance of such a ‘realist’ celebration of the bard. In his 1932 article, ‘Burns and the

8053_Malgrati.indd 96

06/03/23 10:55 am

Relic or Messiah?   97



Scottish soil’, Spence considered the ‘instinctive’ admiration that ‘the average Scotsman’ vows to the ‘might’ and ‘force’ of Burns’s character.24 Such veneration had nothing sentimental, according to Spence. Instead, it was the result of Burns’s ‘volcanic power’ that had shaped the concrete reality – ‘the soil’ – of modern Scotland. An ‘extraordinarily egregious and superhuman’ personality, Burns ‘could translate the speech of the gods in the vernacular of the men’. In poems like ‘Scots wha hae’, ‘Tam o’ Shanter’ and ‘The Jolly Beggars’, Spence claimed the ‘lava-flow’ of Burns’s eloquence matched the patriotism of the Italian fascist poet Gabrielle d’Annunzio. The bard and the Italian shared ’violent’, virile traits. Both were the physical expression of a heroic force ‘which for a season took man’s shape’ in their respective countries and ‘left the mightiest reverberation’ in their ‘people’s soul’.25 Spence’s fierce, lofty élan aimed to convince his avant-gardist friends that Burns was still relevant to modern Scotland. At a time when Italian fascists and German Nazis (soon to take power) worshipped the regenerating influence of preindustrial heroes, Burns’s ‘volcanic’ aura seemed equally capable of moulding a new, revitalised Scotland. Addressing Scottish Renaissance writers, Spence concludes: Hence, my excellent critics, the existence unimpaired and annually extending, of the cultus, the mystery and the adoration which some of you appear to think so exaggerated, wrong-headed and unnatural. As deep calls to deep, so has the Titan spirit whom men name Robert Burns called to that other Titan, the People, who, after all, are the instinctive arbiters of greatness.26

Spence and the NPS endorsed the critique of Burnsian sentimentalism, but they rejected iconoclasm. The young nationalist party aimed to win seats and could not indulge the avant-garde’s contempt for the poet’s popularity. Instead, the NPS thought Burns could still be aligned with modernity as a ‘realist’, Nietzschean, super-manly hero, ranking alongside Bruce and Wallace in the Scottish hall of fame. Burns’s realist ‘might’ and masculine ‘violence’, in the words of Spence, resembled the fascist aesthetics developing in Europe and Britain at the time.27 In October 1932, eight months after the publication of Spence’s article, Oswald Mosley launched his British Union of Fascists (BUF). Although the BUF supported a strictly unionist

8053_Malgrati.indd 97

06/03/23 10:55 am

98   Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics

agenda, it nonetheless claimed the legacy of Burns as a means of winning support in Scotland. In January 1935, Mosley’s daily, The Blackshirt, published an article about Burns, ‘Mainly for Scotsmen’.28 The author – a certain ‘Doric’ – celebrated the modern virtues of Burns’s patriotism against avant-garde iconoclasm. The bard, according to the right-wing author, ‘was in his day and generation one of the moderns’ whose ‘advanced ideas’ were ‘link[ed] with the modern creed of Fascism’. Although he did not substantiate his fascist view of Burns, ‘Doric’ distinguished the bard’s ‘modernity’ from the contemporary ‘ultra-modern smarts’: ‘those whose ideals soar no higher than a foolish mixture of jazz, sex licentiousness, and a quite unintelligible form of art portraying ugliness, distortion and sordidness’. Against this ‘gutter of degenerate thoughts’, a Fascist Britain would ‘recognise the value of our great national figurehead’, and in Scotland, would enable the ‘youth of the country’ to ‘converse with their national tongue’ and rediscover ‘the old Scottish airs’. Against ‘ultra-modern’ artists, keen to bury the ‘Immortal Memory’ under records of Black music, Scottish fascists claimed Burns lived on. The bard’s popularity, they thought, could protect Scottish (and British) culture from ‘Americanisation’ and other ‘degenerate’ influences.29 Even more than jazz and blues, Scottish Fascists saw Jews and Socialists as the central threat to Britain’s integrity. This was made clear in the Blackshirt by a vehemently anti-Semitic article – ‘Rabbie not Rabbi’.30 The article explains that Burns would ‘turn in his grave’ if he knew that his legacy was claimed by left-wing ‘Cohen clansmen in Jacobsen kilt’ who ‘pip[ed] in a kosher haggis’ whilst ‘toast[ing] the “Immortal Memory” in vodka’. Against ‘judeo-bolshevik’ Burnsians, the article asserts that Burns was altogether a ‘national-socialist’ and a ‘poet of Union’ whose ‘most stirring patriotic poem’, ‘Does Haughty Gaul Invasion Threat’, stood ‘against the Army of Revolutionary French Democracy’. Although the bard had written the ‘idealist’ poem ‘A Man’s a Man’, the fascist author declared that Burns ‘ha[d] no illusions about the Brotherhood of Man and [saw] that such [could] only come through each country gaining union within itself and snubs the Moscow Party’. ‘No, dear Pinks and Reds’, the article concludes, ‘you have backed the wrong horse! We Scotsmen are passive when you swindle us of our votes, and even when our Hebrew friends filch our names, but we draw the line when it comes to stealing our National Bard’.31

8053_Malgrati.indd 98

06/03/23 10:55 am

Relic or Messiah?   99



Across Europe, the rise of fascism prompted a vigorous reaction from the left. Until 1934, communists had followed the extremist, ‘class against class’ strategy, ruling out any alliance with social democrats. However, the threatening victory of Hitler in Germany in 1933 changed the views of the Communist International, which began to encourage the creation of antifascist unions (‘Popular Fronts’) with more moderate parties. This new strategy also inaugurated a change in communist propaganda. Whereas the ‘class against class’ line rejected nationalism and folk traditions as reactionary, Popular Fronts would fight fascism by providing a progressive reassessment of national myths. This is precisely what the Scottish section of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) had in mind when issuing a short pamphlet titled Burns Belongs to the People in the mid-1930s.32 Rather moderate in tone, this communist tract presents Burns as a populist bard whose subversive lyrics belonged not to a party but to the Scottish people as a whole. Indeed, Burns was a ‘people’s poet’ who ‘saw the potential values of the people’s dialect’ to craft authentic and irreverent poetry.33 Because he spoke and wrote in the Scottish vernacular, the bard understood better the social reality of his time than any cosmopolitan scholar: ‘Tavern life was Burns’s only university . . . he got no degree there, but, by God, he did see life!’34 In this respect, the pamphlet singles out ‘The Jolly Beggars’ as Burns’s most genuinely subversive depiction of Scottish commoners. According to the communist author: It was neither vulgarity nor bawdry that kept ‘The Jolly Beggars’ out of the [1787] Edinburgh Edition [of Burns’s poem] – it was the revolutionary sentiments expressed in the rollicking chorus of the last song that damned it . . . A fig for those by law protected: Liberty’s a glorious feast! Courts for cowards were erected, Churches built to please the priest.’35

The pamphlet rejects the Edinburgh period of Burns’s life, when the poet’s creative powers dwindled under the influence of city aristocrats and abased themselves in the ‘stupid, time-wasting traffic of Sylvander and Clarinda’.36 Instead, the bard’s genius could only flourish through contact with the folk of Ayrshire and Dumfriesshire. Until

8053_Malgrati.indd 99

06/03/23 10:55 am

100   Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics

the end of his life, the text claims, Burns had remained a poet ‘of the people with the people’ and ‘an out-and-out champion of the French Revolutionists’.37 This did not mean, however, that Burns could be anachronistically hijacked by a modern radical party – even for the sake of communism or socialism. The pamphlet explains: The question, ‘was Burns a Socialist’, has been asked ever since there has been an active Socialist movement, and there have always been foolhardy propagandists prepared to answer in the affirmative . . . But protests against inequalities and injustice of a class society have been common in all ages and don’t add up to Socialism. Burns was a radical democrat, living in an era of the American and the French Revolution, who used his poetry as a vehicle for his progressive opinions.38

This moderate conclusion highlights the spirit of the ‘Popular Front’ strategy. Unlike the communist Grassic Gibbon whose ‘class against class’ novel Grey Granite (1933) had depicted the obsolescence of the bard in modern times and rejected his poetry of the ‘kailyardic’ past, the new line of the CPGB embraced the tide of Burns’s popularity and proposed a careful re-interpretation of his radical legacy. Although Burns’s eighteenth-century airs might have lacked the pomp of a Red Army orchestra, Communists could not leave his legacy at the mercy of brown and black shirts. An additional consequence of antifascism was the mobilisation of Scottish intellectuals. Everywhere in Western Europe, progressive writers were tightening their links to left-wing organisations. In June 1935, 230 famous intellectuals, from André Malraux to Aldous Huxley, gathered in Paris for an ‘antifascist Congress of writers’.39 Despite their absence from the French capital, Scottish writers were no exception to the antifascist trend. In 1934, Naomi Mitchison helped smuggle socialist activists out of fascist Vienna.40 The same year, Hugh MacDiarmid, who had been purged from the newly founded Scottish National Party (SNP), entered the CPGB and wrote his Second Hymn to Lenin. He was soon joined by Catherine Carswell, who apparently joined the Communist Party in 1935.41 Likewise, the staunchly communist and Gaelic poet Sorley MacLean sided with Spanish Republicans in his 1936 poem ‘Gairn na h-Eorpa’ (trans. ‘The Cry of Europe’). Surprisingly, though, the humanitarian and democratic tropes of Burns, highly compatible with antifascist writing, failed to foster a positive reassessment of the poet. The iconoclastic turn

8053_Malgrati.indd 100

06/03/23 10:55 am



Relic or Messiah?   101

of the preceding decade had left its mark on Scottish literature. The antifascist cause notwithstanding, Burnsian rhetoric remained beside the point for most Scottish authors. It thus fell to a lesser-known left-wing writer to pen a new portrait of Burns. In 1938, the West Fife miner, poet, playwright and communist fellow traveller Joe Corrie published a one-act Burns play – The Rake o’ Mauchline, first staged by Paisley’s Barrhead Players in February of that year.42 Hailed by T. S. Eliot as a ‘genuine poet’ whose ‘authentic lyric note’ recalled the bard’s works, Corrie had long been fascinated with Burns.43 In his first, mainly unpublished, 1919 collection of poetry, several of Corrie’s verses drew from Burns, including a pastiche of ‘Green Grow the Rashes’ (entitled ‘Sweet Simmer time has ta’en flicht’) and a lyrical ‘Immortal Memory’ to the bard – ‘Scotia’s Boast’.44 On a more political note, in January 1924 in the columns of The Miner, the journal of the National Miners’ Reform Union, Corrie depicted Burns as a ‘ploughman genius’ who ‘would have been on the side of the revolutionaries in Russia, and the Socialists of this and every other country’.45 Fourteen years later, as Burns’s radical pith failed to inspire modernist writers, the left-wing poet – now famous as a working-class playwright – saw that time was ripe to honour his personal hero. The Rake o’ Mauchline is set in July 1786 in Kilmarnock, after James Armour issued an arrest warrant against Burns for impregnating his daughter Jean. In the first scene, the bard appears a ‘bedraggled’ rebel, escaping the ‘the law hounds’ and seeking refuge in the house of his friend Tam Samson.46 Initially, Tam’s wife refuses to let Burns enter: ‘We a’ ken’, she says, ‘what kin’ o’ character you ha’e wi’ your poetry makin’ against dacent honest elders o’ the Kirk, and your sangs about lasses that arena fit for the ears o’ douce folk’.47 However, Tam locks his wife in her room and admits Burns. A few moments later, Johnnie Wilson, the printer of Burns’s poems, enters and explains the true reason for Burns’s prosecution: ‘Man, if he would only leave the kirk alane – that’s at the bottom o’ it a’, mind ye. Weemen dinna matter a damn, but the kirk!’ Here, Corrie portrays Burns as a subversive anti-clerical hero whose danger to social order lies less in his moral licentiousness than in his radical opposition to law and Kirk. Yet Corrie’s Burns is not godless. Towards the end of the play the poet recites an extract from his long, meditative poem, ‘The Cotter’s

8053_Malgrati.indd 101

06/03/23 10:55 am

102   Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics

Saturday Night’ (1786). As shown by Whatley, this pious account of agricultural Sabbath was a favourite of nineteenth-century Tories, who used it to celebrate a canny and orderly vision of Scotland.48 However, Corrie chose the most ambiguous stanza of Burns’s poem, where in the conclusion the bard conflates frugal piousness with patriotic radicalism: O SCOTIA! my dear, my native soil! For whom my warmest wish to Heaven is sent! Long may thy hardy sons of rustic toil Be blest with health, and peace, and sweet content! And O may Heaven their simple lives prevent From Luxury’s contagion, weak and vile! Then howe’er crowns and coronets be rent, A virtuous Populace may rise the while, And stand a wall of fire around their much-lov’d ISLE.49

Whilst acknowledging Burns’s sincere spirituality, Corrie seems to dwell on the more seditious layer of the poet’s faith – one reminiscent of the seventeenth-century Covenanters’ uprisings. Two years later in January 1940, Corrie reasserted his radical view of Burns by co-founding The Bowhill People’s Burns Club – a unique Scottish communist Burns Club locaded in the West Fife mining town of Cardenden.50 West Fife, at the time, was Britain’s only ‘red’ constituency, having been won by William Gallagher in 1935. The creation of a local, working-class and communist Burns club, distinct from older and more middle-class Burns Clubs in this area (including the Dunfermline United Burns Club founded in 1847 and the Cowdenbeath Glencairn Burns Club founded in 1893), allowed Communists to cement the radical ‘Little Moscow’ culture of Fife mining towns. The first meeting of the Bowhill People’s Burns Club was held in Bowhill Tavern in January 1940. Club members – including Joe Corrie – appointed the communist John Murdoch as President. The meeting was followed by a Burns supper, toasted in the company of two Russian sailors as well as a Polish interpreter. By contrast with traditional Burns clubs, whose international guests often came from diaspora and Empire, Bowhill communists turned Eastward to celebrate Burns’s internationalism.51 Predictably, the Burns Federation fought back against communist attempts to claim Scotland’s bard. Following the German-Soviet pact of August 1939, the neutrality of the USSR at the beginning of the

8053_Malgrati.indd 102

06/03/23 10:55 am



Relic or Messiah?   103

Second World War enabled the patriotic Federation to reject communism and fascism altogether as anti-British and anti-Burns. On 21 July 1940, Rev. Phin Gillieson – a 61-year-old minister of Ayr – gave a patriotic oration at the Wallace and Burns Monument in Leglen Wood.52 Gillieson’s speech, as reported in the 1941 issue of the Burns Chronicle, railed against the ‘faint hearts, the fifth columnists and the neutrals’. Quoting ‘Scots wha hae’ (‘Wha will be a traitor knave?’) and ‘Does haughty Gaul’ (‘Be Britain still to Britain true’), the Reverend summoned his audience to unite in a ‘common effort’ against their ‘common enemy’.53 Gillieson asserted that there was ‘nothing powerful enough to prevail against Nazism or Communism that [was] not as revolutionary and passionate as’ their ideologies. ‘If it [was] a totalitarian war on the one side’, Gillieson added that it should ‘be a consecrated war on the other’.54 The Reverend concluded his sermon with an appeal to fight for God, King and Country. Interestingly, he illustrated his final plea with the same excerpt from ‘The Cotter’s Saturday Night’ as Joe Corrie had chosen to close his Rake o’ Mauchline. In Gillieson’s mouth, however, the meaning of the quotation changed. The ‘rising populace’ and the ‘wall of fire’ did not represent plebeian rebellion against idolatry and privileges – as hinted by Corrie’s play – but rather expressed the future sacrifices of Britons in defending of their ‘much-loved isle’ against the ‘totalitarian’ pact of Stalin and Hitler. During the first two years of the Second World War, the Burns Federation followed Gillieson’s message and resumed the patriotic rhetoric it had embraced during the Great War. In September 1940, one week into the Blitz, the annual conference of the Federation was held in Glasgow. The President, M. H. McKerrow, spoke against Germany and contrasted Burns’s works with Hitler’s Mein Kampf. ‘In the one’, McKerrow argued, ‘we have the highest conception of love, friendship, patriotism and kindness, whereas the other book extols cunning, fanaticism, profanity, mendacity, treachery and brutality’.55 As in 1914, Burns was identified with the fighting spirit of liberal democracy against that of the ruthless German foe. This was made clear by Rev. Harold Cockburn on 26 January 1941, preaching in Dumfries’ St Michael’s Cathedral. Burns, according to Cockburn, was the poet of ‘Manhood, Freedom and Brotherhood’ – the three values for which ‘Britain is fighting for today’. The ‘Brotherhood of Man’, Cockburn declared, was Burns’s most important notion, for it

8053_Malgrati.indd 103

06/03/23 10:55 am

104   Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics

linked his words with the message of Christ. The Reverend insisted that Christians and Burnsians alike had to unite against the Nazis’ threat to universal fraternity. ‘Yes, verily’, Cockburn added: If the followers of Christ this day languish in the prisons and concentration camps of Germany, then let the followers of Burns also beware; for if Burns did not follow Christ so closely as he might in his conduct, he did follow Christ closely in his teaching.56

The bard’s faith in freedom and humanity should lead Burnsians to take up arms. Once again, the Burns Movement was to rally the recruitment campaign of the British army. In January 1941, ‘Does haughty Gaul’ was on the lips of most Burns orators, encouraging young men to enlist. At the supper of the Sandyford Burns Club, Matthew Lindsay’s rendition of Burns’s patriotic song ‘created a tremendous enthusiasm among the members’.57 Likewise, the poetry recital tournament organised by the Glasgow Burns House was won by the poem which proclaimed: The Nith shall run to Corsincon, And Criffel sink in Solway, E’er we permit a Foreign Foe On British ground to rally.58

The myth of Burns the Volunteer was back in full swing.

Notes   1. Dobbie, ‘Burns and Scottish Nationalism’ in BC 2, 1930, Vol. 6, p. 57. See P2, p. 765, ll. 13–16.  2. Mitchell, Hanno.   3. Grassic Gibbon’s Burns was first analysed by Price, ‘Robert Burns and the Scottish Renaissance’, Simpson (ed.), Love and Liberty, pp. 128–44.   4. Grassic Gibbon, Sunset Song, p. 22; Price, ‘Robert Burns’, p. 135.   5. Grassic Gibbon, Sunset Song, pp. 50, 163.  6. Ibid. p. 246; Price, ‘Robert Burns’, p. 136.   7. Grassic Gibbon, Grey Granite, p. 5. Of course, this rather offensive comment about Burns’s alleged alcoholism is not substantiated by recent research. See Buchanan and Kean, ‘Robert Burns’s illness revisited’, in Scottish Medical Journal, pp. 75–88.

8053_Malgrati.indd 104

06/03/23 10:55 am



Relic or Messiah?   105

  8. Ibid p. 164.  9. Ibid. p. 165. 10. Ibid. 11. Mitchell and Hassan (eds), Scottish National Party, p. 63. 12. Blake, The Shipbuilders, p. 32. This passage was already spotted by Price, ‘Robert Burns’, p. 137. 13. Blake, The Shipbuilders, p. 32, quoted in Price, ‘Robert Burns’, p. 137. The author does not condone Blake’s terminology. 14. Muir, Scottish Journey, p. 88. 15. Price, ‘Robert Burns’, 137. 16. The Scotsman, 12 October 1928 and 5 October 1934. Interestingly, the greatest decrease (by more than 13,000 visitors) occurred during the academic year 1927–8, the year MacDiarmid called for the ‘Immortal Memory’ to be forgotten. 17. The Scotsman, 4 October 1930. 18. Boudrot, L’écrivain éponyme, p. 41. 19. BC 2, 1931, Vol. 6, pp. 111, 125. 20. BC 2, 1934, Vol. 9, p. 106. 21. Daily Record, 26 January 1932. Sir Joseph Dobbie, President of the Burns Federation, had launched the SND project in 1929. 22. BC 2, 1930–5, Vols 5–10. Notes of the BC do not account for all Burns events that took place every year. However, they provide details about the events organised by the most prominent Burns clubs. 23. Scots Independent, March 1930. 24. Scots Independent, February 1932. Underlined in the text. 25. Ibid. 26. Ibid. 27. See, for instance, Champagne, Aesthetic Modernism, and Mangan (ed.), Shaping the Superman. 28. The Blackshirt, 25 January 1935. 29. For more details on Scottish fascism, see Bowd, Fascist Scotland. 30. The Blackshirt, 27 January 1939. The auhor does not condone such terminology. 31. Ibid. 32. Scottish section of the CPGB, Burns Belongs to the People. The publication date does not appear on the pamphlet. The catalogue of the NLS indicates 1930. However, the patriotic tone, the moderate argumentation and the very existence of such a pamphlet would have been forbidden in the CPGB at this time – which was the peak of the ‘class against class’ strategy. I agree with Dr Malcolm Petrie (personal communication) that the publication of this pamphlet should be placed at the time of the ‘Popular Front’ line – between 1934 and 1938. For

8053_Malgrati.indd 105

06/03/23 10:55 am

106   Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics more contextual information, see Kristjansdottir, ‘Communists and the National Question’, pp. 601–18. 33. Burns Belongs to the People, p. 8. 34. Ibid. p. 14. 35. Ibid. 36. Ibid. p. 16. 37. Ibid. p. 18. 38. Ibid. p. 21. 39. Boas, The Paris Antifascist Congress. 40. Montefiore, Men and Women Writers of the 1930s, p. 60. 41. McCulloch, Scottish Modernism, p. 108. 42. Corrie, The Rake o’ Mauchline. See also Keith, Robert Burns’s Life on the Stage, p. 89. 43. Eliot’s statement was written on the dustjacket of the 1937 Porpoise Press edition of Corrie’s poems, The Image o’ God. See Eliot and Haffenden (eds), The Letters of T. S. Eliot, p. 527 and ‘Biography’ in Malgrati (ed.), ‘Joe Corrie Website’. Available at (last accessed 23 July 2019). 44. Joe Corrie, unpublished notebook dedicated to Andrew Doig, NLS, Acc. 10839. 45. The Miner, 24 January 1924. The two following pages are partly reprinted from my article, ‘Pit and Plough’, in Malgrati (ed.), ‘Joe Corrie Website’. Available at (last accessed 23 July 2019). 46. Corrie, The Rake, p. 4. 47. Ibid. p. 7. 48. Whatley, Immortal Memory, pp. 25–51. 49. Ibid. p. 17. 50. Anniversary leaflet of the Bowhill People’s Burns Club, Edinburgh University Library, Hamish Henderson, archives, Coll-1438, Box 47/3/8. 51. Ibid. More information about the Bowhill People’s Burns Club can also be found on the club’s website (last accessed 1 November 2017). 52. BC 2, 1940, Vol. 14, p. 37. Regarding Gillieson, see Scott, Fasti, Vol. 8, p. 213. 53. BC 2, 1940, Vol. 14, p. 38. 54. Ibid. 55. BC 2, 1941, Vol. 15, p. 56. 56. BC 2, 1942, Vol. 16, p. 45. 57. Ibid. p. 89. 58. P2, ll. 5–8, p. 765.

8053_Malgrati.indd 106

06/03/23 10:55 am

Chapter 4

‘See Yonder Poor’: The Bard of Welfare (1941–1948)

In the beginning of 1941, as German bombs killed thousands across the UK, from London to Glasgow, it seemed only natural that the Burns Federation should reassert its British patriotic, militaristic creed. From right to left, the country was united against fascism, pledging support for Britain’s liberal democracy and dismissing inappropriate revolutionary or separatist ill-feelings. Certainly, nobody thought it appropriate to open a new, divisive debate about Burns at this time. As had been the case during the Great War, one might have expected the current conflict to revive a jingoistic consensus, strengthening the links between the Burns Movement, King, Kirk, Army and Empire. However, against conservative odds, the Second World War would transform the politics of the Scottish Burns movement. What twenty years of peacetime polemics had failed to achieve, a few years of sedate wartime politics would almost complete. Indeed, from 1941 to 1945, the Burns Federation turned from liberal-conservatism to social-democracy, breaking with more than sixty years of Burnsian memory-making. Though far in appearance from the fury of bombardments, a key reason for this political shift lies in the appointment of Thomas Johnston as wartime Secretary of State for Scotland in 1941. Johnston was a well-known, longstanding figure of Scottish socialism, made famous by his activism as a Red Clydeside pacifist during the 1910s and elected as a radical ILP MP for Dundee in 1922. Whilst remaining firmly on the left of centre, however, Johnston had moderated some of his views in recent years – not least regarding his approach

8053_Malgrati.indd 107

06/03/23 10:55 am

108   Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics

to Scottish cultural politics. Likely to denigrate middle-class Burns clubs in the early 1920s, Johnston had become a committed supporter of the Burns Federation during the 1930s. In 1938, he was the only MP to ask the House of Commons to provide the Burns Federation with financial assistance for the publishing of the second volume of its Scottish National Dictionary – an ambitious project to research and record all historical and present Scots words and phrases.1 Johnston’s proposition was rejected, but official Burnsians were grateful for his efforts. Indeed, the first pages of the 1939 Burns Chronicle thanked the Labour MP for his ‘vigorous support’ which had ‘made the position of the Dictionary better known to Scots folks’.2 Two years later, as Secretary of State for Scotland, Johnston now appeared a pivotal figure whose assistance might finally enable the Federation to fulfil the SND project. In order to gain favour with the new Secretary, Burnsians understood that their best option was to facilitate the rise of the socialist veterans and Johnston’s old friends John S. Clarke and Patrick J. Dollan within their ranks. Indeed, Clarke and Dollan had followed Johnston’s political trajectory since the First World War. Like the Secretary of State, both men had been pacifist ‘Clydesiders’ during their youth, before joining the board of Forward, the ILP’s journal, in post-war years. In 1932, Johnston, Clarke and Dollan were still fighting side by side when they decided to leave the ILP of ‘red’ Jimmy Maxton after he had disaffiliated the ILP from Labour.3 Together, they went on to create the Scottish Socialist Party, which maintained links with Labour and sent Johnston to the House of Commons in 1935. A few years later, by the time Johnston was appointed Secretary of State, Clarke and Dollan remained influential in Glasgow politics. In 1938, Dollan had been elected as Glasgow Lord Provost and was knighted for his support to war recruitment in 1941.4 The same year, Clarke, who now served as a Daily Record columnist, entered Glasgow City Council.5 Their left-of-centre views notwithstanding, the established status of Clarke and Dollan – together with their being close acquaintances of Johnston – strongly appealed to traditional Burnsians. Although neither of the men had ever committed to the activities of the more established Burns clubs, they were to take control of the Federation before the end of hostilities.6 In January 1942, ten months after Johnston’s appointment as Secretary of State, Clarke became the most celebrated orator of the

8053_Malgrati.indd 108

06/03/23 10:55 am



The Bard of Welfare   109

Burns season. He delivered three consecutive ‘Immortal Memory’ speeches to the Tam o’ Shanter Burns Club of Glasgow, the Greenock Burns Club and the Dumfries Burns Club. The last of these was recorded by the Burns Chronicle as a true ‘celebration of international friendship’ due to the presence of guests from Norway, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Poland and Russia.7 The participation of Russian guests at the Dumfries Burns supper reflected the unexpected alliance between Britain and Soviet Russia following Germany’s invasion of the USSR in June 1941. Whereas a few years earlier the decision to invite Soviet guests to a Burns supper could only have been that of the marginal communist Burns Club of Bowhill, by 1942 it had become a mere question of political correctness for the middle-class clubs of the Federation. In the winter of 1941–2, as Moscow was besieged by the Nazis, the commitment of Burns clubs to Britain’s new ally went as far as to organise charity events for ‘the Russian and British Red Cross’ in Ayr and Newbattle.8 This new situation benefited Clarke, whose knowledge of the USSR (in 1920 he had travelled to Russia and even cured Lenin’s dog of an ailment) enabled the Federation to reach out to a country alien to most Burnsians.9 Indeed, at the end of 1941, Clarke had the opportunity to connect Burns with the Eastern Front when delivering lectures on ‘Russia’ to both Mauchline and the Tam o’ Shanter (Glasgow) Burns Clubs.10 Altogether, Clarke’s friendship with the new Secretary of State along with his growing reputation amongst Burnsians were instrumental in his election as Vice President at the annual conference of the Burns Federation on 12 September 1942.11 Interestingly, Clarke’s election during the conference followed the report speech of John McVie (Secretary of the Federation), who emphasised the recent support granted to the Federation by Thomas Johnston. Indeed, McVie explained that the ‘Secretary of State for Scotland [was] very interested’ in the ‘Scots Readers’ for schoolteachers that the Federation had issued in 1936. McVie rejoiced in Johnston’s ‘recent memorandum on “Training for citizenship”’ which affirmed that ‘every good citizen should take pride in the correct use of his native tongue’.12 At a time when the Federation tirelessly sought donations for the Scottish National Dictionary, whose second volume had been published in 1941, Johnston’s official support of Scots revivalism was particularly welcome.13 Newly elected to the Federation’s committee, Patrick Dollan concluded the conference with an address to Burnsian delegates. His speech

8053_Malgrati.indd 109

06/03/23 10:55 am

110   Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics

encouraged a more interventionist approach to the poet’s legacy. He affirmed that there was ‘no man in the past 200 years who had had a message more appropriate for the present time than Robert Burns’. In his correspondence, Dollan explained that Burns ‘offered much guidance . . . for our own time’ and appeared ‘not only [as] a poet but [as] a statesman’ whose ‘message would bring peace and happiness to mankind’.14 Although Glasgow’s Lord Provost remained vague, his speech revealed his intention to be more than a mere mediator between the Federation and Johnston. Instead, both Dollan and Clarke planned to use their new functions to redden the politics of Burns’s memory. Dollan soon detailed his interpretation of Burns’s politics and ‘statesmanship’. On 29 September 1942, delivering a lecture to the Mauchline Burns Club, Dollan claimed that the ‘statesmanship’ of the bard was that of a social radical supporter of the revolutionist Thomas Muir, the Scottish radical leader who had died as a hero in revolutionary France in 1798.15 Dollan furthered his point in January 1943 in the columns of the socialist journal Forward. In his article, the Lord Provost insisted that Burns had conceived ‘Scots wha hae’ in September 1793 as a tribute to Muir, who had just been put on trial by British authorities. Burns’s song, Dollan explained, was ‘as much a song for rebels as the Marseillaise, the Internationale or any other song of freedom that has become universal’.16 In ‘Scots wha hae’, Burns proved his quality, not only as ‘a lyric-poet’, but, more importantly, ‘as a reformer, politician and statesman’. Indeed, ‘if it had been possible for Burns to stand as a political candidate’, Dollan asserted ‘he probably would have accepted the invitation’. At a time when ‘agricultural workers were paid a few pounds’, ‘miners [were] in bondage and sold when pits exchanged owners’, and ‘unions [were] regarded as criminal organisations’, Burns stood up for the rights of working people. As an example, Dollan quoted Burns’s 1784 poem ‘Man was made to mourn’: Man’s inhumanity to Man Makes countless thousands mourn! See, yonder poor, o’erlabour’d wight, So abject, mean and vile, Who begs a brother of the earth To give him leave to toil; And see his lordly fellow-worm, The poor petition spurn,

8053_Malgrati.indd 110

06/03/23 10:55 am

The Bard of Welfare   111

Unmindful, tho’ a weeping wife And helpless offspring mourn. If I’m design’d yon lordling’s slave, By Nature’s law design’d, Why was an independent wish E’er planted in my mind? If not, why am I subject to His cruelty, or scorn? Or why has Man the will and pow’r To make his fellow mourn?17

According to Dollan, these lines unambiguously ‘proclaimed – (1) The right to work or maintenance; (2) The natural right of every man to mental, spiritual and economic independence and (3) Collective welfare and security for the aged’.18 More than a hundred and fifty years before the Beveridge Report (published two months before Dollan’s article), Burns was already the poet of the Welfare State. Further still, Dollan interpreted the bard’s oft-quoted lines ‘That I for poor auld / Scotland’s sake / Some useful plan or book / could make’ as a proof that Burns had foreseen the need for planned economy. ‘Burns was a planner’, Dollan concludes, adding that: Evidence of his interest in housing, education, amenities, security, thrift and organisation can be found throughout his writings and especially in his letters by those who want to study the popular origins of the . . . industrial reforms that have brought us to the verge of security for all.19

Dollan’s words echoed contemporary discussions about welfare in the House of Commons. Around the same time, the Rev. James Barr, Labour MP for Coatbridge, and long-standing comrade of Johnston, Clarke and Dollan, used the debates following the Beveridge Report to promote a social-democrat image of the bard. On 12 March 1942, Barr spoke in the Commons against old age unemployment. To emphasise his point, he quoted Burns’s brother, Gilbert, who recalled that Robert ‘could not conceive a more mortifying picture of human life than a man seeking work and unable to find it’.20 Like Dollan, Barr then went on to recite ‘Man was Made to Mourn’ before concluding that: Age and want are still an ill-matched pair, and although much has been done to alleviate the want, much remains before it is replaced, I do not say by plenty, but at least by comfort, by a competence, and a sufficiency.21

8053_Malgrati.indd 111

06/03/23 10:55 am

112   Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics

Three months later, on 17 June, Barr made a similar intervention during a debate on old age pensions: None have spoken with greater pathos on [old age] than my favourite poet, Robert Burns. In the closing words of his ‘Ode on Despondency’, he wrote: ‘The fears all, the tears all, Of dim declining age’. In one of his ‘Epistles to Robert Graham of Fintry’, he referred mournfully to those who are ‘Low sunk in squalid unprotected age’. And in his ‘Ode to Liberty’, he wrote: ‘The palsied arm of tottering, powerless age’. These are burdens that we cannot lift; but if we cannot lift the burden, we can at least make it lighter.22

In drawing on his Burnsian erudition in this way, Barr simultaneously underlined his support both for collective welfare and for the actions of his friends, Clarke and Dollan, within the Burns movement. The 1943 Burns season marked the first breakthrough of this official, social-democratic vision of the bard. In late 1942, the Federation was approached by the Ministry of Information with a plan to host a series of Burns meetings throughout Scotland. The point of these meetings was to emphasise ‘Burns’s championship of democracy and universal brotherhood, his hatred of dictatorship, and how he had laid down the principles upon which the Atlantic Charter and the Beveridge Report are based’.23 This was not the first time that the British government intervened in the making of Burns’s legacy. During the Great War, as seen in Chapter 1, the state had used the bard for army recruitment. In 1943, however, the Ministry’s purpose was less to mobilise Scottish people for the war effort than to prepare them for post-war socio-economic reforms. In total, eighteen public Burns meetings were held on 24 January, from Ayr to Coatbridge and Falkirk to Kirkcaldy. They were followed by a special BBC broadcast on 25 January. According to Patrick Dollan’s report in the Burns Chronicle, these meetings ‘were attended by an aggregate of about 35,000 people’.24 Predictably, Clarke and Dollan were at the forefront of this initiative, delivering ‘Immortal Memory’ toasts at many gatherings between Cumbrae, Greenock and Glasgow.25 The growing Keynesian zeitgeist benefited Clarke and Dollan, whose once radical social ideas were now becoming mainstream; it facilitated their final ascension to the head of the Burns movement. In September 1943, Clarke replaced M. H. McKerrow as President of the Burns Federation.26 At the same time, Dollan became convenor of

8053_Malgrati.indd 112

06/03/23 10:55 am

The Bard of Welfare   113



the Federation’s new sub-committee for Scottish Literature, the aim of which was ‘to promote the study of Scottish Literature, to secure support for the Scottish National Dictionary and to increase the circulation of the Burns Chronicle’.27 An immediate consequence of Clarke and Dollan’s takeover was the Federation’s association with the Scottish Council of Social Service (created in March 1943 under Tom Johnston’s secretaryship). The Council aimed ‘to provide a common centre for mutual contact and co-operation between all Voluntary Organisations engaged in constructive social service in Scotland’.28 In the name of Burns’s eighteenth-century egalitarianism, the Burns Federation became one of the sponsors of the Welfare State in Scotland. This was clarified by Dollan in the 1944 issue of the Burns Chronicle: The gospel of Robert Burns was not written for the enjoyment of festivals on 25th of January, but was formulated for daily observance by individuals and nations as the true way of living in politics, industry, social service and administration. Robert Burns was a greater advocate of peace and social security than Roosevelt, Churchill, Beveridge or any of the modern champions will ever be . . . It is only in the application of the social and humanitarian principles to the furtherance of which Robert Burns devoted his life, that the World can be protected against war and saved from disease, poverty and unemployment and other manifestations of men’s failure in the past to appreciate that ‘Man’s inhumanity to Man’ has been the most potent cause of strife, disorder and insecurity at home and abroad.29

Admittedly, Dollan’s call to follow Burns’s egalitarian prophecy resembled the speech delivered by C. M. Grieve at the Federation’s Birmingham conference more than twenty years earlier. Yet, whereas MacDiarmid’s words sounded inappropriately fiery in the context of 1922, the antifascist and social-democratic spirit of 1944 provided Dollan with a much stronger position. After the formation of Clement Attlee’s government in July 1945, Labour’s victory was reflected, two months later, in the election of Dollan, alongside Clarke, as Vice President of the Burns Federation. Labour was now the dominant force of the Burns movement in Scotland, with two representatives at the helm of its key organisation. This new situation was made evident on 8 September 1945 at the Diamond Jubilee Dinner of the Federation in Glasgow. To mark

8053_Malgrati.indd 113

06/03/23 10:55 am

114   Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics

the occasion, Clarke had invited Tom Johnston, who now ran the Scottish Hydroelectricity Board. In his toast ‘to the Federation’, the ex-Secretary of State renewed his support to the Scottish National Dictionary. ‘For the first time in our history’, Johnston declared, ‘we have an organised attempt at preserving the dialect of our forebears and Scottish literature’. Unlike the old nineteenth-century Burns clubs whose annual celebrations ‘gave way to various ascriptions to Burns of poetry he never wrote’, the modern Federation had fought the decline of Scottish culture and influenced ‘the great change that had come over the Scots tongue, the Scots dialect, and Scots literature, in the past half-century’.30 Certainly, Johnston’s critique of the nineteenth-century ‘Burns clubs’ reflected the emerging contention that opposed the Labourite, Glasgow-centred Federation to the older, more conservative Ayrshire Burns clubs – including the Irvine Burns Club (created in 1826), which had chosen Thomas Moore (Conservative MP for Ayr) as President in 1945. These tensions notwithstanding, Johnston’s focus on the recent activities of the Federation (especially on the SND and the ‘Scots Reader’ for Schools) aimed to identify the modern purpose of the organisation with that of Labour in Scotland. The revival of Scottish culture, combined with a centralised Welfare State, could provide a new balance to the British Union and prevent Scotland from ‘becom[ing] a region or a mere postal district’.31 This new balance of power was further illustrated by a short correspondence between John McVie, the Secretary of the Burns Federation, and Tom Johnston in late 1945. In this exchange of letters, McVie requested Johnston to assist the publication of the third volume of the SND.32 The Federation asked Johnston to secure financial support from the Pilgrim Trust, a national grant-making body which had worked with the Ministry of Labour and National Service during the War.33 The Trust’s assistance, McVie explained, would help complement Clarke and Dollan’s grant application to the Scottish Education Department. Moreover, McVie asked Johnston to sign the Federation’s ‘Appeal to Donors’, aimed at ‘industrial magnates’ and middle-class Burnsians. Significantly, Johnston agreed to contact the Pilgrim Trust but refused to sign the Appeal: As for attaching my signature to the Burns Federation Appeal, I think that would be extraordinary bad tactics. You have already got Clarke

8053_Malgrati.indd 114

06/03/23 10:55 am

The Bard of Welfare   115



and Dollan and if you overload it with people of one political persuasion you may do harm to the Fund Appeal. I can assist probably more in other directions. Under these circumstances, it would be most unwise for me to sign the Burns Federation Appeal.34

Whilst hinting at Labour’s tight control over the Federation, Johnston distanced himself from fundraising methods inherited from the Victorian era, relying on private donors to fund projects of national significance. In other words, Johnston made it clear that the financial future of the Burns movement lay not in nineteenth-century bourgeois philanthropy but, rather, in indirect state subsidies. Labour’s hegemony over the Burns movement deeply affected the bard’s position in the politics and literature of post-war Scotland. Certainly, the egalitarian reading of Burns as promoted by Labour was not particularly innovative. It drew on the tradition of the Scottish working-class movement, alive since the time of Burns’s death, and from 1820s Weaver Poets to 1830s Chartists and Edwardian trade-unionists to Great War pacifists. However, despite this strong tradition – and despite short-lived Labour governments in 1924 and 1929–31– it was not until now, in the wake of Churchill’s war ministry, that radical Burnsians had left the fringes of Scottish politics to influence the discourse of key institutions, including both the Burns Federation and the British state. This new situation profoundly affected the terrain of Burns’s memory. From across the political divide, Burnsians were now forced to choose their class side. Could the exciseman be turned into an NHS director? Would he have supported state intervention, or would he have stuck to the laissez-faire principles of pre-war Scotland? Furthermore, how would contemporary Scottish writers react to the bard’s posthumous career as a social-democratic ‘statesman’? In the immediate aftermath of Attlee’s victory, important support for Labour’s Burns was drawn from the Communist Party. In 1945, the CPGB had reached 60,000 members and sent William Gallacher back to the House of Commons.35 Although the party’s attempt to affiliate with Labour had been thwarted in 1943, communist propaganda embraced the creation of the Welfare State. This stance was reflected in J. R. Campbell’s Burns, the Democrat (1945), an influential pamphlet building on the rather moderate approach to Burns developed by Scottish Communists since the 1930s. A journalist at the Daily

8053_Malgrati.indd 115

06/03/23 10:55 am

116   Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics

Worker, Campbell did not depict Burns as an insurrectional proletarian who ‘envisaged drastic economic changes in the social system’ but rather as a ‘common man’ – a ‘lower middle-class’ farmer who ‘looked to the gradual economic progress of the tenant farmers, small manufacturers and the middle class in general’.36 Although he was not a proto-socialist, Burns still thought a better system could exist for the poor, as expressed in ‘Man was Made to Mourn’.37 Moreover, as an eighteenth-century middle-class reformer, the poet strongly opposed landowners and the ‘reactionary gentry’. This certainly explained his support for Thomas Muir during the French Revolution.38 According to Campbell, Burns’s pro-French ardour only vanished when France, after Robespierre’s fall, had ceased to represent the international interests of the common people. This, Campbell explains, was something that ‘Tory Burnsites’ failed to understand when they ‘seize[d] upon [‘Does haughty Gaul’] to prove that after all Burns was not as radical as some people imagine’. Instead, the end of ‘The Dumfries Volunteers’, which goes: ‘But while we sing, GOD SAVE THE KING / We’ll ne’er forget THE PEOPLE’, indicates that Burns had written his poem ‘without any major sacrifice of reform principles’.39 Against the Conservative interpretation of the bard, Campbell concluded that ‘Burns . . . had striven to make the lot of the common people a happier one’. Today, his example was followed by ‘the common people themselves’ who were currently ‘go[ing] forward to achieve their freedom and to make our beloved country a land of which Burns would be proud’.40 Campbell’s final reference to recent social progress made in Scotland and Britain was an obvious approval of the Welfare State. A few months later, Campbell’s propagandist efforts were seconded by the first volume of James Barke’s novelisation of Burns’s life – The Wind that Shakes the Barley. Barke was William Gallacher’s friend and a communist ‘fellow traveller’. He had reached literary prominence in the 1930s with Major Operation (1936) and The Land of the Leal (1939) – two realistic novels depicting the life and struggle of working people on the west coast of Scotland.41 Barke’s political radicalism, together with his activities in Scottish PEN and his literary interest in modern Scotland, drew him close to the Scottish Renaissance movement.42 However, the communist writer strongly disagreed with the iconoclastic turn that many Scottish writers had taken against Burns. Indeed, in a 1948 letter to the American Burns scholar J. Delancey Ferguson, Barke violently dismissed Catherine

8053_Malgrati.indd 116

06/03/23 10:55 am

The Bard of Welfare   117



Carswell as ‘a dirty minded old bitch’ and an ‘exhibitionist’ who had ‘viewed Burns through the peep-hole of her vagina’.43 Against the influence of Carswell’s biography which insisted on Burns’s blemishes as both a radical and a lover, Barke undertook the production of a quintet of lengthy Burns-based novels – Immortal Memory. From The Wind that Shakes the Barley in 1946 to The Well of the Silent Harp in 1954, Barke provided the first serious literary effort to overcome the divorce between Burns and twentieth-century Scottish writing. Five years after Edwin Muir had denounced Burns and Scott as the ‘sham bards of a sham nation’, Barke wished to rehabilitate the ploughman poet as a valuable literary subject.44 Barke’s hopes were comforted by the social-democratic consensus of post-war Scotland. For the first time, it seemed, one could be both a radical writer and a devoted Burnsian without exposing oneself to overwhelming contradictions – a comfort which the young MacDiarmid had sorely lacked during the early 1920s. Indeed, in the acknowledgements section of The Wind that Shakes the Barley, Barke affiliated himself to the left-wing tradition of Burns worshippers who now controlled the Burns Federation. From William Stewart ‘the Grand Old Man of Scottish Reform’, author of the ILP’s first book on Burns and the Common People in 1910, to ‘Mr. John S. Clarke and Mr. J. R. Campbell’, Barke credited forty years of Burnsian socialism with the inspiration of his novel.45 Accordingly, The Wind that Shakes the Barley is a Marxist rendition of Burns’s life.46 Focusing on the poet’s early years, it pays particular attention to the character of William Burns (Burns’s father). The unending struggle that set William against his successive landlords epitomises the social tensions of the novel. Indeed, Barke presents William Burns as an independent-minded tenant farmer, rejecting ‘wage-slavery’ whilst attempting to live decently from his labour.47 However, William’s honest work is soon ruined by the rapacity of his capitalist landlords. Upon his arrival at Lochlea farm, William exclaims: The greed for money is greater than the fear of the Lord wi’ the gentry nowadays. Ony [sic] industry a man puts on the land, the landlords and their rascally factors plan to rob you of by the way of an increase in your rent.48

Here, the fate of Burns’s father sums up the traditional Marxist analysis of the eighteenth century as an era in which landlords had to

8053_Malgrati.indd 117

06/03/23 10:55 am

118   Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics

increase their rents to compete with the growing urban bourgeoisie. Later in the novel, this stance is repeated by the adolescent Robert when addressing his brother Gilbert: Rent: that’s what matters: that’s what counts. Rent’s the curse o’ Scotland. Rent’s the cause o’ misery, poverty and ignorance. Aye, and the source o’ the gentry’s wealth. MacLure [Burns’s landlord] sits snug in Ayr wi’ nae mair education than enables him to sign his name to a deed-bill and cast up a column o’ figures in his ledger, while I’ve got to howk in a bog ditch to improve his land.49

The protests of Barke’s Burns certainly had a particular significance in 1946 when Parliament was debating Town and Country Planning – an Act which would challenge landlords’ power and foster public housing all over Britain. Burns’s youthful class consciousness, according to Barke, was not only due to his father’s plight but also to the radicalism of his own reading. For instance, Barke interprets Henry MacKenzie’s The Man of Feeling (1771) – a book which Burns ‘prize[d] next to the Bible’ – in an unexpectedly anti-colonialist light.50 Somewhat out of context, Barke quotes directly from MacKenzie’s book: When shall I see a commander return from India in pride of honourable poverty? You describe the victories they have gained; they are sullied by the cause in which they fought: you enumerate the spoils of those victories; they are covered with the blood of the vanquished.51

In Barke’s novel this particular extract leaves a lasting impression on Burns: ‘Here was sensibility with social fervour to it! Here were words that scalded as no tears could scald. Here was truth that came as a flaming sword’.52 Although MacKenzie was a staunch Tory, Barke’s Burns declares that ‘anything might be forgiven [him] for having given Mr. Harley the opportunity of declaiming on the politics of colonisation and nascent imperialism – and the moral rights of man’.53 In 1946, Barke’s anti-imperialist depiction of Burns served, once again, to comment on the politics of Attlee’s government. Indeed, one year later, the independence of India and Pakistan granted the wishes of Barke’s fictional Burns. Predictably, The Wind that Shakes the Barley was praised in leftwing circles. On 19 June 1946, Allen Huff celebrated Barke for his

8053_Malgrati.indd 118

06/03/23 10:55 am



The Bard of Welfare   119

novel of ‘soil and struggle’ in the Daily Worker; here was a successful description of Burns’s ‘dour and unending struggle to scrape subsistence from his father’s bleak Ayrshire peasant-farm’.54 Likewise, John S. Clarke sent a congratulatory letter to Collins, Barke’s publisher, explaining that ‘it would have been tempting and easy for Mr Barke, with such a theme to work on, to have out-kailyarded the kailyarders’, but thankfully ‘he ha[d] not fallen into the trap’.55 At last, the Federation held its official bestseller. A few days later, Clarke wrote in Forward that Barke’s book ‘should be on the bookshelf of every admirer of Burns’.56 According to the President of the Burns Federation, ‘the author [would undoubtedly] secure a place on the literary map of Scotland’ provided he followed the example of his first volume and avoided ‘salacious details about sex’. This puritanical worry about sexual suggestiveness was also shared by Patrick Dollan, who regretted that Barke had ‘luxuriated in descriptions of [Burns’s] amorous adventures’ with Jean Gardner and Annie Rankine. Rather than such scenes, Dollan preferred Barke’s depiction of Burns’s father, ‘who loved justice and honesty more than anything else and imparted to his son the philosophy that made him the hater of sham and hypocrisy and the detester of poverty in all its forms’.57 In other words, official Burnsians praised Barke’s politics but begged him to avoid Carswellian sensuality. The success of Barke’s novel, which was reprinted four times in two years, added to the left-wing overtones of the 150th anniversary celebrations of Burns’s death in July 1946.58 That month, a few weeks following the publication of The Wind, Barke wrote a short essay for Scottish Field summarising his personal approach to Burns. According to the bestselling novelist, ‘Burns [was] the wide, rolling plain of all humanity where men and women in joy and sorrow and suffering, live their allotted span’. In this anniversary month, ‘Should Auld Acquaintance be Forgot [was] the International anthem and A Man’s a Man [was] the Marseillaise of all humanity’.59 Barke’s egalitarian and humanist appreciation of Burns was matched by Clarke at the Anniversary Luncheon of the Burns Federation, on 20 July in Dumfries. In his address, Clarke quoted Burns’s lines from ‘Epistle to Davie’: ‘It’s no in titles nor in rank; / It’s no in wealth like Lon’on Bank, / To purchase peace and rest’. According to Clarke, these words summarised Burns’s philosophy for which ‘it [did] not matter whether you wear moleskin trousers or whether you

8053_Malgrati.indd 119

06/03/23 10:55 am

120   Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics

wear a coronet on your head’. ‘Are you a good man? Are you doing something to uplift your fellows?’: such was Burns’s only social criterion.60 On the following day, the 84-year-old James Barr, who had just retired from the House of Commons, delivered the Anniversary Sermon at St Michael Church in Dumfries. Seconding Clarke, Barr declared that Burns rejected unjust hierarchies in both social and religious matters. Indeed, the socialist veteran explained that ‘Burns [had thrown] off the Calvinism of his time, with its unbending doctrine of election and its crude conception of eternal punishment’.61 As proof, Barr (mis)quoted Burns’s 19 August 1788 letter to Mrs Dunlop, explaining that ‘religion in its strength and purity, in its pious supplication and devout thanksgiving, is not to be looked for in the court, the palace, or in the glare of public life, but among the obscure recesses of disappointment, affliction poverty and distress’.62 This social-democratic interpretation of Burns, however, met with criticism during the commemoration of the poet’s death. Such opposition was an indirect result of the election of Emrys Hughes (the left-wing editor of Forward) as MP for South Ayrshire in January 1946. Indeed, Hughes’ election campaign was marked by a blistering confrontation with Thomas Moore – Conservative MP for Ayr and Honorary President of the Irvine Burns Club – which revealed dormant divisions within Burns country.63 A few months later, as Labour Burnsians convened in Dumfries, the Ayr minister Alexander Williamson delivered an open-air sermon for the 150th Anniversary of Burns’s death. Williamson denounced the ‘one or two political partisans [who were] trying their best to make out that the poet belonged to their clique’.64 ‘I can imagine nothing more calculated to ruin Burns clubs’, Williamson added, ‘than their perversion to serve any sectional interest’. Against the divisive work of those ‘two political partisans’ (easily recognisable as Clarke and Dollan), Williamson summoned his audience to follow the words of the exPrime-Minister Winston Churchill, who had recently committed to ‘a united Europe to save civilisation’. According to the old minister, Europe and the ‘Christian gospel’ of brotherhood offered the only possibility of ‘salvation . . . at the age of the atom bomb’.65 Behind humanitarian rhetoric, Williamson made no bones about his feelings towards the Labour-led Federation. The following Burns season, Williamson’s lead was followed by the Unionist Earl of Selkirk (George Douglas-Hamilton), who

8053_Malgrati.indd 120

06/03/23 10:55 am



The Bard of Welfare   121

sharpened Tory opposition to the politics of the Federation.66 Invited to deliver the ‘Immortal Memory’ speech at the Sandyford Burns Club (Glasgow), Selkirk ‘wondered what Burns would have written about our Government regulations today, or, for that matter, about the officials who operate them’.67 ‘Criticism and satire of the Burns quality [was] required in this age when a man cannot build his own house or buy his own food and clothing without permission.’ This situation, Selkirk insisted, was that of sheer ‘dictatorship’ – a term which ‘arose long before this government took office, before the last war, but [which was] even more serious now than it was then’. This libertarian style of speech, which praised both individual and regional liberties against central powers, was typical of the Unionist Party during the late 1940s. As explained by historian Malcolm Petrie, ‘the defence of local government, [and] the promotion of Scottish distinctiveness was effective’ for Scottish Conservatives, ‘because it could be accommodated within, and even strengthen, a pre-existing critique of centralised bureaucracy’.68 Another characteristic example of this rhetoric came from a lawyer named McKechnie at the 1949 supper of the Falkirk Burns Club. In his ‘Immortal Memory’, McKechnie lambasted the ‘over-regulations’ and ‘nationalisations’ of Labour’s ‘totalitarian state’, which Burns, as the poet of ‘individual freedom’ would have condemned.69 Against the ‘monstrous regiment of bureaucrats’ who ‘enforce[d] controls and price’, McKechnie reasserted, with the bard, that ‘Freedom and whisky gang thegither’ and that the state should be kept at bay from Scottish local life. Indeed, the lawyer presented himself as having ‘his roots deep in the past, in the good old days of good fellowship’. As such, McKechnie ‘was the last relic of the old system’ – that of pre-centralisation and pre-war Scotland when the Burns movement relied on the initiatives and voluntary deeds of its leading middle-class. Symptomatically, McKechnie’s toast was seconded by Falkirk’s architect, Henry Wilson, who criticised the inapplicability of The Town and Country Planning Act. ‘The responsibility for making a better and more beautiful town rested with the inhabitants themselves’, explained Wilson, who concluded that he ‘hop[ed] that the traditions would be maintained’ despite the state’s intervention in Falkirk’s development.70 Interestingly, the post-war Scottish National Party (SNP) also repositioned Burns to oppose state centralisation. In February 1946,

8053_Malgrati.indd 121

06/03/23 10:55 am

122   Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics

the poet and ex-SNP leader Douglas Young wrote an article in Scots for The North East Review in which he criticised ‘J. R. Campbell and ithers [wha haed] laid claim on [Burns] as a “Socialist” albeid he scryvit never a word in favour o Marx’s theory’.71 Although he was politically close to Labour (which he would join in 1951), Young explained that: Burns was bred in a couthie but individualist Scotland, whaur fowk managed for theirsels and gaed their ain gait, whaur Willie brewed his peck o maut—in our time Freedom and Whisky hae gane thegither til England’s umquhile (trans. former) rebel colony—whaur a makar could be merry teethan a heckle or shapean a spoon and whaur the last o’t, the best o’t, the warst o’t was anely but to beg wi nane o the formalities o Sir William Beveridge.72

Burns’s socialism, Young asserted, ‘was na groundit on the state but on the personal group’ – on interpersonal and ‘man to man’ co-operation.73 Young’s opposition to Labour’s centralisation was further reflected by the SNP’s attitude towards the Burns Federation. One month after Young’s article, Roland Muirhead, director of the SNP’s Scottish Secretariat, refused to renew his subscription to the Scottish National Dictionary. In his answer to the Federation’s ‘Appeal to Donors’, the nationalist veteran explained that he was ‘not a member of a Burns Club’ and ‘[did] not think [he would] join until Scotland ha[d] self-government’. Indeed, Muirhead regretted ‘to see how Burns Clubs repeat[ed] so glibly the splendid sentiment of our national poet whilst forgetting to support the essential of an independent minded Scotsman, that is Self-Government’.74 Scottish nationalists still scorned the British Federation, whether under Tory or Labour control. Such a blend of anti-Labour, Burnsian rhetoric was also used at the time by John MacCormick – the old rival of Douglas Young and centre-right figurehead of the post-war movement for Home Rule. Co-founder of the SNP in 1934, MacCormick was a moderate who had fought the party’s hard-line separatists until his eventual resignation in 1942. After the war, MacCormick joined the Liberals and, in 1949, launched the Scottish Covenant Association whose petition for a devolved Scottish assembly collected more than two million signatures.75 Although his Covenant was officially apolitical,

8053_Malgrati.indd 122

06/03/23 10:55 am



The Bard of Welfare   123

MacCormick soon became one of Labour’s vocal Scottish opponents. Admittedly, Attlee’s government had little time for Scottish devolution. In 1948, the Secretary of State for Scotland, Arthur Woodburn, had deemed MacCormick’s demands for Home Rule inopportune at a time of post-war food crisis.76 Such tension was still palpable, a few years later in January 1952, when MacCormick delivered the ‘Immoral Memory’ toast to the Stirling Burns Club. Invoking the bard’s ‘independent mind’, MacCormick claimed that Burns ‘hated the kind of organisation which destroyed the individual by turning him into a mere number in the State’.77 The poet of whisky and liberty, MacCormick insisted, would have begrudged a situation where ‘almost every detail of the economy and the government of Scotland was controlled from Whitehall’.78 Here again – despite differences between Young, Muirhead, and MacCormick – Burns appeared a useful reference for Scottish patriots opposing Labour’s centralisation. Whilst home rulers had often sought help from the left in prewar years, linking class and nation, they now reverted to a more localist laissez-faire stance, closer to that of the Unionist Party. Such vicinity between nationalists and the liberal-conservative Unionists, though apparently paradoxical, could build on the older legacy of Victorian home rulers, who once advocated federalism as a bulwark for British imperial power.79 Certainly, Labour Burnsians refused to yield either to nationalist or centre-right critics. Instead, they wanted a ‘national’ Burns along British lines – reflecting the assimilation of modern Scotland into Welfare Britain. This was illustrated in November 1947 with the release of Comin Thro’ The Rye, a Burns biopic directed by Arthur Dent and based on the script of Gilbert McAllister – Labour MP for Rutherglen.80 Dent’s fifty-five-minute film offers a conventional and rather tame depiction of Burns’s life, intercut with choral renditions of his most famous songs and poems. On several occasions the movie presents Burns as ‘a champion of the Common Man’, whose work could be related to the new identity of post-war Britain. For instance, towards the end of the movie, the film quotes Burns’s poem ‘The Rights of Woman’ (‘Amidst the mighty fuss just let me mention / The Rights of Woman merit some attention’) whilst picturing protesting Suffragettes being arrested by policemen. This is followed, in the conclusion, by a rendition of ‘A Man’s a Man’, with shots of ploughmen and modern coalminers working in the background. Together with

8053_Malgrati.indd 123

06/03/23 10:55 am

124   Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics

Burns’s sympathy for ‘common men’ and women, Comin’ Thro’ The Rye also mentions the bard’s support for the French Revolution through images of falling guillotines and insurrectional crowds. In the wake of this passage, however, the film swiftly moves on to depict a marching regiment of red-coat soldiers. The off-screen voice explains: Although [Burns] had sent a gift of four small cannons to the French Republic, when Napoleon threatened invasion he joined the volunteers and wrote a marching song that swept the country – ‘Be Britain still to Britain true / Amang oursels united’.81

This patriotic extract climaxes with a choir rendition of ‘Scots wha hae’, illustrated by English infantrymen charging under St George’s Cross. Such syncretism between Burns’s ode to the Scottish War of Independence and English martial prowess offered a clear message to the film’s audience. Scotland’s bard was also Britain’s bard, and his social message – which never went as far as embracing an outlandish cause against his own country – applied to the whole Union. Comin’ Thro’ The Rye was screened in the House of Commons on 2 November 1947 in the presence of ‘Mrs Attlee, the Secretary of State for Scotland [Arthur Woodburn], and many West of Scotland MPs’.82 The reception of the film, however, was mixed. Whereas Arthur Woodburn lauded its accuracy, Emrys Hughes dismissed the unionist views of the movie as well as ‘the cross between Bannockburn and Balaclava [that] illustrated “Scots wha hae”’.83 ‘It only needed Harry Lauder bringing in the haggis to make the thing complete’, the MP concluded. For his part, Patrick Dollan, now President of the Burns Federation, was pleased with the result. According to him, the film depicted ‘Burns not only as a poet and lover, but as a great humanist whose ideas [were] only now coming into general circulation’.84 The left-of-centre unionism of Dent’s movie was seconded a few years later by the Labour-led Festival of Britain: a patriotic celebration of British arts, technology and society that ran throughout the summer of 1951. Conceived by Labour’s Lord President of the Council, Herbert Morrison, the Festival featured events and exhibitions at more than twenty five locations across the British Isles, including a Burns-themed theatre gala in Dumfries.85 The most significant play selected for the occasion was W. Bernard de Bear Nicol’s three-act work, True Pathos, staged from 24 to 30 June at Dumfries’ St Mary’s Hall.86 Like Dent’s movie, Nicol’s play put emphasis on Burns’s radical

8053_Malgrati.indd 124

06/03/23 10:55 am

The Bard of Welfare   125



politics. In the first act, the character of Maria Riddell introduces him as ‘a friend of the people’ who ‘would cast down the government to-morrow if he could; yes, even by the shedding of blood’.87 This reckless declaration, overheard by the play’s lead antagonist – the fictitious informer Matthew Erskine – leads Burns to come under the scrutiny of his superiors at the Excise Board. Their inquiry on Burns’s revolutionary principles takes place during the second act of the play. Against allegations of sedition, Burns protests his loyalty to Britain, claiming that ‘as a freeborn Scotsman’ it is his right to support the liberal Whigs against the Tories of William Pitt.88 By blending socially radical ideas with a sensible defence of parliamentary pluralism, Nicol’s play matched the spirit of Labour’s Festival, which, in the words of Harriet Atkinson, aimed to ‘demonstrate the viability of British democracy’.89 It seemed Burns’s egalitarian kind of patriotism allowed Scotland, and Dumfries in particular, to remain firmly pinned to the map of post-war, reconstructed Britain. Certainly, unionist politics appeared increasingly important for Labour’s leading Burnsian: Patrick Dollan. Invited to speak Grahamston (Glasgow) in November 1947, the President of the Burns Federation insisted Burns ‘was no narrow nationalist’.90 Instead, the bard had been influenced by Shakespeare and Addison and, by the end of his life, had ‘become more British than Scottish’. Besides, Dollan added that: The need for being British rather than Scottish or English or Welsh is now more important even than it was in Burns’s time, not only for the future welfare and prosperity of what is called the United Kingdom, but for the British Commonwealth.91

A few months later, Dollan re-asserted his British patriotism when he sided with the Tory MP Niall Macpherson against his comrade, Tom Johnston, who insisted that ‘Scots wha hae’ should become Scotland’s official anthem. Although Dollan praised the radicalism of Burns’s song, he nuanced Johnston’s view by saying that ‘Burns had no intention of providing a new national anthem’.92 The bard’s personal position on this matter was clear, and could be found, according to Dollan, in ‘Does haughty Gaul’, a poem which gave ‘assent to the one anthem in use in his day and ours’ – ‘God Save the King’. ‘Scots wha hae’, by contrast, had no official status and was merely a song which ‘enjoyed great national popularity’. This situation, Dollan explained, was comparable to that of ‘Auld Lang

8053_Malgrati.indd 125

06/03/23 10:55 am

126   Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics

Syne’ in the rest of the world – a song, which, in passing, was a much ‘better international anthem than “The Red Flag”’.93 Dollan’s allusions to the ‘Red Flag’ and the dangers faced by ‘the British Commonwealth’ highlighted the emergence of a new concern in the late 1940s: the Cold War. At a time when Britain supported nationalists against communists in Greece, the rising tensions between East and West presented a specific challenge for the Burns movement. Indeed, Britain’s alliance with Russia, from 1941 to 1947, had allowed Scottish Burnsians to hear about the Soviets’ growing interest in Scotland’s bard. In January 1947, for instance, a delegation of three Soviet poets (Mykola Bazhan, Samad Vurgun and Konstantin Simonov) had visited Burns Cottage, where they had informed Clarke and Dollan that Samuil Marshak, a prominent Soviet poet and dramatist, had met great success with his translations of Burns into Russian.94 At the time, Labour leaders of the Federation had rejoiced in the news and encouraged their Soviet visitors to create a Burns club in Moscow. A few months later, however, such familiarity with delegates from Stalin’s country was not an option anymore. The Truman and Zhdanov Doctrines were now firmly established. The world entered a polarised era, and Britain belonged to the West.

Notes  1. Hansard, HC Deb, 8 February 1938, Vol. 331, cols 833–4.  2. BC 2, 1939, Vol. 13 p. 4.  3. Challinor, John S. Clarke, p. 63.   4. See Carrigan, ‘Patrick Dollan’.   5. David Stephen’s review of Challinor, John S. Clarke, in The Weekend Scotsman, 17 December 1977.   6. Apart from a few lectures and toasts given to liberal-orientated Burns clubs, Clarke’s only significant pre-1942 contribution to the Federation’s work was the short article, ‘A Novelist’s Diatribe’ in BC 2, 1938, Vol. 11, pp. 36–47.  7. BC 2, 1943, Vol. 16, p. 66.  8. Ibid. pp. 41–2.   9. Lenin gave an autograph to Clarke as an acknowledgement of Clarke’s curing his dog of illness in September 1921. John S. Clarke’s papers, NLS, Acc. 7656/3. 10. BC 2, 1942, Vol. 15, p. 51; BC 2, 1943, Vol. 16, p. 49

8053_Malgrati.indd 126

06/03/23 10:55 am



The Bard of Welfare   127

11. BC, 1943, p. 74. 12. Ibid. p. 65. 13. Mackay, The Burns Federation, pp. 194­–5. 14. BC, 1943, pp. 76–7. 15. Ibid. p. 45. 16. Forward, 23 January 1943. 17. Ibid. See also P1, ll. 55–73, p. 116. 18. Forward, 23 January 1943. 19. Ibid. 20. The entire quotation can be found in Burns, The Poems and Songs, Vol. 2, p. 1087. 21. Hansard HC, Deb 12 March 1942, Vol. 378, col. 1252. 22. Hansard HC, Deb 12 March 1942, Vol. 378, col. 1252; Hansard HC, Deb 17 June 1942, Vol. 380, col. 1632. 23. BC 2, 1944, Vol. 17, pp. 68–9. 24. Ibid. p. 73. 25. Ibid. pp. 43, 50. 26. Ibid. p. 76. 27. Ibid. p. 53. 28. Ibid. p. 72. 29. Ibid. pp. 22–3. 30. BC 2, 1946, Vol. 19, p. 88. 31. Ibid. p. 89. 32. Letter from John McVie to Tom Johnston, 5 November 1945. Archives of the Scottish National Dictionary, NLS, Acc. 9448/220. 33. See the Pilgrim Trust’s website, (last accessed 18 November 2017). 34. Letter from Tom Johnston to John McVie, 4 December 1945, in NLS, Acc. 9448/220. 35. Eaton and Renton, The Communist Party. 36. Campbell, Burns, the Democrat, p. 9. 37. Ibid. 38. Ibid. p. 7. 39. Ibid. pp. 38­–9. 40. Ibid. p. 40. 41. There is no clear evidence that Barke ever joined the CPGB. See Manson, ‘Did Barke join the Communist Party’, pp. 5–11. The relationship between Barke’s 1930s novels and the ‘national turn’ of the CPGB at the same period was analysed by Taylor in The Popular Front Novel, pp. 141–76. 42. An extract of Barke’s first novel, The World His Pillow, was published in the Scottish modernist journal, Modern Scot, 1933, Vol. 4, p. 2.

8053_Malgrati.indd 127

06/03/23 10:55 am

128   Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics 43. Letter from James Barke to Delancey Ferguson, 31 December 1948, GML, Barke archives, Box 7A. 44. This quotation is from Muir’s poem ‘Scotland 1941’, published in The Narrow Place. A longer analysis of the quotation can be found in Gifford, ‘Sham Bards’, pp. 339–61. 45. Barke, The Wind, p. viii. See also Stewart, Robert Burns. 46. See Taylor, The Popular Front Novel. 47. Barke, The Wind, p. 5. 48. Ibid. p. 123. 49. Ibid. p. 164. 50. Letter to John Murdoch, 15 January 1783, L1, p. 62. 51. Quoted by Barke in The Wind, p. 189. 52. Ibid, p. 190. 53. Ibid. 54. Daily Worker, 19 June 1946. 55. Letter from Clarke to Collins (publisher), 20 May 1946, Barke’s archives, GML, Box 6B. 56. Forward, 22 June 1946. 57. Daily Herald, 21 June 1946. 58. The Wind was reprinted by Collins four times between June 1946 and January 1948, as detailed in the January 1948 new impression of the book. Another version was also printed by Macmillan (New York) in 1947. The book was then reprinted by Collins in 1949, 1950, 1956, 1969 and 1975. In this respect, Barke’s book was arguably the greatest Burns bestseller of the twentieth century – above Carswell’s biographies, reprinted three times by Chatto & Windus (in 1931, 1936 and 1951). 59. Scottish Field, July 1946, p. 22. 60. BC 2, 1947, Vol. 20, p. 11. 61. Ibid. p. 20. 62. Ibid. The correct quote reads: ‘Who looks for the heart weaned from earth; the soul affianced to her God; the correspondence fixed with heaven; the pious supplication and devout thanksgiving, constant as the vicissitudes of even and morn; who thinks to meet with these in the court, the palace, in the glare of public life?’. L1, p. 307. 63. For instance, Hughes antagonised Moore by recalling his 1930s links with Mosley’s BUF in Forward, 19 January 1946. 64. Ayr Advertiser, 25 July 1946. This article features in the personal press cuttings collection of Barke in his archives, GML, Unboxed Items, Vol. 3. 65. Ibid. 66. Dollan was elected President of the Federation on 14 September 1946 at the conference of the Federation, where he was introduced by John

8053_Malgrati.indd 128

06/03/23 10:55 am



The Bard of Welfare   129

S. Clarke as his longstanding ‘friend in journalism and social politics’. BC 2, 1947, Vol. 20, p. 82. 67. BC 2, 1948, Vol. 21, p. 104 68. Petrie, ‘Anti-Socialism’, p. 203. 69. Falkirk Herald, 29 January 1949. 70. Ibid. 71. North East Review, February 1946. 72. Ibid. 73. Ibid. 74. Letter from R. Muirhead to J. McVie, 8 March 1946. Archives of the Scottish Secretariat, NLS, Acc. 3721/34. 75. See MacCormick, The Flag in the Wind, pp. 110­–19. 76. Ibid. p. 112. 77. Stirling Observer, 31 January 1952. 78. Ibid. 79. See Kidd, ‘Early nationalism as a form of unionism’ in Union and Unionisms, pp. 257–99. 80. Comin’ Thro’ the Rye, film, produced by Arthur Dent (UK: Advance Films, 1947). BFI Archives, London, 26534. 81. Ibid. 82. Glasgow Herald, 3 November 1947. 83. Forward, 8 November 1947. Hughes was also a home ruler. See his sustained correspondence with Roland Muirhead (from 1938 to 1958) in the archives of the Scottish Secretariat, NLS, Acc. 3721, Box 14/302. 84. The Weekly Scotsman, 27 November 1947. 85. Atkinson, The Festival of Britain, p. 10. 86. Keith, ‘Burns’s Life on the Stage’, p. 91. 87. George Humphrey, ‘Review of True Pathos’; BC 3, 1952, Vol. 1, p. 45. 88. Ibid. p. 48. 89. Atkinson, The Festival, p. 15. 90. Falkirk Herald, 12 November 1947. 91. Ibid. 92. Dumfries Standard, 18 February 1948. 93. Ibid. 94. BC 2, 1948, Vol. 20, p. 59.

8053_Malgrati.indd 129

06/03/23 10:55 am

8053_Malgrati.indd 130

06/03/23 10:55 am

Chapter 5

Into the Cold War: Checkpoint Rabbie (1948–1959)

Samuil Marshak’s Russian translation of Burns is arguably the most influential rendering of the poet in any language. Issued in 1947 with sponsorship from the Soviet state, Robert Berns v perevodakh sold in the hundreds of thousands, entering schools and universities as a staple of Russia’s English curriculum.1 From there, Marshak’s Burns permeated Soviet popular culture; his works featured on many radio and early TV shows, and his song, ‘O Wert Thou in the Cauld Blast’, already adapted by Dmitri Shostakovich during the Second World War, became a classic of the Russian folk repertoire.2 Such a success owed much to Marshak’s personal talent as a translator. Yet the official status of his work, embracing communist orthodoxy, was the real key to its broad, nation-wide circulation. Natalia Kaloh Vid has already listed the many biases of Marshak’s adaptation, from omissions of Burns’s Jacobite and royalist verse to censorship of his religious lines and an emphasis on his egalitarian themes.3 Indeed, Marshak’s works were a prime example of ‘ideological translations’.4 Burns’s popularity in communist Russia had a significant impact on Cold War Scotland. Not until this moment had Burns become a prominent cultural figure in a non-English-speaking country. Since the nineteenth century, Burns’s memory had travelled around the globe following into the footsteps of the Scottish diaspora, from American Burns clubs to South African Burns suppers to New Zealand Burns statues. In the words of Leith Davis, Holly Faith Nelson and Sharon Alker, these international links ‘had revise[d] critical perceptions of Burns’s work, connecting it not only to local and national concerns, but also to the transatlantic’ and global ‘circulation of ideas’.5

8053_Malgrati.indd 131

06/03/23 10:55 am

132   Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics

Crucially, such contacts had shaped the universalist image of Burns as a both local and global poet, singing for all ‘fellow mortals’. Yet in practice, Burns’s universalism rarely reached beyond Englishspeaking countries, whose common culture, common tongue, common political values and, in most cases, common monarch, allowed for smoother, deeper interactions. Despite translations into most world languages, including popular renditions in Germany, Eastern Europe and Bengal, no adaptation of Burns outside the Anglosphere had ever proved so powerful as to affect his image back home in Scotland.6 Certainly, Marshak’s Burns was about to change this. In January 1949, as Berlin was under Soviet blockade, Patrick Dollan, President of the Burns Federation introduced the annual Burns Chronicle with a vehemently anti-communist piece. He asked: I wonder if the Soviet writers and politicians understand Robert Burns in the same way as we do. Are they prepared to allow the free organization of Burns Clubs and similar societies in all the Republic of the Soviet Union? Robert Burns proclaimed freedom of speech and writing as the foundation principles of democracy, and hated totalitarianism in whatever form it might disguise itself.7

According to Dollan, the time had come for Scottish Burnsians to imitate the bard when he had ‘joined the Dumfries Volunteers’ to face ‘French Sovieteers’. Against those who ‘absurdly’ claimed that ‘the People’s poet’ was ‘a supporter of Communism as practised in Russia’, Dollan retorted that Burns, ‘if he were alive now’, would follow the message of ‘Scots wha hae’ and ‘demand freedom for all the political prisoners in Russian spheres’.8 Further still, Dollan criticised Marshak for turning Burns into a foot soldier of Bolshevism. Ideological blinkers, according to Dollan, had led Marshak to misinterpret Burns’s social situation. Whilst the Russian translator enlisted Burns on the ‘proletarian’ side of class warfare, the President of the Burns Federation reminded his readers that Burns ended his life as a lower-middle-class Exciseman.9 Finally, Dollan denied the link which Marshak had drawn between Burns and Marx in the preface of his translation.10 Marshak’s text was based on a quote of Paul Lafargue (Marx’s son in law), who, in his memoirs, recollected that ‘Dante and Burns were [Marx’s] favourite poets’.11 But such a quote was no evidence for Dollan, who ruled out any similarities between the spiritual

8053_Malgrati.indd 132

06/03/23 10:55 am



Into the Cold War   133

bard and the inventor of Dialectical materialism: ‘Burns was idealistic and a believer in Christianity . . . whereas Marx was materialistic and had no use for religion of any kind’.12 Between the Atlanticist Federation, which counted many important clubs in the United States, and Soviet Burnsians, who viewed the bard as a revolutionary ‘plebeian’ and an irreligious ‘tramp’, there was no possible compromise. This tense geopolitical context soured relations between left-wing Scottish Burnsians. Significantly, it led to a public divorce between the anti-Soviet Burns Federation and the popular communist novelist, James Barke. Back in 1946, the first episode of Barke’s Immortal Memories had paid tribute to Burnsian officials. In return, it had received their enthusiastic praise. Three years later, however, Barke’s third episode, The Wonder of all the Gay World, shunned any association with the Federation. This was further aggravated by Barke’s emphasis on Burns’s sexual radicalism – a creative choice which he knew would enrage the poet’s squeamish admirers. For instance, in a passage of The Wonder focusing on Burns’s time in Edinburgh, Barke describes the bard in thrall to ‘the madness, the incongruity, the basic ruthlessness [of] the phallus’ which knew ‘no conscience, no morality’ and answered ‘to nothing but the surge and swell of life, seedspumed and fertile-crested’.13 ‘Only in the fraternity of his brothers’ and other debauched ‘comrades’, Barke explains, ‘could Burns find relief from the burden of his sexual urges’. Such underground bawdiness, according to Barke, enabled Burns to cope with the pressures of Edinburgh aristocrats who had censored the publication of his riotously libidinal piece ‘The Jolly Beggars’ in the second edition of his poems. ‘Damn the Edinburgh literati and the pedant, frigid soul of their criticism for ever and ever,’ declares Barke’s Burns a few pages later.14 This combination of ribaldry and rebellion – similar to Marshak’s portrait of Burns as a seditious, godless ‘tramp’ – was unacceptable for the puritanical, anti-communist Federation. In January 1949 Dollan tackled Barke’s interpretation of Burns’s Edinburgh years. Speaking at the Edinburgh Burns Club, the exPresident of the Burns Federation claimed that although ‘many commentators had criticised Edinburgh for its treatment of the poet . . . it had been the Edinburgh edition of his work in 1787 that had really given him British and world reputation’.15 A few months later, at the annual conference of the Burns Federation on 10 September 1949, Dollan sharpened his defence. He criticised the ‘tendency on the part

8053_Malgrati.indd 133

06/03/23 10:55 am

134   Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics

of some modern writers to exceed the sensationalism of the past in the exploitation of Burns to ensure what was termed as best seller’.16 Under no circumstances, Dollan declared, could such fictitious biographies of Burns be ‘recognised by the Burns Federation as official publications (Applause)’.17 On the contrary, the Federation should now counter attack against Barke’s ‘sensational tendency’ and ‘lead a refining process’ through which ‘the very best in [Burns’s] life and writings should be preserved and held up as an example for young people in Scotland’. As a matter of consequence, the Burns Chronicle had to reform itself and ‘circulate its own literary materials’ to increase its influence on contemporary Scottish literature.18 Dollan’s hostile declarations, combined with his bowdlerising intentions, infuriated James Barke. For the communist writer, Burns’s sense of bawdry and debauchery was not only material for literary sensationalism, but, more importantly, represented the core of his own interpretation of the bard’s radical challenge to social order. Since 1946 Barke had been corresponding with John Delancey Ferguson, the American Burns scholar and editor of Burns’s letters (in 1932), about the publication of Burns’s unpublished bawdy pieces, ‘The Merry Muses of Caledonia’.19 Such a project was at loggerheads with the pure-minded intentions of Labour Burnsians, who refused to conflate Burns’s radicalism with what they saw as moral depravity.20 Upon hearing of Dollan’s declarations at the Federation’s conference, Barke wrote a blistering response in the Sunday Express lambasting Dollan and official Burnsians for concealing the true face of Burns.21 Interestingly, on the following day, Barke received an admonishing letter from his friend, the Communist MP William Gallacher, who advised him to avoid open conflict with the Federation. Certainly, Dollan’s attempt to ‘cover up’ Burns’s life was ‘an exposure of his own shallow, insecure character’, but Barke, as a communist fellow traveller, ‘should have left the Federation’ alone.22 Despite the Cold War context, the CPGB had no intention of opening a new front against the Burns Federation. However, now that Barke had answered Dollan’s anticommunist and puritanical provocations, the CPGB was compelled to provide him with public support. A few days later, the Daily Worker sided with Barke against ‘some Burns Clubs’ whose ‘stained-glass window worship of Burns’ combined ‘with wishy-washy mawkish sentimentality’ resulted in their absurd ‘objecti[on] to a picture that tells the truth about the whole man’.23 Two days later, communists

8053_Malgrati.indd 134

06/03/23 10:55 am



Into the Cold War   135

were rallied by the socialist journal Forward which berated Dollan – its own columnist – for ‘allowing his feelings to run away with him’ in trying to ‘white wash’ Burns’s memory.24 Scottish leftists, it seemed, stood united against Dollan’s attempt to implement Cold War politics in the literary field. Whilst controversial, Dollan’s declarations at the 1949 conference of the Burns Federation resulted in an original attempt to modernise the form and content of the Burns Chronicle. Following Dollan’s speech, the Federation appointed a new editor to its annual journal: the Broughty Ferry based writer William Montgomerie. His task, according to Dollan’s guidelines, was to refine the literary pedigree of the Chronicle, challenging the shallow ‘sensationalism’ of avant-garde (and communist) Scottish writers. In other words, the Chronicle had to lose its exclusive interest in Burns and become a fully-fledged literary review. This perspective, however, irritated traditional Burnsians who refused to abandon the characteristics of the Burns Chronicle; ‘because something [was] old it should not be considered bad’ argued the past President H. G. McKerrow.25 Montgomerie retorted that ‘at the present time there were young men writing Scottish poetry, and among the large mass of their work there was a small collection of excellent work which Burns himself would have been intensely interested in’.26 Like MacDiarmid twenty years earlier, Montgomerie thought that the Federation should honour Burns by crediting new Scottish writers. From the Federation’s perspective Dollan had made a rather adventurous choice in appointing Montgomerie as editor of the Chronicle. Certainly, the latter was known neither as a communist sympathiser nor as an avant-garde versifier.27 Nevertheless, Montgomerie was immersed in Scottish Renaissance milieux. His longstanding friendship with the Lallans poet William Soutar had facilitated his acquaintance with MacDiarmid, Edwin Muir and – ironically for Dollan – James Barke.28 For instance, in May 1949, Montgomerie wrote to Barke to tell him he had just written a ‘7,000 word-manuscript’ on the relationship between Burns and Scottish folk traditions for the Burns Chronicle. Montgomerie was pleased with his article, which he deemed ‘brilliant’. However, Montgomerie judged that only ‘about 1% of Burns Chronicle readers would understand it, if that’.29 Along with his modernist acquaintances, in other words, Montgomerie snubbed the traditionalist audience of his own journal. Although Dollan had

8053_Malgrati.indd 135

06/03/23 10:55 am

136   Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics

hired him chiefly to fight communist literati, Montgomerie was ready to use this opportunity to achieve a cultural reform of the Federation’s main organ – from bardolatry to literary expertise. Montgomerie’s project would prove as radical as it would be short lived. In January 1950, the Burns Chronicle announced the launch of a new annual: Unicorn. Along the lines of Dollan’s anticommunist declarations, this new publication was presented as a means to defend Scottish letters against those who confounded ‘literature and politics’ by using ‘modern methods of propaganda’ to expand their influence over the literary field.30 Against such ‘groups’, ‘cliques’ and ‘literary monopolies’, Unicorn would be the review of ‘individuals in opposition to tyranny’. In other words, this review would publish writers who were not sponsored by the Communist Party – unlike Barke or MacDiarmid. The following year, the new Chronicle (eventually renamed The Scots Chronicle under the pressures of traditional Burnsians) came to light. With only one article that explicitly dealt with Burns, Montgomerie had achieved the tour de force of transforming the Chronicle into a generalist literary review. Other pieces included a short story, an article on George Orwell, a debate on poetic uses of Scots and an assessment of the Scottish Renaissance.31 The latter, written by Alastair Thomson, followed the political line of the review and praised MacDiarmid’s early poetry whilst dismissing his later work as ‘mostly rubbish’ – a compilation of verse and political slogans.32 On the other hand, Thomson acclaimed the work of Edwin Muir, whose poetry did not ‘spring from the reduction of verse to a matter of language and dialect’. This balanced assessment of the Scottish Renaissance – neither laudatory nor dismissive – typified the singular voice of the Scots Chronicle. Combining an apolitical and anti-communist façade with a genuine interest for modern literary criticism, the new annual of the Burns Federation might have flourished – had it not been for Burnsian conservatism. Unfortunately for Montgomerie, his main supporter, Patrick Dollan, withdrew from the Burns Federation committee in 1951.33 This meant the editor was now isolated amongst traditional Burnsians, who rejected his reformist views. These circumstances ended the Scots Chronicle experiment. In September 1951 Montgomerie was forced to resign ‘on account of pressure of other duties’, whilst the Burns Federation reverted to the old content and title of its annual.34

8053_Malgrati.indd 136

06/03/23 10:55 am



Into the Cold War   137

Six months later, the Burns Chronicle returned from the grave under the tamer editorship of James Veitch – ‘a Federation “stooge” and completely undistinguished’ in the words of James Barke.35 Dollan and Montgomerie’s failure to transform the Burns Chronicle into an anti-communist literary review, however, did not prevent Cold War ideologies from impinging further on Burns’s legacy. This was exemplified, once more, by James Barke, in the last opus of his Immortal Memory series – The Well of the Silent Harp. Published in 1954, Barke’s biographical novel offered a fiery depiction of the poet’s commitment to the cause of French revolutionaries. On many occasions, Barke’s hero declares himself in favour of the execution of crowned heads. ‘When criminals persist in going against the will o’ a nation, they have got to suffer accordingly’ says Burns, before adding, ‘let them desist in their criminal anti-democratic activities and not a hair o’ their heads’ll be touched. Let them persist – then off goes the head!’36 Likewise, the bard shows ‘no regret’ following the beheading of Louis XVI. According to Barke, Burns’s revolutionary mindset persisted after his enlistment in the Dumfries Volunteers. Under his red coat, the communist writer explains that ‘Burns’s views had not changed in any particular’, and ‘his heart still warmed to the French People’.37 Arguably, the loyalty of Barke’s Burns to an overseas cause reflected the pacifist actions taken by the CPGB against the intervention of NATO in the Korean War of 1950–3.38 Two years later, the ideological debate on Burns’s legacy was embraced by Christina Keith, a retired Scottish academic, who countered Barke’s ‘red’ depiction of the bard with a new, conservative assessment of Burns’s work. In her book The Russet Coat, Keith asserted that Burns’s ‘famous political songs’ – ‘Scots Wha hae’ and ‘Is There for Honest Poverty’ – were ‘calling for no Red Revolution’.39 Instead, she claimed that Burns’s song, ‘A Man’s a Man’, had become meaningless in the world of the Welfare State where ‘the poor and the privileged ha[d] changed place’ and where ‘manual workers’ now affected the same ‘arrogance and stupidity’ as eighteenth-century lords.40 Similarly, the liberal and emancipatory slogans of ‘Scots Wha hae’ were compromised by ‘the Scots miner’ and the ‘fellow-member of his Trade-Union’. ‘The Welfare State’, Keith added, had grown ‘as omnipotent’ and ‘as tyrannical as the Kirk’ in Burns’s day.41 In other words, ten years after the foundation of the Welfare State, Burns’s revolutionary message did not apply to the working class but to the

8053_Malgrati.indd 137

06/03/23 10:55 am

138   Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics

impoverished ‘employers’ who now had to draw ‘Freedom’s sword’ against the oppressive social order imposed upon them, from Russia to Scotland.42 Such antagonism between communist and anti-communist uses of Burns, however, were tempered by geopolitical developments in the mid-1950s. Following Stalin’s death in 1953, the ‘thawing’ of relations between East and West enabled Soviet writers to travel to Scotland and pay tribute to the ‘People’s Poet’. Upon hearing the news of the bard’s ever-growing fame in Russia, representatives of the Burns movement understood that they could play an unexpected role as cultural intercessors between the USSR and the United States. This was confirmed in January 1955 when an international Burns supper was broadcast, from Ayr, on television in the UK, the USA, and Canada.43 This event gathered a surprising assortment of guests, from a Soviet delegation led by Marshak himself to the captain of the team of American and Canadian women curlers (Mrs Ross Benett).44 At the end of the supper, it fell to the 74 year-old Tom Johnston to deliver the ‘Immortal Memory’. In his speech, the ex-Secretary of State for Scotland tried to reach out to his heterogeneous audience by depicting Burns both as an ‘internationalist’ and as a ‘patriot’. Certainly, the bard had blazing political opinions, which ‘at one stage in his life nearly landed him at Botany Bay’.45 Yet, ‘on the other hand, whatever he might have thought of George Washington in the United States or of the French Revolution, [Burns] was an enthusiastic volunteer in Great Britain and he wrote “Does haughty Gaul invasion threat”’. It was no surprise, therefore, that such a multi-faceted character had become ‘a fount at which many divergent types had dipped their ladles – Scots, Nationalists, Internationalists, Freemasons, Republicans, Bon vivants, Grim realists, everybody’. In conclusion, the once enthusiastic home ruler seized his opportunity to highlight Burns’s fundamental Scottishness. ‘You might prove against anything about Burns from his verse except that he was no Scotsman’ explained Johnston.46 Indeed, with both American and Soviet worshippers, Burns was placing Scotland and Scottish culture under exceptional international spotlights. The following year, Marshak visited Scotland once again.47 In Edinburgh, he met with Emrys Hughes, Labour MP for South Ayrshire, as well as Hamish Henderson, the Communist poet, who had served as secretary of the Scottish USSR Friendship Society in the

8053_Malgrati.indd 138

06/03/23 10:55 am

Into the Cold War   139



late 1940s. For the occasion, on 24 January 1956, Marshak delivered a small speech in which he described Burns’s success amongst Russian people. ‘My translations’, he explained, ‘are to be found in the houses of intellectuals, in the cottages of collective farms, in the apartment of workers, on the tables of students’.48 According to Marshak, Burns ‘[was] the proof that only a national poet, true to his own country, can become a great international poet’. At the end of his speech, the Soviet translator quoted Burns’s 1790 lines: The deities that I adore Are social Peace and Plenty. I’m better pleased to make one more Than be the death of twenty.49

These, Marshak insisted, were ‘common-sense words’ which had their place ‘on the doors of the parliamentary buildings of all nations’.50 This special relationship which Burns enabled between Scotland and the USSR sparked a significant controversy in the run-up to Burns’s 1959 Bicentenary. Three years before the commemorations, in the summer of 1956, the Soviet Union decided to celebrate the 160th anniversary of Burns’s death with a postage stamp featuring ‘the great national poet of Scotland’.51 Whether the stamp represented a Soviet attempt to reach out to Scottish culture, or whether it was instead meant to challenge Britain’s capacity to honour its own radical bard, is unclear. However, it provoked great uproar in Scotland. Arguably, the Soviet move was even more remarkable, or infuriating, considering that Harold Macmillan’s Conservative government had already refused to issue a British Burns stamp. Indeed, in November 1955, the old enemies Emrys Hughes (Labour MP for South Ayrshire) and Thomas Moore (Conservative MP for Ayr Burghs) had joined forces in the House of Commons to ask for a ‘special postage stamp to commemorate the bicentenary anniversary of Robert Burns’ in 1959.52 Yet their request had been rejected by Charles Hill, the Postmaster General, who argued there could be no other ‘illustrious character’ than the Queen on an official British stamp.53 Two years later, following the issue of the Soviet Burns stamp, pressure upon the new Postmaster General, Ernest Marples, increased. In December 1957, Scottish Labour MPs William Ross, Arthur Woodburn, Jon Rankin and Emrys Hughes, followed by their English

8053_Malgrati.indd 139

06/03/23 10:55 am

140   Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics

Labour peers John Parker (Essex) and Emmanuel Shinwell (Easington), all demanded a British Burns stamp.54 ‘Why should it be that the Soviet Union has a Robert Burns stamp yet the country of his origin has no Burns stamp at all?’ asked Emrys Hughes.55 Likewise, Arthur Woodburn emphasised that both Russians and Americans considered Burns as ‘one of their poets’.56 By honouring Burns, Marples would not only ‘respond to Scottish opinion but to national public opinion and international public opinion’.57 An additional argument made by Ross was that the policy restricting portraiture on postage stamps to images of the monarch had become obsolete due to a recent stamp commemorating the Boy Scout Jubilee.58 This did not suffice to convince Marples, however, who held, as this sometimes comical philatelic row developed, that ‘Burns was hard to read and not better than English poets’. ‘It would be invidious’, he explained, ‘to have to choose between [the] merits’ of Burns compared to those of ‘Wordsworth, Shelley, Shakespeare and Keats’.59 This dismissive approach was also embraced by Kenneth Thomson, the Assistant Postmaster General, who explained that ‘the Boy Scout movement [was] in a quite different category’ than that of the ‘Burns Movement’.60 On 25 January 1958, this polemic attracted public attention when, during a BBC TV Burns Supper, the ex-President of the SNP, Douglas Young, criticised the government. Although he was not a communist, Young opened his televised ‘Immortal Memory’ by presenting viewers with a copy of Marshak’s Burns. The success of this Russian translation, Young explained, had led Soviet authorities to ‘honour [Burns] with special issues of postage stamps’ – ‘a tribute which [was] denied to Scotland’s bard by the English Postmaster General’.61 Such contempt for Scotland’s national sentiment, Young implied, had been foreseen by Burns when he had ‘denounced the submergence of the old Scottish Parliament in the English’.62 Featuring in a BBC primetime broadcast, Young’s strident comments revealed that the Burns stamp affair was no mere benign polemic, but might undermine Scottish unionist sentiment. In April of the same year, as Labour MPs made eight unfruitful interventions in Parliament asking for a Burns stamp, and the Burns Federation led a last attempt to change the government’s decision. Twice, in May and December 1957, official Burnsians had failed to obtain an appointment with the Postmaster General.63 Yet, one year later, as public and Parliamentary pressure increased, the Prime

8053_Malgrati.indd 140

06/03/23 10:55 am



Into the Cold War   141

Minister agreed to receive a delegation from the Federation. The meeting took place at No. 10, on 29 April, in the presence of Macmillan’s friend, the Conservative MP Thomas Moore.64 Against the Federation’s best hopes, however, this appointment resulted in Macmillan’s resolution to stand by the decision of his Postmaster. ‘I [feel] that the arguments against the issue of a stamp must prevail’, wrote Macmillan to Moore, before adding, ‘I know that this decision will cause disappointment but I am convinced that it is the right one’.65 Having reached the head of government, the Burns stamp controversy was no longer a trivial affair. More than mere ‘disappointment’, Macmillan’s decision sapped unionist attempts to integrate Burns’s legacy into post-war British culture. Since the 1940s, Scottish debates on economic and international issues had both renewed and diversified the poetics of Scottish unionism. On the left, Labour and the Burns Federation had turned Burns into the prophet of the Welfare State, at once opposed to unbridled free-market economy, Scottish nationalism, and Soviet totalitarianism. This social-democratic portrayal of Burns, though opposed to Toryism, enhanced the unionist tradition long dominated by the Scottish centre right. In reaction, it had forced conservative and liberal politicians, from the Unionist Party to moderate home rulers, to revamp old-style unionism. This had proved especially effective in Scottish rural areas, where Burns’s traditional legacy could serve against Labour by conjuring the heyday of Victorian, localist laissez-faire.66 Whilst in practise 1950s Tories could prove skilful state managers, their patriotic, libertarian rhetoric had been key to achieving victory in Scotland at the General Elections of 1950 and 1955.67 In 1958, however, and despite pressures from both Labour and Unionist MPs, the government’s refusal to issue a Burns stamp contrasted awkwardly with the stance of Scottish political elites. Not only did this undermine Labour’s attempt to link Burns’s image with British governance, but it also weakened the unionist efforts of Macmillan’s own party. Further still, it disregarded the poet’s symbolic role as a mediator between Russia and the ‘free world’, even as British imperial and international power declined. In other words, on the eve of Burns’s bicentenary, it seemed Scottish Burnsians had to seek support beyond the old framework of Union and Empire, which had shaped commemorations of the poet since

8053_Malgrati.indd 141

06/03/23 10:55 am

142   Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics

the time of his death. The future of Burns’s wider legacy, it seemed, lay less in London than between Washington and Moscow. The failure of traditional unionist institutions to mobilise for Burns’s anniversary became even clearer in January 1959, when the Cathedral Board of St Giles rejected the Burns Federation’s proposal to inaugurate a Burns plaque in Edinburgh’s cathedral.68 Since the nineteenth century, Kirk ministers – when they did not disapprove of the bard’s licentious life – had been essential vehicles for a canny, unionist-nationalist (if not jingoistic) version of Burns. Although Edinburgh elders did not speak on behalf of the Kirk, their dismissal of the Federation’s project – on account of a lack of space on the Cathedral’s walls – broke with the tradition of Presbyterian involvement in the Burns Movement. Predictably, their decision sparked infuriated, anti-clerical reactions in the Scottish Press. In The Scotsman, columnist Wilfred Taylor wrote that ‘if [St Giles elders] are not members of an establishment they have behaved exactly as if this alleged institution did exist’. Furthermore, Taylor added that ‘elders have convinced thousands of people that they stand for pomp, pedantry and exclusiveness’.69 This poor impression was worsened, a few days later, when Edinburgh legal bodies (The Court of Session, The Writers to the Signet, the Faculty of Advocates and the Solicitors before the Supreme Court), refused to attend the special Burns service in St Giles, on 25 January 1959. Lord Clyde, the President of the Court of Session, declared that ‘the profession only attended those ceremonies at which members of the Royal Family were likely to be present’.70 Once again, Burns was deemed insignificant compared to other symbols of the Union. By eschewing the Burns movement in this way, unionist institutions put Conservative Burns orators in a challenging situation. On 24 January, George-Douglas Hamilton (Earl of Selkirk) was invited to deliver the ‘Immortal Memory’ at the Bicentenary Dinner of the Burns Federation. Addressing delegates from America, Russia and every nation of the Commonwealth, the Conservative Earl attempted to re-integrate Burns into the British pantheon. Selkirk explained that Burns’s ‘universalism’ was comparable to that of Admiral Nelson who prayed, on the eve of Trafalgar, that ‘after victory may humanity be the predominant feature of the British Navy’.71 Two days later, a similar depiction of Burns, as a key figure of Britain’s global influence, was presented by Sir A. P. Herbert – an Independent MP whom

8053_Malgrati.indd 142

06/03/23 10:55 am



Into the Cold War   143

George Orwell had described as a ‘Neo-Tory’ – at the supper of the Dumfries Burns Club.72 According to Herbert, Burns’s lyrics, and ‘Auld Lang Syne’ in particular, were sung ‘all round the world, in every ship that flies the British flag; all round the world, wherever the sons of Britain are dwelling or serving’. Burns’s old songs reflected Britain’s imperial might and, as such, was far superior to ‘so called “pop” or popular song’ which ‘sells by the thousands . . . but come and go like mayfly, because there is no truth in them’.73 Without support from their own government, Selkirk and Herbert were left with mere anachronistic clichés to defend their viewpoint on Burns. Three years after the Suez Crisis, and three years before the Beatles’ first single ‘Love me Do’, it seemed conservative uses of Burns were losing momentum. This situation rolled out the red carpet for a more radical, Sovietfriendly hijacking of Burns’s bicentenary. On 25 January 1959, the Scottish Committee of the CPGB brought together 3,000 people in Glasgow’s St Andrews Hall for a special Burns rally.74 The first address was delivered by the 67-year-old Hugh MacDiarmid, who praised the Party for its initiative and claimed that ‘nowhere else in the world would so many ordinary people gather to honour the poet’.75 MacDiarmid was seconded by J. R. Campbell, whose pamphlet Burns, the Democrat had been republished for the occasion. The Daily Worker journalist backed MacDiarmid, explaining that the Communist Party followed Burns’s model as the ‘authentic voice of the Scottish people’.76 Campbell then introduced members of the Young Communist League (YCL), who concluded the event with a choral performance of ‘The Jolly Beggars’. Certainly, the choice of Burns’s irreverent and irreligious piece contrasted ironically with the decision of St Giles elders. Produced by Jimmy Sutherland from Scottish Television, the YCL’s performance met with ‘a thunder of applause’ which ‘went on for minutes on end’, according to the Daily Worker.77 The same month, MacDiarmid published a re-assessment of Burns’s legacy: Burns Today and Tomorrow.78 In his introduction, the Scottish poet affirmed that he ‘did not remove a word’ from what he had ‘written a quarter of a century ago’.79 He still denounced the ‘principal Burns clubs’ as ‘middle-class institutions’ which ‘denied in practise [sic], if not in precept, all the values [Burns] stood for’.80 Similarly, he renewed his iconoclastic critique of the more ambiguous

8053_Malgrati.indd 143

06/03/23 10:55 am

144   Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics

aspects of Burns’s life which had given way to the ‘philistine’ hijacking of his radical legacy. Such was the case, for instance, with ‘[Burns’s] peasant conceit’ as well as ‘his inverted snobbery, his nostalgia de la boue’ and, more importantly, his ‘betrayal’ of ‘Thomas Muir’s movement’ in ‘Does haughty Gaul’.81 ‘To undo [Burns’s] betrayal’ in denouncing the ‘Burns cult’ together with the bard’s own deficiencies had been the purpose of the Scottish Renaissance movement.82 However, in saving Burns from his own flaws, MacDiarmid claimed that twentieth-century Scottish literature had restored the poet’s legacy. Certainly, as a radical, Burns could still speak to contemporary Scotland. According to MacDiarmid, who was now changing his tone, ‘the courage of Burns was unbelievable’, considering ‘the political climate of Scotland’ in the 1790s. ‘Son of a poortenant farmer . . . he was a republican under a monarchy, [and] a democrat under despotism.’83 Burns’s ‘democratic spirit’, MacDiarmid argued, should inspire contemporary Scottish writers to commit to the politics of their time. In 1959 circumstances seemed to call for a radical response from Scottish poets. ‘The proposed siting of Yankeecontrolled rocket-launching sites in Scotland’, for instance, seemed to MacDiarmid an outrage that Burns himself would have fought.84 Likewise, supporting the Soviet Union – the only nation which took the arts ‘seriously’ according to MacDiarmid – was a necessity for any followers of the Jacobin bard.85 More importantly still, Scottish poets had to follow Burns – and other European communist writers – by ‘go[ing] directly to the people’ to inaugurate the alliance of ‘highbrow and lowbrow against middlebrow’.86 To MacDiarmid, elitism in the arts was compatible with a left-wing kind of populism. What mattered was to crush the middle class, ‘the ministers, bankers, schoolteachers, business men, and what not’, from whose ranks came ‘most of the Burns orators’.87 Only this anti-bourgeois alliance between poets and workers could bring about change in Scotland, heralding an independent ‘Scottish Workers’ Republic’.88 Whilst the eighteenthcentury bard might lose his influence on this future Scottish utopia, MacDiarmid concluded, nonetheless, that Burns would ‘always hold his place in the history of Scots poetry and be honoured for the stand he took and the revolutionary ideas he expressed’.89 For a long time marginal, MacDiarmid’s revolutionary and communist ideas were now in line with the geopolitics of Burns’s bicentenary. During the first months of 1959, it seemed the USSR had

8053_Malgrati.indd 144

06/03/23 10:55 am



Into the Cold War   145

become the new ambassador of Scottish culture. On 25 January 1959, 1,000 people gathered in Burns Statue Square in Ayr to hear the commemorative speech of G. Z. Ioanisyan, first secretary of the Soviet embassy in the United Kingdom.90 In his oration, Ioanisyan explained that ‘the poetry of Robert Burns with its deep lyricism, its humour, and its democratic spirit, ha[d] won the heart of Soviet readers’. Thanks to Marshak’s translations, ‘Burns’s poetry [was] now a real factor in Soviet cultural life and the heart of the Soviet reader swell[ed] with love and admiration for the great genius of the Scottish people’s poetry’.91 Accordingly, many initiatives were being taken all over the USSR to celebrate the poet’s birth – not least ‘a special radio Moscow programme composed by Mr. Emrys Hughes, MP, on the poetic work of Burns’.92 Hughes was the principal mediator in Scottish-Soviet relations during this period. In March 1959, as a Russophone, he joined Macmillan’s British delegation to the USSR – the first since the beginning of the Cold War.93 There he was hosted by Marshak, whom he had first met in Moscow in 1951. A few days after his arrival, Hughes was invited to deliver the ‘Immortal Memory’ to an immense Burns supper in Tchaikovsky Hall – Moscow’s main concert hall. For this occasion, the Labour MP recollects, Soviet organisers had held ‘a huge painting of Robert Burns behind the platform’ presided over by Alexei Surcov, the Secretary of the Soviet Writers’ Union.94 In his best Russian, Hughes declared that although ‘Burns belonged to Scotland; it was clear from the meeting that Burns belonged to Russia as well’. Reciprocally, Hughes added, ‘if Burns now belonged to Russia, Marshak belonged to Scotland too’ for ‘it was mainly through Marshak that Russia had got to know Burns’. Enthused by the event, he optimistically concluded that it was ‘appropriate that the year of the bicentenary of Robert Burns would also be remembered as the year which was the beginning of the end of the Cold War’. In the spirit of the bard who wrote ‘Man’s inhumanity to Man / Makes a countless thousand mourn’, Scotland, and Russia now, had to ‘work hand in hand for peace’.95 The following year, in September 1960, Marshak was appointed honorary President of the Burns Federation.96 Since the end of the Second World War, Burns had shifted from being a unionist icon of Welfare Britain to acting as a Cold War ambassador between Scotland and Russia. During the late 1940s, Scottish Labour had successfully integrated Burns to their unitary

8053_Malgrati.indd 145

06/03/23 10:55 am

146   Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics

vision of British social democracy. Whilst weakening the old liberalconservative creed of organised Burns clubs, Labour’s Burns had further reinvigorated cultural unionism in Scotland with a new egalitarian twist. However, during the 1950s, Cold War geopolitics and decolonisation, undermining both social-democratic and Tory forms of British pride, came to emphasise national tensions over Burns’s bicentenary. For the first time since the poet’s death in 1796, Soviet propaganda showed his memory could pave other ways than those of Union and Empire. This unaligned path, in a post-colonial world, would soon raise the broader question of Scotland’s selfrule as a nation.

Notes  1. By 1959, Marshak sold 613,000 copies of his translations. Pittock (ed.), Robert Burns in Global Culture, p. 38.   2. Kaloh Vid, Ideological Translations, p. 11.   3. Ibid. pp. 145–58.  4. Ibid.   5 Sharon and Leith (eds), Robert Burns and Transatlantic Culture, 2.  6. See Pittock (ed.), Robert Burns in Global Culture and Pittock (ed.), The Reception of Robert Burns.  7. BC 2, 1949, Vol. 22, p. 7.   8. Ibid. p. 10.  9. BC 2, 1949, Vol. 22, p. 10. Interestingly, Dollan’s argument resembles Duncan McNaught’s, which John S. Clarke had fought against in 1925. 10. Ibid. p. 11. Dollan provides an English translation (by Mr Morsoff) of Marshak’s preface to his Poems of Robert Burns. 11. Ibid. p. 12. Lafargue’s quotation is from his ‘Reminiscence of Marx’, written in 1890. 12. Ibid. p. 11. 13. Barke, The Wonder, p. 168. 14. Ibid. p. 172. 15. The Scotsman, 26 January 1949. 16. BC 2, 1950, Vol. 23, p. 92. 17. The Scotsman, 12 September 1949. 18. Ibid. 19. The correspondence between Barke and Ferguson covers 1946 to 1956 in the Barke archives, GML, Box 7A. See also Ferguson (ed.), The Letters of Robert Burns.

8053_Malgrati.indd 146

06/03/23 10:55 am



Into the Cold War   147

20. The Merry Muses was finally published in 1959 (one year after Barke’s death) by the poet Sydney Goodsir Smith (who had joined the project at a later stage) and with the help of Ferguson. 21. Sunday Express, 11 September 1949. 22. Letter from W. Gallacher to J. Barke, 12 September 1949. Barke archives, GML, Box 4A. 23. The Daily Worker, 22 September 1949. 24. Forward, 24 September 1949. 25. The Scotsman, 12 September 1949. 26. Ibid. 27. In a 1986 interview with Trevor Royle for BBC Scotland, Montgomerie would declare that he had always preferred ‘simple’ poems over ‘dressed up’ poetry. A tape of this interview is available in NLS, Acc. 9215. 28. See Montgomerie’s 1930s and 1940s correspondence in NLS, Acc. 6855 and 8240. 29. Letter from W. Montgomerie to J. Barke, 17 May 1949, Barke archives, GML, Box 4A. 30. BC 2, 1950, Vol. 23, p. 2. 31. The Scots Chronicle, Kilmarnock, 1951. 32. Ibid. p. 4. Despite his opposition to the Federation, MacDiarmid authorised Montgomerie to reproduce his poem ‘Crowdieknowe’ in the Scots Chronicle. In his letter to Montgomerie, he added, ‘I am looking forward eagerly to the Scots Chronicle and hope it will have great success’. As often, MacDiarmid put literature before politics. Letter from Grieve (MacDiarmid) to Montgomerie, 26 September 1950, NLS, Acc. 8240. 33. BC 3, 1952, Vol. 1, p. 96. Dollan’s name does not appear in the Committee list. His resignation came after a decade of intense Burnsian activities – including two years as Vice President, two as President and four as Committee member. 34. BC 3, 1952, Vol. 1, pp. 118, 138. 35. Letter from J. Barke to J. Delancey Ferguson, 29 May 1952. Barke archives, GML, Box 7A. 36. Barke, The Well, p. 94. 37. Ibid. p. 221. 38. Labourn, Marxism in Britain, p. 43. 39. Keith, The Russet Coat, p. 166. 40. Ibid. p. 222. 41. Ibid. p. 223. 42. Ibid. 43. BC 3, 1956, Vol. 4, p. 76.

8053_Malgrati.indd 147

06/03/23 10:55 am

148   Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics 44. Ibid. p. 76 45. ‘Millions watch Burns dinner on Television’, The Scotsman, 20 January 1955. 46. Ibid. 47. Pictures of Marshak’s journey in Scotland can be found in the archives of Emrys Hughes, NLS, Dep. 176, Box 22. 48. Hamish Henderson, unpublished notes. In Henderson archives, quoted in Neat, Hamish Henderson, Vol. 2, pp. 90–1. 49. Ibid. pp. 90–1 50. Ibid. 51. This stamp was re-issued in 1957 and 1959. The 1956 version of the stamp can be seen in the Robert Burns Birthplace Museum in Alloway. See Kirsty Macqueen, ‘Burns in the USSR’, Burns Birthplace Blog (November 2016), (last accessed 15 February 2022]. 52. Hansard, HC Deb. 09 November 1955, Vol. 545, cols 1827–8. 53. Ibid. 54. Hansard, HC Deb. 05 December 1957, Vol. 579, cols 615–98; Hansard, HC Deb. 18 December 1957, Vol. 580, cols 395–6. 55. Hansard, HC Deb. 5 December 1957, Vol. 579, col. 676. 56. Hansard, HC Deb. 5 December 1957, Vol. 579, col. 691. 57. Hansard, HC Deb. 5 December 1957, Vol. 579, col. 676. 58. Hansard, HC Deb. 5 December 1957, Vol. 579, col. 667. 59. Hansard, HC Deb. 18 December 1957, Vol. 580, col. 396. 60. Hansard, HC Deb. 5 December 1957, Vol. 579, col. 690. 61. Archives of Douglas Young, NLS, Acc. 7085/6. Interestingly, the first draft of Young’s speech includes a nuance – ‘Yet Burns was far from being a Marxist’ – which was deleted in the later version. Certainly, this reveals that, despite his opposition to communism, Young needed to stress Soviet uses of Burns in order to emphasise, by contrast, Britain’s failure to honour the poet. 62. Ibid. 63. BC 3, 1958, Vol. 6, p. 105; Hansard, HC Deb. 04 December 1957, Vol. 579, col. 45W. 64. Hansard, HC Deb. 06 May 1958, Vol. 587, cols 91–2W. 65. Hansard, HC Deb. 10 July 1958, Vol. 591, col. 582. 66. See the second half of Chapter 4. 67. Petrie, ‘Anti-Socialism’. 68. The Scotsman, 9 January 1959; BC 3, 1960, Vol. 7, pp. 2–3. 69. Quoted in BC 3, 1960, Vol. 7, p. 2. 70. Ibid. p. 3. 71. Ibid. pp. 7­­–8.

8053_Malgrati.indd 148

06/03/23 10:55 am



Into the Cold War   149

72. Orwell, ‘Notes on Nationalism’ in Polemic, October 1945. 73. BC 3, 1960, Vol. 7, p. 39. 74. The event was organised by the founder of the Scottish Committee of the CPGB, Bob Horne. See the letter from Horne to MacDiarmid, 7 January 1959, in MacDiarmid’s 1959 correspondence, NLS, Acc. 7361. 75. The Daily Worker, 26 January 1959; Cairney, Immortal Memories, p. 203. 76. The Daily Worker, 26 January 1959. 77. Ibid. 78. MacDiarmid, Burns Today. 79. Ibid, p. 1. 80. Ibid. p. 6. 81. Ibid. pp. 2, 25. 82. Ibid. p. 26. 83. Ibid. p. 105. 84. Ibid. p. 8. 85. Ibid. pp. 8, 93. 86. Ibid. pp. 39. 87. Ibid. p. 39. 88. Ibid. p. 102. 89. Ibid. p. 128. 90. BC 3, 1960, Vol. 7, p. 53. 91. Ibid. p. 53. 92. Ibid. p. 54. 93. Ibid. p. 45. 94. Ibid. 95. Ibid. p. 46. 96. BC 3, 1965, Vol. 12, p. 81.

8053_Malgrati.indd 149

06/03/23 10:55 am

8053_Malgrati.indd 150

06/03/23 10:55 am

Chapter 6

Indigenous Dreams and Kailyard Politics: Burns after Empire (1960–1979)

Despite Hugh MacDiarmid’s hopes in 1928, modern Scotland was not yet willing to ‘forget Burns for at least one hundred years’.1 Instead, from Glasgow to Moscow, the bard’s 1959 bicentenary had drawn crowds of thousands rivalling Victorian Burns festivals in size. Whilst the 1956 Border Telegraph could pose the question ‘Immortal Memory? Is Sir Walter Scott Forgotten?’, it was manifestly evident that Burns continued to matter.2 Unlike the Tory Baronet of Abbotsford, whose works were increasingly neglected, Burns had a democratic aura better adapted to the egalitarian kind of politics which prevailed in post-war Britain. The efforts of the Scottish left, combined with Soviet interference in British affairs, had played a crucial role in shaping this blue-collar version of the poet. The ‘Krushchev Thaw’ after the death of Stalin had allowed for the bard’s bicentenary to be celebrated in a spirit of rapprochement between Scottish and Soviet admirers of Burns. However, despite the loose ideological link between Scottish leftwingers and Soviet Burnsians, their actions did not have the same reverberation in the context of the late 1950s. On the one hand, most Labour and Communist readers of Burns were committed to preserving the British union. For them, Burns’s egalitarianism was the harbinger of a unitary, statist kind of Britishness, which had been under construction since the end of the Second World War. On the other hand, uses of Burns by the Soviet Union meant that Scottish culture could reach beyond the Anglosphere and the boundaries of a fast-collapsing Empire. Nonetheless, the Soviet Union was not in a position to singlehandedly inspire a post-imperial reassessment of Scottish culture.

8053_Malgrati.indd 151

06/03/23 10:55 am

152   Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics

Three years after the suppression of the 1956 Hungarian insurrection, the appeal of Communism was declining in Scottish proletarian cities. The influence of the CPGB on Burns’s bicentenary commemorations was out of proportion with the limited electoral clout of the party in Scotland.3 Moreover, many fellow travellers in intellectual spheres had left the organisation – except for MacDiarmid, whose well-known views on Burns ran the risk of wearing out after decades of relentless polemics. As illustrated by the 1956 Bandung Conference which saw the rise of the Non-Aligned movement, the contemporary context was favourable for a critique of both imperialism and Stalinism. The countries of the ‘Third World’, it appeared, could chart a path out of the Cold War and transform self-government into a tool for international peace. In England, left-wing Non-Aligned ideas and antiStalinism found expression in new periodicals, such as The Reasoner, launched by E. P. Thompson and John Saville in 1956, which would become the New Left Review three years later. Back in Scotland, these ideas were also making headway. Could Scottish cultural identity, after two centuries in the service of Empire, reinvent itself and find a place in the new world order? In the autumn of 1959, the young Scottish poet Norman MacCaig, MacDiarmid’s literary protégé, accepted an order from the Scottish Committee of the British Arts Council to edit Honour’d Shade, a compilation of contemporary Scottish poetry to commemorate Burns’s bicentenary.4 This anthology featured both established and emerging poets (from MacDiarmid and MacCaig to Edwin Muir, Sydney Goodsir Smith and Edwin Morgan), many of whom were MacDiarmid’s friends and regulars in the ‘poets’ pubs’ of Edinburgh’s Rose Street. Conspicuously, however, MacCaig’s anthology omitted the works of many other Scottish poets, including all Scottish female writers as well as those poets associated with the Scottish Folk Revival of Hamish Henderson. Until 1956, Henderson had been a fervent Communist, an early translator of Antonio Gramsci into English, and an organiser of the Edinburgh People’s Festival under the sponsorship of the CPGB.5 However, the Soviet crackdown on Hungary in 1956 had led Henderson to leave the party and embrace instead a kind of Non-Aligned Third-Worldism.6 In 1960, the publication of his anti-imperialist song, ‘Freedom Come-all-Ye’ – a future classic of the Scottish left –

8053_Malgrati.indd 152

06/03/23 10:55 am



Indigenous Dreams and Kailyard Politics   153

testified to his commitment to the cause of the ‘black boy[s] frae yont Nyanga’ and other decolonised countries.7 Henderson’s political evolution, away from party discipline, was certainly not to MacDiarmid’s taste. The publication of MacCaig’s contentious anthology, in this context, made a controversy between the Non-Aligned folklorist and the ‘highbrow’ Stalinist even more likely. The story of Henderson’s flytings with MacDiarmid has been chronicled extensively.8 In November 1959, The Scotsman lambasted MacCaig’s anthology for its Rose Street tribalism.9 A two-month furore ensued in the columns of the newspaper, during which Henderson and MacDiarmid appeared as the most prominent opponents. Their duel swiftly moved away from the anthology to embrace broader issues of aesthetics, national politics, geopolitics, elitism and folklore in Scottish arts and poetry. Although the first duel ended in January 1960, there was enough material left for a second sparring: ‘The Folksong Flyting’, hosted by The Scotsman in March to June 1964. Besides the intellectual brio of this quarrel, Henderson’s challenge to MacDiarmid reveals a deep disagreement over the reception of Burns’s works. As Alec Finlay puts it, ‘Burns became one of the first battlegrounds in the Flytings’.10 Certainly, MacDiarmid and Henderson agreed on several aspects of the bard’s legacy. They both despised the ‘Burns cult’ and settled on a revolutionary interpretation of Burns’s politics.11 In January 1958, for instance, Henderson had invited MacDiarmid to ‘pull a fast one on the official Burns cult with a vengeance’ at a Burns supper of the Scottish Miners’ Union.12 However, both poets nursed contradictory feelings about the bard’s works. Whilst MacDiarmid only spared Burns’s most technical and Scots-infused poems from his general critique of kailyardic folklore, Henderson embraced the bulk of Burns’s songs and lauded his ‘preeminent example [as] a poet who understood and recreated his own work in the folk tradition of the people’.13 In other words, according to Henderson, Burns’s works as a poet and, more importantly, as a song collector had been a crucial milestone in the preservation of Scottish indigenous culture. Considered altogether, the ‘Flyting’ correspondence between Henderson and MacDiarmid, from 1959 to 1964, highlights the link between the authors’ personal readings of Burns and their wider argument on poetry and politics. MacDiarmid, for his part, acknowledges that ‘he attaches a certain value to some poems of Burns, based

8053_Malgrati.indd 153

06/03/23 10:55 am

154   Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics

on folksong originals’, whilst recalling ‘the deplorable effects [of] the vast body of post-Burnsian doggerel’ that spoilt the corpus of Scottish poetry until the twentieth century.14 In this light, Henderson’s Folk Revival appears to MacDiarmid as a neo-kailyardic attempt to ‘find the ideal man in the “muckle sumph” and scrap all learning and all literature in favour of the boring doggerel of analphabetic and uneducable farm-labourers, tinkers, and the like’.15 Against those ‘left-wing advocates of regression to the simple outpourings of illiterates and backward peasants’, MacDiarmid opposes the works of ‘poets in the communist countries’.16 Paraphrasing Lenin, the author of In Memoriam James Joyce explains that, ‘Communism becomes an empty phrase, a mere façade, and the Communist a mere buffer, if he has not worked over in his consciousness the whole inheritance of human knowledge’.17 In other words, MacDiarmid’s communist art sought the ‘superior forms’ of Lenin’s ‘monumental propaganda’ as manifested by the works of Eisenstein in cinema, Shostakovich in music and Mayakovski in poetry.18 By contrast, the core of Henderson’s argument, expressed in his first letter to The Scotsman, lies in his belief that ‘the folksong revival [is] paying what is probably congenial tribute to the “honour’d shade” of the most famous Crochallan Fencible’.19 This reference to the famous eighteenth-century Edinburgh club, where Robert Burns relaxed away from upper-class etiquette and collected myriad bawdy poems, mirrors the rest of Henderson’s critique. Like the aristocrats who pressed Burns to align his verse with their insipid rhetoric, MacDiarmid acts as a ‘feudal Balkan grandee who continues to exercise his droit de seigneur, oblivious of the fact that a revolution is building up around him’.20 Such narrow mindedness confines MacDiarmid to the ‘impasse’ of Lallans poetry and the rut of a ‘withered and archaic political spent force’ – the Stalinist CPGB.21 Instead, Henderson asserts that ‘the best hope for a genuine popular poetry’ is to follow Burns and Gramsci in embracing folksongs as a source of artistic inspiration and political revitalisation.22 In other words, together with his friend E. P. Thompson, Henderson advocates for a renewal of left-wing thinking – a ‘new left’ – opposed at once to Stalinist control of literature and colonial scorn for indigenous roots.23 Despite the attacks of MacDiarmid, who dismissed folklorists and New Left thinkers as ‘sucklings’ of the Communist Party, the Scottish folk revival would come to play a crucial role in shaping

8053_Malgrati.indd 154

06/03/23 10:55 am



Indigenous Dreams and Kailyard Politics   155

Burns’s legacy and popularising his works amongst Scotland’s postwar generation.24 Certainly, Henderson was not isolated. In 1962, across the Atlantic, a young American folksinger – who later acknowledged Burns’s ‘Red Red Rose’ as his biggest inspiration – released his eponymous first record: Bob Dylan.25 The same year, Peggy Seeger – the half-sister of Dylan’s mentor, Pete Seeger – released an album with Henderson’s socialist friend Ewan MacColl.26 Titled Jacobite Songs, their record opens with Burns’s ‘Ye Jacobites by Name’ and ‘Such a Parcel of Rogues in a Nation’. This blending of Burns’s songs with radical Jacobite tunes and Americanised folk would become one of the main features of 1960s Scottish traditional music. Indeed, it seemed 1960s American soft power, alongside Soviet uses of Burns, could help renew Burns’s post-imperial legacy. Whilst Hamish Henderson and Ewan MacColl were not cardcarrying nationalists, the folk revival they had imported to Scotland would place Burns’s works at the centre of a new patriotic musical subculture. Folk music, it seemed, could reconnect contemporary Scotland with its native culture – one that preceded the British Empire and the anglicisation of Scottish society. This ideal of authenticity, combined with the brisk strumming and hoarse singing of folk musicians, appealed to many Scottish youths. Soon, the Scottish folk revival gained in visibility. Alongside Edinburgh University Folksong Society, founded by Henderson in 1958, many local folk clubs came to life across the country and, in 1963, the first Annual Folk Music Festival was organised in Aberdeen. 27 Billy Kay, who was a young nationalist student during the late 1960s, and a member of Edinburgh University Folksong Society, remembers how folk concerts stirred his patriotic feelings.28 These bands ‘of young guys my age playing traditional music’, explains Kay, contrasted with the ‘scunnering kind of tenors that you would see on Burns Night television’.29 Reacting against conventional tastes, folk musicians revived the rougher side of Burns’s muse and nursed Scotland’s underground, nationalist fringes. As the decade went on, many folk bands evolved in more openly political directions. In 1967, Roy Williamson and Ronnie Browne from The Corries (a pairing dating from 1961), released their first duo album Bonnet, Belt, and Sword. This compilation was strongly patriotic in tone, featuring Burns’s ‘Parcel of Rogues’ alongside many Jacobite classics, from ‘Cam ye o’er frae France’ to ‘The

8053_Malgrati.indd 155

06/03/23 10:55 am

156   Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics

Haughs o’ Cromdale’.30 The same year, following the historical victory of SNP’s Winnie Ewing in the 1967 Hamilton by-election, four other bands, The Livingstones, The Lallans, The Albannachs and The Newcomers, joined forces to release an LP titled SNP Folk. Unambiguously partisan, this record featured Ewing’s signature on its back cover, and included songs such as ‘Scotland Free’, ‘The SNP’ and ‘The Bonny Seat o’ Hamilton’ alongside Burns’s ‘Scots wha hae’ and ‘Parcel of Rogues’.31 Certainly, this popularisation of Burns as a neo-Jacobite hero was inextricable from the simultaneous growth of Scottish nationalism. Momentum for the SNP had been rising throughout the decade. Party branches now spread all over the country, and, in 1966, one year before Ewing’s election, nationalist candidates came second in three constituencies: West Lothian, Perthshire and Stirlingshire. Although modern nationalists were increasingly more concerned with hard-headed facts and figures than with the lyricism of Scottish poetry, they did manage – at least on one occasion – to capitalise on Burns. Interestingly, this episode was linked with the consequences of the bard’s bicentenary. In 1964, the Burns stamp polemic, which had marked Scottish 1950s philately, was reactivated by the British Government. Whereas back in 1959 Harold Macmillan had stood by the rule according to which only the Queen could figure on official stamps, his successor, Alec Douglas-Home, now departed from tradition to commemorate the National Shakespeare Festival, staged for the 400th Anniversary of England’s bard. Such preferential treatment offered a timely opportunity for Scottish nationalists to stir the pride of their compatriots. On 8 February 1964, in the Scots Independent, W. A. Milne criticised the government by contrasting Shakespeare’s popularity in England with that of Burns in Scotland. ‘If you went into the streets of an average English town’, explains Milne, only few passers by would know the date of Shakespeare’s birthday. By contrast, ‘if you tried the same experience substituting Burns for Shakespeare in a Scottish town, I guarantee that nine people out of ten could answer correctly’.32 Scottish people, nationalists thought, were prepared to stand up for their bard. A few weeks later, Wendy Wood – a longstanding separatist, radical member of the SNP and founder of the militant organisation The Scottish Patriots – reacted to the government’s stamp policy. On

8053_Malgrati.indd 156

06/03/23 10:55 am



Indigenous Dreams and Kailyard Politics   157

9 April 1964, she published an article in The Scotsman titled, ‘Up Rabbie’, in which she advertised the printing of a three-shilling ‘protest Burns stamp’ to replace Shakespeare’s effigy on Scottish mail.33 This unofficial stamp featured Burns’s portrait over a white and blue Saltire. It was produced together with two series of special envelopes, respectively printed ‘If Shakespeare, why not Burns?’ and ‘Whur’s your Wullie Shakespeare noo?’.34 Wood’s stamp and envelopes proved popular. Between 1964 and 1966, the leader of The Scottish Patriots received about 445 letters ordering the stamp from all over the country.35 Fifty-five additional letters came from exiled Scots or Scotophiles living in England, and twenty five from the Commonwealth and the United States. In total, orders from these mails amount to 6,650 stamps – although Wood claims in her autobiography to have sold more than ten thousand.36 Unsurprisingly, Wood’s main purchasers were nationalist groups: the Hamilton branch of the SNP (the constituency that would elect Winnie Ewing three years later) ordered one hundred stamps, whilst the Scottish Secretariat requested six hundred.37 Aside from nationalist societies, Wood’s mail came mostly from patriotic individuals. Whilst most of these letters were brief, some of Wood’s correspondents enclosed lengthy diatribes against England and the British government. For instance, Thomas Thomson from Lanark explained, ‘Like you, I say that we in Scotland should have our bard on stamps, but trust an Englishman to say no’.38 Similarly, Margaret Neil from Dumbauchly declared that she ‘was very glad that you [Wendy Wood] managed to produce something like this when those English fools would do nothing’.39 More vehemently, still, a ‘Scots woman’ from Thurso, protested that this ‘indignity [couldn’t] go on’ and that her ‘Highland blood ha[d] been at boiling point since Shakespeare’s stamp ha[d] been allowed on envelopes’.40 Arguably, Wendy Wood had succeeded in transforming a small alteration of British postal policy into a minor but meaningful constitutional furore which mobilised the nationalist elements of Scottish public opinion. Philately might seem trivial when set beside politics, but, on this occasion, it revealed significant undercurrents within the country. A few months later, the polemic came to an end under the newly elected Labour government of Harold Wilson. In February 1965, the Post-Master General, Anthony Wedgwood Benn, announced the issue of an official stamp to mark the 170th Anniversary of Burns’s

8053_Malgrati.indd 157

06/03/23 10:55 am

158   Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics

death.41 This resulted, the following year, in the printing of two sets of official Burns stamps – the one drawn from Nasmyth’s portrait of Burns and the other representing the bard’s face over a Saltire. Although Wood claimed credit for the creation of an official Burns stamp, the decision by the government can rather be seen as Labour’s willingness to reconcile Burns with its vision of Britain.42 After thirteen years spent in effortful opposition, and despite attempts by left-wingers, folklorists and nationalists to use Burns in more subversive ways, Scottish Labour still intended to claim the poet’s voice. Since the 1950s, a new generation of social-democratic Burns orators had replaced the likes of John Smith Clarke, James Barr, and Patrick Dollan. From the ILP veteran Emrys Hughes to the trade-unionist John Pollock, the young Jim Sillars and the towering William Ross – appointed Secretary of State for Scotland in 1964 – Labour’s Burns still counted many advocates. Sillars, a native of Ayr, recalls that Burns ‘seeded very early into [his] personality’.43 ‘Burns was in the air since my childhood’, explains Sillars – this was an age when he would hear his grandfather recite ‘The Twa Dogs’ and listen to his father discuss MacDiarmid’s iconoclastic views of Burns. ‘This led Burns to have a great influence on me’, adds Sillars, who entered Labour at the age of 23 in 1960. ‘I think all of my generation’ in Ayrshire Labour ‘took inspiration from Burns’: We saw Burns as part of our socialist inheritance. We saw him as part of the continuum of the working-class struggle, to get ourselves in a better position in society . . . Burns fortified the kind of things we were saying. People should not have to beg for a living, they should not be cast aside.44

Throughout the 1960s, Sillars was coming to political maturity. On several occasions, Burns references made by local Labour leaders left lasting impressions on him: One day, at a Labour Burns supper, John [Pollock] made a point, and I have repeated it ever since at Burns Suppers. Shakespeare often wrote about power. Burns never did. Burns wrote about people, about a daisy, about flowers. Not about power. And yet he did also talk about people in terms of people’s rights, the injustice done to people . . . ‘Yon birkie ca’d a lord’ . . . This is a huge difference between him and Shakespeare.

8053_Malgrati.indd 158

06/03/23 10:55 am

Indigenous Dreams and Kailyard Politics   159



That had quite a profound effect on me, growing up and trying to put together a political philosophy.45

In other words, for Sillars and other Ayrshire Labour leaders, Burns’s poetry not only offered a convenient set of references, but it more importantly structured their own vision of the world, of class, society and power. This led most of them to consider the transmission of Burns’s values as a democratic and civic duty. The reason I did the Burns suppers, and Ross, and Hughes, and the others, is that we knew that we had a duty to keep Burns alive, because Burns alive is part of the fabric of Scottish society, because if we lose him we lose a very important component of our society . . . You had a responsibility to tell people the Burns message. You had a responsibility to interpret the importance of Burns to an audience that went well beyond the politics. It was important to maintain the life and the dynamic inside Burns’s egalitarian poems but also to pay tribute to this remarkable genius who could take ordinary words and make them magic.46

Listening to Sillars, one is left with the impression that, by the mid1960s, Labour had become the mainstay of the Burns Movement across Scotland. Yet, the electoral progress of the SNP prevented Labour from maintaining the British socialist vision of Burns that Dollan and the Burns Federation had developed twenty years earlier. Decolonisation, nationalism and the polemical consequences of the 1959 bicentenary had loosened the ties between Burns’s memory and the unitary culture of Welfare Britain. This new situation led Labour Burnsians to revive a kind of unionist-nationalist approach to the poet – one that celebrated Burns’s Scottish identity together with his internationalism. A prime example of this could be found in the speeches of Willie Ross, Sillars’ mentor, who served as Secretary of State for Scotland between 1964 to 1970, and again from 1974 to 1976. Ross was born in Ayr in 1911 to a local ILP councillor remembered for his cheerful renditions of Burns’s ‘Mary Morrison’ – which was also the name of his wife – on Hogmanay.47 Such family traditions left their mark upon Ross, who went on to develop an early passion for the bard and who filled his ‘shelves with very old Burns books’, when he became

8053_Malgrati.indd 159

06/03/23 10:55 am

160   Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics

a primary school teacher in the Glasgow Gorbals.48 After spending the Second World War in Asia where he met his future wife Elma, whose parents ran the ‘Brig o Doon’ Hotel in Alloway, Willie Ross was elected as Labour MP for Kilmarnock. Within two decades, the ex-primary school teacher had become altogether the most respected Scottish character in the Labour Party, the most important politician in Scotland and a renowned Burns orator. According to his daughter Fiona, Willie Ross ‘viewed Burns as an early socialist and internationalist’ – an ‘anti-establishment’ poet who ‘sided with the underdog’ against authority and inequalities.49 Ross’s favourite Burns poems reflected his Labour persuasion. Amongst other pieces, the Scottish Secretary of State favoured the vitriolic ‘Twa Dogs’, the satirical ‘Holy Willie’s Prayer’, the riotous ‘Jolly Beggars’, the egalitarian ‘A Man’s a Man’, and the humble ‘Cotter’s Saturday Night’ (which Ross enjoyed as a celebration of modest and sincere religiosity against the rigid creed of the eighteenth-century Kirk).50 Yet Ross also saw Burns as an ‘integral part of his Scottish pride’ and relished the more patriotic ‘Scots wha hae’ and ‘Parcel of Rogues’, which he often quoted at great length in his Immortal Memory speeches.51 Jim Sillars remembers: Willie Ross at a Burns Supper in the Labour Party was more nationalist than anybody. You know, when Ross would quote ‘Parcel of Rogues in a Nation’, you’d really think he did mean it. He really felt the same as Burns felt. But Willie did not see how he could escape from the Union and therefore his nationalism was a very controlled one, except when he went to Burns Suppers.52

Indeed, Ross remained a staunch unionist who believed that state intervention, adjusted for Scotland’s needs by his own role as Scottish Secretary of State, offered the best chances of progress for Scottish workers.53 In other words, whereas Ross prided himself on Burns’s Scottishness – and delighted in patriotic rousing – he did not read the bard’s message as a defence of Scotland’s national independence but, rather as a plea for the economic and moral independence of working people, ‘the world o’er’.54 Ross’s position on Burns was clarified in May 1967 in the House of Commons, when James Dempsey (Labour MP for Coatbridge) asked him whether he would ensure that ‘Robert Burns, the Scottish bard, [would] enjoy equal status with Shakespeare, the English bard’

8053_Malgrati.indd 160

06/03/23 10:55 am

Indigenous Dreams and Kailyard Politics   161



in the Scottish Certificate of Education.55 Ross answered with the ‘Twa Dogs’: ‘But human bodies are sic fools / For a’ their colleges and schools’ . . . Shakespeare may need this extra encouragement, but Burns does not need it . . . We had better put our faith and reputation in the knowledge and the instinctive love that Scots people have for Burns, without relying upon colleges and teachers.56

A few moments later, Ross’s colleague Hector Hughes, Labour MP for Aberdeen North, took the opportunity to inquire about the way Scottish pupils might be affected by ‘the work of Robert Burns [which] marches pari passu with the spread of nationalism in Scotland’. To this Ross answered, ‘I do not think that it is nationalism. I think that it is national pride’.57 In other words, the Secretary of State would not leave the monopoly of patriotism to the SNP. Whilst refusing to oppose Burns to Shakespeare in the Scottish curriculum, Ross placed Burns’s popularity above that of England’s bard, in a manner reminiscent of Wood’s nationalist letters. Ross’s unionist-nationalist narrative would, however, meet fiercer opposition as the SNP gained momentum. In February 1969, the newly elected SNP figurehead Winnie Ewing derided what she perceived as Ross’s ambivalence. In the House of Commons, during a debate on the Scottish peerage which Ewing had used as a pretext to attack both the House of Lords and the Act of Union, she quoted an extract of a Burns supper toast pronounced by Willie Ross at the Kilmarnock Burns Club eighteen years earlier in 1951.58 In his speech, Ross had declared that ‘the Treaty of Union was a great blow to Scottish pride and could have finished Scotland as a nation’. The shamefulness of the Act of Union, Ross had insisted, lay in the treachery of Scotland’s ‘parcel of rogues’ who ‘were bought and sold for English gold’ to reimburse the cost of the Darien Scheme – an adventure that England had ‘ruined’ by ‘its actions’.59 By citing Ross’s controlled patriotic statement out of its underlying unionist context, Ewing stressed the apparent inconsistencies of the Secretary of State.60 Certainly, Ross disputed such allegations. Far from resigning his Burnsian ‘pride’, he used it as a certificate of Scottishness against the rise of nationalism. In February 1973, during the Dundee East by-election campaign, Ross supported the local Labour candidate,

8053_Malgrati.indd 161

06/03/23 10:55 am

162   Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics

George Machin, a native from Yorkshire, against the SNP candidate Gordon Wilson. During a rally, as some SNP supporters criticised Machin’s English origins over the loudspeaker on their campaign van, Ross came to them and launched into ‘A Man’s a Man’. This symbol of Scotland’s internationalist identity, however, was mocked by the nationalist campaigners, who took over with the phrase ‘Willie Ross is an Englishman’.61 Two weeks later, after a tough campaign, Labour could only preserve its seat by a 2% margin. Cautious demonstrations of Scottish pride, it appeared, were losing ground against the increasingly nationalist feelings of working-class Dundonians. In a context when cultural nationalists and neo-Jacobite folklorists were refashioning songs such as ‘Parcel of Rogues’ and ‘Scots wha hae’ as anthems of Scotland’s post-imperial identity, Labour’s tactful uses of Burns ran the risk of becoming increasingly ineffective – if not counter productive. Indeed, by the early 1970s, ‘Parcel of Rogues’ had become an opportune slogan for the SNP’s campaign against the British exploitation of Scotland’s newly discovered oil.62 A few weeks before the General Election of February 1974, the front cover of the Scots Independent featured the three stanzas of ‘Parcel of Rogues’ with the headline: ‘Robert Burns put a name to them’.63 This rather vague attack, combined with the several possible meanings of the word ‘rogue’, suited the SNP’s indiscriminate opposition to all the unionist parties, who seemed to covet Scottish resources without regard for the Scottish people. Later that month, the SNP celebrated the election of seven MPs – including Gordon Wilson for Dundee East. Beyond sloganeering and opportunistic citations, however, the SNP missed its chance to truly appropriate Burns during the 1970s. Whereas Scottish Labour leaders continued to weave the bard’s poetry into the fabric of British social democracy, the SNP showed little interest in turning Burns into an unmistakably pro-independence icon. Certainly, in The Break-up of Britain, Tom Nairn, – the renowned Scottish New Left reviewer – explains that the ‘politicisation’ of Scotland’s ‘cultural sub-nationalism’ was key to the SNP’s breakthrough during the late 1960s and 1970s.64 Nonetheless, in the case of Burns, shrewd ‘politicisation’ of the bard across SNP publications tended to decline as nationalists rose. Until the early 1960s, winter editions of the Scots Independent often included lengthy transcriptions of nationalist Burns toasts.65 By the end of the decade, however, erudite pieces had given way to scarcer and brisker Burns references.

8053_Malgrati.indd 162

06/03/23 10:55 am



Indigenous Dreams and Kailyard Politics   163

At least two reasons could account for this shift in tone. On the one hand, the Scots Independent had to reflect the new pragmatic line of the SNP, in place since the election of Billy Wolfe as chairman of the party in 1969. Although Wolfe occasionally wrote Lallans verses, his leadership of the party owed more to his talent as a hard-headed strategist, cunning in socio-economic matters, than to his lyrical gifts.66 On the other hand, members of the SNP who still nursed a poetic approach to the idea of independence seemed much more influenced by the living presence of MacDiarmid than by the posthumous shadow of Robert Burns. As remembered by Jim Sillars, widow of the late Margo MacDonald (SNP Deputy Leader from 1974 to 1979), ‘MacDiarmid had a bigger influence than Burns in the SNP. He was part of the scene. He was alive, he was an activist, and his son [Michael Grieve] was also there to carry on his flame’.67 Certainly, until his death in 1978, MacDiarmid remained a vocal figurehead of the nationalist movement – making television appearances as late as February 1977.68 MacDiarmid’s influence was evident in the pages of the Scots Independent, which issued a special edition in advance of his 85th birthday in June 1977.69 Moreover, MacDiarmid’s influence led many nationalists to frown upon hackneyed aspects of Burns’s legacy. This is illustrated, for instance, by a 1976 letter written to James Halliday, ex-SNP chairman and editor of the Scots Independent. The letter came from Helen Loudon, a Livingstone SNP activist, who regretted the absence of ‘any proposed celebration to honour the birthday of our world-famous Robert Burns’ in the recent issues of the nationalist journal.70 Although Burns was ‘in theory the best SNP [member] we have ever had or are likely to have in the future’, Loudon expressed her ‘disillusion’ with the ‘apathy’ of her party – including that of her local branch, which refused to hold a Burns supper despite her repeated suggestions.71 The editor’s answer came straight from MacDiarmid’s 1920s verses: ‘There are very many Scots, and Nationalists, who love the poetry, and memory of Rab Burns – so much that they hold the “traditional Burns nicht” to be unworthy of so great-hearted a man and makar’.72 Halliday’s prose regurgitation of A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle epitomises the critical reception of Burns in the 1970s SNP. Combined with the party’s new emphasis on economic pragmatism, there was little ambition to repaint Burns as a romantic icon of independence.

8053_Malgrati.indd 163

06/03/23 10:55 am

164   Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics

More problematic still for the followers of MacDiarmid, were the ‘kailyardic’ depictions of Burns which proliferated on British and Scottish television at the time. Despite the Scottish folk revival and the rise of nationalism, television programmes about Burns, from the mid-1960s to the late 1970s, confined themselves to the repetition of worn-out, mainly apolitical clichés. Classical singers, who had been trained during the late 1940s and early 1950s, still featured as Burns’s main TV interpreters. On each 25 January, the BBC and Scottish Television would broadcast Burns’s famous love songs as sung by tartan-garbed opera singers, from Kenneth McKellar and Andy Stewart to Bill McCue and the soprano Moira Anderson.73 Of them all, only McCue, – an ex-miner with a Communist mother – showed interest in Burns’s political songs.74 Back in 1962, STV had screened McCue rendition of ‘A Man’s a Man’ with his shirt sleeves rolled up and shots of coal pits in the background.75 Yet, since then, McCue’s role on TV had been mainly limited to stereotypical presentations of Burns. Whilst he occasionally shared stages with some folk bands, McCue’s daughter, Kirsteen, remembers that most singers of his generation, including himself, ‘felt discomfort’ with the coarser accents of traditional singers.76 ‘My dad was never part of the Scottish folk revival’, concludes Kirsteen McCue.77 Conventional tastes also marked the most popular Burns show of the time – the one-hour, one-man biopic, There was a Man, written by Tom Wright in 1963, and interpreted by the energetic John Cairney, for both the stage and the BBC, from 1965 through to the mid-1970s.78 At a time when most Scottish households had access to television, the success of the show was so complete that numerous viewers began to identify Burns with Cairney.79 Except for a few swift sequences, however, There was a Man overlooked the politics of Burns. Tom Wright, the author of the play, was a manifest critic of MacDiarmid. As early as January 1962, he had railed in Scottish Field against MacDiarmid’s pretension to overtake Burns, declaring that ‘Scottishness [was] vanishing from our poetry’ and that the time had come to ‘reassess Burns not as a Scottish poet but simply as a poet’.80 Such views shaped Wright’s play, which was written in Standard English and focused more on the maze of Burns’s romances than on the details of his poetics or politics. As a result, Wright’s brisk mention of the bard’s grudges against Edinburgh’s literati was soon brushed

8053_Malgrati.indd 164

06/03/23 10:55 am



Indigenous Dreams and Kailyard Politics   165

aside by Clarinda’s correspondence. Likewise, Burns’s enthusiasm for the motto ‘Liberty! Equality! Fraternity’ and the ‘calls of ça ira’ are rapidly forgotten amidst ‘the Gowden Locks of Anna’ Park.81 These rare political allusions, however, were still profuse in contrast to other Burns programmes of the 1970s, such as ‘The Chiel Amang Us’, screened in January 1977, and the Burns episode of the BBC series ‘Great Britons’, produced in 1978.82 Whilst ‘The Chiel’ focuses exclusively on Burns’s sexual adventures, ‘Great Britons’, although based on a script by Burns scholar David Daiches, limits itself to the list of Burns’s places and mistresses. Apart from a perfunctory overview of the Scots Musical Museum, followed by a brief mention of the ‘Dumfries Volunteers’, the political and polemical aspects of Burns are altogether bypassed. Beyond sex, haggis and whisky, it seemed that Burns was of limited attraction for smallscreen producers. Despite their kitsch and apolitical nature, however, Burns-themed broadcasts, combined with the popularity of John Cairney, had the merit of keeping Burns in the public eye. This curiosity about the poet was also encouraged, at the same time, by the Scottish Tourist Board (created in 1969), which inaugurated a ‘Burns Heritage Trail’ in 1971, in collaboration with Ayr and Dumfries Councils as well as the Burns Federation.83 Promotion of Burns was amplified throughout the decade by the Board’s sponsorship of an annual Alloway Burns Festival from July 1976 to July 1979.84 Initiated by John Cairney, the Festival hosted a series of Burns spectacles (including Cairney’s new play, Robert Burns Story) and recitals by both folk singer Jean Redpath and TV soprano Moira Anderson.85 In 1977, the Festival also provided the occasion for the opening of a new Land of Burns Centre, a few yards from the Burns Cottage.86 Both venues had received over 140,000 visitors by July 1978 – 30,000 more than the previous record of 1948–9. 87 Such developments suggest that public awareness of Burns was relatively high when the debate on Home Rule came to the fore in Scottish politics during the late 1970s. Following James Callaghan’s loss of majority in the House of Commons in 1976, Labour had to assent to proposals for devolved assemblies in both Scotland and Wales to gain support from both SNP and Plaid Cymru backbenchers. As recommended by the final report of the Royal Commission on the Constitution, Parliament passed the Scotland Act, stipulating

8053_Malgrati.indd 165

06/03/23 10:55 am

166   Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics

that the creation of a Scottish Assembly, with limited powers, should be ratified by referendum in March 1979. Recent developments in Burns tourism fuelled the pro-devolution agenda of Labour-leaning tabloids in the run up to the referendum. In January 1979 John Fairgrieve from the Daily Record praised the prosperity of ‘Burns’s economy’.88 From the tens of thousands of tourists who flocked to the new Ayrshire Burns Trail to the ten million pints of ‘Dryburghs Burns Extra Special’ that were sold in Scotland every year, Burnsian business could become an asset for the future economy of a devolved Scotland. This original attempt in the press to monetise Burns’s memory highlighted the importance of the economic argument during the referendum debate. When it came to defend Scottish self-government, the profitability of Burns’s image mattered as much as his patriotic songs. Besides being a prosperous part of Scotland’s future, Burns also served as a convenient symbol for conjuring the last years of Scotland’s independent past. On the same day as Fairgrieve’s article, a news story reported that a Burns supper had just been held in Darien – Scotland’s short-lived colony of the 1690s. The Scotsman explained that on 24 January 1979 one hundred guests from Panama had gathered at the location of New Edinburgh, in response to an invitation from the Scottish leader of an archaeological crew that had excavated the former Scottish settlement.89 Three months before the referendum on Scottish Home Rule, Burns’s shadow haunted the sites of Scottish vainglory. Unsurprisingly, Burns Night 1979 provided both the SNP and Labour with the opportunity to advertise the bard as an icon of devolution. On the morning of 25 January, Margo MacDonald, vice chairman of the ‘Yes’ campaign, invited the press to eat haggis pies at the Edinburgh Yes Office.90 For the occasion, she issued a statement in which she explained that the Yes campaign ‘ha[d] enlisted the services of the Corries and Gaberlunzie folk groups’ to use the ‘patriotic fervour’ of their songs at pro-devolution rallies.91 Then MacDonald explained that ‘it [was] very fitting that the Burns season should coincide with the referendum debate’. Quoting ‘Parcel of Rogues’, she went on to accuse the figureheads of the ‘No’ campaign, ‘Brian Wilson, Tam Dalyell, Teddy Taylor, and Lord Wilson of being the self-same “coward few” that Robert Burns wrote of when he described the Scots politicians who [had] handed over Scots’ selfrespect to the English Parliament’.92

8053_Malgrati.indd 166

06/03/23 10:55 am



Indigenous Dreams and Kailyard Politics   167

More moderately, in the evening of that same day, Labour’s political broadcast featured a rendition of ‘A Man’s a Man’, followed by the singer’s swift commentary asserting that ‘Burns had been a nationalist with a small “n” but of course an internationalist too’.93 Helen Liddell, ex-General Secretary of Scottish Labour, then asked the singer for confirmation that Scotland’s bard, whilst a patriot, would never have opted for ‘separation’ from Britain.94 ‘No, never’, answered Burns’s interpreter. Finally, the broadcast was concluded by a short ‘Immortal Memory’ speech from Willie Ross. Although the ex-Secretary of State personally opposed the idea of devolution, he toed the party line, explaining that ‘the Scottish people had been working for devolution for a hundred years’ and that the time was ripe for ‘Scotland’s chance of democracy’.95 On the opposite side, ‘No’ campaigners had dismissed Burns Night as a pertinent occasion to set out their arguments. With the exception of Malcolm Rifkind, Tory MP for Edinburgh Pentlands, who, in 1975, had criticised Home Rule in Parliament, with citations of ‘Be Britain still to Britain true’, Conservative politicians and tabloids, from the Scottish Daily Express to the Scottish Daily Mail, seemed uninterested in Burns. Such indifference, however, did not prevent unionists from winning the March 1979 referendum. Although ‘Yes’ scored 51%, the prodevolution campaign failed to mobilise more than 40% of the registered electorate – as required by the Scotland Act. The opportunity for devolution, with which Burns had become superficially associated, was gone. It seemed the hopes of 1960s folk revivalists, aiming to rejuvenate Scotland’s post-imperial culture with the indigenous power of Burns’s songs, had failed to rally Scottish opinion. Hackneyed presentations of Burns on TV, disinterest for his poems in contemporary Scottish literature, and technocratic approaches to national politics in both Labour and the SNP prevented the poet’s legacy from growing in bolder, uncharted ways. Would Burns’s poems end up on the bookshelf of scarcely read Scottish classics, occasionally picked up for perfunctory TV shows, yet uninspiring for citizens, writers and activists committed to the modern life of the nation? Such a pessimistic thought would have been conceivable in the late 1970s. Yet it would also have been short sighted. In May 1979, Margaret Thatcher entered No. 10, heralding a new era of neoliberal economics, class resistance and identity politics. This proved a paradoxically fertile ground for Burns’s memory.

8053_Malgrati.indd 167

06/03/23 10:55 am

168   Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics

Notes  1. Daily Record, 23 January 1928.  2. Border Telegraph, 14 August 1956, quoted in Rigney, The Afterlives of Walter Scott, p. 292.   3. The CPGB won only 0.5% in Scotland in the October 1959 General Election.   4. MacCaig (ed.), Honour’d shade.  5. Callaghan, Cold War, p. 87.  6. Neat, Hamish Henderson, Vol. 2, pp. 105–77.  7. Gibson, The Voice of the People, 120–2.  8. Ibid. pp. 144–58; Finlay (ed.), The Armstrong Nose, pp. 320–2; Gibson, The Voice of the People, pp. 9–44 and ‘Folkniks in the Kailyard: Hamish Henderson and the “Folk-song Flyting”’, in Bell and Gunn (eds), The Scottish Sixties, 209–27; Ross, ‘Visions and Voices: The Flyting of Hamish Henderson and Hugh MacDiarmid’, in Bort (ed.), Anent Hamish.  9. The Scotsman, 19 November 1959. All letters from the Henderson/ MacDiarmid Flytings are quoted from Finlay, The Armstrong Nose, pp. 79–100, 117–40. 10. Finlay, The Armstrong Nose, p. 312. 11. Henderson’s various Burns supper notes in the Hamish Henderson Archives, University of Edinburgh Library, Box 34, 7/12, oppose the radical bard to his ‘kailyardic’ worship. 12. Letter quoted in Neat, Hamish Henderson, p. 146. 13. ‘Programme Notes for the 1952 People’s Festival Ceilidh’, reprinted in Arthur Argo’s magazine Chapbook in 1967, Vol. 3, Issue 6, p. 27. 14. The Scotsman, 19 March 1964, 7 March 1964. 15. The Scotsman,19 January 1960. 16. The Scotsman, 7 April 1960. 17. The Scotsman, 4 January 1960. 18. The Scotsman, 7 April 1964. 19. The Scotsman, 1 December 1959. 20. The Scotsman, 18 January 1960. 21. The Scotsman, 13 and 18 January 1960. 22. The Scotsman, 12 April 1964. 23. The Scotsman, 18 January 1960. Regarding Henderson and E. P. Thompson see Neat, Hamish Henderson, p. 107. 24. The Scotsman, 4 January 1960 25. Bob Dylan, LP, written and performed by Bob Dylan. USA: Columbia Studio, 1962. Also See ‘Bob Dylan: Robert Burns is my biggest inspiration’, The Guardian, 6 October 2008.

8053_Malgrati.indd 168

06/03/23 10:55 am



Indigenous Dreams and Kailyard Politics   169

26. Jacobite Songs – The Two Rebellions 1715 and 1745, LP, written and performed by Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger. Scotland: Ossian Publications, 1962. 27. Gibson, Voice of the People, p. 14. 28. Interview with Billy Kay, 16 August 2018. 29. Ibid. 30. Bonnet, Belt, and Sword, LP, written and performed by The Corries. UK: BGO Records, 1967. For the origins of The Corries, see Browne, That Guy. 31. SNP Folk, LP, written and performed by The Livingstones, The Albanachs, Newcomers and Lallans. Scotland: Scotia Record, 1968. 32. Scots Independent, 8 February 1964. 33. The Scotsman, 9 April 1964. Other articles were issued in the Edinburgh Evening News, 11 March 1964, and in the Scottish Daily Express later that month. 34. Wood, Yours Sincerely, p. 213. 35. Letters counted from the correspondence between Wendy Wood and The Scottish Patriots, in the NLS, Acc. 8072/9–13 and Acc. 7980/47. 36. Ibid.; Wood, Your Sincerely, p. 213. 37. Order from the Scottish Secretariat, 12 April 1964, NLS, Acc. 8072/9; Letter from the Hamilton Branch of the SNP, 4 June 1964, NLS, Acc. 7980/47. 38. Letter from Thomas Thomson, 2 April 1964, NLS, Acc. 8072/11. 39. Letter from Margaret Neil, 21 May 1964, NLS, Acc.8072/11. 40. Letter from ‘A Scots Woman’, 22 April 1964, NLS, Acc. 8072/9. 41. Hansard, HC Deb. 1 February 1965, Vol. 705, cols 235–6W. 42. Wood, Yours Sincerely, p.213. 43. Interview with Jim Sillars, 5 June 2018. 44. Ibid. 45. Ibid. 46. Ibid. 47. Interview with Fiona Ross, 4 July 2018. 48. Ibid. 49. Ibid. 50. Ibid. 51. Ibid. 52. Jim Sillars, 5 June 2018. 53. Fiona Ross, 4 July 2018. 54. Ibid. For a wider assessment of Ross’s perspective on Scotland and Union, see the chapter on Ross in Torrance, Scottish Secretaries. 55. Hansard, HC Deb. 10 May 1967, Vol. 746, col. 1483. 56. Hansard, HC Deb. 10 May 1967, Vol. 746, cols 1483–4.

8053_Malgrati.indd 169

06/03/23 10:55 am

170   Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics 57. Hansard, HC Deb. 10 May 1967, Vol. 746, col. 1484. 58. Hansard, HC Deb. 25 February 1969, Vol. 778 col. 1517 59. Ibid. 60. For broader considerations about the growing hostility between SNP and Labour in the late 1960s, see Gerry Hassan, ‘The Auld Enemies: Scottish Nationalism and Scottish Labour’, in Hassan (ed.), The Modern SNP, pp. 147–61. 61. This episode was narrated by Ross himself in the House of Commons. See Hansard, HC Deb. 04 July 1977, Vol. 934, col. 945. 62. See ‘It’s Scotland’s Oil’, in Wilson, SNP, pp. 75–90. 63. Scots Independent, February 1974. 64. Nairn, The Break-up of Britain, p. 173. 65. Scots Independent, 6 February 1960, 11 February 1961, 2 February 1963 and 8 February 1964. 66. Stephen Maxwell, ‘Social Justice and the SNP’, in Hassan (ed.), The Modern SNP, pp. 121–2. Wolfe did not coin the slogan ‘It’s Scotland’s oil’, however, it was SNP Vice-chairman Gordon Wilson. 67. Sillars, 5 June 2018. 68. MacDiarmid appeared in the debate on devolution, ‘People and Politics’, Thames TV, 21 February 1977. Available at (last accessed 16 July 2018). 69. Scots Independent, June 1977. 70. Scots Independent, March 1976. 71. Ibid. 72. Ibid. 73. Clips from these TV shows were screened on Robert Burns: Hidden Treasures, television show, presented by Cat Hepburn. Scotland: STV, 2019. See also Kirsteen McCue’s documentary about her father, Burns, My Dad, and Me, film, written by Kirsteen McCue. Video uploaded by Dhivya Kate Chetty on 27 June 2016. Available at (last accessed 31 July 2019). 74. Interview with Kirsteen McCue, 26 March 2019. 75. For a’ that, television show, directed by Brian Maheney. Scotland: STV, 1962. This show featured in McCue, ‘Burns, My Dad, and Me’. 76. McCue, 26 March 2019. 77. Ibid. 78. John Cairney narrated the story of There Was a Man in his autobiography, The Man who Played, pp. 13–74. 79. This is, at least, what John Cairney claims in his autobiography. 80. Scottish Field, January 1962, p. 30. 81. There was a Man, film, written by Tom Wright. Scotland: BBC Scotland, 1966. BFI Archives, London, 330823. The show was filmed a

8053_Malgrati.indd 170

06/03/23 10:55 am



Indigenous Dreams and Kailyard Politics   171

second time under the direction of Norman Fraser, Scottish TV, 1978, BFI Archives, London, 6519. 82. The Chiel Amang Us, film, directed by Gordon Menzies. United Kingdom: BBC, 1977. BFI Archives, London, 142168; Great Britons: Robert Burns, film, written by David Daiches and produced by Harry Hastings. United Kingdom: BBC, 1978. BFI Archives, London, 99238. 83. Scottish Field, January 1975, pp. 15–17. 84. BC 3, 1978, Vol. 26, pp. 8–9. 85. Ibid. 86. Ibid. 87. Daily Record, 24 January 1979; Evening Citizen, 6 October 1949. 88. Daily Record, 25 January 1979. 89. The Scotsman, 25 January 1979. 90. Ascherson, Stone Voices, p. 96. 91. The Scotsman, 26 January 1979. 92. Ibid. 93. Stone Voices, 96. 94. Ibid. 95. Ibid. p. 97; Jim Sillars, 5 June 2018; Fiona Ross, 4 July 2018.

8053_Malgrati.indd 171

06/03/23 10:55 am

8053_Malgrati.indd 172

06/03/23 10:55 am

Chapter 7

The Bardic Politics of Scottish Devolution (1979–1999)

Scottish countercultures of the 1960s–70s, from left-wing folklorists to cultural nationalists, had presented another vision of Burns, away from both post-war unionism and imperial grandeur. Yet such a postcolonial, nativist approach to the poet had failed to enter the mainstream. TV shows, tabloids and Burns Suppers still featured rosy, apolitical clichés about Burns – only spiced up by the occasionally risqué, sexually liberated innuendo. Still more problematic, Labourdominated Scottish politics, whilst keen on Burns’s home-proud egalitarianism, remained mostly uninterested in Scottish culture. The 1979 debate on devolution had stressed the need for Scotland’s economic and democratic representation, yet arguments to protect or bolster Scottish cultural identity had remained quiet. In this context, Burns’s legacy, at the crossroads of culture and politics, only had a limited role to play beyond the provision of hackneyed quotes for Scottish sloganeers. As put by Edwin Morgan in 1978, ‘the shrinking, mouselike, shadowy figure of the goddess Devolution is not a Muse that would stir either a Burns or a MacDiarmid’.1 This situation changed drastically during the 1980s–90s, however. Following the results of the 1979 referendum, Margaret Thatcher’s radical neoliberal reforms were experienced as a threat by the Labourvoting Scottish electorate, whose working-class core bore the brunt of deindustrialisation. As explained by Scott Hames, a national ‘logic of pain’ soon enhanced the more aloof technocratic case for devolution built during the 1970s.2 The ‘state of injury’ of Scottish workers under Thatcherism, in other words, became naturalised as that of the entire Scottish nation – a social, ethnic body in need of both recognition

8053_Malgrati.indd 173

06/03/23 10:55 am

174   Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics

and representation.3 This new context opened an unprecedented space for contemporary Scottish writers who, alongside political parties and trade unions, could voice Scottish sufferings and provide Scottish working-class vernacular identity with formal literary outputs. Unlike the interwar Scottish modernism, this ‘second Renaissance’ found in Robert Burns a reassuring paragon. Indeed, the bard’s model – as a suffering underdog peasant turned national poet, representative of Scotland’s voice and Scottish sentiment whilst accommodating English verse and aspects of British identity within his work – fitted the halfway house of devolution. Certainly, these developments were not obvious at the start of the decade. Still influenced by MacDiarmid, who had died in 1978, many Scottish writers thought Burns and his works had vanished altogether as an authoritative reference point. Remarkably, not a single article, short story or poem on Burns features in late 1970s and 1980s editions of the main literary magazines of the time, such as Chapman, Lines Review, and Cencrastus.4 Such indifference for the national poet was emphasised by Alasdair Gray, in his ironic ‘index of diffuse and imbedded Plagiarisms’ printed at the end of his milestone novel Lanark in 1981. Amongst Gray’s avowedly plagiarised references, a sarcastic note on Burns reads: ‘Robert Burns’ humane and lyrical rationalism has had no impact upon the formation of this book, a fact more sinister than any exposed by mere attribution of sources’.5 This instance of post-modernist satire stressed Burns’s conspicuous absence from contemporary Scottish writing at a deeper level. Despite this general trend, however, a few younger poets attempted to reconnect with Burns. For the first time in decades, they weaved the bard’s memory with new poetic themes, probing the anxious state of post-1979 Scotland. In 1984, Morgan, who had translated Mayakovski into Scots, published his Sonnets from Scotland, a series of fifty-two sonnets which reflected on the meaning of Scottish identity after the 1979 setback.6 Morgan’s fifteenth sonnet, ‘Theory of the Earth’, draws on the title of an essay by Scottish geologist James Hutton, who met with Burns in Edinburgh in 1786: James Hutton that true son of fire who said to Burns ’Aye, man, the rocks melt wi the sun’ was sure the age of reason’s time was done: what but imagination could have read

8053_Malgrati.indd 174

06/03/23 10:55 am



The Bardic Politics of Scottish Devolution   175 granite boulders back to their molten roots? And how far back was back, and how far on would basalt still be basalt, iron iron? Would second seas re-drown the fossil brutes? ‘We find no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end.’ They died almost together, poet and geologist, and lie in wait for hilltop buoys to ring, or aw the seas gang dry and Scotland’s coast dissolve in crinkled sand and pungent mist.7

The merging of poetic and scientific imaginations, intensified by the almost simultaneous deaths of Burns and Hutton (in 1796 and 1797 respectively), climaxes with a fusion of Burns’s famous verses (‘the rocks melt with the sun’) and the concrete future of stony Scotland. This image is ambivalent. Whilst Burns’s granitic gospel might tend towards the independence of rocks, Morgan emphasises its ‘pungent’ counterpart – the vanishing of Scotland’s coast into vapour and drought. So Morgan’s Burns allows for both Scotland’s effusion and oblivion, somewhere between devolution and dissolution. Published in 1981, Douglas Dunn’s poetry collection, St Kilda’s Parliament, displays similar insights into the post-referendum strangeness of using Burns.8 Half-way through Dunn’s book, whose title ‘focuses on a parliament as far from Westminster as it is possible to get in the British Isles’, a series of poems – ‘Green Breeks’, ‘Tannahill’ and ‘John Wilson in Greenock, 1786’ – evoke three Scottish writers, all contemporaries of Burns. From the towering Sir Walter Scott to the humbler, more obscure and more tragic lives of Robert Tannahill and John Wilson, these poems avoid direct engagement with Scotland’s national poet. Yet their subtle references to Burns, illustrating broader concerns about class, provincial writing and national memory highlight their ‘retrospective unity’, in the words of Dunn himself.9 ‘Green Breeks’, a lengthy poem set in 1783 Edinburgh (three years before Burns’s arrival there), remembers Walter Scott’s juvenile rivalry with a plebeian ‘beggar’ and ‘boy-barbarian’, renowned for his green trousers.10 This episode leads Dunn to draw a class-based line between Scott’s high-born ‘chums’ and Green Breeks’s ‘sans culotte friends – “chiefly of the lower ranks”’. Certainly, Dunn’s reference to Burns’s Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect highlights the furtive presence of the ‘ploughman poet’ alongside the ‘peasant

8053_Malgrati.indd 175

06/03/23 10:55 am

176   Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics

baroque’ Green Breeks.11 The bard’s ‘support for the underdog’, remarks Dunn, in hindsight, contrasts with Scott’s confinement of ‘lower-rank’ characters to cameo appearances in his novels.12 Similarly to the young Burns, Green Breeks, whose later life can only ‘be imagined’, appears as the true symbol of gallus plebeian Scotland: He is perpetual. He is my country. He is my people’s minds, when they perceive A native truth persisting in the weave Of shabby happenings. When they turn their cheeks The other way, he turns them back, my Green Breeks.13

The meaning of Dunn’s allusion to Burns becomes more explicit in his following poems. Written in Standard Habbie (the so-called ‘Burns stanza’), ‘Tannahill’ addresses Paisley’s eponymous ‘weaver poet’ who committed suicide in 1810 due to financial hardship. In this poem, which analyses ‘how a provincial writer can be reduced to a state of terrible depression’, Burns’s own experience as a ‘peasant poet’ appears as an early warning for Tannahill:14 In seventeen hundred and eighty-six They set you learn a weaver’s tricks While Burns discovered Muses vex        As well as grace, Young Burns, whose Scots proprietrix        Spat in his face. Douce dandies of the posh salons Took that man in, as if on loan, Then having raised, they laid him down,     Their ploughman poet. They made Society’s decision,     And let him know it.15

Twenty years later, once again, the caprice of ‘Society’ would be the cause of Tannahill’s tragic death ‘among / The ugliness’. Such a comparison allows Dunn to nuance Burns’s myth. Whilst often praised (or dismissed) with Walter Scott as one of Scotland’s literary greats, Dunn’s Burns shares more in common with the likes of Tannahill. His short-lived fame in Edinburgh should obscure neither his destitute

8053_Malgrati.indd 176

06/03/23 10:55 am



The Bardic Politics of Scottish Devolution   177

Ayrshire beginnings nor his modest Dumfriesshire ending. In other words, Burns’s life embodies that of a failed social climber – an idea already expressed by Edwin Muir in the 1920s.16 Such bitter failure, as hinted by Dunn, makes for Burns’s tragic yet enduring representativity of Scottish subaltern voices. His vernacular of pain, satire and defiance echoes throughout Scotland’s overlooked tradition of minority provincial writing. This idea is confirmed by Dunn’s third poem, ‘John Wilson’: a fictional plea by the eponymous Greenock poet, who died in 1789 after he abandoned his poetic ambitions to feed his family. Like ‘Tannahill’, Dunn’s Wilson perceives no sign of encouragement in Burns’s example. Although the bard who ‘has come to us from Ayrshire’s sod / . . . jests at Kirks and outmanoeuvres God’, the time will come, Wilson insists, when the ‘unco guid’ might ‘learn a way of blotting truth / And shut his mouth, and shut his singing mouth . . . unless they dispossess / His art with purchased righteousness’.17 Like Wilson, who abandoned poetry to see ‘[his] children fed’, like Tannahill, whose dreams of fame led to poverty and suicide, and like ‘Green Breeks’, obscured by his plebeian background, elusive references to Burns in Dunn’s poetry reflect the scarcity of ‘underdog’ voices – both provincial and plebeian – outside the dominion of imperial, Waverley-like history. Aside from the ‘purchased righteousness’ of the ‘unco guid’, the real Burns lies in ambivalent obscurity. To a certain extent, Dunn’s bard resembles St Kilda’s Parliamentarians, whose democratic existence in the ‘barbarous’ Hebrides can only be recalled thanks to an incidental late nineteenthcentury snapshot.18 Outside the picture’s frame, however, the lives of Scottish ‘barbarians’ and lower-rank poètes maudits remain largely unrepresented. In other words, following the ‘barbarian’ side of Burns’s poetry, closer to subaltern Ayrshire than to the Edinburgh gentry, Dunn’s literary Parliament stresses the disenfranchised voices of Scottish history. His approach to Burns – similarly to Morgan’s – reveals a blend of hope and angst at the crossroads of plebeian assertiveness and cultural oblivion. Whilst Dunn and Morgan wondered about Burns’s Scottish minority voice, at the same moment other actors discussed the poet’s capacity to represent all Scots – including Scottish women. Indeed, modern feminism took part in the slow-burning, post-1979 reassessment of Burns. Surprisingly, perhaps, few voices had tackled Burns’s

8053_Malgrati.indd 177

06/03/23 10:55 am

178   Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics

masculinity since the publication of Catherine Carswell’s 1930 Life of Burns. Instead, the early developments of second-wave feminism in Scotland during the 1960s had been concomitant with noiseless changes within the Burns Movement.19 Many Burns clubs now admitted women and, in 1970, the Burns Federation had elected Lady Jane Burgoyne as its first female President.20 Moreover, many contemporary female politicians, especially in Labour and the SNP, admired Burns’s radicalism in ways which were incompatible with a critique of his cumbersome masculinity. Whilst Wendy Wood, Winnie Ewing and Margo MacDonald endorsed Burns’s patriotic vision, Labour MP Jennie Lee opposed prohibitive laws against pornography in the House of Commons with mentions of Burns’s bawdy verses.21 Nonetheless, by the late 1970s and the early 1980s the relationship between Burns and women was becoming a subject of increasing enquiry and polemic. In response to a first BBC television debate on ‘Burns and Women’ in January 1979, the Daily Record printed, two years later, an acrid duel between the feminist journalist Sandra Ratcliffe and the Burnsian columnist John Fairgrieve.22 Under the title ‘Burns: Rascal or Romantic?’ Ratcliffe attacked the bard’s masculine ethos by quoting his letter to Robert Ainslie from March 1788. In this letter, which Burns wrote after his return from Edinburgh, the poet explained that he had found Jean Armour ‘forlorn, destitute, and friendless’ and had ‘f—d’ her, as a result, ‘till she rejoiced with joy unspeakable’. ‘I gave her such a thundering scalade’, added Burns, ‘that [it] electrified the very marrow of her bones’.23 According to Ratcliffe, this was evidence of ‘one the biggest male chauvinistic pigs that ever existed’ – an ‘arrogant’ and ‘violent man’ that cared not for the well-being of his female partner. To this, John Fairgrieve retorted that ‘The shrieking feminists, suddenly emerging by courtesy of a man-made four-letter PILL’ should praise Burns, the bard of equality, who ‘would have cast a generous eye on the Women’s Lib Movement’. Such generosity, however, would not have applied to Germaine Greer – the inventor of the concept of ‘male chauvinism’, about whom Fairgrieve comments: ‘it is hard to believe that Robert Burns, in 1981, would have tried to get into bed [with]’.24 From risks of anachronism to outright misogyny, the debate on Burns’s sexuality would not go in for subtleties. Whilst compromise between Ratcliffe and Fairgrieve seemed unattainable, William J. Murray attempted a more balanced account of

8053_Malgrati.indd 178

06/03/23 10:55 am



The Bardic Politics of Scottish Devolution   179

‘Women in Burns’s poem and songs’ in the 1982 edition of the Burns Chronicle.25 In this article, Murray stressed the ‘liberationist’ aspects of Burns’s poetry, as exemplified by his celebration of ‘free love and fun’ in the songs ‘Corn Rigs’ and ‘Green Grow the Rashes’.26 Even Burns’s bawdy poems, which did not ‘deny women’s rights’ and ‘avoided cruelty’, Murray explained, ‘escaped the debasement of pornography’. Instead, Burns described sex as one of the only pleasures left for deprived women, as expressed by the fiery barmaid in ‘The Jolly Beggars’ who sings ‘I ONCE was a Maid, tho’ I cannot tell when, / And still my delight is in proper young men’.27 This notwithstanding, Murray acknowledges ‘male chauvinistic’ aspects of Burns’s life are evident, for instance, in his creation of the Tarbolton Bachelors’ Club and in his infamous letter to Robert Ainslie. Certainly, Burns ‘ha[d] not absorbed Wollstonecraft’, and his oft-quoted poem ‘The Rights of Woman’ (1793) was, in truth, a sarcastic confinement of female to the home-based ‘rights’ of ‘Protection, Decorum and Admiration’.28 On balance, Murray concluded that Burns ‘appealed for the rights of women on the points where they were most vulnerable, their sexual relations and their social choices’.29 Despite Murray’s measured argumentation, polemics on Burns and women would continue, unabated, until (and beyond) the end of the century. From Norman MacCaig’s 1986 critique of ‘predictable feminist whine’ and his defence of all-male Burns clubs – whose members can ‘let loose without their minders’ – to John Cairney’s denunciation of ‘masculine women’ in a 1988 ‘Toast to the Lassies’, it seemed that anti-feminist postures appealed both to Burns worshippers and modern poets.30 To these the feminist journalist Lesley Riddoch’s replied by denouncing Burns, MacDiarmid and ‘our national bardic heroes . . . whose writing skills and power of limited observation have made selfish male behaviour quite acceptable and banished generations of “sulky dame” to stay at home’.31 Such considerations, however, did not apply to the most powerful woman in the United Kingdom at the time. Rather surprisingly indeed, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher turned a keener eye on Burns than many early-1980s Scottish writers and critics. On 10 May 1985, a few months after the end of the Miners’ Strike which had shaken the whole country, the Prime Minister addressed the Conference of Scottish Conservatives in Perth City Hall. At the beginning of her speech, Thatcher declared that the time had come for

8053_Malgrati.indd 179

06/03/23 10:55 am

180   Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics

Conservatives to reclaim Scotland from Labour as a ‘natural Tory territory’.32 Quoting Disraeli, she insisted that the Conservatives should be ‘a national party or nothing’ – the party of ‘One Nation’, united, from Edinburgh to London, by a common purpose.33 ‘Our vision’, she explained, was that of a Britain where ‘freedom belongs, not to a collective . . . but to individuals’ and ‘property-owners’ who ‘aspire to their own particular greatness’. To support her Disraelian vision of ‘One Nation’, Thatcher had decided to co-opt Burns’s ‘A Man’s a Man’ – though she begged her audience to ‘let her say it in an anglicised version of Burns’. ‘Then let us pray that come it may / As come it will for a’ that; / That sense and worth, o’er all the earth / May bear the prize and a’ that’, cited she, before adding, ‘I didn’t expect to find so much pure Toryism in Burns, but there it is [laughter]’.34 This was a shrewd quotation. With ‘A Man’s a Man’, Thatcher was not only purloining Scottish Labour folklore, but she also co-opted Burns’s message for her own philosophical doctrine. Certainly, from the Prime Minister’s point of view – influenced by Methodist teachings and market-orientated economics – ‘sense and worth’ in Burns’s poem did not mean class equality, but, instead, heralded a world of meritocracy and self-made individuals.35 Such uses of Burns were part of Thatcher’s wider endeavour to display her neoliberal morals in a Scottish light. In 1983, as noted by David Torrance, the Prime Minister had already quoted Adam Smith and David Hume at the Glasgow Chamber of Commerce.36 Likewise, in 1988, her ‘Sermon on the Mound’ would attempt, albeit maladroitly, to reach out to Presbyterian theology. Though Thatcher failed to convince Scottish voters, her efforts to engage with Scottish culture had been unequalled in the Conservative party since at least the 1950s. Political responses to Thatcher’s Burns were timorous at first. Certainly, as early as 1981 in the House of Lords, Willie Ross had deplored rising unemployment by invoking ‘Man was Made to Mourn’.37 In similar fashion, the communist Jimmy Reid recalled Burns’s ‘sentiments and support for the poor, the oppressed and the suffering’ in the columns of the Daily Record two months before the Miners’ Strike.38 Such instances, however, were a timid defence of the left-wing Burns tradition. In August 1985 miners from the Castlehill colliery in Clackmannshire downed tools against a proposal to close their pit.39 Led

8053_Malgrati.indd 180

06/03/23 10:55 am



The Bardic Politics of Scottish Devolution   181

by union leaders Tam Mylchreest and Sam Cowie, they descended underground and occupied the site for forty-eight hours. Cowie, a keen Burnsian and a talented singer, entertained the strikers with his favourite Burns songs.40 For his audience, who heard him sing those two nights by the lights of headlamps, the bard’s lyrics must have felt like the swansong of an era – that of the close-knit mining communities of the Scottish central belt where Burns’s words of hope, labour and common sense had found passionate reception for nearly two centuries. A few weeks later, Cowie was sacked for trespassing on management property. The Castlehill colliery, which employed 700 workers, closed its doors five years later in 1990.41 The tragic fate of Scottish miners, however, would inspire bolder uses of Burns against Thatcher as the decade went on. Whilst the poet’s legacy remained ambivalent, as highlighted by contemporary poets and feminist critics, his works could still voice Scottish resistance against English Tories. On 29 January 1987, the night was marked by a prime-time Burns film broadcast on STV, Channel 4 and Grampian TV.42 Directed by Timothy Neat, in collaboration with Hamish Henderson, The Tree of Liberty – titled after Burns’s alleged Jacobin poem – was a tribute to Serge Hovey, an American left-wing composer and Burns enthusiast, who, together with Scottish folk singer Jean Redpath, had undertaken the musical re-arrangement of Burns’s works.43 Interestingly, Hovey had been under suspicion in McCarthyite America during the 1950s when he had discovered the poetry of Burns in an anthology compiled by the Scottish communist James Barke.44 Three decades later, this left-wing approach still defined Neat’s documentary. Interviewed during the film, Hamish Henderson (Neat’s friend) launches an attack against nineteenth century Burns worshippers – the bard’s ‘most insidious enemies’ – who ‘wanted to turn Burns in a sort of literary equivalent of Lenin in his mausoleum’.45 Against this Victorian shadow, Henderson insists that Burns’s energetic folksongs, as revealed by Hovey’s work, ‘were the key . . . to set Burns en route for liberation’. Like William Blake, who wrote in his poem ‘America’ that ‘Empire is no more, and now the wolf and the lion shall cease’, Burns’s poetry ‘exulted in, what seemed for a little while, the imminent downfall of the old order’.46 This ‘revolutionary élan’, Henderson concludes, ‘was brought to life’ in the present day by Hovey’s re-arrangement of ‘Parcel of Rogues’. Indeed, nearing the end of the documentary, Redpath’s singing of

8053_Malgrati.indd 181

06/03/23 10:55 am

182   Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics

Burns’s ‘nationalist tune’ is illustrated by a rather explicit video montage. Whilst the first verses are accompanied by footage of fishermen, oil platforms and steelwork factories – the symbols of Scotland’s threatened and coveted economy – the last stanza comes alongside a picture of Robert the Bruce’s spider’s web and shots of modern miners walking into darkness.47 By conflating Bruce’s fight for independence with recent struggles against Thatcherism, Neat’s film turned Burns’s verse against the ‘roguish’ attitude of the Conservative Government. The Tree of Liberty met with great success in Scotland. Alongside Billy Connolly, who congratulated the film producer Barbara Grigor, the Glasgow Herald praised Neat for achieving ‘an original, moving and obliquely charming film about the liberation of Robert Burns’.48 A few months later, in May 1987, Neat’s film was awarded ‘Best Documentary’ at the Celtic International Film and Television Festival in Inverness.49 Such critical approbation showed that Neat’s movie had struck the right chord. For the first time, an openly radical and nationalist Burns film had been screened on prime-time television. This undoubtedly broke with the televisual ‘kailyard’ of the 1970s. According to TV producer Donny O’ Rourke, in hindsight Neat’s film would lead the way out of small-screen kitsch and inspire the modernisation of Burns Night shows for years to come.50 Crucially, The Tree of Liberty brought together nationalistic and socialist views of the bard. Whilst the disharmony between ‘Parcel of Rogues’ and the ‘Red Flag’ had contributed to the failure of the 1979 referendum, it now seemed that Burns’s legacy could bolster a new culture of leftward nationalism. In this respect, Neat’s film reflected the shift of Scottish politics during the late 1980s. On 30 March 1989, two years after Margaret Thatcher’s re-election, all serving Labour and Liberal MPs (Tam Dalyell excepted), along with representatives of the Church of Scotland, the Catholic Church and the Scottish Trades Union Congress, came together in Edinburgh’s Assembly Hall to sign a Claim of Right ‘acknowledging the sovereign right of the Scottish people to determine the form of Government best suited to their needs’. This manifesto, inaugurating the cross-party Scottish Constitutional Convention, represented a bold attempt to transform the technocratic advice of the 1970s Royal Commission on the Constitution into the indigenous demand of Scotland’s political establishment. Whilst Labour and moderates

8053_Malgrati.indd 182

06/03/23 10:55 am



The Bardic Politics of Scottish Devolution   183

had only paid lip service to devolution during the 1970s, their common opposition to Thatcher now led them to embrace the case for a Scottish Parliament. Impetus for Home Rule, however, was marred by the SNP’s refusal to join the Scottish Constitutional Convention. Whilst nationalists supported the creation of a Scottish assembly as a vehicle for independence, the party’s leaders remained wary to associate with Labour after the embarrassing outcome of 1979.51 The loveless coalition between nationalists and the centre left would not return, in other words. Admittedly, such divisions could have undermined the pro-devolution movement which was organised after the 1989 Claim of Right. But instead, partisan disagreements seemed to result in a paradoxically larger consensus for constitutional change. By contrast with the narrowly parliamentarian technocratic project of the 1970s, the campaign for Home Rule in the late 1980s was turning into a motley movement, seeping into society, and blending crafty unionistnationalist reformism with vaguer dreams of independence.52 Such new conditions provided a unique opportunity for Scottish writers and poets. After decades of effort to establish a platform for modern Scottish writing, from the creation of Scottish PEN in 1928 to that of Canongate Books in 1973, the devolutionary climate of the 1980s–90s enabled Scottish writers to refashion themselves as mouthpieces of the nation. Increased support from the Arts Council of Great Britain, soon to devolve its Scottish branch in 1994, as well as a keener reception in political and media spheres, helped authors access a long-sought readership. As put by Hames, their native styles could now serve to brand literary Scottishness as an aesthetic, recognisable ‘display-identity’ in need of legitimate representation.53 Certainly, as suggested by Neat’s film and Douglas Dunn’s poetic Parliament, Burns still had a role to play in this political rebranding of contemporary Scottish literature. More than MacDiarmid’s works, whose unpalatable Anglophobia and root-and-branch separatism forbade a constitutional compromise, Burns’s bardic and biographic ambiguities lent themselves to the narrative of devolution. The ploughman’s tergiversation, between Ayrshire fields and excise duties, could now serve the creation of a new myth, portraying post-modern Scottish literati as spearheads and initiators of British constitutional reform.

8053_Malgrati.indd 183

06/03/23 10:55 am

184   Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics

This bardic ambition of contemporary writers, turning the hardships of working-class Scotland into a national literary resource, was made clear by the patriotic broadcaster Billy Kay in a 1987 interview for Radical Scotland: Interestingly, although most people don’t have the kind of knowledge of Scottish culture that would enable them to make choices about being Scottish, about what Scottishness is, it’s the culture of that same majority which constitutes the important facets of the national culture, certainly of literature. [Quoting Billy Kay:] ‘Thank God there is a working-class identity, because without it there would be no identity . . . Very little has been written about the Scottish middle-class experience – right back to Burns, and today with William McIlvanney or Tom Leonard, it’s the working class that has written up its own experience’.54

Inverting MacDiarmid’s famous slogan, ‘Not Burns – Dunbar!’, Kay praised modern Scottish writers for pursuing the bard’s mission – that of voicing and preserving Scottish indigenous identity into an authoritative body of work. Certainly, it might be worth debating whether authors such as William McIlvanney and Tom Leonard were more concerned with promoting national identity rather than vindicating the traditional working-class struggle. Yet in the context of 1987, these two notions appeared increasingly conflated and both Burns’s proletarian and patriotic gusto, as highlighted by Kay, matched the spirit of the time. Flag-waving uses of Burns, whilst occasional in the early 1980s, would become commonplace in 1990s Scottish poetry. This can be seen, for instance, in Liz Lochhead’s third poetry collection, Bagpipe Muzak (1991), whose eponymous piece describes the nationalist awakening of ‘Glesca folk’ after the victory of SNP candidate Jim Sillars in the Govan by-election of 1988.55 ‘Lochhead’s poem inventories the various cultural items which have fed this new patriotic momentum – from modern Scottish television, including John Byrne’s sitcom ‘Tutti Frutti’ and the STV detective Taggart to the multicultural assortment of ‘haggis’, ‘pesto’ and ‘L.A. lager’.56 Such a popular, motley style of Scottishness lends itself to a mention of ‘Rabbie Burns’ whom Lochhead describes as ‘turn[ing] in his grave’ whilst ‘dunt[ing]’ the head of a slumbering Hugh MacDiarmid. Indeed, by contrast with the aloof modernist, Burns’s memory appears more relevant to Glasgow’s new ‘separatist dream’. A few

8053_Malgrati.indd 184

06/03/23 10:55 am

The Bardic Politics of Scottish Devolution   185



lines later, the bard is followed by his most famous character, Tam o’ Shanter, waking up on ‘the cold-heather hillside’ after a ten-year sleep. The reference to the failed 1979 referendum is clear. Yet this time the new ‘Campaign for an Assembly’ seems imbued with fiercer optimism as Lochhead concludes: ‘watch out Margaret Thatcher . . . Or we’ll tak’ the United Kingdom and brekk it like a bannock’.57 Lochhead’s poem would find echo, in the following months, as both Scottish national sentiment and anti-Tory resentment became exacerbated by the government’s new Poll Tax. Implemented in Scotland during the fiscal year 1989–90, twelve months before the rest of the UK, this regressive measure had soon triggered a mass nonpayment campaign of which many public intellectuals, including poet Douglas Dunn, became keen participants. In a 1990 pamphlet, titled Poll Tax: The Fiscal Fake, Dunn enclosed a strident propaganda poem: ‘Poor People’s Cafés’ which seconded Lochhead’s use of Burnsian tropes against Thatcherism: For a’ that, aye, For a’ that, men Could live and die, The angry pen Fall from the hand And nothing change In this hurt land Until that strange Obsession dies And begging-bowl Free enterprise Goes to the wall.58

This explicit, italicised reference to Burns’s ‘A Man’s a Man’ was ‘calculated’, Dunn remembers.59 Against Thatcher’s dream of transforming Britain into a classless nation of entrepreneurs, ‘Poor People’s Cafés’ asserts ‘Burns’s inevitable class dimension’ and hopes of egalitarian progress amongst Scotland’s ‘pauperdom’.60 The same year, new poetic commitment to the preservation and redefinition of Scottish identity was achieved by Dunn’s colleague – the young poet Robert Crawford from the University of St Andrews’ English Department. Raised in Cambuslang, Crawford had come to poetic maturity as a postgraduate student, working on T. S. Eliot in

8053_Malgrati.indd 185

06/03/23 10:55 am

186   Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics

Oxford during the early-mid 1980s.61 There, in the heart of England, he had nursed a self-awareness of his distinctive Scottish identity. As Crawford recollects: I became more and more conscious of Scotland as very different from this sort of public-school, in a sort of cliched way, Oxfordy English identity . . . which I vaguely associated with the right-wing English politics of that era.62

Longing for the northern ‘acoustic’ of Scottish voices, Crawford had found meaningful inspirations in the poetry of Burns and MacDiarmid. A few years later, in 1990, Crawford, who by then lectured at St Andrews, published his first poetry collection – A Scottish Assembly.63 Whilst making explicit reference to devolution and the recent Claim of Right, Crawford ‘also liked the idea of an assembly being a collection of poetry, collecting different voices together, different kind of Scotlands in one book’.64 Like Burns, who, ‘from the Lowlands to the Highlands, was able to fuse his voice through collecting material from and to do with Scottish culture’, Crawford was drawn to an eclectic conception of Scottish identity.65 Following the bard’s ‘protean quality’, with his mixing of moods and linguistic registers, A Scottish Assembly sang a song of self-determination for a distinctly diverse nation.66 One revealing instance of Crawford’s approach to Burns lies in his poem ‘The Dalswinton Enlightenment’. In this piece, the poet imagines the Scottish portraitist Alexander Nasmyth, side by side with two of his models, Robert Burns and the Dumfries inventor of the ‘first steamship’ Patrick Miller.67 Similarly to Edwin Morgan’s 1984 poem on Burns and James Hutton, Crawford merges the voice of Scotland’s bard with ‘the light of Science’ and the ‘triumphant metre’ of Miller’s scientific innovation. However, unlike Morgan’s ‘Theory of the Earth’, Crawford’s piece avoids apocalyptic implications for the future of Scotland. Instead, ‘The Dalswinton Enlightenment’ closes with the amused gaze of Dumfriesshire ‘locals’, making some ‘cracks / Almost as if they were watching a ship of fools’. Here, Scottish science, arts and poetry, the symbols of Scotland’s worldranking achievements, are conflated with the prosaic standpoint of Scottish country folks. Drawing from Burns, the poet who could celebrate both the Jolly Beggars and Science’s ‘coy abode’, Crawford’s Scotland appears at once provincial and universal.68

8053_Malgrati.indd 186

06/03/23 10:55 am



The Bardic Politics of Scottish Devolution   187

A further instance of Crawford’s Burns was published the same year, in Sharawaggi, a collection of Scots poems written in collaboration with the Dundee poet, W. N. Herbert.69 In this collection, Crawford included a long pentametric monologue, ‘Burns Ayont Edinburgh’, imagining the bard’s reflections on the organic – and orgiastic – power of his own poetic language. In this, Crawford’s Burns asserts the world-wide reach of his own ‘synthetic leid (trans. Language)’, whose ‘wurds sky oot wi Coancoard’s soanic bangs / Abune thi Mekong, Murray, Mississippi’, as a remedy to ‘muck-wreistlin Scoatlaun . . . aye oabsessed wi kickin baas’.70 Further, Burns-Crawford condemns the ‘cute-gralloching’ kailyard of past Scottish poetry, whilst proclaiming instead the ‘burnin’ power of his ‘ain peat-claig buiks’, whose language is ‘neiver circuataboot’ (trans. Restricted) and ‘mudges oot, lik froe (trans. cum), lik Noah’s Arks . . . fae Aibirdein tae yon Tasmanian Highlands . . . phoanin thi warld, dialin an dialin’, and holding the ‘future’ of ‘this laun’ in its hands.71 In other words, a contemporary, composite kind of Scots, inspired by Burns’s global appeal is presented by Crawford as a solution to liberate Scottish literature from ‘cute’ commonplaces. Whilst such an attack against the ‘kailyard’ is reminiscent of MacDiarmid, Crawford distances himself from the leader of the modernist ‘Renaissance’ who scorned Burns’s vernacular and praised the purer separate language of William Dunbar. Instead, Crawford identifies the radical, ‘burnin potency’ of Burns’s dialect with its motley nature – with its distinctive mixture of Scots and English which had transported the aspirations of Ayrshire peasants from Mauchline to Austin to Sydney. Crawford deepened this point two years later in his academic essay Devolving English Literature (1992). This book, which deconstructs the centralist notion of ‘English Literature’, devotes a chapter to the politics of Burns’s multi-faceted language.72 The bard’s ‘impure language’, explains Crawford, was a ‘cultural broker’, whose broad linguistic spectrum, between Ayrshire dialect, other kinds of Scots and formal English, allowed for the ‘unsettling’ ‘juxtaposition of major and minor’ themes.73 From melting rocks to lassie-loving, from ‘riches’ to ‘rashes’, and from tongue-in-cheek ‘Bardship’ to the provincial epithet ‘bardie’, Burns’s crafty language blurred conventional boundaries between ‘barbarian’ Ayrshire and Georgian Edinburgh.74 Such slyness, according to Crawford, could lead Burns’s afterlife in two opposite directions. On the one hand, the bard’s ‘synthesising of Scottish and English language . . . exemplifies the development of a fully British

8053_Malgrati.indd 187

06/03/23 10:55 am

188   Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics

Literature’, a ‘Lingua Britannica’, accounting for the wider linguistic spectrum of Great Britain. In this respect, Burns could be seen as a Scottish maker of literary Britishness – equal to his contemporaries, James Thomson, James Boswell, Tobias Smollett and Walter Scott.75 On the other hand, however, Crawford notes that Burns’s British blend was also ‘a potentially explosive’ mixture.76 The bard’s uneasiness with the Treaty of Union, his denunciation of the ‘Parcel of Rogues’ and his flirting with ‘Scottish republican nationalism’ weakened the unionist interpretation of his poetic language.77 Indeed, Burns’s bilingualism had inspired Scott’s unionist Waverley, but, at a later stage, Burns had also stimulated the works of modernist ‘barbarians’, such as the likes of Hugh MacDiarmid, D. H. Lawrence, Seamus Heaney and Douglas Dunn, whose centrifugal assertiveness and experimental language fostered both the ‘Devolution of English Literature’ and the ‘breakup of Britain’.78 In the context of the 1990s, following decolonisation and the crisis of unionist culture Crawford implied that Burns’s legacy could serve as both a maker and a saboteur of Britishness. Strengthened by the rise of devolutionary sentiments in 1990s Scotland, Crawford’s works proposed a solution to the twentiethcentury crisis of Burns’s image. According to the St Andrews poet, Scotland’s bard was neither a full-bodied unionist nor an outright ‘barbarian’ rebel. Instead, Burns appeared as a malleable symbol for devolution – one whose contradictory views and plastic language lay between union and independence. Unlike MacDiarmid, who regularly saw Burns’s ambiguity as a curse on Scottish pride, Crawford transformed bardic fluidity into the strength of a nation, whose postmodern and post-colonial assembly could allow for nuances, diversity, and constitutional compromise. In many ways, Burns’s ‘explosive Britishness’ would manifest itself during the commemorations of the bicentenary of Burns’s death in 1996. As noticed by Hutchison in his survey of Burns Night editions of Scottish newspapers in January 1995, tabloids exacerbated the link between the poet’s work and the future of Scotland’s constitution.79 On 25 January 1995, the pro-Labour Daily Record and Mirror argued in favour of Home Rule, explaining that Burns Night stirred ‘the deep sense of independence many Scots feel from the rest of the United Kingdom’.80 More surprisingly, on the same day, the Scottish edition of The Sun, a traditionally conservative tabloid, transformed Burns into an icon of national ‘freedom’ and ‘independence’ in an

8053_Malgrati.indd 188

06/03/23 10:55 am

The Bardic Politics of Scottish Devolution   189



attempt to bolster the SNP vote against Labour’s ‘tame’ devolution plans.81 This line was shared by the Scottish Daily Express, which promoted a Burns holiday in Scotland on 25 January as a replacement to the un-Scottish ‘May Day’.82 From Labour-leaning devolution to opportunistic calls for independence, tabloids across the Scottish political spectrum, though for different reasons, transformed Burns Night 1995 into a series of toasts to Scottish self-rule. The patriotic consensus of Scottish tabloids, however, contrasted with English indifference towards Burns. Of all southern tabloids and broadsheets, only The Guardian paid tribute to Burns’s bicentenary in January 1996 – with a long tirade against the ‘Burns cult’ by Scottish writer Andrew O’Hagan.83 According to Hutchison, media treatment of Burns’s anniversary provided: a conspicuous example of the gap between the Scottish and London agendas . . . with the national Scottish titles much more liberal than the national English ones, the centre of gravity of which is firmly on the right of the political spectrum.84

Indifference towards the bard south of the border had adverse consequences for the preparations leading up to the commemorations. As in 1959, the commitment of the British state was minimal, which left the organisation of Burns’s bicentenary mainly to the private sector and Scottish local authorities. More patriotic than in 1959, however, Scottish public opinion resented the prospect of an underwhelming fête. As a result, disappointment and bitterness soon filled the columns of Scottish newspapers. National failure to organise a decent bicentenary was symbolised by the fiasco of the Ayr ‘International Burns Festival’ – a venture initially presented as a ‘major marketing push’ to honour Burns, with ‘hundreds of events throughout 1996’. Momentum had built behind the project, and John Struthers, the festival director, went as far as to advertise the popular rock folk band Runrig, the opera singer Pavarotti and the Scottish comedian Billy Connolly as potential headliners.85 As the year 1995 unfolded, however, it became clear that the Festival would not fulfil such expectations. The Scottish press soon took umbrage at Struthers, an English businessman who self-avowedly ‘did not know much about Burns’s works’ before entering his position.86 His haphazard organisation as well as his inability to co-ordinate

8053_Malgrati.indd 189

06/03/23 10:55 am

190   Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics

actions from local councils attracted many sneers.87 In October 1995, a debacle was looming when the chairman of the Festival, East Ayrshire Councillor Eric Rowe, left the Festival committee and went missing for two weeks.88 Three months later, in January 1996, the project had folded. ‘What should have been presented as a single, co-ordinated festival is now a series of more or less independent initiatives, separately funded and promoted’, complained Aaron Hicklin in The Scotsman, regretting the ‘national embarrassment’ of this ‘Festival fiasco’.89 Public animosity against the Festival committee reached a peak around Burns Night, when Sam Gaw, the convenor of the Burns Federation, decided to come out against the Festival Committee and denounced their lack of managerial skills – unfit to ‘even organise a Burns supper’.90 More vehemently still, Brian Donohoe, Labour MP for Central Ayrshire, demanded the ‘dismissal’ of John Struthers for having ‘made a laughing stock of Burns’s immortal memory’ whilst ‘squander[ing] a unique opportunity to sell Burns and Scotland’.91 On top of this fiasco, further news added to the list of national embarrassments. A week before Burns Night 1996, The Scotsman reported that film director David Hayman had failed his attempt to realise a much-expected Burns blockbuster. In the wake of Mel Gibson’s success with Braveheart (1995), Hayman’s script, which ‘highlighted Burns’s romantic life and humanitarianism’, had convinced Hollywood stars Robert Downey Jr. and Emma Thompson to join the potential cast.92 Yet Hayman had met with the opposition of English producers who, according to him, ‘either didn’t know who Burns was or thought he was some obscure Scottish poet that no one had ever heard of who would not appeal to the market’. Moreover, the same article reported that ITV director George Rosie and Broadway celebrity John Barrowman lacked funding to complete their project to stage a big-budget Burns Musical.93 In conclusion, Scotsman journalist Martin Hannan regretted the absence of ‘Scottish money for Scottish cinema’ – a situation which left local directors to the mercy of ‘narrow middle-class middle-aged Englishmen who meet any Scottish topic with a basic blind prejudice’.94 Such series of disappointments had an unexpected effect on the bicentenary commemorations. Bereft of any rock bands, musical stars or blockbuster celebrities, Scottish press and television had to find other subjects to fill paper columns and Burns Night TV sets. Poets, writers and academics, as a result, received an unexpected

8053_Malgrati.indd 190

06/03/23 10:55 am



The Bardic Politics of Scottish Devolution   191

degree of media attention. This allowed Burns’s anniversary to take an edgier political turn. On 22 January 1996, BBC1’s prime-time programme, ‘Ploughboy of the Western World’, departed from traditional Burns Night productions.95 A few minutes after the opening credits, Andrew O’Hagan lambasted past iterations of Burns on TV. Those versions, O’Hagan explained, ‘suck[ed] all the radicalism out of Burns, all the danger, all the trouble, all the sexual complexity, and offers that offenseless [sic] Weetabix back to people’.96 Against rosy depictions of Burns, O’Hagan, insisted that the poet ‘was a complete punk, a sexual profligate, a shocking and brilliant innovator of his time’, whose politics were those of ‘a Jacobin believer in Scottish independence’. After an experimental rendition of ‘The Jolly Beggars’ by folk singer Rod Paterson (‘Liberty is a glorious feast . . . Churches are built to please the priest’), Dundee poet W. N. Herbert added, ‘We are not only talking about “let’s have the vote please”, here, we are talking about lining up the priests and shooting them outside their kirks like during the Spanish Civil War’.97 Such explicit radicalism, unseen to this extent on Scottish television, even in Neat’s 1986 Tree of Liberty, paved the way for the final highlight of the documentary which reported the alleged discovery of anonymous poems written by Burns in the Scottish radical press of the 1790s. Although Patrick Scott Hogg and Andrew Noble, the scholars responsible for this research, would come under severe criticism during the following decade, their discovery appeared credible in the light of O’Hagan and Herbert’s declarations. Except for a brief, sceptical review with Burns scholar James Mackay, the documentary left its viewers with the impression that an entirely new version of Burns was born – that of an unambiguously revolutionary hero. Ironically, perhaps, Noble commented that ‘we may now see these poems as Burns poems because we are closer to a radical national politics than we have been for a long time’.98 Arguably, as will be seen in the next chapter, Hogg and Noble’s work owed more to the Scottish political context of the mid-1990s than to cool-headed standards of research.99 Without resorting to unverified research, similar television documentaries strengthened the left-wing, patriotic undertones of Burns’s bicentenary. On 28 January, the Border TV film An Immortal Memory opened with MacDiarmid’s famous attacks against the ‘Burns cult’ (‘You canna gang to a Burns Supper even / . . . An ten to wan the

8053_Malgrati.indd 191

06/03/23 10:55 am

192   Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics

piper is a Cockney’).100 Critical of past televisual clichés on Burns, David Bean’s documentary gave prominence to Joy Hendry, the radical editor of Chapman, who explained that twentieth-century Scotland was slowly departing from the ‘unthinking sentimentality’ of old Burns clubs.101 Burns suppers, she insisted, should now secede from conservative and misogynist attitudes to focus on Scotland’s modern culture and self-governing future. Certainly, according to Hendry, Burns could, at times, be a ‘dreadful [male] chauvinist’, boasting about his ‘rough’ intercourse with Jean Armour. Overall, however, Hendry affirmed that Burns had remained a steady advocate of female sexuality, as well as an ‘inherent nationalist’ and revolutionary ‘from the very beginning of his writings to the very end’. Only by remaining faithful to the bard’s radicalism, concluded Hendry, could a modernised Burns cult become an ‘envoy of nationhood’.102 In similar vein, a radical – and critical – appraisal of Burns’s legacy, blended with concerns about race and gender, cropped up in the award-winning film, Angelou on Burns, broadcast on BBC2 in August 1996.103 Applauded at the Edinburgh Film Festival the same month of its release, this BBC Scotland documentary followed Maya Angelou, the African American poet and icon of the civil rights movement, during her 1996 tour of the bard’s country. Angelou explained that she had discovered the ploughman poet at the age of eight, when growing up in a small dwelling in Arkansas, which she compared to Burns’s Cottage in Alloway.104 Since then, Burns’s ‘struggle against injustice’ and his compassion for black slaves, as expressed in his (alleged) poem ‘The Slave’s Lament’, had a marked effect on the African-American poet.105 Later in the film, Angelou explores the ramparts of Stirling Castle; there, she invokes the ‘thrill of this place’ which, she explains, strengthens her fascination with ‘Robert Burns, Wallace and the people of Scotland’ whose ‘dignity, independence, humanity’ reverberated in the ‘African American struggle for freedom’. Significantly, this sequence of the documentary is intertwined with shots of Angelou’s emotional reaction to ‘Scots wha hae’ and ‘Parcel of Rogues’, sung a cappella by the Scottish communist folksinger, Dick Gaughan. ‘That’s it’, cries Angelou, at the end of both songs, ‘that’s it, human beings are more alike than they are unalike: there are the sellers and there are the sold, and sometimes the sellers get sold’. At once sensitive and mischievous, Angelou’s comment endorses the bard’s impetus for liberty and independence whilst recalling Scotland’s parallel involve-

8053_Malgrati.indd 192

06/03/23 10:55 am



The Bardic Politics of Scottish Devolution   193

ment in the slave trade. Although she knew that Burns himself had envisaged sailing over to Jamaica, Angelou stresses that she ‘couldn’t imagine him as a slave owner’. Instead, she concludes that the ploughman poet had to stay rooted in Scotland for his poetry to eventually ‘transcend race, time, and space’.106 From the BBC to Border TV, scepticism towards Burns’s masculine and colonial legacy merged with radical nationalism to mark a bicentenary bereft of traditional bardolatry. This confirmed what David Hutchison noted, the same year, when explaining that ‘scepticism now seems to be as much part of celebrating Burns as idolatry was previously’.107 On 25 January 1996, it seemed that irreverence, which was often adopted in the name of the poet, had become integral to the new norm of Burns commemorations.108 This was evident from Jim Gilchrist’s pieces in The Scotsman calling for the demolition of Burns Cottage – an eighty year old idea – to George Rosie’s feminist sneer at Burns’s ‘lecher’ behaviour in The Herald, as well as John Hodgart’s attacks against ‘annual binge of bardolatry’ in the conservative Scottish Daily Express, This apparent shift of Scottish public opinion contrasted with the declining influence of traditional Burns clubs. In 1959, the Burns Federation could still play a prominent role as a memory-maker when it served as mediator with Soviet Russia whilst (unsuccessfully) summoning Harold Macmillan to issue a Burns stamp on behalf of the Scottish nation. Forty years later, however, the Federation’s had lost its leadership. In a world when lengthy Burns supper speeches appeared ill-suited to modern media expectations, traditional Burnsians rarely featured in the news – except perhaps from a few cameos as guides to Burns antiquities on TV documentaries. Whilst the Federation seized the opportunity of the bicentenary to rebrand itself as the ‘Robert Burns World Federation’, its Scottish influence, in truth, was now limited to its few strongholds, mainly in Ayrshire and the Borders.109 This was the case, for instance, in Dumfries, where the Southern Scottish Dumfries Burns Association, sponsored by the Duke of Buccleuch and Dumfries Council, organised a five-day bicentenary programme in July 1996.110 This conventional celebration, structured by Kirk services, pipe demonstrations, and critical debates on MacDiarmid’s works, was marked on 21 July by a low-key procession through the rainy town centre of Dumfries.111 The sardonic legacy of MacDiarmid,, it seemed, was finally prevailing over his old Burnsian rivals.

8053_Malgrati.indd 193

06/03/23 10:55 am

194   Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics

Yet, simultaneously, the cultural revival of the 1990s offered a way out of MacDiarmid-like iconoclasm. On TV, Andrew O’Hagan, Joy Hendry and Maya Angelou, though aware of Burns’s flaws, all stressed the compatibility of his works with the radical and constitutional hopes of the present. Moreover, their enthusiasm combined with the rehabilitation of Burns’s poetic forms in contemporary Scottish poetry and literary criticism. Since the 1920s, Burns’s metric, and more particularly the Standard Habbie (otherwise known as the ‘Burns stanza’), had been dropped from the repertoire of Scottish poetry and confined mainly to the realm of after-supper doggerel.112 The Habbie’s tetrametric pith, mixed with sharp dimetric tips, did not fit the expansive and experimental flow of most Scottish modernists. As explained by Douglas Dunn in a bicentenary lecture at the University of St Andrews this situation had led ‘Burns’s artistry’ and ‘technical metric’ to ‘be relegated to a relatively undervalued place in the overall assessment of Burns’s work and his identity as a poet’.113 In reaction to this, Dunn’s lecture – which was part of a series of talks organised by Robert Crawford – set out to ‘rescue Burns for poetry’ by ‘paying attention to the significance of how he wrote as well as what he said’.114 Past the first impression of Burns’s work, ‘which gives the appearance of being undemanding’, Dunn insisted that the bard’s native diction – his well-known accent and language – found its real power in metrical virtuosity. From the Standard Habbie to the ‘Christ’s Kirk’ stanza, Burns had followed in the footsteps of Allan Ramsay and Robert Fergusson in reviving and re-energising the stanzaic range of Scottish medieval poetry.115 This had led Burns to combine ‘a judiciouslydistributed Scots diction’ with ‘national stanzas, rhythms, cadences, tones and melodies’ in a way which Dunn claimed ‘lifted the linguistic experience of [Burns’s] poetry and song above that of mere accent’.116 This native control over Scottish ‘aboriginal’ metres, Dunn concluded, raised Burns as Scotland’s true national poet.117 Dunn’s point was seconded, during the same series of the lectures by Seamus Heaney, the Northern Irish poet and Nobel Laureate in Literature. For Heaney, who had grown up in a rural, Ulster-Scots speaking area, Burns’s ‘art speech’ evoked ‘an old familiarity’.118 Whilst he loved ‘To a Mouse’ during his youth, the twentiethcentury poet had long remembered the eighteenth-century ‘Burns stanza as one which set its cap rather too winsomely at the reader’.119 In fact, it was not until he had ‘began rereading Burns for this essay’

8053_Malgrati.indd 194

06/03/23 10:55 am

The Bardic Politics of Scottish Devolution   195



that Heaney had realised the poet’s ‘deep poetic’ which ‘self-inheres in something much bigger and older and more ballad-fastened’.120 What Heaney remarked here, as Fiona Stafford would later note, was Burns’s poetic power in ‘collapsing the distance’ between the other and the self – between the archaic and the present and between intuition and consciousness.121 The bard’s many contradictions, indeed, could juxtapose unexpected thoughts and open ‘secret psychic nests’ within the mind of his readers.122 Nowhere did this shine with more intensity, according to Heaney, than in the ‘firm’ and ‘independent’ beat of ‘To a Mouse’, where the ploughman’s metric: gets set deeper and deeper in the psychic ground, dives more and more purposefully into the subsoil of the intuition until finally it breaks open a nest inside the poet’s own head and leaves him exposed to his own profoundest foreboding about his fate.123

This, the Nobel Laureate implied, exemplified the universal strength of Burns’s oft-derided stanza. Although Dunn and Heaney rehabilitated Burns’s metric, they did not, however, think it suitable, at the time, to revive Standard Habbie into their own (published) writings.124 In fact when Dunn, one of the few contemporary poets to have ever used the Burns stanza (back in his 1981 poem ‘Tannahill’), recanted his previous attempts at the Habbie, he explained that Burns’s craft, whilst deserving praise, remained ‘a phenomenon of the past’. To revive it, Dunn claimed, would contradict Burns’s ‘progressive spirit’, whose ‘experimental’ courage had fought the rigid ‘tenor of his time’.125 In other words, despite celebrating Burns’s revivalist (and somewhat antiquarian) metrics, Dunn refused to depart entirely from the avantgardist tenets of the Scottish Renaissance. This opinion, however, was not shared by the young Dundonian poet W. N. Herbert, who published his new volume of Scots poetry, Cabaret McGonagall, the same year.126 Herbert opposed Dunn’s statement, which for him had ‘much to do with the great modernists and . . . this kind of quickish history in which everything is dispensed with’.127 Herbert’s views, by contrast, were grounded in his native experience of brutalist Dundee, ‘a place which had embraced that kind of progressivist ideology and destroyed itself, wiping out huge areas of its historical significance’. This first-hand experience of loss

8053_Malgrati.indd 195

06/03/23 10:55 am

196   Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics

and destruction had led Herbert to conceive a restorative kind of post-modernism – one which ‘was innately interested in picking up the bits and putting them back together and seeing what happens if you repair’.128 Part of this effort was evident in Cabaret McGonagall, a collection which restored various kinds of stanzas and metres, included two long pieces in the Standard Habbie. The first of these, ‘Lammer Wine’, evokes the legendary Pictish elixir which could turn men (and poets) into true immortals: Gin Burns hud anely hud wan drink his statues warld-wide at wan wink wad print oot rantin crambo-clink       in standirt habbie: twa centuries wad turn delinq       uent as deid Rabbie.129

Herbert’s enjambed and rather unbolted kind of Habbie appears once more in his poem ‘In Chips we Trust’, a pun-based satire focusing on interactions between ‘microchip’ technology and ‘microwaveable chips’.130 From ‘Cyberlimbo’ to ‘gluttony’, Herbert warns his reader that the power of chips, which ‘rules o’er us aa’, might erase the memory of ‘aa wha thocht afore us’. Towards the end of the poem, the poet’s hungry stomach declares: Forget yir Immortal Rabbie and his tricky Standirt Habbie: gee me thi Standirt Haddie     (Supper, of course), bocht in the Ashvale, laddie,     lyk thi heid o a horse.131

This gastric call to forget Burns and his stanza, though expressed in off-beat (trimetric instead of tetrametric) Standard Habbie, reveals the self-conscious irony of Herbert’s poetry. The Dundonian highlights that he is ‘interested in the facsimile, and in the fake, in the twin, in the copy . . . in knowing that the older form itself can never be actually recovered and therefore the new thing is actually emerging through a cautious distance to reverence’.132 Stanzaic restoration, in other words, is a wobbly affair and can never be pristine. That said, however, Cabaret McGonagall showed that Burns’s stanza

8053_Malgrati.indd 196

06/03/23 10:55 am



The Bardic Politics of Scottish Devolution   197

could still stir reflexive and tongue-in-cheek verse after decades of disuse. Between oblivious chips and immortal wine, the (un)Standard Habbie had earned its place into the twenty-first century. Certainly, Herbert’s revival of Burns’s stanza was not directly a political act. His endeavour, which can be aligned with Dunn and Heaney’s criticism, was chiefly aesthetic and pragmatic, similar to that of ‘a musician tempted by a strange kind of instrument’.133 Nonetheless, by reconciling the Burns stanza with contemporary Scottish poetry, Herbert contributed to the general spirit of the 1996 bicentenary, which, despite initial disappointments, proved that Burns’s works could still frame the nation’s imaginary. After almost a century of endless polemics, whose vigour had paradoxically kept Burns’s memory alive, Scotland’s bard was finally coming home. The symbolic devolution of Burns’s memory occurred three years later, on 1 of July 1999, when folksinger Sheena Wellington burst into ‘A Man’s a Man’ at the re-opening ceremony of the Scottish Parliament. In front of her, the Queen, a thistle-coloured plaid over her shoulder, sat in polite silence at evocations of ‘honest poverty’, ‘guinea’s stamp’ and lordly ‘coof’. Despite the alarm of Palace courtiers, mingled with the ire of the Times, which considered the choice of Burns’s song as ‘a calculated insult to the Royal Family’, Elizabeth II – henceforth ‘Queen of Scots’ – was willing to respect Scotland’s partially recovered sovereignty.134 She had personally accepted the choice of Burns’s anthem.135 An ‘appropriate’ song, declares Dunn, in hindsight.136 ‘An appropriate moment in ritualistic terms’, insists Herbert.137 ‘Brilliant, very dramatic, very poignant, just ideal’, adds Fiona Ross, the daughter of the 1970s Scottish Labour leader, Willie Ross.138 ‘Very moving, a great moment’, interwoven with ‘productive ambiguities’, contends Crawford.139 More enthusiastic still, the ex-Labour nationalist Jim Sillars explains that ‘Sheena singing “A Man’s a Man” was the pinnacle of a development that had been taking place’ for decades. ‘If ever there was a people speaking to the world with a microphone this was the day’, adds Sillars, ‘this is who we are, we are Scots, we are internationalist, but we also have a philosophy of life and it is encapsulated in this song’.140 When Wellington began the last verse, ‘And let us pray that come it may’, the reconvened assembly joined in to create the emotional climax of the day. Certainly, beyond the façade of national unity, the decision to sing ‘A Man’s a Man’ had an explicit ideological meaning, rooted

8053_Malgrati.indd 197

06/03/23 10:55 am

198   Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics

in the political consensus of 1990s Scotland. As recalled by George Reid, SNP MSP who played a crucial role in the organisation of the ceremony, the decision to sing ‘A Man’s a Man’ was taken by an allparty Constitutional Steering Committee, which represented the radical strand of contemporary Scottish politics.141 Most members of the Committee were left-leaning patriots with a keen interest in Scottish traditional music. Alongside Reid, for instance, were Cathy Peattie and John McAllion for Labour, Margaret Ewing for the SNP, Robin Harper for the Greens and Tommy Sheridan for the Scottish Socialists.142 The Committee’s choice of Burns’s song was unanimous. Reid explains: ‘I don’t think there was any great opposition [to the song]. Within the parliament itself there was only a handful of Tories . . . around 85% were left or left leaning, [including Liberals] and the majority rules at these things’.143 The reason behind the Committee’s choice was explicit: ‘A Man’s a Man’ lent itself perfectly well to a proclamation of the myth of Scotland’s native egalitarianism. This central tenet of the Scottish left, developed after fifteen years of Tory rule, was emphasised by First Minister Donald Dewar in his inaugural speech. Following Wellington’s rendition, Dewar stood up and declared: We’ve just heard beautifully sung one of [Burns’s] most enduring works, and at the heart of that song is a very Scottish conviction that honesty and simple dignity are priceless virtues not imparted by rank or birth or privilege but part of the soul. Burns believed that sense of worth would ultimately prevail, he believed that was the core of politics and that without it our profession is inevitably impoverished.144

A belated answer to Margaret Thatcher’s 1985 speech, which commented on the same passage, Dewar’s speech conflated Burns’s words with what he saw as Scotland’s essentially progressive identity. Surely, in a country which had rejected Conservatism in all general elections for more than forty years it seemed hard to conceive that Burns could ever have been an icon of the British Empire.145 Since 1979, the poet’s memory had become an evident vehicle for devolution. From the Miners’ Strike to poll tax riots, from the 1989 Claim of Rights to Burns’s radical Bicentenary, from Dunn’s St Kilda’s Parliament to Crawford’s A Scottish Assembly, Scotland’s bard seemed integral to Scotland’s cause. With the re-opening ceremony of the Scottish Parliament, however, Burns’s poetry left behind

8053_Malgrati.indd 198

06/03/23 10:55 am



The Bardic Politics of Scottish Devolution   199

its admirers, critics and commentators to become the symbol of devolution itself. On 1 July 1999 indeed, ‘Is there for Honest Poverty’ was the motto of devolved Scotland. The voice of the bard had fused with the constitutive identity and project of Scotland’s proto state. Nonetheless, the Queen’s tactful acceptation of ‘A Man’s a Man’ stressed the persisting ties between Burns’s legacy and the British union. Arguably, the pages of Empire and twentieth-century warfare, when Scotland’s bard could be requisitioned as a foot soldier of Crown and Country, had been turned. Claims that Burns was a King’s Volunteer at heart, whose enthusiasm for the British Constitution overtook his riotous sense of locality, were now marginal. Indeed, Burns’s memory was devolved, and the Queen herself had approved the merging of his legacy with Scottish sovereignty. Yet according to the order of ceremony, Burns – through Sheena Wellington – had only resonated in the wake of Elizabeth II’s address to Parliament. Furthermore, Burns’s message was deemed sovereign, not merely as a declaration on behalf of the Scottish people, but also as an authorised response to the Queen. In other words, the ambivalence of Burns’s symbolical devolution was complete. Did Burns express the identity and project of the Scottish people, independently from the Queen, who had authorised his song, or, instead, did he acknowledge the precedence of the overarching monarch – and state? The complex meaning of the re-opening ceremony of the Scottish Parliament, reflecting the ambivalent nature of devolution, structures Scottish politics to this very day.

Notes  1. Morgan, ‘The future of the antisyzygy’, Bulletin of Scottish Politics, 1980, 1.1, from a speech made in 1978.  2. Hames, The Literary Politics of Scottish Devolution, pp. 13–14.  3. Brown, States of Injury, p. 55, quoted in Hames, The Literary Politics of Scottish Devolution, p. 13.   4. No explicit pieces on Burns appear in any of these magazines until the late 1990s.  5. Gray, Lanark, p. 486. According to Glass, Alasdair Gray wrote this note together with his friend Carl MacDougall. See Glass, Alasdair Gray, p. 141.  6. Morgan, Sonnets from Scotland, p. 24. This poem is reprinted by kind permission of Carcanet Press, Manchester, UK.

8053_Malgrati.indd 199

06/03/23 10:55 am

200   Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics  7. Ibid.  8. Dunn, St Kilda.   9. Interview with Dunn, 12 and 19 June 2018. 10. This episode of Scott’s life was reported by Lockhart in Memoirs of Sir Walter Scott, Vol. 1, pp. 81­–5. 11. Dunn, St Kilda, l. 24, p. 47. 12. Dunn, 19 June 2018. 13. Dunn, St Kilda, ll. 109–12, p. 47. This extract is reprinted by kind permission of Douglas Dunn, the author, and of his publisher, Faber & Faber, London, UK. 14. Dunn, 19 June 2018. The ‘Standard Habbie’ consists of three tetrameters (rhyme A), followed by one dimeter (rhyme B), another tetrameter (rhyme A) and a conclusive dimeter (rhyme B). 15. Dunn, St Kilda, ll. 125­–37, p. 53. This extract is reprinted by kind permission of Douglas Dunn, the author, and of his publisher, Faber & Faber, London, UK. 16. Edwin Muir, Latitudes. 17. Dunn, St Kilda, ll. 127–8, 133–4, 135–6, p. 60. 18. Indeed, inspiration for Dunn’s poem ‘St Kilda’s Parliament’ came from the title of a picture by George Washington Wilson, taken on St Kilda during the late 1880s. See Crawford, Devolving English Literature, pp. 277–98, for an exploration of the concept of the ‘barbarian’ in Dunn’s poetry. 19. See Browne, The Women’s Liberation, for a broader presentation of second-wave Scottish feminism. 20. BC 3, 1973, Vol. 21, p. 53. 21. Hansard, House of Lords Deb. 29 November 1972, Vol. 336, col. 1373. 22. Daily Record, 23 January 1979, 23 January 1981. Unfortunately, the television Burns Night debate, with Kenneth McKellar opposing Jean Redapth on 23 January 1979, cannot be recovered. 23. Daily Record, 23 January 1981; Burns’s letter to Robert Ainslie, 3 March 1788, L1, p. 251. 24. Ibid. 25. BC 3, 1982, Vol. 30, pp. 67–75. 26. Ibid. p. 68. 27. Ibid. p. 72. 28. Ibid. p. 71. 29. Ibid. p. 75. 30. The Scotsman, 25 January 1986; Daily Record, 24 January 1988. 31. Harpies and Quines, January 1993. 32. Margaret Thatcher, ‘Speech to Scottish Party Conference’, 10 May 1985, Online archives of Margaret Thatcher, (last accessed 26 July 2018).

8053_Malgrati.indd 200

06/03/23 10:55 am



The Bardic Politics of Scottish Devolution   201

33. Ibid. 34. Ibid. 35. See Letwin, The Anatomy of Thatcherism, for a detailed account of Thatcher’s philosophy and understanding of individual virtue. 36. Torrance, ‘We in Scotland’, p. 57. 37. Hansard, HL Deb. 4 March 1981, Vol. 417 col. 1487. 38. Daily Record, 25 January 1984. 39. Phillips, Collieries, p. 154. 40. Many thanks to Bill Dawson, editor of the Burns Chronicle (2019), for giving me this piece of information. 41. Phillips, Collieries, p. 154. 42. Neat, Hamish Henderson, Vol. 2, p. 278. 43. The Tree of Liberty, film, directed by Timothy Neat and produced by Barbara Grigor. Scotland: STV, 1987, United Kingdom: Channel 4, 1987. BFI Archives, London, 304574. See McCue, ‘“Magnetic Attraction”: the Transatlantic Songs of Robert Burns and Serge Hovey’, in Davis and Alker (eds), Robert Burns and Transatlantic Culture, pp. 233­–47. 44. The Tree of Liberty; James Barke (ed.), Poems and Songs of Robert Burns. Conspicuously, ‘The Tree of Liberty’ features in Barke’s edition of Burns poems. 45. Ibid. 46. Ibid. 47. Ibid. 48. Neat, Hamish Henderson, p. 281. 49. Ibid. 50. O’Rourke, ‘Supperman: Televising Burns’, in Simpson (ed.), Burns Now, pp. 212–13. This applied to O’Rourke himself, whose 1990 and 1991 STV Burns Night programmes subverted traditional Burns Supper codes with post-industrial decorum, ‘parodies of Standard Habbie’, readings of Scottish contemporary poetry, and experimental renderings of Burns’s songs. See Ibid. pp. 214­–15. 51. Pittock, The Road to Independence?, pp. 35–6. 52. Ibid. pp. 37–8. 53. Hames, The Literary Politics, p. 235 Also see the author’s review of Hames’s book in Études Écossaises, 2020, Vol. 21. 54. Radical Scotland, February–March 1987. Author’s emphasis. This article is also quoted in Hames, The Literary Politics, p. 152. 55. Liz Lochhead, Bagpipe Muzak, p.24. 56. Ibid. pp. 24–6. 57. Ibid. p. 26. 58. Dunn, Poll Tax, p. 55. 59. Dunn, 19 June 2018.

8053_Malgrati.indd 201

06/03/23 10:55 am

202   Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics 60. Ibid. 61. Interview with Robert Crawford, 4 June 2018. 62. Ibid. 63. Crawford, A Scottish Assembly. 64. Crawford, 4 June 2018. 65. Ibid. 66. ‘Protean’ and ‘inter-class’ aspects of eighteenth-century Scottish literature had also been discussed in Simpson, The Protean Scot. 67. Crawford, A Scottish Assembly, p. 21. 68. Robert Burns’s ‘Address to Edinburgh’, P1, l. 16, p. 308. 69. Crawford and Herbert, Sharawaggi. 70. Ibid. p. 52. 71. Ibid. p. 53. 72. Crawford, Devolving English Literature. 73. Ibid. pp. 90–2. 74. Ibid. pp. 91–6. 75. Ibid. pp. 102–7. 76. Ibid. p. 109. 77. Ibid. 78. This is what Crawford attempts to demonstrate in his following chapters, ‘Modernism as Provincialism’ and ‘Barbarians’, Devolving English Literature, pp. 216–70, 271–305. 79. David Hutchison, ‘Burns, The Elastic Symbol: Press Treatment of Burns’s Anniversary, 1995 and 1996’, in Simpson (ed.), Love and Liberty, pp. 79–86. 80. Mirror, 25 January 1995, cited in Hutchison, ‘The Elastic Symbol’, p. 81. 81. Ibid. 82. Scottish Daily Express, 26 January 1995. 83. Hutchison, ‘The Elastic Symbol’, p. 85. 84. Ibid. 85. Herald, 17 October 1994 and 2 December 1995. 86. Interview of John Struthers, in An Immortal Memory. The Life of Robert Burns, film, directed by David Bean. Scotland: Border TV, 1996. BFI Archives, London, 456486. 87. Herald, 12 October 1995. 88. Ibid. 89. The Scotsman, 21 January 1996. 90. The Scotsman, 25 January 1996. 91. The Scotsman, 24 January 1996. 92. The Scotsman, 20 January 1996. 93. Ibid.

8053_Malgrati.indd 202

06/03/23 10:55 am



The Bardic Politics of Scottish Devolution   203

 94. Ibid.  95. Ploughboy of the Western World, film, produced by John Archer. Scotland: BBC Scotland, 1996. BFI Archives, London, 456394.  96. Ibid.  97. Ibid.  98. Ploughboy of the Western World.  99. The polemic surrounding Hogg and Noble’s research is further addressed in the following chapter. 100. An Immortal Memory, film, directed by Bean. 101. Ibid. 102. Ibid. 103. Angelou on Burns, film, directed by Elly M. Taylor. Scotland: BBC Scotland, 1996. BFI Archives, London, 468692. This documentary was funded by Scottish Arts Council in association with the Scottish Film Production Fund. It won ‘Best Entertainment Programme at the CRE Race in the Media Awards 1996’ and was finalist in the ‘Media Net Awards Munich Film Festival 1996’. See the film’s description on the NLS website, (last accessed 19 August 2018). 104. Ibid. 105. See Carruthers, ‘Robert Burns and Slavery’, pp. 21–6. 106. Ibid. 107. Hutchison, ‘The Elastic Symbol’, p. 83. 108. The Scotsman, The Herald, Scottish Daily Express, 25 January 1996. 109. BC, 1997, Kilmarnock, Burns Federation, p. 132. 110. Ibid. pp. 114–15. 111. Ibid. 112. A rare exception to this was the work of Robert Garioch, though, according to Douglas Dunn, this was due to the poet’s ‘attachment to [Robert] Fergusson more than to Burns’. Dunn, ‘“A Very Scottish Kind of Dash”: Burns’s Native Metric’, in Crawford (ed.), Robert Burns and Cultural Authority, p. 83. 113. Dunn’s lecture was reprinted in Crawford (ed.), Robert Burns and Cultural Authority, p. 58. 114. Crawford (ed.), Robert Burns and Cultural Authority, p. 84. 115. Ibid. pp. 58, 60–4. 116. Ibid. p. 79. 117. Ibid. p. 76. 118. Heaney, ‘Burns’s art speech’, in Crawford (ed.), Robert Burns and Cultural Authority, p. 217. 119. Crawford (ed.), Robert Burns and Cultural Authority, p. 229. 120. Ibid.

8053_Malgrati.indd 203

06/03/23 10:55 am

204   Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics 121. Stafford, ‘The Collapse of Distance: Heaney’s Burns and the 1990s’, in Stafford and Sergeant (eds), Burns and Other Poets, p. 206. 122. Stafford, ‘Heany’s Burns’; Heaney, ‘Burns’s art speech’, p. 230. 123. Heaney, ‘Burns’s art speech’, p. 219. 124. Although Heaney had written verses in Standard Habbie in An Open Letter (1983), he would not repeat their use until twenty six years later when sending ‘A Birl for Burns’ for publication in Gifford (ed.), Addressing the Bard. Overall, Heaney confined his Burnsian experiments mainly to his private writings and correspondence. Throughout 1996 he exchanged a lengthy mock-flyting in Burns’s stanza with fellow poet Robert Crawford. Their poetic joust remains unpublished. Crawford, 4 June 2018. 125. Dunn, ‘Burns’s Native Metric’ p. 83. 126. Herbert, Cabaret McGonagall. 127. Interview with W. N. Herbert, 11 March 2019. 128. Ibid. 129. Herbert, Cabaret McGonagall, p. 23. This extract is reprinted by kind permission of Bloodaxe Books, Hexham, UK. 130. Author’s emphasis. 131. Ibid. p. 72. This extract is reprinted by kind permission of Bloodaxe Books, Hexham, UK. 132. Herbert, 11 March 2019. 133. Ibid. 134. The Times, 31 May 1999. This information is based on an interview released by Iona Craig with Sheena Wellington and SNP MSP George Reid on 7 February 2017. It can be found in Craig, ‘The influence of Robert Burns’, pp. 41–2. 135. Ibid. 136. Dunn, 19 June 2018. 137. Herbert, 11 March 2019. 138. Ross, 4 July 2018. 139. Crawford, 4 June 2018. 140. Sillars, 5 June 2018. 141. George Reid, 7 February 2017, in Craig, ‘The influence of Robert Burns’, p. 39. 142. Ibid. p. 40. 143. Ibid. p. 44. 144. Speech reproduced in The Scotsman, 2 July 1999. 145. The last Conservative (Unionist) victory in Scotland dated back to 1955.

8053_Malgrati.indd 204

06/03/23 10:55 am

Chapter 8

Rabbie for Yes? (2000–2014)

On 21 September 2013, a year before the referendum on Scottish Independence, a vast crowd surged towards Edinburgh’s Calton Hill for a major ‘Yes’ rally. Down the Royal Mile, across North Bridge, past Duke of Wellington’s statue and New Parliament House, then upward to the acropolis, thousands had rallied in a stream of Saltires.1 Traditional badge-wearing SNP rank-and-file stood alongside Green activists, Scottish Socialists, trade-unionists, artists from National Collective and LGBT+ groups.2 As the crowd’s excitement rose in expectation of a speech by First Minister Alex Salmond, folk singer Sheena Wellington, together with folklorists and a choir from ‘TradYes’, re-enacted the opening of the Scottish Parliament with an acapella rendition of Burns’s ‘A Man’s a Man’. Fourteen years after 1999, the exhilarated ‘Yes’ supporters joined in the refrain, ‘for a’ that and a’ that’, before reaching the climax, at the end of the third stanza, with the line, ‘The man o’ independant [sic] mind / He looks an’ laughs at a’ that’.3 Certainly, the adjective ‘independent’ bore no direct constitutional meaning in Burns’s original piece. The poet’s use of this term referred instead to his moral and social aspiration as a free-thinking and selfsupporting individual. Away from rapacious landowners, sanctimonious Kirk elders and restrictive patrons, ‘The glorious priviledge / Of being independant’ (as Burns also coined it in ‘Epistle to a Young Friend’) overlooks the fatalism of rank and dogma.4 This is more evident, still, in Burns’s 1784 poem, ‘Man Was Made to Mourn’: If I’m design’d yon lordling’s slave, By Nature’s law design’d, Why was an independent wish E’er planted in my mind?5

8053_Malgrati.indd 205

06/03/23 10:55 am

206   Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics

Except for one significant occasion, in the 1790 letter to Mrs Dunlop which deplored ‘the annihilation of [Scotland’s] Independance [sic], & even her very Name’, Burns’s conception of self-rule seemed more spiritual and individual rather than national.6 Yet in the context of 2014, beyond the meaning – or even grammar – of Burns’s lyrics, the adjective ‘independent’ could only evoke the upcoming referendum. Burns’s legacy was saturated by ideas of Home Rule and the political intensity of the present imposed a revision of the past. By repeating the act of 1999 and tilting Burns’s words in a proindependence direction, Wellington and ‘Yes’ Campaigners overwrote the ambiguities of devolution. The constitutional settlement of the late 1990s, it seemed, was not an end but a mere prerequisite for independence. There arose the possibility of a new, full-bodied state, seconded by an openly separatist version of the bard. However, this retrospective attempt to rewrite the meaning of devolution should not eclipse the decade which preceded the 2014 Referendum. Whereas the 2010s witnessed heated debates on Burns’s patriotism, the 2000s, following the re-opening of the Scottish Parliament, fostered, for a while at least, a more consensual approach to the poet’s legacy. Indeed, after 1999, Burns’s message in ‘A Man’s Man’ represented the values of the devolution settlement and, for over a decade, from the Labour–Liberal Democrat coalition of 1999–2007 to the SNP minority Government of 2007–11, his legacy became a marker of unity in the new Scottish Parliament. Often forgotten today, this time of cross-party consensus led to important changes in both the memorialisation of Burns’s work and the management of his heritage. On 25 January 2001 the first debate about Burns in the records of the Scottish Parliament was launched by Tory MSP David Mundell in the General Assembly Hall. Fifteen months after devolution, the Conservative speaker invoked the spirit of July 1999 ‘when all members – on that day at least – echoed the sentiment’ of “A Man’s a Man for a’ that”’.7 Citing a recent Who’s Who in Scotland poll which declared Burns ‘Scot of the millennium’, the MSP added, it was high time that Parliament ‘recognise his importance and – not just today – celebrate his life and works.’ To achieve this, explained Mundell, the Scottish Executive had to ‘put in the resources . . . rather than leaving the burden on the shoulders of the volunteers and enthusiasts’ of the Burns Federation.8

8053_Malgrati.indd 206

06/03/23 10:55 am



Rabbie for Yes?   207

Mundell’s motion was unanimously supported. During a debate which SNP veteran Winnie Ewing described as ‘one of the jolliest moments that I have experienced in the life of the Parliament’, speakers from all parties shared their admiration for Burns and concluded that his legacy deserved public support and recognition.9 For instance, Ian Jenkins, Liberal Democrat MSP, explained that ‘the Robert Burns World Federation should be recognised as a positive, established organisation whose cultural work and role as an ambassador for Scotland deserved the support of Parliament’.10 Moreover, Cathy Jamieson, Deputy Leader of Scottish Labour, ‘very much agreed’ that financial partnership between the Scottish Executive, local authorities and Burns organisations was ‘the way forward’.11 She was seconded by SNP MSP Fergus Ewing, Winnie Ewing’s son, who enlivened the debate with an interpretation of Burns’s song, ‘Parcel of Rogues’.12 Likewise, Cathy Peattie from Labour, presented Burns as a ‘socialist and internationalist’ before bursting into ‘Ye Banks and Braes’ and ‘A Man’s a Man’ accompanied by her colleagues’ applause.13 Peattie, who had performed Burns’s ‘Aye Waukin O’ at the funeral of Donald Dewar three months earlier, is an accomplished singer.14 Her rendition of Burns from the assembly’s bench would have been hard to imagine in a different parliamentary context – not least in Westminster. It marked her colleagues as a touching expression of the new parliament’s roots and identity. As a result, Allan Wilson, Deputy Minister for Tourism, Culture and Sport, congratulated ‘members who ha[d] spoken in what must have been the best debate in the Parliament to date’ and ‘made the pledge’ to aid the Burns Federation and commit to ‘a determined process to recognise the bard’s unique contribution not only to our cultural heritage but to our contemporary economy’.15 Between lyrical outbursts and pragmatic debates over money, Scottish parliamentarians placed Burns at the centre of a new politics of memory. The Scottish Executive soon translated Mundell’s motion into a concrete commemorative project. In November 2002, during a roadshow in Kirkwall, Tavish Scott, national convener of the Scottish Liberal Democrats and member of the coalition government with Scottish Labour, drew inspiration from the traditional ‘hamefarin’ celebrations in Shetland and Orkney to announce the organisation of a ‘Scottish Homecoming Year’.16 The chosen date was Burns’s 250th Anniversary in 2009 – an event which offered ‘huge

8053_Malgrati.indd 207

06/03/23 10:55 am

208   Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics

potential’ for ‘Scotland’s tourist industry’.17 These announcements were detailed in parliament, by LibDem MSP Donald Gorrie, who explained that the project was to ‘bring together the powerful forces of cultural tourism; historical tourism . . . and interest in Rabbie Burns’ to ‘encourage Scots from all over the world to come here’ and ‘bring in a lot of money’.18 In January 2003, a BBC survey conducted by World Bank economist Lesley Campbell, found that the sum of Burns merchandising, memorabilia, tourism and January festivals contributed a total of £157 million a year to the Scottish economy – including £100 million to local tourism.19 This figure strengthened the plan of the Scottish Liberal Democrats, which was supported across benches in Parliament.20 Here was a consensual opportunity to turn Burns’s symbolic power into a substantial contribution to the country’s GDP. Almost five years after devolution, cross-party unity still marked evocations of Burns’s memory. This was evident on 9 October 2004 during the inauguration of the new Scottish Parliament building at Holyrood. As in 1999, the Queen and Burns’s lyrics were both highlights of the ceremony, though organisers had replaced the irreverent lyrics of ‘A Man’s a Man’ with the world-famous chorus of ‘Auld Lang Syne’, sung by Eddi Reader. Halfway through her performance, the Scottish singer invited all MSPs to ‘offer each other a hand’ in an iconic demonstration of harmony and friendship.21 Outside the building, Burns’s legacy was further acknowledged by the citations of the new Canongate Wall. Douglas Dunn, who was ‘conscripted’ with folklorist Margaret Bennett ‘into a cross-party committee which was to select the quotes for the wall’, recalls that the choice of Burns’s lines was ‘unanimous’ and ‘without difficulty’.22 The last stanza of ‘A Man’s a Man’ (‘Then let us pray that come it may’) and Burns’s lines from ‘To A Louse’ (‘O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us / To see oursels as others see us!’) were carved on the Parliament façade, alongside extracts from Walter Scott, Hugh MacDiarmid, Hamish Henderson, Norman MacCaig and Alasdair Gray, amongst others. Once more, Burns’s memory served to build the culturalist myth of devolution: a constitutional halfway house conceived by Labour in the 1970s, but apparently grounded in three centuries of Scottish poetics.23 Such celebrations of Burns’s influence, however, contrasted awkwardly with recent news from Ayrshire. Already in February 2003,

8053_Malgrati.indd 208

06/03/23 10:55 am



Rabbie for Yes?   209

Conservative MSP Phil Gallie had warned Mike Watson, the Minister for Tourism, Culture and Sport, that Burns Cottage was ‘perhaps not up to the standard that we should expect’.24 One year later, as the new Parliament building opened its door, the situation had degenerated. In November 2004, Adam Ingram, SNP MSP for the South of Scotland, gave a distressed account of ‘the current crisis enveloping the Burns national heritage park in Alloway’, where the ‘leaky roof’ and the ‘deplorable state of Burns cottage’ threatened the local collection of Burns materials.25 The situation was worse, still, in Kilmarnock, where an 1877 Burns monument had just been destroyed by an accidental fire. These disasters, according to the MSP, were the responsibility of local authorities and independent trusts, ‘which have demonstrated that they are not up to the task’. Without rapid ‘intervention to sort out this mess’, Ingram concluded that the Year of Homecoming might turn into a ‘national embarrassment’ for the Government.26 Ingram’s plea followed the recommendations of a recent survey of Burns’s heritage.27 From December 2003 to April 2004, the Distributed National Burns Collection (DNBC) Project, funded by the Scottish Museum Councils and led by Nat Edwards from the National Library of Scotland and David Hopes, the ex-curator of Mauchline Burns House, had investigated the conditions of Burns museums and collections all over Scotland. Their conclusion was alarming. As evident in the survey report, the condition of Burns’s heritage fell short of twenty-first-century standards of preservation.28 Alongside the decrepit state of Burns Cottage, the study ‘showed that the tendency among the independent and local authority sectors’, who were responsible for ‘the lion’s share of the most important material relating to Burns . . . had either been to undervalue collections, restrict the movement of objects, or not cover collections at all’.29 Altogether, museums, monuments, heritage centres and libraries relating to Burns or owning Burns materials appeared antiquated, understaffed, under resourced and underfunded. According to this survey, the situation was aggravated by the ‘decentralised nature of significant Burns collections nationwide’.30 This ‘tendency for collections to grow independently, and often in competition’, was the legacy of Victorian memory-making in Scotland, characterised by both minimal state involvement as well as grassroots, middle-class action and organisation.31 Despite attempts during the second half of the twentieth century to transform the

8053_Malgrati.indd 209

06/03/23 10:55 am

210   Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics

Burns country into an asset for Scottish tourism, the state of Burns’s heritage preserved its outdated nineteenth-century structure. In these conditions, drastic measures were necessary to ensure the success of Burns’s 250th anniversary. In January 2005, in Holyrood, the Burns Collection Project launched ‘The Road to 2009’, ‘a political document’, lobbying for ‘national support’ and ‘investment’ in Burns’s heritage.32 More than just a tighter partnership between existing actors and institutions of the Burns country, the project summoned the Scottish state to take financial responsibility. Increasing pressures on the Minister for Tourism followed the issue of this document. On 20 January 2005, Adam Ingram initiated a debate on the deterioration of Burns’s heritage. His speech was seconded by John Scott, Conservative MSP for Ayr, who announced the submission of an e-petition lodged by Alloway community council, ‘urging the Scottish Executive to take the lead so that a Burns national heritage park and trail can be restored and ready in time for the Year of Homecoming’. 33 At last, on 5 October 2005, Patricia Fergusson, the Minister for tourism and culture, announced that ‘proposals for a significant redevelopment of the heritage park, including a new museum, [were] being taken forward by the Scottish Executive through the National Trust for Scotland’.34 An allowance of £20,000 a year ‘for the next five years’ was also granted to the Burns Federation, as well as ‘£150,000 through the Scottish Arts Council to support Burns initiatives’.35 This was an unprecedented level of state involvement in Burns’s memory making. Although Hopes insists that ‘nothing of this would have happened’ without pressures due to the Year of Homecoming, the decision of the Scottish Executive broke with two centuries of governmental inaction towards Burns’s heritage.36 In 1999, Burns’s lyrics had embodied the values of devolution. A few years later, devolved institutions were about to transform the face of the Burns country. On 31 October 2008, after intricate negotiations supervised by ‘a very keen and very supportive SNP Government’, South Ayrshire Council and the Alloway Burns Monument Trust, created in 1814 by Alexander Boswell of Auchinleck (the son of diarist James Boswell and conservative friend of Walter Scott), surrendered their assets to the National Trust for Scotland.37 The trust’s estate, as well as the 4,000 artefacts of the local Burns collection, would serve to construct a new, modern and attractive museum a few hundred yards

8053_Malgrati.indd 210

06/03/23 10:55 am



Rabbie for Yes?   211

from Burns Cottage. The total cost of this operation was estimated at £26 million, including ‘the value of assets given to the National Trust’ and a £10 million investment from the Scottish government.38 Alex Salmond, the new First Minister, was following the plan of his Labour and Liberal Democrat predecessors. With high financial expectations for Burns’s 250th anniversary, in January 2009, the Scottish Executive listed the activities for the Year of Homecoming as part of its six-tier economic programme to recover from the crash of 2008.39 With over ‘300 events taking place across Scotland from Burns Night to St Andrew’s Day’ and ‘140,000 US households with Scots ancestry’ invited to Scotland through the official website VisitScotland, the Government expected ‘an eightfold return on investment generating an anticipated additional £40 million in tourism revenue’.40 On 24 January, the Year of Homecoming was officially launched at a crowded Burns Supper in the Alloway Brig o’ Doon Hotel. The First Minister depicted the year 2009 as a ‘a once-in-a-lifetime celebration of the lasting legacy of Robert Burns and of the country he loved’.41 The following day 15,000 people flocked to the banks of the River Nith in Dumfries for a giant Burns parade. After a new marble bust of the bard was unveiled by culture minister Linda Fabiani, Salmond addressed the crowd, declaring that from ‘Devorgilla Bridge [Dumfries] to the Brig o’ Doon, from Cape Horn to the Cape of Good Hope, people were celebrating the life and works of Robert Burns’.42 Indeed, that same month, an interactive map sponsored by the whisky company Famous Grouse recorded more than 3,500 Scottish and international Burns suppers, held across the globe and a total of eighty countries.43 These impressive figures, according to Clark McGinn, were only a portion of the global turnout, estimated at 9 million participants.44 During the following months, as Homecoming celebrations unfolded, Alex Salmond was omnipresent. On 24 February, alongside actor Sean Connery, he opened a two-day Burns symposium at the Library of Congress in Washington DC.45 Back in Scotland, in March, he attended the St Andrews Poetry Festival, StAnza, where a life-size head of Burns was torched by its sculptor, David Mach, in a ‘daring metaphor for the power of the Bard’s imagination’.46 Three months later, in June, at a somewhat different event, Salmond delivered the first Homecoming Coca-Cola bottle featuring a portrait of the bard.47 This was before he presented a group of Scottish pupils,

8053_Malgrati.indd 211

06/03/23 10:55 am

212   Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics

in November, with a miniature volume of Burns’s poems to be sent into space, in partnership with NASA.48 Finally, three weeks later, whilst the new Burns Museum was under construction, the First Minister returned to Alloway to inaugurate the refurbished pavilion at Burns Cottage.49 Salmond’s ubiquity during Homecoming festivities sparked criticism from his opponents. Amongst others, Labour MSP George Foulkes declared that ‘there was a very strong feeling that a lot of people expressed to me that the SNP, and Alex Salmond in particular, exploited the Homecoming for their own purposes’.50 Certainly, the constant emphasis on the worldwide impact of Scottish culture and sentimental evocations of Scotland’s diaspora – without further mention of Scotland’s imperial past – fitted the SNP’s agenda. Nevertheless, Salmond’s uses of Burns in 2009 remained relatively conventional and largely avoided traditional SNP celebrations of the poet’s patriotism. The Year of Homecoming, after all, was not a nationalist project. It was the achievement of a five-year-long process, benefiting from widespread support across parties in Holyrood, and marked by pragmatic economic concerns rather than political hijackings of Burns’s legacy. With between £38.8 and £53.5 million profit for Scottish tourism (depending on calculations) the Year of Homecoming was a successful economic operation.51 In many ways, it confirmed the analysis of Australian scholar Josephine Douglas, who stressed ‘the commodification of Burns’ in contemporary Scotland.52 The ‘Immortal Memory’, for the time being, had entered a dispassionate era of tight economic budgeting and expertise. Away from partisan polemics, which had marked the political reception of Burns throughout the twentieth century, the bard’s legacy was now an object of economic policy and a source of income for Scotland’s devolved finances. Yet ideological strife had scarcely disappeared from the surface of post-devolution Scotland. On 4 January 2009, Scotland on Sunday headlined ‘Bard blood between two Burns experts’ about ’a dispute’ which was ‘threatening to overshadow the 2009 Year of the Homecoming’. Writer Patrick Scott Hogg, accused of ‘fraudulent methods’ in his treatment of Burns by Gerard Carruthers of the University of Glasgow, announced he was ‘consulting a lawyer’ about filing a defamation lawsuit. This was the climax of a politically infused quarrel which had disrupted the world of Burns scholars for over a decade.

8053_Malgrati.indd 212

06/03/23 10:55 am



Rabbie for Yes?   213

The cause of this dispute originated in the so-called ‘lost poems’ of Burns, presented by Hogg and his collaborator Andrew Noble in the 1996 BBC documentary, ‘Ploughboy of the Western World’ (see Chapter 7).53 According to Hogg’s research, British radical newspapers from the 1790s published several anonymous poems which could be attributed to the bard and would change the scholarly interpretation of Burns’s politics. Amongst these pieces, for instance, was ‘The Ghost of Bruce’, a revolutionary and patriotic ode published in The Edinburgh Gazetteer on 24 July 1793. Calling upon ‘each brave Briton’ and ‘each Patriot Scot’ to rise ‘from their sleep’, these verses were penned by a certain ‘Agrestis’ – a pseudonym which Hogg compared to that of ‘Agricola’, which was used by Burns in his 1789 ‘Ode On The Departed Regency Bill’.54 Similarly, another ‘lost poem’ presented by Hogg was ‘The Dagger’, a parody of a speech by counter-revolutionary politician Edmund Burke, published in the same newspaper on 16 May 1793.55 The poem was signed ‘Ane o’ The Swine’ – a reference to Burke’s description of French insurgents as ‘the swinish multitude’. Uses of the Christ’s Kirk stanza and characteristic rhymes between ‘nappy’ and ‘happy’ led Hogg to present this piece as one of Burns’s.56 In 2001 Hogg and Noble included these verses in their controversial edition of Burns’s poems and songs, The Canongate Burns. This twovolume compilation was also supported by the Scottish Arts Council, the Carnegie Trust, the Leverhulme Trust and the Universities of Edinburgh and Strathclyde, and it involved consultation with several prominent academics, including Tom Crawford, David Daiches, Rory Watson and Cairns Craig.57 In their introduction, Hogg and Noble set out their aim to use ‘some recently retrieved archival material’ against the reactionary ‘obliteration’ of Burns’s radicalism ‘from the national memory’.58 Indeed, Hogg and Noble insisted that the bard’s ‘Jacobinism’ had been constantly dismissed and ‘demonis[ed]’ by the long tradition of Burns commentators which spanned from his first biographer, James Currie, guilty of turning the ‘political poet’ into a ‘malcontented unstable neurotic’, to the contemporary scholar James Mackay, whose description of Burns ‘represents no advance on nineteenth-century criticism’.59 Even MacDiarmid, the editors explained, was blinded by his ‘intellectual absolutism’ when failing to appreciate Burns’s appeal as a patriotic and ‘Yeatsian precursor’.60 Against such mistreatment, Hogg and Noble aimed to restore Burns’s radical image

8053_Malgrati.indd 213

06/03/23 10:55 am

214   Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics

and contribute to a ‘republican reorientation’ of Scottish politics in the twenty-first century.61 Whilst Hogg and Noble’s radical interpretation of Burns was hardly original after a century of left-wing uses of Burns, the quality of their research proved highly questionable. One year later, in the Burns Chronicle, Gerard Carruthers levelled severe criticisms at their edition. Hogg and Noble’s ‘monument to an unequivocally leftist Burns’, he wrote, was not serious scholarship but a ‘new bardolatry’.62 Though Carruthers’s ‘own political instincts [were] at least as left-leaning as those of the editors’, he argued that politics had blinded Hogg and Noble to the point of ‘traducing history’.63 Mistranslations of the Scots language, factual errors and approximate referencing flawed their overall effort. Worse still, they presented ‘inadequate evidence’ for the so-called ‘lost poems’. Amongst other faults, Hogg had omitted the byline ‘Airdrie’ under the original version of ‘The Dagger’. This piece of information suggested the author was not Burns, who lived in Dumfries at the time, but William Yates, a poet from Airdrie, best known for his verses in the Christ’s Kirk stanza.64 Likewise, in a later article, Carruthers revealed that ‘Agricola’, the pen name used by Hogg to identify Burns as the author of ‘The Ghost of Bruce’, was shared by two other 1790s Scottish radical poets, James Anderson and Peter Stuart – a fact which complicated any effort to attribute the poem.65 Overall, Carruthers deplored Hogg and Noble’s failure to make a fully convincing case for Burns’s radicalism. Nevertheless, Carruthers insisted that ‘Burns could be proved a radical’ – a challenge which was achieved that same year by Liam McIlvanney’s compelling study, Burns the Radical.66 Though this book received praise from both Hogg and Carruthers, McIlvanney ‘pursue[d] a rather different approach to Burns’s political poetry’ from that of The Canongate Burns.67 Certainly, McIlvanney acknowledged the work of Hogg and Noble and accepted ‘The Dagger’ and ‘The Ghost of Bruce’ as Burns’s own. But these poems were secondary to his argument and, like Carruthers, McIlvanney criticised an overly Jacobin depiction of the bard. The French Revolution, he explained, was ‘hardly the alpha and omega of Burns’s political consciousness’.68 Burns’s radicalism, in other words, was not imported from overseas, but rooted in Scotland’s own dissenting culture. From George Buchanan’s theory of resistance to the militant traditions of seventeenth-century Covenanters and the civic humanism of eighteenth-century ‘Real Whigs’, McIlvanney

8053_Malgrati.indd 214

06/03/23 10:55 am



Rabbie for Yes?   215

described Burns’s native political background.69 More than hackneyed analyses of ‘Scots wha hae’ and ‘A Man’s a Man’, this led McIlvanney to attempt a new reading of Burns’s early satires, such as ‘The Author’s Earnest Cry and Prayer’, in which the ‘rustic bard . . . suggests that even the humblest member of society is competent to censure and admonish his governors’.70 As a result, McIlvanney concluded that Burns’s response to the French Revolution stemmed not from novice enthusiasm, but from his ability to translate Jacobinism into his own political culture. Moreover, according to McIlvanney, the poet’s attachment to Scottish traditions of dissent, explained his later opposition to revolutionary France. Rather than a piece of ‘vulgar loyalism’, ‘The Dumfries Volunteers’ recalled Burns’s radical interpretation of the British constitution as a political settlement, earned by national resistance, which ensured that ‘THE KING’ should ‘ne’er forget THE PEOPLE’.71 Devoid of excessive left-wing ‘bardolatry’, McIlvanney’s book upheld Burns’s radicalism in a nuanced and comprehensive manner which contrasted with that of The Canongate Burns. Whilst the ‘lost poems’ polemic unravelled, further discrediting Hogg and Noble’s work, McIlvanney’s cool-headed effort to analyse Burns’s progressive views was reinforced by Robert Crawford from the University of St Andrews. Crawford’s biography of Burns, The Bard, published in time for Burns Night 2009, deplored the ‘questionable scholarship’ of The Canongate Burns.72 Hogg and Noble’s ‘inaccuracies and splenetic outbursts’, Crawford explained, were especially regrettable because they threatened to discredit scholars willing to ‘rescue [Burns] from those many monarchists, imperialists, staunch Unionist supperers, and others who over the centuries have controlled – and sometimes still seek to control – his posthumous reputation’.73 According to Crawford, however, ‘a nuanced case for Burns’s radicalism’ was still viable.74 To achieve this, the scholar drew on a new – and safe – piece of evidence: the journal of Reverend James MacDonald, which presented ‘the last account of [a] conversation [with Burns] written during [his] lifetime’.75 MacDonald, who combined an ‘interest in the Jacobites’ with ‘democratic’ views, visited Burns on 1 June 1796, less than two months before the poet’s death. Commenting on ‘the very best & most genuine spirit of pleasantry’ which animated his supper with Burns, the minister described the poet’s politics as that of a ‘staunch republican’.76 Though fleeting,

8053_Malgrati.indd 215

06/03/23 10:55 am

216   Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics

this comment on Burns’s politics, written a year after ‘The Dumfries Volunteers’, tended to confirm the tenacity of Burns’s radical convictions until the end of his life. From Burns the Radical to The Bard, new research on Burns’s politics seemed able to overcome the Canongate embarrassment. Indeed, the discredit inflicted on the field of Burns studies by the so-called ‘lost poems’ had led Burns experts to produce a more consistent and convincing account of the poet’s radicalism than existed before. Any new approach to Burns would now contend with a solid radical interpretation of his politics.77 Alongside changes in the academic treatment of the bard’s politics, the ‘lost poems’ quarrel resulted in a deeper transformation of the Burns scholarship. As Murray Pittock, Professor of Literature at the University of Glasgow, remarks, The Canongate Burns ‘was symptomatic of the way Burns had been repeatedly addressed without being tackled from the ground’.78 Yet the ensuing polemic, explains Pittock, was a ‘meaningful moment because it made some Burns scholars so annoyed that they became interested in pursuing collected editions’ of the poet’s works.79 Indeed, a fresh ‘scholarly encounter with the evidence for the creation of [the Burns] canon’ was the only solution to the crisis of Burns studies.80 Pittock’s sentiment, which was shared by his colleague, Gerard Carruthers, led to the creation of the Centre for Robert Burns Studies at the University of Glasgow in July 2007. With several seven-figure awards from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the Centre immediately became the new keystone of Burns scholarship and began in 2009 a fifteen-year-long editing project aiming to collect, assess and publish the complete works of Burns in line with the highest standards of expertise.81 This project added to the profound change which affected Burns’s legacy since devolution. In less than a decade, unprecedented public investments had rescued Burns’s heritage and transformed Burns’s image into a prominent icon of Scottish tourism. Meanwhile, after years of controversy, the Centre for Robert Burns Studies, supported by new research, had expanded Burns’s scholarship and restored its credibility. On 22 January 2011 the inauguration of the Robert Burns Birthplace Museum in Alloway concluded this period of transformation.82 After a two-year construction delay, the £21 million museum could finally open its doors.83 The Robert Burns Birthplace Museum’s

8053_Malgrati.indd 216

06/03/23 10:55 am



Rabbie for Yes?   217

exhibition dealing with Burns’s politics was a model of adroitness. Alongside a small poster in Scots, explaining that ‘Robert had a strang [sic] belief in equality and independence’, the museum displayed Burns’s volunteer uniform, emphasising the poet’s loyalism. Likewise, an interactive game quiz insisted on the paradoxes of Burns’s politics. On the matter of ‘independence’, for instance, an animated drawing of the poet could recite either ‘Parcel of Rogues’ or ‘Does haughty Gaul’. As related by David Hopes (who became curator of the Robert Burns Birthplace Museum in 2013), the exhibition attempted to ‘raise questions rather than impose answers’ and avoided ‘easy equivalences between the politics in Burns’s time and today’.84 The inauguration ceremony, however, proved more political. First Minister Alex Salmond, the poet Liz Lochhead and the writer Alasdair Gray addressed an audience of 300 guests. This was Lochhead’s first official duty as Scotland’s Makar – a five-year position created in 2004 by First Minister Jack McConnell. Originally bestowed on Edwin Morgan, this title – Makar – conjured MacDiarmid’s famous slogan ‘Not Burns – Dunbar’. This was fitting for Lochhead, who shared a taste for public flyting with the Scottish Renaissance firebrand. Indeed, a few days before the inauguration, she had sparked controversy when refusing to write a poem for the wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton. ‘No, it’s not the way it is in Scotland, it’s not a royal appointment’, she had declared, before adding, ‘I am a republican, it doesn’t mean I have anything against the individuals concerned, it’s just that I’d like Scotland to be an independent socialist republic’.85 A suitable heir to MacDiarmid, Lochhead also shared Catherine Carswell’s sceptical admiration for Burns. In 2009, alongside poets including Carol Ann Duffy, Jackie Kay, Robert Crawford, Seamus Heaney and W. N. Herbert, she had participated in a volume of poetry published by the Scottish Poetry Library to celebrate Burns’s anniversary.86 Her pastiche, ‘From a Mouse’, paid tribute to the bard whilst reversing the standpoints of his best-known poem: It’s me. The eponymous the moose The To a Mouse that – were I in your hoose, A bit o dust ablow the bed, thon dodd o’ oose     That, quick, turns tail, Is – eek! – a livin creature on the loose,     Wad gar you wail.

8053_Malgrati.indd 217

06/03/23 10:55 am

218   Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics

Beyond parody, Lochhead’s incorrect Standard Habbie, which ‘tends to be two syllables or an extra stress too long’, hinted at the more iconoclastic undertones of her poem.87 Through the mouse’s eyes, her piece challenged Burns’s self-assertion as a masculine poet: Burns, baith man and poet, liked to dominate. His reputation wi the lassies wasna great. They still dinna ken whether they love to hate,        Or hate to love. He was ‘an awfy man!’ He left them tae their fate,        Push came to shove. . . . Arguably I am a poem wha, prescient, did presage Your Twentyfirst Century Global Distress Age. I’m a female mouse though, he didna give a sausage        For ma sparklin een! As for Mother Nature? Whether yez get the message        Remains to be seen.88

A mute object in Burns’s original, the mouse becomes the feminine subject of Lochhead’s pastiche. Gifted with speech, the famous rodent uses her new platform to invoke the other voiceless faces of Burns’s works – from the abandoned ‘lassies’ to the ploughed fields of ‘Mother Nature’. In other words, Scotland’s Makar addressed the bard with a mixture of poetic admiration and eco-feminist suspicion. Despite its iconoclastic accents, Lochhead’s poetry was hailed by Alex Salmond during the opening ceremony of the new Burns Museum. ‘Her work has similar themes to Burns’, explained the First Minister, ‘she is a radical, she is at once intellectual and unpretentious, she looks outwards, and has translated Molière, yet she is passionate about preserving our ain tongue’.89 Like the ploughman poet, Lochhead had been raised in a modest environment: in the mining village of Newarthill, near Motherwell. According to Salmond, Burns and Lochhead’s achievements as poets coming from the common ranks of society proved the success of Scottish education across the centuries: The most important thing about Robert Burns is he was an educated man. And the most important thing about Scotland is that Scotland then

8053_Malgrati.indd 218

06/03/23 10:55 am

Rabbie for Yes?   219



was the only country in the world where somebody of Burns’s status in life would have been an educated man. And that is why we must always preserve the right to free education in this country.90

More than a historical analogy, Salmond’s declaration resonated with the current political context in Britain. Two months earlier, David Cameron’s government had tripled tuition fees in English universities, triggering student protests throughout the country. This dispute provided the First Minister with a new opportunity to appropriate Burns as a symbol of Scotland’s distinctive education policy. On 12 March 2011, a few weeks ahead of the Scottish Parliamentary election, Salmond reiterated his views on Burns and education. When presenting his manifesto at the SNP’s Spring Conference in Glasgow, the First Minister declared, ‘The rocks will melt with the sun before I allow tuition fees to be imposed on Scottish students’.91 This powerful image, drawn from Burns’s ‘A Red, Red Rose’, dominated the Scottish media for several days following Salmond’s announcement. For the first time since devolution, Bute House used Burns’s legacy to emphasise a political divergence with No. 10. The nationalists’ victory in the Scottish elections of May 2011 and the creation of a majority SNP government intensified this situation. Unfettered from the constraints of coalition and minority rule, now Salmond had free rein to break with the politics of consensus which prevailed since devolution. Following his party’s manifesto, on Burns Night 2012 in the Scottish Parliament, he introduced the consultation paper ‘Your Scotland, Your Referendum’, which demanded a vote on independence for ‘the autumn of 2014’ and announced the referendum question: ‘Do you agree that Scotland should be an independent country?’.92 On this important occasion, the First Minister ‘invoke[d] Burns the democrat, because the choices that Scotland faces are, fundamentally, matters of democracy’.93 Against members of the House of Lords, including the Advocate General for Scotland, who denied Holyrood’s ‘power to legislate for a referendum on independence’, Salmond summoned the spirit of ‘A Man’s a Man’ against ‘yon birkie ca’d a lord’ who is ‘but a coof for a’ that.94 ‘Three centuries on from Burns’s time’, Salmond prompted Scottish people to ‘revisit’ the Treaty of Union with a democratic decision.95 A few hours later, David Cameron derided Salmond’s announcements. In the House of Commons, the Prime Minister seconded

8053_Malgrati.indd 219

06/03/23 10:55 am

220   Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics

Eleanor Laing, Conservative MP for Epping Forest, who praised ‘Burns’s impassioned plea for the unity’ of Britain ‘in his poem, “The Dumfries Volunteers”’: Be BRITAIN still to BRITAIN true, Amang oursels united; For never but by British hands Must British wrongs be righted!96

Congratulating Laing on her address, the Prime Minister used this opportunity to attack the SNP. Although his government would permit a referendum on Scottish independence, Cameron ironised on Salmond’s decision to postpone the vote until 2014: When I hear the Scottish nationalists, who are so keen to leave the UK yet so anxious about having a referendum, I think that perhaps they should remember Burns’s words when he referred to the: ‘Wee, sleekit, cowrin, tim’rous beastie, O, what a panic’s in thy breastie!’ 97

Cameron’s sneers triggered an immediate reply from Salmond. Interviewed on Channel 4, the First Minister scoffed at the Prime Minister’s mangling of Burns’s rhyme scheme reminded him of the Scots pronunciation of the word ‘breastie’ – [i:] instead of [e].98 This Burns Night battle between the British and Scottish premiers initiated a new phase in the bard’s afterlife. For the past decade, Burns’s myth had symbolised the constitutional settlement of 1999 and fostered parliamentary unity. The perspective of a referendum on independence, however, combined with co-opting of Burns by the Scottish Government, ended such a consensus. On 15 October 2012, Salmond and Cameron signed the Edinburgh Agreement, which confirmed the terms for a vote on Scottish independence, to be held on 18 September 2014. Whilst the referendum campaign began, Burns’s image as an icon of Scottish identity returned to the front line. Once more, Salmond played a significant role in politicising Burns’s legacy in the runup to the referendum. In June 2013, he delivered a speech at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe for the premiere of Robert Burns Votes for Scotland, a play by BBC Broadcaster Mark Stephen which presented Burns’s views on both sides of the independence

8053_Malgrati.indd 220

06/03/23 10:55 am

Rabbie for Yes?   221



debate.99 Though Stephen’s play was politically neutral, Salmond claimed that ‘from tip to toe, Robert Burns was a 100% Scottish patriot’ who ‘always backed the nation of Scotland’.100 As proof of this, the SNP leader quoted Burns’s letter to Robert Muir, from 26 August 1787, which mentioned his ‘fervent prayer for Old Caledonia, over the hole in a blue whinstone, where Robert de Bruce fixed his royal standard on the banks of Bannockburn’.101 Likewise, Salmond recalled Burns’s autobiographical letter to Dr John Moore, explaining that ‘the story of Wallace poured a Scottish prejudice in [Burns’s] veins which [would] boil along there till the floodgates of life shut in eternal rest’.102 These quotations, combined with the poet’s rant against the Treaty of Union in his ‘Parcel of Rogues’, led Salmond to conclude that Burns would have voted Yes.103 Salmond’s declarations, reminiscent of James Barr’s 1924 Home Rule speech, contrasted markedly with the economic debate which structured most of the referendum campaign. Certainly, the First Minister was aware that poetry could not replace a clear message on the future of the Scottish currency and businesses. Yet by stressing Burns’s enthusiasm for Wallace and Bruce, he acknowledged the importance of history, culture and emotions in rallying a civic majority for independence. Unlike Walter Scott’s unionist-tinged conservatism or Hugh MacDiarmid’s Stalinist Anglophobia, the bard fitted the SNP’s civic approach to nationalism. His democratic patriotism provided a safe and popular literary medium to conjure romantic myths of Scottish nationhood without indulging in dubious ethnic nationalist rhetoric. This view was also shared by Salmond’s long-standing rival, the exLabour MP, ex-SNP deputy leader and fellow ‘Yes’ orator, Jim Sillars. Certainly, the socialist veteran felt more comfortable with the accents of ‘A Man’s a Man’ than with the nationalist undercurrents of ‘Parcel of Rogues’ or ‘Scots wha hae’. Yet, like Salmond, Sillars approved the use of Burns to rally Scottish workers behind the cause of independence. ‘If you go to a housing scheme’, explains Sillars, ‘and you’re looking for an 80–90% turnout then you’d better have something based on Burns – if you don’t it’ll no happen’.104 Indeed, on several occasions throughout the referendum campaign, Sillars addressed ‘hundreds of people’ in Scotland’s most deprived areas. He remembers one speech in particular: I quoted Burns. I got huge answer from the audience. I was in Clydebank . . . Burns came into the speech to tell what was going to happen

8053_Malgrati.indd 221

06/03/23 10:55 am

222   Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics to change the working-class. The audience saw Burns on their side because he spoke to their condition . . . There’s a philosophy there – humanitarianism – a set of ideas to change a state in which humanity is at pain to one in which humanity is joyful. 105

By contrast with Salmond and Sillars, however, the ‘No’ campaign seemed less prone to appropriate Burns as part of their argument. Except for sporadic quotations of ‘Does haughty Gaul’, in The Scotsman, The Herald and The Daily Telegraph, unionist politicians, personalities and journalists tended to dismiss uses of Burns as devoid of any political clout.106 In response to Salmond’s Burns quotations at the Fringe Festival, Labour MSP Richard Baker, one of the directors of the ‘Better Together’ campaign, declared that: it was foolish of Alex Salmond to try to appropriate Burns for the SNP. Every Scot can find aspects of his poetry that concurs with their beliefs . . . It’s quite wrong to suggest that Burns would have voted one particular way as Burns spoke for all Scots and all humanity.107

Likewise, Michael Forsyth, the former Conservative Scottish Secretary, mocked the First Minister who ‘has got so desperate for his cause that he is now having to recruit the dead’.108 More directly, still, Murdo Fraser, ex-deputy leader of the Scottish Tories, denied that ‘somebody who were going to change their vote on independence would do so on the basis of what Robert Burns wrote or sang’.109 Whilst spurning political uses of Burns, nonetheless, unionists seemed paradoxically nervous – sometimes to the point of paranoia – about the SNP’s handling of the poet’s legacy. In October 2013, two weeks after Sheena Wellington’s rendition of ‘A Man’s a Man’ on Calton Hill, the Scottish Daily Express accused the public-funded quango Education Scotland of promoting ‘politically-biased songs for primary and secondary pupils’ on their website. Indeed, the Express explained that Education Scotland provided a new online resource entitled ‘Freedom and Scots people’, which advised Scottish teachers and pupils to learn Hamish Henderson’s song ‘Freedom Come all Ye’, as well as Robert Burns’s ‘Scots wha hae’ and ‘Parcel of Rogues’. Opposing what seemed like an attempt to influence the Scottish curriculum, the Daily Express interviewed ‘a Better Together spokesman’, who denounced ‘an outrageous example of taxpayerfunded political propaganda’ and ‘a deeply cynical ploy, aimed at

8053_Malgrati.indd 222

06/03/23 10:55 am



Rabbie for Yes?   223

presenting a distorted view of history to young people’.110 ‘Scots wha hae’, in particular, was presented as a nationalist anthem ‘sung at the end of SNP party conferences’, which, according to ‘Better Together’, might influence the minds of the 16- and 17-year-olds who were eligible to vote in 2014.111 It would have been difficult for these twenty-first-century unionists to realise that, a century earlier, ‘Scots wha hae’ had served as an enlisting tool for King and Country against Germany. On a similar note, David Hopes, who curated the Alloway Robert Burns Birthplace Museum during the referendum campaign, remembers several complaints from local unionist supporters who suspected the museum of ‘hosting political events’.112 The reason behind this was that several ‘Yes’ campaigners had used the Museum car park as a ‘setting for photographs’ and flag-waving demonstrations.113 ‘It’s incredible how people – especially “No” voters – then thought we were being political’, recalls Hopes, who claims the museum remained completely neutral throughout the campaign.114 Whereas political parties from all sides had welcomed the renewal of Burns’s birthplace a few years earlier, some anti-independence campaigners now seemed to hold the poet’s entire legacy – and even parts of his heritage – as an exclusive nationalist preserve. Despite unionists’ awkwardness with Burns, the ‘No’ campaign made an original attempt to engage with the poet’s legacy as the referendum drew nearer. On Burns Night 2014, nine months before the vote, ‘Better Together’ uploaded a six-minute ‘Immortal Memory’ video on their YouTube account.115 This speech was delivered by a tartan-jacketed actor, John Barrowman, star of the TV series Torchwood and vocal supporter of the ‘No’ campaign. The actor began by recalling his first Burns Supper, held in South Dakota, with ‘fellow Scottish expats’, several years earlier. That evening, explained Barrowman, was a ‘reminder that Scotland has always been more than its geographic borders’, as illustrated by Burns’s ‘generous, egalitarian, and . . . global’ kind of patriotism. This, according to Barrowman, contradicted the SNP’s ‘crazy mix of nostalgia and nonsense’, formulated by Alex Salmond’, the ‘puddin o’ our chieftain race’ and the ‘parcel of rogues’ of his cabinet. Decrying them, the actor concluded his speech by invoking the ritual of ‘Auld Lang Syne’ and by encouraging his viewers to link arms with the rest of Britain. ‘Let us stand together, and “let us not, like snarling tykes, / In wrangling be

8053_Malgrati.indd 223

06/03/23 10:55 am

224   Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics

divided”’, Barrowman concluded with a final quotation from ‘The Dumfries Volunteers’.116 This video, which attracted thousands of viewers within a few hours, triggered an immediate backlash from the online community of ‘Yes’ activists – the so-called ‘cybernats’.117 On the morning after Burns Night, Rev. Stuart Campbell, editor of the influential proindependence blog ‘Wings Over Scotland’, posted a link to Barrowman’s video, inviting his followers to mock the actor.118 This resulted in a large online furore across the social media platform Twitter, which forced ‘Better Together’ to deactivate comments on their YouTube video.119 Alongside hundreds of tweets and comments deriding the actor’s ‘pathetic’ and ‘embarrassing’ effort, a few cybernats riposted by sharing the ‘Immortal Memory’ speech delivered by Fiona Hyslop, Scotland’s Cabinet Secretary for Culture, on Burns Night at the Yes Scotland Burns Supper in Edinburgh.120 Hyslop’s speech, reprinted by ‘Bella Caledonia’, another prominent ‘Yes’ website, opposed Barrowman’s views and recalled Burns’s inspiration for freedom fighters and writers across the world, including the African American poet Maya Angelou and the early twentieth-century Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore. 121 Burns and his poetry of emancipation, infused with ‘the story of Wallace’, according to Hyslop, should inspire Scottish people to rebuke ‘Better Together’ and join ‘in the task that lies before us to seize the moment and the power to shape our country’s future to take control of our lives, our communities and our country’.122 That same week, another significant Burns wrangle occurred during the STV news programme ‘Scotland Tonight’, which had staged a five-minute debate on Burns and independence.123 On the ‘Yes’ side, journalist James Mackay had invited Patrick Scott Hogg, the co-editor of The Canongate Burns, to contradict David Purdie, honorary fellow at Edinburgh University and later co-editor of a revised edition of The Burns Encyclopaedia, who would argue from the ‘No’ perspective.124 Both debaters had prepared a list of quotations to convince their audience. Hogg began with ‘Parcel of Rogues’ before citing Burns’s 1790 letter to Mrs Dunlop, which regretted the ‘annihilation of [Scotland’s] Independance [sic] & even her very Name’.125 ‘In that statement’, Hogg explained, ‘Burns is attacking English exceptionalism’, a notion which the poet also challenged by ‘articulating a language of the poor’ in the Scots language.126 For these reasons, Hogg concluded that he

8053_Malgrati.indd 224

06/03/23 10:55 am



Rabbie for Yes?   225

had ‘no hesitation in stating . . . that Burns would vote Yes’.127 But this did not impress Purdie, who defended Burns’s loyalism and quoted, instead, the poet’s 1793 letter to John Erskine, which declared that ‘it would be insanity to sacrifice’ the British Constitution, whose ‘original principles, and experience had proved to be every way fitted for our happiness in society’.128 Against ‘Patrick Scott Hogg, the SNP, and the Yes Campaign [who] are trying to say that Burns wanted to tear up the Constitution’, Purdie concluded with a rendition of ‘Does haughty Gaul’, which, according to him, represented ‘Burns at his best’.129 To further challenge Purdie, Hogg insisted that his views were supported by other Burns scholars, including the poet’s biographer, Robert Crawford.130 Certainly, as a nuanced analyst of Burns, Crawford had criticised Hogg’s biased and partisan scholarship in the past. But the new context of the referendum campaign had led the St Andrews professor to join the ‘Yes’ side and adopt a more partisan tone. ‘I thought that was the moment’, recollects Crawford, ‘I hadn’t concealed my political views before but I wasn’t as strident . . . I did want to nail my colours to the mast and do whatever I could to advance the cause’.131 Since the beginning of January, indeed, Crawford had given several interviews to Scottish newspapers which justified Hogg’s comment. In the Herald, for instance, Crawford explained that ‘even if you find other quotations from Burns that seem to be defending the Union, you have to bear in mind that he was meant to do that because of the job [Exciseman] he was doing at the time.’132 Moreover, a few days later in the Daily Record, Burns’s biographer contrasted ‘Does haughty Gaul’, a poem in which Burns apparently lacked sincerity, with ‘Scots wha hae’ and ‘Parcel of Rogues’, whose ‘heartfelt’ quality ranked them ‘amongst [the poet’s] greatest works’.133 Crawford’s comments in the press accompanied the publication of his latest book, Bannockburns, which provided an enthusiastic study of the influence of the Wars of Independence on the imagination of Scottish writers since the fourteenth century.134 As suggested by the book’s title, Crawford wrote a chapter on ‘Burns and Bannockburns’ and the repercussion of the 1314 battle on the poet’s eighteenth-century politics. 135 A notable instance of this could be found in Crawford’s analysis of ‘Robert Bruce’s March to Bannockburn’ – ‘Scots wha hae’ – in which Burns conflated the vocabulary of republican France with the memory of Bruce’s victory.136 ‘LIBERTY’s in every blow / Let us DO or DIE’ – Burns’s final, rousing lines,

8053_Malgrati.indd 225

06/03/23 10:55 am

226   Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics

halfway between the 1320 Declaration of Arbroath and the 1792 French Marseillaise, performed, according to Crawford, ‘the greatest service both to the ideal of modern democracy and to the cause of Scottish independence’.137 On the dustjacket of Bannockburns a comment by Scots Makar Liz Lochhead praised the book as ‘comprehensive, daring, timely’. Like Crawford, Lochhead supported independence and had signed the official list of support of ‘Yes Scotland’ as early as 2012.138 Two years later, on the day Bannockburns came out, she seconded Crawford’s interpretation of Burns in the columns of The Guardian. ‘True, Burns did inhabit many apparently contradictory personae’, Lochhead acknowledged and ‘even diehard unionists will be searching around for works of his that seem to support their position’.139 But, at heart, like Crawford and Hogg, Lochhead’s ‘gut feeling [was] that as a libertarian, a democrat, a lover of freedom and autonomy, a revolutionary and a romantic, of course he’d be voting for independence’.140 Moreover, Lochhead added that Burns inspired ‘every contemporary writer or artist, young and old, that [she knew]’, who, without being SNP members, supported the movement for Scotland’s ‘cultural and political autonomy’.141 Indeed, except for Edinburgh resident J. K. Rowling and a few other writers, including Allan Massie, Ian Rankin and Andrew O’Hagan, the vast majority of Scottish literari – from Alasdair Gray and A.L. Kennedy to Kathleen Jamie, James Kelman and Irvine Welsh – had come out in favour of independence.142 By enlisting Burns into the ‘Yes’ campaign, Liz Lochhead, Scotland’s Makar, represented the political consensus in her field. Three months later, in April 2014, Lochhead developed her views into a new play, Dear Scotland, which portrayed Burns as an independence supporter.143 Performed in the National Portrait Gallery, Lochhead’s creation, according to her own words, was a ‘little piece of doggerel’ which used Burns to deter its audience from the risk of ‘Tory rule forever’.144 As evident in the following extract reprinted in The Scotsman Burns’s song, ‘Parcel of Rogues’ was key to Lochhead’s argument: That parcel o rogues’ in Seventeen-O-Seven, Eftir the Darien disaster (wha’ll ne’er be forgiven), Had us bought and sold for English gold, bastards driven        By greed and gain.

8053_Malgrati.indd 226

06/03/23 10:55 am



Rabbie for Yes?   227 Taken us till noo (and somehow still by dissent riven)       T’get free again. Sh’d Scotland be an independent country?’ The question We’ll shairly say Aye! to? They cannae manifest yin Guid reason why we shouldnae. Yes! the best yin,       The only answer. So screw yer courage, stick a Saltire in the Yessed yin       On th’voting paper.145

Though Dear Scotland was perhaps not Lochhead’s finest piece of writing, her choice to stage Burns’s politics proves more interesting. Throughout the twentieth century, apart from Joe Corrie during the 1930s, W. Bernard de Bear Nicol in 1951 and Tom Wright during the 1960s, Burns’s politics had inspired few playwrights. The interest of Scottish dramaturges, for the most part, had been limited to the romantic side of Burns’s life.146 But the cultural dynamism of the referendum campaign seemed to change this trend. From Mark Stephen’s 2013 Fringe show to Lochhead’s Dear Scotland, theatre, as a more interactive and deliberative artform, enabled Burns’s legacy to fit the mass politics of the indyref. Alongside Lochhead, the works of Dundee painter and trompe l’oeil artist Calum Colvin further illustrate how contemporary adaptations of Burns reverberated with the referendum context. In January 2014, Colvin collaborated with the Scots-language poet Rab Wilson to exhibit ‘constructed photographic artworks’ and poems on the theme of ‘Burnsiana’ – ‘Burns artefacts’ – at the Robert Burns Birthplace Museum.147 Amongst other pieces, the artist included a digital print called Twa Plack (2009), which portrayed Burns with a misty saltire in the background, a pile of coins in the foreground and, across both sides, the inscription, ‘Now’s the Day & Now’s the Hour, Scotland’.148 In a conversation with Wilson, reprinted in the exhibition’s book, Colvin explained that his artwork was in fact a three-dimensional reproduction of the protest stamp sold for ‘twa plack’ by Wendy Wood and the Scottish Secretariat, fifty years earlier, after the 1959 bicentenary of Burns.149 More than a mere echo of the work of early nationalists, however, Colvin explained that Twa Plack provided further reflections on the ‘idea of money and economic control’, both in Scottish history and the biography of Burns.150 Colvin’s

8053_Malgrati.indd 227

06/03/23 10:55 am

228   Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics

artwork had been further inspired by the 2008 economic recession, at a time when ‘the financial industry overshadowd[ed] . . . people’s sense of justice’.151 Certainly this preoccupation was still relevant five years later in a context when Scotland’s future hinged upon issues of currency, deficit and austerity. Would Scotland’s dream of independence be ‘bought and sold’ once more? Would Scots follow Burns’s example, eschewing sedition to preserve their wages? Colvin warned that the passionate ‘idea of nationalism’, represented by a saltire in his print’s background, might yet stumble over more ‘piles of coins’.152 Compared to the economic case for independence, it seems hard to gauge whether artistic and cultural interventions, as produced by Colvin, Lochhead, Crawford, Hogg, Purdie and Barrowman, had any significant impact on the referendum results. In hindsight, actors from both sides insist rather on the marginality of Burns, literature and history in the wider frame of the referendum debate. For instance, Murdo Fraser, Conservative MSP, was categorical: ‘Burns’s politics was very much on the fringe of the discussion’ and ‘it wasn’t a significant part of either campaign’.153 Tinged with regrets, Robert Crawford agrees also, and he stresses that ‘the battle was fought too much on economic issues’, whereas ‘Scottish independence is more about a sense of cultural identity than it is just about money’.154 Likewise, Billy Kay, Scots language broadcaster and pro-independence activist explains that the ‘Yes’ Campaign ‘should have had a bigger cultural dimension’ instead of maintaining cultural initiatives ‘mainly at a local level’.155 This feeling is also shared by David Hopes, who estimates that ‘Burns Cottage could have been more used by the “Yes Campaign”’ and that staff at the Robert Burns Birthplace Museum, including himself, ‘could have been more creative in using’ the momentum of the campaign.156 By avoiding polemics, Hopes considers that the Robert Burns Birthplace Museum missed an opportunity to engage with the public – an observation which inspires leads him to call for ‘a change in the exhibition’ of the museum in order ‘maybe to create more controversy’ in the future. Since 2014, further comments about indyref have also tended to confirm the campaign’s lack of cultural and historical depth. For instance, in a 2016 article Alex Thomson recalls that: one notable feature was the concern of both campaigns not to appeal to history. This was a political decision to avoid being painted as the

8053_Malgrati.indd 228

06/03/23 10:55 am

Rabbie for Yes?   229



reactionary side, but it can also be seen as an echo of the new historiographical stress on the intertwining of varying forms of unionism with national sentiment throughout the period since 1707.157

Certainly, traditional myths of Scottish history remained absent from indyref debates. From Mary Queen of Scots to the Covenanters to Bonnie Prince Charlie, Scottish romantic figures, once key to the political cultures of both Victorian unionists and early nationalists, appeared inappropriate for 2010s Scottish politicians wary of emotive patriotism. At best, it seemed history could be used in a negative, derogatory way to destabilise the opposite side. This was the case, for instance, with William Wallace’s warlike memory, strongly influenced by the film Braveheart, which fuelled efforts by unionist media to undermine the SNP’s civic approach to independence.158 However, there is a limit to how such observations can be applied to Burns. Although minor compared to economic debates, references to Burns’s poetry recurred throughout the referendum campaign. Moreover, in contrast to other Scottish historical characters, it should be noted that Burns’s legacy was used as a mostly positive resource by both nationalists and unionists. This was evident on the pro-independence side, seeking to identify with Burns’s democratic, egalitarian values. Yet this was also true for the ‘Better Together’ campaign, which occasionally claimed the poet’s internationalist, colourful kind of Britishness. Such a difference between the political treatment of Burns and that of other Scottish heroes reveals, once more, the constitutive clout of the poet in contemporary Scottish politics. Despite the referendum’s strong economic focus, it seemed impossible to evoke Scottish selfgovernment without at least referring to the poet, whom, after twenty years of devolutionary politics and a decade of devolution, had come to embody the awkward state of the nation. In other words, in 2014, Burns’s legacy appeared perhaps the most readily usable, consensual kind of lyrical resource to evoke the future of Scotland’s constitution. This had paradoxical consequences, however, especially for the ‘Yes Campaign’, which, by favouring Burns over the more frankly separatist Wallace and MacDiarmid, was in fact relying on the chief poetic symbol of devolution. Such a contradiction became apparent in hindsight at the ‘Yes’ rally on Calton Hill in September 2013, when Sheena Wellington re-enacted her 1999 performance of ‘A

8053_Malgrati.indd 229

06/03/23 10:55 am

230   Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics

Man’s a Man’. By focusing most of their campaigning effort on the technocratic case for independence, and despite the pro-Yes consensus amongst Scotland’s youth, Scottish nationalists remained heavily dependent on the political culture of the 1980s–90s. Finally, beyond the spheres of Scottish media culture, and professional politics, a last element evidencing Burns’s influence on the indyref can be found in internet archives for the years 2012 to 2014. According to Google Trends, a software package recording the popularity of Google search, Burns’s songs, including ‘Parcel of Rogues’, ‘Ye Jacobites By Name’ and ‘Scots wha hae’ all attracted significant searches in Scotland during last few days of the campaign.159 Admittedly their individual search rate represented only one tenth of that scored by Roy Williamson’s ‘Flowers of Scotland’ during the same period of time.160 Still, interest in ‘Parcel of Rogues’ did reach the highest point ever recorded by Google Trends in September 2014, during the indyref. Likewise, ‘Scots wha hae’ and ‘Ye Jacobites’ achieved their highest peak of popularity on record, never equalled since – Burns Nights excepted. Throughout the referendum campaign, this trend was also corroborated by a significant number of YouTube views on videos featuring Burns’s political songs. For instance, a popular version of ‘Scots wha hae’ on YouTube, adapted by the folk band Scocha, increased its views by 40,000 between April and September 2014 – this included a 10,000 peak in the last three days before the vote.161 Similarly, Paolo Nutini’s rendition of ‘A Man’s a Man’ attracted 30,000 viewers between December 2013 and September 2014.162 Finally, the most popular Burns song on YouTube, gaining around half a million views between 2012 to 2014, was a rendition of ‘Ye Jacobites by Name’, introduced as the ‘BEST SCOTTISH REBEL SONG EVER’.163 It might seem rather surprising that a song summoning Scottish Jacobites to ‘let their schemes alone’ and ‘leave a man undone’ attracted such patriotic acclaim. Indeed, ‘Ye Jacobites By Name’, a traditional, pro-Union song, rewritten by Burns with more pacifist lyrics in 1791, does not lend itself easily to nationalist interpretations.164 But the political momentum of the campaign, combined with Burns’s rousing acoustics, enabled a careless identification with the ‘Name’ of ‘Jacobite’. In any case, from Google to YouTube, under the radar of politicians and economists, thousands of voters experienced the referendum campaign with Burns’s music in their ears.

8053_Malgrati.indd 230

06/03/23 10:55 am



Rabbie for Yes?   231

On the eve of polling day, Alex Salmond, seizing his moment, wrote a last-minute plea in favour of independence. ‘In these final hours of this historic campaign I want to speak directly to every person in this country’, explained the First Minister, who promised that ‘if we work hard, Scotland can be a global success story’ and reach ‘the top twenty of the richest countries in the world’.165 To achieve success, Salmond added that Scotland should follow the model of two eighteenth-century icons: ‘Adam Smith’, on the one hand, ‘who said that no society can flourish and be happy if too many of its people do not benefit from its wealth’, and ‘Robert Burns’, on the other, ‘who loved Scotland dearly and also celebrated humanity the world o’er’.166 Between ‘economic growth’ and ‘social justice’, at the crossroads of Smith and Burns’s contrasting legacies, Salmond conceived his broad sweeping vision for independence.167 That evening, Alan Riach, Professor of Scottish literature at Glasgow University and pro-independence writer, was driving to his home in Alloway. A few yards from Burns Cottage, on the main road, his attention was caught by a large banner, raised by one of his neighbours, which read: ‘Burns Would Have Voted Yes’.168 Likewise, further south, down by the river Nith, ‘Yes’ activists from Dumfries had projected a large blue and white saltire on the wall of Burns’s last house.169 Yet despite their best efforts, pro-independence supporters failed to convince their neighbours and compatriots. On 18 September 2014, 55% Scottish people voted ‘No’ and only 45% opted for ‘Yes’. South Ayrshire and Dumfries and Galloway, the heart of Burns country, ranked amongst the strongholds of Scottish unionism, with 57.9% and 65.7% ‘No’ voters respectively. Whether Burns’s works had any impact on this outcome is uncertain. What is sure, however, is that the politicisation of Burns across Scottish public opinion had reached a new and perhaps unprecedented height. The poet’s works framed 2014 options more clearly than did the memory of any other Scottish hero. Certainly, decades of constitutional politics had turned Burns into the paragon of Scotland’s present state. Whilst ‘Scots wha hae’ and ‘Does Haughty Gaul’ could once mould Scottish unionist-nationalist sentiments, their increasingly dissonant clash in the context of 2014 split the poet’s monument. For how long would the structure hold? And could it ever be repaired? Those questions still lack an answer at the time of writing.

8053_Malgrati.indd 231

06/03/23 10:55 am

232   Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics

Notes  1. According to the SNP, there were 30,000 participants, though only 8,300 according to the police. See The Scotsman, 23 September 2013.  2. There are several films of the demonstration on YouTube. See, for instance, “March and rally for Scottish independence, Edinburgh, 21 September 2013”, uploaded on 23 September 2013. Available at (last accessed 4 February 2019).   3. This is evident in ‘A Man’s A Man For A’ That by Sheena Wellington – Rally for Scottish Independence’, uploaded on 21 September 2013, YouTube. (last accessed 5 February 2019). Author’s emphasis.  4. P1, ll. 55–6, p. 250.  5. P1, ll. 65–9, p. 118.   6. Burns’s letter to Mrs Dunlop, 10 April 1790, L2, pp. 23–4.  7. Scottish Parliament, Official Report (hereafter SP OR), 25 January 2001, col. 713. The title ‘Scot of the millennium’ was awarded to Burns in December 1999. This followed a poll organised by Kenneth Roy, the Scottish editor of Who’s Who Scotland. With 268 ballots from persons listed in the book, the bard came first, well before William Wallace and Robert the Bruce, who were respectively voted second and third. Glasgow Herald, The Scotsman, 18 December 1999.  8. SP OR, 25 January 2001, col. 713.   9. SP OR, 25 January 2001, col. 725. 10. SP OR, 25 January 2001, col. 718. 11. SP OR, 25 January 2001, col. 715. 12. SP OR, 25 January 2001, col. 717. 13. SP OR, 25 January 2001, cols 726­–7. 14. See ‘About Cathy’ in Cathy Peattie’s website, (last accessed 7 February 2019). 15. SP OR, 25 January 2001, col. 728. 16. Sunday Herald, 10 November 2002. 17. Ibid. 18. SP OR, 14 November 2002 (Morning), cols 12451–2. 19. The Scotsman, 24 January 2003. 20. Sunday Herald, 10 November 2002. 21. See ‘EDDI READER – “Auld Lang Syne” (at Scottish Parliament)’, YouTube, uploaded on 11 May 2006. Available at (last accessed 14 January 2018). 22. Interview with Douglas Dunn, 19 June 2018.

8053_Malgrati.indd 232

06/03/23 10:55 am



Rabbie for Yes?   233

23. See Hames, The Literary Politics, pp. vi–xii for a discussion of the Canongate Wall’s ambiguous symbolism. 24. SP OR, 27 February 2003, col. 15853. 25. SP OR, 16 December 2004, col. 13096. 26. Ibid. 27. Interview with David Hopes, 20 November 2018. 28. Hopes, ‘Scoping Study’. 29. Ibid. pp. 24, 34, 38, 47. 30. Ibid. p. 15. 31. Ibid. p. 24. 32. Hopes, 20 November 2018. 33. SP OR, 20 January 2005, cols 13819–20; SP OR Public Petition Committee, 16 March 2005, col. 1559. 34. SP OR Public Petition Committee, 5 October 2005, cols 2039–40. 35. Ibid. 36. Hopes, 20 November 2018. 37. Ibid. 38. Ibid. 39. ‘The Scottish Economic Recovery Programme’, in ‘The Scottish Government’s Response to the First Annual Report of the Council of Economic Advisers’, 15 January 2009, (last accessed 16 January 2019). 40. Ibid. 41. Sunday Mail, 25 January 2009. 42. The Scotsman, 26 January 2009. 43. Burns Suppers were added by participants on an interactive map hosted by Famous Grouse on the (now deceased) website www.burnssupper2009.com. 44. McGinn, The Burns Supper, p. 209. 45. Interview with Billy Kay, 16 August 2018. Salmond tried unsuccessfully to invite US President Barack Obama, whose grandmother was descended from a Scottish family. See Scotland on Sunday, 18 January 2009. 46. The Scotsman, 19 March 2009. 47. The Scotsman, 6 June 2009. 48. Aberdeen Press and Journal, 7 November 2009. 49. Sunday Herald, 29 November 2009. 50. The Scotsman, 1 August 2009. 51. The Telegraph, 8 September 2010. Whilst the Scottish Executive announced £53.5 million, independent economist Geoff Riddington calculated a total of £38.8 million. 52. Dougal, ‘The Re-Making of National Memory’, p. 8.

8053_Malgrati.indd 233

06/03/23 10:55 am

234   Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics 53. John Archer (prod.), Ploughboy of the Western World, film, produced by John Archer. Scotland: BBC Scotland, 1996. BFI Archives, London, 456394. This documentary was followed by Hogg’s first book on this subject, The Lost Poems. 54. Hogg and Noble (eds), Canongate Burns, pp. 465, 469. Another version of this poem was printed in The Edinburgh Gazetteer on 16 July 1793. 55. Hogg and Noble (eds), Canongate Burns, pp. 456–60. 56. Ibid. 57. See ‘Acknowledgements’, Canongate Burns, p. vi. 58. Ibid. p. xvi. 59. Ibid. pp. xxiii, xxx, lv–lxvii. 60. Ibid. p. xci–ii. 61. Ibid. p. xciv. 62. Carruthers, ‘New Bardolatry’, in BC, 2002, Kilmarnock Burns Federation, p. 2. 63. Ibid. p. 13. 64. Ibid. p. 12. 65. Carruthers, ‘The Problem of Pseudonyms’, p. 101. For other comments on The Canongate Burns, see Carruthers, ‘The Word on Burns’, pp. 10–15 and ‘Misreading Robert Burns’, pp. 41–50. See also Paton, ‘Why Should We Idly Waste our Prime’, in BC, 2002, Kilmarnock Burns Federation, pp. 47–8. 66. Carruthers, ‘New Bardolatry’, pp. 13; McIlvanney, Burns the Radical. 67. Carruthers, ‘New Bardolatry’, pp. 13; Hogg and Noble (eds), The Canongate Burns, p. x; McIlvanney, Burns the Radical, p. 5. 68. McIlvanney, Burns the Radical, p. 5. 69. Ibid. pp. 15–63. 70. Ibid. p. 96. 71. Ibid. pp. 235–7. 72. Crawford, The Bard, pp. 9–10. 73. Ibid. p. 10. 74. Ibid. 75. Ibid. p. 395. The manuscript of this journal is kept at the University of St Andrews Library’s Special Collections. 76. Ibid. p. 395. 77. This new consensus, however, did not prevent a more sceptical approach to Burns’s radicalism. See Colin Kidd’s article, ‘Burns and Politics’, in Carruthers (ed.), The Edinburgh Companion, pp. 61–74, which provides a nuanced case for Burns’s radicalism by focusing on the poet’s fluid political allegiances at a local level. 78. Interview with Murray Pittock, 28 November 2018.  79. Ibid.

8053_Malgrati.indd 234

06/03/23 10:55 am



Rabbie for Yes?   235

 80. Ibid.   81. Ibid. Since its creation, the Centre has benefited from two £1 million grants, awarded to Murray Pittock by the AHRC in 2007 and 2009 respectively, and a total of £3 million, awarded to Gerard Carruthers between 2011 and 2018 for his project, ‘Editing Robert Burns for the 21st century’.  82. Glasgow Herald, 22 January 2011.  83. The museum opened in November 2010, two months before its official inauguration.   84. Hopes, 20 November 2018. Since 2011, and as of 2018, the museum had not received any complaint about the politics of its exhibition.  85. Scottish Daily Express, 24 January 2011.   86. Douglas Gifford (ed.), Addressing the Bard.   87. This quote is from Lochhead’s comment on her own poem, in Gifford (ed.), Addressing the Bard, p. 12.   88. Ibid. This extract is reprinted by kind permission of the author, Liz Lochhead.  89. The Scotsman, 25 January 2011.  90. Ibid.  91. Sunday Herald, 13 March 2011.   92. SP OR, 25 January 2012, col. 5605.   93. SP OR, 25 January 2012, col. 5615.  94. Ibid.; Daily Record, 21 January 2012.  95. Ibid.  96. Hansard, HC Deb, 25 January 2012, Vol. 539, col. 291. Also see P2, ll. 13–16; p. 765.  97. Ibid.  98. ‘Alex Salmond corrects David Cameron’s Burns pronunciation’, Channel 4, 25 January 2012. Available at (last accessed 23 January 2019).  99. The Scotsman, 23 June 2013. 100. Ibid. 101. The Scotsman, 23 June 2013; Burns’s letter to Robert Muir, 26 August 1787, L1, p. 151. 102. The Scotsman, 23 June 2013; Burns’s letter to Dr John Moore, 2 August 1787, L1, 136. 103. Ibid. 104. Interview with Jim Sillars, 5 June 2018. 105. Ibid. 106. See, for instance, The Scotsman, 23 June 2013, Herald, 5 February 2014 and The Daily Telegraph, 18 September 2014. 107. The Scotsman, 23 June 2013.

8053_Malgrati.indd 235

06/03/23 10:55 am

236   Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics 108. The Scotsman, 26 June 2013. 109. Interview with Murdo Fraser, 27 November 2018. 110. Scottish Daily Express, 13 October 2013. 111. Ibid. 112. Hopes, 20 November 2018. 113. Ibid. 114. Ibid. 115. ‘John Barrowman, Burns’s Night Immortal Memory’, uploaded by BetterTogetherUK, YouTube, 25 January 2014. Available at < https:// www.YouTube.com/watch?v=sArFksxhV-0> (last accessed 12 February 2019). 116. Ibid. 117. The video had attracted 28,000 viewers in March 2014 and 37,000 in September 2014. Available at (last accessed 13 February 2019). 118. Rev. Stuart Campbell, ‘Dropping the Lovebomb’, Wings Over Scotland, 26 January 2014. Available at (last accessed 13 February 2019). 119. Scottish Daily Mail, 27 January 2014. 120. Campbell, ‘Dropping the Lovebomb’; Fiona Hyslop, ‘Immortal Memory’, Bella Caledonia, 25 January 2014. Available at (last accessed 13 February 2019). 121. Ibid. 122. Ibid. 123. ‘Would Robert Burns have been a Yes voter?’, uploaded by STV News, YouTube, 21 January 2014. Available at (last accessed 13 February 2019). 124. Hogg, The Patriot Bard; Purdie, McCue and Carruthers, The Burns Encyclopaedia. 125. Burns’s letter to Mrs Dunlop, 10 April 1790, L2, pp. 23–4. 126. ‘Would Robert Burns have been a Yes voter?’ 127. Ibid. 128. Ibid.; Burns’s letter to John Erskine, 13 April 1793, L2, p. 208. 129. ‘Would Robert Burns have been a Yes voter?’ 130. Ibid. 131. Interview with Robert Crawford, 4 June 2018. 132. Glasgow Herald, 11 January 2014. 133. Daily Record, 12 January 2014. 134. Crawford, Bannockburns. 135. Ibid. pp. 70–96.

8053_Malgrati.indd 236

06/03/23 10:55 am



Rabbie for Yes?   237

136. Ibid. p. 91. 137. Ibid. p. 96. 138. Ibid. p. 230. 139. The Guardian, 24 January 2014. 140. Ibid. 141. Ibid. 142. The list of pro-independence Scottish writers is discussed by Crawford in Bannockburns, pp. 230–3. 143. The Scotsman, 25 April 2014. 144. Ibid. 145. Ibid. 146. This can be verified in the list of Burns plays drawn up by Keith in ‘Burns’s Life on the Stage’, 147. Evening Telegraph, 14 December 2013. 148. Calum Colvin, Twa Plack, 2009, Digital print on canvas, 151x122cm, visible online on Colvin’s website, < http://www.calumcolvin.com/ Burnsiana.html> (last accessed 18 February 2013). 149. Colvin and Wilson, Burnsiana, p. 21. 150. Ibid. pp. 21–4. 151. Ibid. p. 24. 152. Ibid. p. 22. 153. Fraser, 27 November 2018. 154. Crawford, 4 June 2018. 155. Kay, 16 August 2018. 156 , 20 November 2018. 157. Thomson, ‘From ‘Renaissance’ to referendum?’, p. 83. 158. See for instance, ‘Scotland’s Braveheart Nationalism Shows its Dark Side’, Financial Times, 12 June 2014. More research is needed on 2014 references to William Wallace and the Scottish Wars of Independence. 159. All data in this paragraph can be verified on the website (last accessed 18 February 2019). Choose ‘Scotland’ as the location and use keywords like ‘Such a Parcel of Rogues in a Nation’, ‘Scots wha hae’ and ‘Ye Jacobites By Name’. 160. It also represented only one fifth of the popularity of Dougie MacLean’s ‘Caledonia’. 161. ‘scocha — scots wha hae lyrics’, uploaded by killingloneleyness1, 7 December 2008, YouTube. Data accessed through the ‘Wayback Machine’ of the website web.archive.org. Available at (last accessed on 18 February 2019).

8053_Malgrati.indd 237

06/03/23 10:55 am

238   Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics 162. ‘Paolo Nutini – A Man’s a Man for a’ that’, uploaded by Kiddo, 15 June 2010, YouTube. Available at (last accessed 18 February 2019). 163. ‘Best Scottish Rebel Song Ever’, uploaded by nathanprice90700, 23 March 2012, YouTube. Unfortunately, no statistics or archive is available for that video. Half a million views by September 2014 is a sensible estimate considering that the video reached one million viewers in August 2017, five years after being uploaded. Available at (last accessed on 18 February 2019). 164. Burns’s version of ‘Ye Jacobites By Name’ was published in the fourth volume of James Johnson’s Scots Musical Museum. 165. Independent, 17 September 2014. 166. Ibid. 167. Ibid. 168. Interview with Alan Riach, 23 November 2018. David Hopes also remembers this detail (interview, 20 November 2018). 169. See tweet by @patronsaintofca, 17 September 2014, Twitter. Available at

(last accessed 19 February 2019).

8053_Malgrati.indd 238

06/03/23 10:55 am

Epilogue: A Poetic Constitution

Today, more than two hundred and twenty years after Burns’s death, the poet’s fame endures. According to opinion polls, most Scottish people still consider him to be the ‘Greatest Scot’ in history. Burns was voted ‘Scot of the Millennium’ by Who’s Who in Scotland in 1999, ‘Top Scot’ by Ipsos-Mori in 2006, ‘Great Scot’ by STV in 2009, and ‘Greatest Scot’ by the National Trust for Scotland in 2016.1 In 2005, moreover, a poll led by researchers at Glasgow Caledonian University described ‘A Man’s a Man’ as ‘Scotland’s top political song of all time’.2 Similarly, in 2013, alongside the Loch Ness Monster and Andy Murray, Burns topped a survey of two thousand people about who should feature on Scottish banknotes if Scotland were to adopt an independent currency.3 Paradoxically, however, this trend contrasts with several other polls, emphasising Scottish ignorance about the poet. In 2000, a survey by the supermarket ASDA explained that only one third of Scots (and 7% of English respondents) could recall the date of Burns Night.4 Similarly, in 2004 another poll found that ‘seven out of 10 Scots [were] unable to recite a verse from Burns’s seminal works’.5 More strikingly still, in 2017 a poll funded by Sainsbury revealed that only 7% of Scots remembered the four verses of ‘Auld Lang Syne’, whilst 54% admitted ‘they hardly knew any’.6 This apparently ambivalent attitude has led some commentators to regret the decline of reverence for Burns’s poetic genius – an attitude once widespread and now limited to ageing Burns clubs. An instance of this can be found when Christopher Whatley, at the end of his Immortal Memory, presents a nostalgic evocation of the many Burns statues which haunt Scottish towns and villages. These ‘sites’, Whatley explains, were once inaugurated with pomp, speeches and

8053_Malgrati.indd 239

06/03/23 10:55 am

240   Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics

popular ‘fervour’, but they have now ‘become depositaries of urban grime and . . . pit-stops for town-dwelling gulls’.7 Such a contrast between the lasting popularity of the poet and the decay of traditionalist commemorations of his works reminds us that collective memory is a fundamentally mutable object. As explained by Coppélia Kahn and Clara Calvo, in the case of Shakespeare, ‘The statue or memorial, as in Ovid’s line, may survive fire, sword and time, may last in its physical form, but it will cease speaking to its viewers’.8 Likewise, the conditions and modes of Burns’s fame have changed dramatically since Victorian times. The decline of print culture and the evolution of social practices have undermined the strength of the conventional Burns Movement. The time is long gone when the Burns Chronicle could sway Scottish cultural life and when battalions of autodidacts learnt ‘The Twa Dogs’ from Kirk benches to village Burns clubs and labour colleges. Likewise, the collapse of Empire and the transformation of local government in Scotland have diminished the aura of Burns monuments. Those institutions are no longer a significant source of local pride with the capacity to tie Scottish communities with the achievements of Great Britain overseas through the cult of Scottish heroes. Finally, the public worship of great male writers appears itself as a past phenomenon. The rise of feminism in Scottish culture and society, reinforced by the iconoclastic turn of Scottish literature since the interwar years, has debunked the masculine, pristine myth of Burns constructed by nineteenthcentury enthusiasts. Considering these changes, and the fact that Burns remains a marginal figure in the Scottish high school curriculum, the bard’s lasting popularity appears even more remarkable.9 Not all ‘immortals’ have lived up to Burns’s success. For instance, as explained by Ann Rigney, the commotions of the twentieth century, from decolonisation to literary modernism to the end of hero-worship, have undermined the ‘Immortal Memory’ of Walter Scott – Scotland’s ‘Great Forgotten’ – who now seems prisoner of the Victorian vision of the past he once helped shape.10 Unlike Scott’s upper-class aura, which even at the height of his popularity remained limited to bourgeois ranks, it seems that Burns’s democratic appeal resonates better with the social structure and ideology of modern Scotland – at least since the introduction of both universal suffrage and Welfare rights in the first part of the twentieth century.

8053_Malgrati.indd 240

06/03/23 10:55 am



Epilogue  241

Moreover, some elements of Burns’s legacy have proved particularly adaptable to the development of collective memory in twentiethcentury Scotland. For instance, the rise of visual culture during the last fifty years, has turned the 1787 Alexander Nasmyth portrait of Burns into an omnipresent and profitable icon of Scottishness. As a popstar or as ‘Che’ Guevara, from biscuit tins and whisky boxes to the rear wing of Norwegian airliners, it enhances the poet’s lasting, commodified popularity.11 Likewise, the revival of Scottish folk music, combined with the development of new audio technologies from vinyl to Spotify, has greatly improved access to Burns’s songs, which now constitute an essential introduction to the poet’s overall work. Moreover, Burns Suppers have grown out of the contrived series of toasts, borrowed from Masonic rituals and codified by Victorian and overseas Burns clubs, to become a more flexible kind of celebration, allowing for diversity, iconoclasm and informality. As revealed in a recent survey led by the University of Glasgow’s Centre for Robert Burns Studies and inventorying 2,500 contemporary Burns Suppers across one hundred and forty five countries, traditionalist kinds of Burns Night events are only the façade of a much more diverse phenomenon.12 Indeed, twenty-first-century Burns Suppers can either be ritualistic or parodic, stuffy or airy, multicultural or homely, meaty or vegetarian, corporate or intellectual, and, since the COVID-19 pandemic, in person or virtual.13 By reinventing itself, the tradition pervades every sector of Scottish society and generates millions of pounds for the Scottish economy. More fundamentally still, Burns remains a keystone of Scottish cultural politics. His lasting popularity, however deep or superficial, still challenges politicians, activists and writers to draw the poet’s legacy closer to their own worldview. Indeed, the level of media activity around Burns Night, which requires all political groups to defend their version of the bard every year, offers an effortless opportunity to stir polemic and attract coverage. This annual ritual confirms the status of Burns’s memory as an important political resource in modern Scotland. This is what Hugh MacDiarmid himself had sensed when, after condemning Burns suppers publicly during the 1920s, he remained an assiduous Burns speaker until the end of his life. Perhaps MacDiarmid had understood that the Burns Supper, more than a passé, nineteenth-century ceremony, was also an informal civic institution of stateless Scotland – a rare occasion to affirm the democratic life of the nation by upholding the memory of its national poet.

8053_Malgrati.indd 241

06/03/23 10:55 am

242   Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics

Certainly, David Hutchison was right to describe Burns as an ‘elastic symbol’, lending itself to all sorts of political opinions on Scotland’s past, present and future.14 Every political movement in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, from fascism to communism and unionism to nationalism, has claimed in some manner Burns’s ‘Immortal Memory’. In other words, the ‘protean’ bard, who adopted ambiguous political lines throughout his life, allows for multifarious and creative uses of his legacy from both ends of the political spectrum.15 However, a closer attention to chronology reveals a more subtle ideological shift in Burns’s afterlife. Though all parties lay claim to Burns’s message, some readings of his poetry tend to prevail over others, depending on the broader historical and political contexts. Such a development, for instance, is evident when considering the decline of the unionist, centre-right interpretation of Burns dominant during the Victorian era. Whilst this fusion of British imperialism, Scottish patriotism and counter-revolutionary values had defined Burns’s legacy until the Great War, the upheavals which ensued during the interwar years, combined with the enfranchisement of Scottish workers, exposed the poet’s eruptive contradictions. A significant blow against the liberal-conservative interpretation of Burns was struck during the 1920s by Scottish modernists, socialists, feminists and early nationalists, whose radical and (often) iconoclastic relation to the bard shook the foundations of the Victorian ‘Burns cult’. Fierce polemics between radical and traditionalist Burnsians were only softened during the 1940s, when the creation of the Welfare State as well as Labour’s progress, both across Scotland and within the Burns Federation, offered an inventive compromise. Whilst left-wing views of Burns reached the mainstream of Scottish society, emphasising the specifically Scottish roots of post-war corporatism, Labour Burnsians remained dedicated to the union of workers across the British Isles. Two decades later, however, the rise of the Scottish Question in the wake of the Cold War and decolonisation accelerated the decline of Scotland’s distinctive unionist culture. The pro-devolution shift in the strategy of Scottish Labour, initiated during the 1970s and exacerbated under Thatcherism, led the left to adopt the myth of Burns as a symbol of Scotland’s native egalitarianism. This merging of traditional left-wing themes with cultural nationalist slogans was striking,

8053_Malgrati.indd 242

06/03/23 10:55 am



Epilogue  243

for instance, in Donald Dewar’s speech at the convening ceremony of the Scottish Parliament in July 1999. Yet the deepening of the constitutional crisis during the following years lay bare Labour’s rhetorical ambiguities. Whilst Labour’s vision of Burns could thrive when Scottish matters remained subordinated to class politics, it lost its momentum as the nationalist movement incorporated demands for social justice. During the independence referendum campaign in 2013–14, Dewar’s rhetoric became an effective weapon when adopted by Alex Salmond, and ‘Yes’ rallies appropriated Labour’s egalitarian reading of Burns, encapsulated by the lyrics of ‘A Man’s a Man’. Meanwhile, the timid attempts to claim Burns for the ‘No’ side, revealed the abeyance of Scotland’s once powerful unionist imagination. Such change was also reinforced by the increasing involvement of the state – first British then Scottish – in the management of Burns’s memory and heritage. During the nineteenth century, the memorialisation of Burns through monuments, festivals and Burns clubs stemmed from the cultural laissez-faire of the Victorian era, characterised by the local, organic sponsorship of Scottish elites without further state intervention.16 However, this tradition was broken during the two world wars, when the British state repeatedly enrolled Burns’s memory for propaganda purposes. In 1915, the British Parliamentary Recruiting Committee issued a poster summoning Scotsmen to ‘Take [Burns’s] Tip’. Similarly, in January 1943 the Ministry of Information recruited the Burns Federation to hold meetings across Scotland and use Burns’s egalitarian message to promote the Beveridge Report. Moreover, alongside wartime propaganda, the creation of both the National Trust for Scotland (1931) and the Saltire Society (1936), combined with the consequences of the Local Government (Scotland) Act of 1973, accompanied the development of Scottish heritage oversight at a more national level.17 As Graeme Morton puts it, this ‘ideological shift in the superiority of central over local government’, which resulted in increasing powers for the Scottish Office in Scottish cultural matters, was evident at the head of the Burns Federation. During the 1940s, indeed, Scottish Burnsians resorted to asking the Scottish Secretary of State for funding whilst developing social and charitable activities to accompany the creation of the Welfare State.18 This statist trend was not linear, however, and it relapsed temporarily during the second part of the twentieth century. With the end

8053_Malgrati.indd 243

06/03/23 10:55 am

244   Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics

of the war in 1945 and the defeat of Labour in 1951, state involvement in Burns’s memory-making receded in the run-up to the 1959 commemorations of Burns’s birth. Likewise, thirty-seven years later in 1996, John Major’s government, though very keen on imposing Shakespeare’s plays on the English National Curriculum, shunned the bicentenary celebrations of Burns’s death.19 From the Burns stamp controversy in 1959, to the failure of the under-funded Ayr ‘International Burns Festival’ in 1996, state inaction agitated Scottish civil society and triggered nationalist reactions. Certainly, such mismanagement of Burns’s memory contrasted awkwardly with the poet’s growing popularity overseas during the same period, not only in the Anglosphere but further still in Communist regimes and many new countries of the southern hemisphere.20 The poet’s global popularity, opportune for Scottish trade and tourism, needed stronger political attention. In retrospect, devolution seems to have brought an answer to these concerns. The unprecedented involvement of the Scottish Government in the Year of Homecoming in 2009, and the inauguration of a new, £21 million Burns Museum in Alloway in 2011, put an end to the time of laissez-faire in matters of memory making. This was further asserted in January 2020, when a government-funded study, led by Professor Murray Pittock, advised new public investments in Burns’s brand – estimated at £203 million per annum for the Scottish economy.21 The bard’s memorialisation and commodification are now, and more than ever, a matter of state. Admittedly, this broad-brush picture of Burns’s afterlife might encourage a hasty conclusion, stressing the successful capture of Burns’s memory by Scottish nationalists in the early twenty-first century. By contrast with demonstrations of ‘banal unionism’ in the nineteenth century, it is true that Burns’s legacy feeds an increasingly self-confident – yet also self-conscious – kind of cultural nationalism in the contemporary era.22 Since the 2014 referendum, every Burns Night has been marked by relatively expected tweets or videos from Scotland’s First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, inviting Scottish folks to celebrate the globally famous author of ‘Tam o’ Shanter’ and ‘A Man’s a Man for a’ that’.23 These interventions, seconded by most SNP MSPs and ministers, as well as Scottish Government accounts on social media, seem less an attempt to use Burns for explicitly partisan purposes than a serene demonstration of nationalist control

8053_Malgrati.indd 244

06/03/23 10:55 am



Epilogue  245

over national symbolism. Besides, at a more grassroots level, Burns’s image appears as a recurring feature of Scotland’s broader proindependence scene. From Burns flags and tshirts at rallies by the separatist collective ‘All Under One Banner’ to humorous nationalist Burns Night memes on social media, the rise of a Burnsian, pro-independence folklore appears a lasting legacy of the 2014 ‘Yes’ Campaign.24 This is also revealed by the University of Glasgow’s interactive map of contemporary suppers published in 2021, which lists a total of 28 nationalist Burns Suppers across Scotland – by contrast with only a handful of unionist events.25 Further still, and beyond partisan spheres, it seems Burns’s image can feed into more openly nationalist tropes in Scottish popular culture. This was exemplified in 2021 during the UEFA European Football Championship, when a video of Scottish supporters chanting ‘Ye’re just a shite Rabbie Burns’ at William Shakespeare’s statue in London’s Leicester Square went viral on the internet. Shared by the influential Instagram account ‘Scottish Patter’, the video gained more than a million views on social media as well as almost 100,000 likes.26 A mostly harmless display of Scottish humour, this episode nonetheless shows that thousands of Scots enjoy a version of Burns unimaginable a century ago, when the memories of both Scotland and England’s bards were tied together by Britain’s imperial project. Nevertheless, the links between Burns’s memory and contemporary nationalism are more complex than those brazen elements might suggest. Whilst shifts can be identified in Burns’s political legacy, from laissez-faire unionism to social democracy and civic nationalism, such developments were neither straightforward nor unequivocal. Conflicting approaches to Burns marked every step in the process of his memorialisation, and our contemporary era is anything but an exception to this. Indeed, contradictions are evident amongst twentyfirst-century nationalists. The rise of a confident pro-independence force remains a very recent development in Scottish history; this means the 2010s ‘Yes’ movement has had to rely on cultural representations shaped by centuries of union-based politics. Building on Labour’s patriotic opposition to Thatcherism, the modern SNP uses Burns as a progressive, civic hero, whose international profile, egalitarian values, pluralistic bardship and Anglo-Scottish bilingualism could bolster a fluid form of ‘post-nationalism’.27 Such a position has led the SNP to distance itself from the more aggressive Anglophobic stance of

8053_Malgrati.indd 245

06/03/23 10:55 am

246   Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics

its founding member, MacDiarmid whose scepticism towards Burns marked the party’s culture until at least the 1980s. Certainly, Burnsian inclusiveness has proved effective in rallying Labour and Liberal votes to the nationalist cause. Yet it also sheds light on the increasingly narrow impasse faced by the broader independence movement. After more than fifteen years of power in the Scottish Parliament, the SNP seems mired in the constitutional settlement of devolution with which Burns’s memory was so tightly associated in 1999. With limited legal and political capacity to force a second independence referendum, the SNP seems in a paradoxical situation, deriving its power from a status quo it claims to oppose. Certainly, nationalist uses of Burns’s versatile Anglo-Scottish diction reflects these complicated links between the SNP’s hegemony in Scotland and Britain’s current constitution. Beyond nationalist spheres, moreover, it would be wrong to suggest that the more traditional, unionist uses of the poet inherited from the Victorian era have entirely disappeared. Burns remains a useful reference for the more conservative elements of Scottish society. For instance, the loyal toast still features in the liturgy of established Burns clubs – from Dumfries to Ayr, Irvine, and Greenock – and, in January 2021, amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, the Prince of Wales (and future King Charles III) even joined the virtual supper of the Robert Burns World Federation, reciting ‘Auld Lang Syne’ for the occasion.28 Likewise, many Scottish Masonic lodges have maintained a royalist decorum for their annual Burns Supper. For instance, the Lodge St Servanus No. 771 in Alva, near Stirling, hosted a Burns supper in January 2018 which included a ‘Loyal Address’ followed by ‘Auld Lang Syne’ and ‘The National Anthem’.29 This combination of ‘God Save the Queen’ and ‘Auld Lang Syne’ is also a recurring trait of the Last Night of the Proms in London, which traditionally features both songs, together with other British patriotic hymns from ‘See, The Conquering Hero Come’ to ‘Rule Britannia!’. The resilience of this unionist Burns is further attested by Murdo Fraser, Conservative MSP and ex-deputy leader of the Scottish Conservatives: ‘There are a lot of people in the Burns hierarchy, in the Burns Federation, who are very strongly unionist’, explains Fraser, before dropping the name of Peter T. Hughes, a ‘very active unionist’ who was President of the Burns Federation in 2015–16.30 According to Fraser, such conservatism can be explained ‘because Burns is a tradition and that conservatives love traditions, which means

8053_Malgrati.indd 246

06/03/23 10:55 am



Epilogue  247

that the strict formula of the Burns Supper appeals to people who are rather conservative’.31 Fraser’s analysis is also shared by David Hopes, curator of the Robert Burns Birthplace Museum from 2014 to 2016. ‘The strict liturgy of Burns Suppers is cementing the fact that things shouldn’t change’, declares Hopes, who points out the influence of Masonry and ‘working-class conservatism’ in some contemporary Burns clubs.32 Besides, Hopes adds that ‘Burns Suppers reflect the power structure and the norms of society’ – a dimension which is also reflected by the fact that many Burns clubs excluded women until a very recent date. In 2015, for instance, Hopes had to intervene personally to allow Kirsteen McCue from the University of Glasgow to become the first female speaker at the very exclusive Tarbolton Bachelors’ Club.33 Certainly, whilst recent research points to an increasing diversification of the Burns Supper, the stricter façade of the Burns movement, appealing to a more conservative audience, endures in some sectors of Scottish society.34 Furthermore, Theresa May’s Burns Suppers, hosted in No. 10 twice, in January 2018 and 2019, and reiterated by Boris Johnson in 2020, appear an original effort to revamp the unionist Burns tradition.35 Indeed, more than a mere celebration of Scottish Conservative gains in the 2017 General Elections, the Prime Minister’s Burns Supper aimed to strengthen an ‘enduring Union’ at a time of deep constitutional unrest, heightened by the context of Brexit. 36 May’s efforts could be seen as a direct response to the Scottish Government, which, since the Brexit vote in June 2016, has used Burns repeatedly in international settings to reach out to European partners. In January 2017, for instance, Alex Salmond participated in a Burns Supper at the European Parliament in Strasbourg. 37 Likewise, in January 2019 Burns Suppers were held in Paris and Berlin to mark the recent opening of Scottish Government offices in both European capitals.38 Against these, the Prime Minister’s Burns supper restated London’s importance on the political map of the contemporary Burns movement. Certainly, such an attempt to reverse the cultural devolution of Burns seems unlikely to succeed. Unionist and conservative uses of the poet, despite surviving up to the present day, are weaker than they were a century ago, in an era when Empire, warlike patriotism, exclusive patriarchy and middle-class sociability were constitutive elements of the ‘Burns cult’. Nonetheless, the Prime Minister’s

8053_Malgrati.indd 247

06/03/23 10:55 am

248   Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics

suppers had the merit of highlighting the resilience of pan-British Tory Burns celebrations. Overall, it is debatable whether the old, unionist-nationalist reading of Burns has declined or whether its fluid spirit has been revived in tacit, ambiguous ways by the Janus-faced settlement of devolution. What is sure, however, is that from the SNP to the Tories, few voices in contemporary Scottish politics seem capable (or willing) of opposing the narrative which conflates Burns’s legacy with the past, present and future of Scotland’s constitution. Certainly, throughout the nineteenth century and for most of the twentieth, the bard stood as a prominent symbol of Scottish identity. As such, his legacy remained a battlefield for any political grouping willing to impose its vision of Scottishness, whether imperialist, socialist, pacifist or patriotic. But it was not until the last four decades that Burns’s image developed into a more distinct symbol of national self-rule – an icon used not only to define the identity of a stateless nation but, more markedly, to advocate or oppose the creation of a Scottish nation-state. This constitutional obsession has become the central feature of the bard’s political afterlife in contemporary Scotland. In this context, one must turn to contemporary artists and poets to address Burns’s legacy beyond issues of self-determination. Significantly, Burns has made a comeback in Scottish poetry since MacDiarmid’s death in 1978. Against MacDiarmid’s mot d’ordre, ‘Not Burns – Dunbar!’, contemporary poets have returned to Burnsian forms and themes to explore new Scottish sounds, challenging the status quo of English literature. This trend is conspicuous from Edwin Morgan and Robert Crawford’s celebration of Scotland’s miscellaneous identity to Douglas Dunn and W. N. Herbert’s revaluation of the Burns Stanza in contemporary Scottish writing. Marked by the emergence of the Scottish Question during the 1970s and the movement for a Scottish Assembly during the 1990s, these poets have often – though not always systematically – explored Burns’s bardic legacy, brandishing Scottish identity in hope of constitutional change. Alongside this, however, a more sceptical approach to Burns and Scottish identity has recently re-emerged in Scottish poetry. Since the 2014 referendum, several poets of national prominence, including Scots Makars Liz Lochhead, Jackie Kay and Kathleen Jamie, have used Burns’s legacy not to assert, but instead to query home-proud definitions of Scottishness. Tinged by feminist, anti-racist or environmental

8053_Malgrati.indd 248

06/03/23 10:55 am

Epilogue  249



concerns, their approach to Burns tends to deconstruct questions of identity and sovereignty altogether. Lochhead’s suspicion towards Burns was already clear in her 2009 poem, ‘From a Mouse’, which replaced the poet’s masculine, top-down address ‘To A Mouse’, by the impudent perspective of a feminine rodent. More recently still, after the parenthesis of her commitment to the ‘Yes’ Campaign, Lochhead renewed her feminist critique of the bard. In January 2018, in the wake of the #MeToo feminist social media movement, she compared Burns’s rakish behaviour to that of Harvey Weinstein, the predatory American film producer.39 Evidence of this, according to Lochhead, lay in Burns’s infamous letter to Robert Ainslie, in which the poet boasts his rough (and perhaps forced) intercourse with his pregnant wife, Jean Armour.40 However anachronistic, Lochhead’s argument proved interesting, as it changed the focus of the debate on Burns from the black and white wrangle on the poet’s patriotism to the more intricate issue of Scotland’s hyper-masculine pantheon. Whilst Scottish identity had often been repressed, Lochhead explained that its ‘prurient sentimentalism’, oblivious to the darker side of national myths, could also prove ‘grisly’ and oppressive.41 This point was also raised by Jackie Kay – Scots Makar 2016–21 – during the 2017 Edinburgh Art Festival, which featured an exhibition about Burns and slavery, at the National Portrait Gallery. The highlight of this event was Douglas Gordon’s statue, ‘Black Burns’ – a black marble replica of John Flaxman’s 1824 statue of the poet, which towered in the Great Hall of the Gallery.42 Unlike the latter, however, Gordon’s black statue lay broken on the floor, shattered to pieces at the feet of Flaxman’s white original. For many art critics, like Laura Cumming of The Guardian, Gordon’s broken statue reflected the ‘darker side’ of Burns – the man who ‘booked a passage to Jamaica with the aim of becoming a bookkeeper on a slave plantation’ and only cancelled his plans due to his unexpected literary success.43 Jackie Kay, a poet born to a Nigerian father, shared this interpretation of Gordon’s statue. In her poem ‘The Planting Line’, occasioned by Gordon’s work, Kay explored Burns’s complicated relationship with equality, race, and slavery: . . . Had [Burns] not very nearly agreed To be an assistant overseer on

8053_Malgrati.indd 249

06/03/23 10:55 am

250   Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics a Jamaican Plantation, out of whatever desperation. . . . Had he overseen slaves toil on the sugarcane; Had he not written A Slave’s Lament . . . Had his dream of lime and orange and pine come to fruition. And had he finally boarded the Nancy for Savannah Western Jamaica, . . . Had he not been the Bard o’ Scotland. Had he never been seen like this, Smashed on the floor of a national gallery, Then who might he be? Not Rabbie.44

According to Kay’s poem, Gordon’s ‘smashed’ statue reflected the unrealised potential of Burns’s biography. The contradiction between the poet’s Jamaican dream, which could have led him on the road to slave ownership, and ‘The Slave’s Lament’ – an abolitionist poem allegedly written by Burns – drew a fault line in the bard’s memorialisation and raised difficult questions about Scotland’s colonial history. Indeed, Burns’s many iconic statues which secured his imperial reputation during the nineteenth century served as a further reminder of Scotland’s aggressive past. More recently still, in 2020, similar questions resurfaced in the wake of the international Black Lives Matter protests. In Scotland, news of George Floyd’s murder fuelled concerns about the unsolved death of Sheku Bayoh: a Kirkcaldy man born in Sierra Leone who had died after being arrested by the police in May 2015. Reflecting on this affair during the summer of 2020, the Scottish playwright Hannah Lavery wrote a Lament for Sheku Bayoh in co-production with the Royal Lyceum Theatre and the National Theatre of Scotland. Her play, staged in November of that year, is an indictment of Scotland’s self-image as a generous, welcoming nation.45 Ironically, Lavery’s Lament opens with a gospel rendition of Burns’s ‘A Man’s a Man’: a symbol of Scotland’s egalitarian myth which the play aims to challenge. Stressing the unclear circumstances of Bayoh’s death and voicing the sorrow of his friends and family, the play ends with a motherlike cry: ‘My beautiful brown boy. / My sweet son- / welcome to your world’.46 Once again, as seen with Lochhead and Kay, it seems the conflation of Burns’s memory with

8053_Malgrati.indd 250

06/03/23 10:55 am



Epilogue  251

the chest-beating, ideology of devolved Scotland has turned the poet into an almost compulsory symbol for any writer wishing to nuance that narrative. Such association of Burns’s memory with Scotland’s patriarchal and racial status quo could undermine the poet’s reputation in future years. However, besides the issue of Scottish independence, the rise of Scottish environmental politics and eco-poetry since the beginning of the twenty-first century has proved Burns’s works can still inspire change. In January 2022, Scotland’s newly appointed Makar Kathleen Jamie published a video in which she read and contrasted Burns’s 1786 poem ‘To A Mountain Daisy’ with her own 2004 piece of verse, ‘Daisies’.47 According to Jamie, ‘Burns tends when having spoken to a flower, or to a mouse, or to whatever to turn that as analogy for his own condition’. This is a key difference with ‘modern eco-poetry’ which ‘wouldn’t do that and would just leave the flower or the mouse alone’.48 Indeed, Burns’s poem to a flower ‘turned down with the plow’ likens the daisy’s hasty ‘bloom’ and sudden ‘doom’ with a foreshadowing of his own ‘fate’. By contrast, Jamie’s poem adopts the daisies’ voice, providing the flowers’ own perspective on their untimely death.49 Yet, despite her modern ecological approach, critical of the bard’s self-centred form of nature writing, Jamie agrees to situate her work in the Scottish tradition inaugurated by Burns. ‘The practice has come a long way’, she explains, ‘but poetry’s ability to speak both to and as natural things remains a vital strength, especially in these times of environmental emergency’.50 As such, Burns, who should be ‘considered one of the first eco-poets’, ranks as an inspiring antecedent.51 Here, Jamie’s words seem to echo a more clearly political statement issued a few years earlier by the Scottish branch of the civil disobedience movement, Extinction Rebellion. On Burns Day 2019, this radical ecologist group occupied the Scottish Parliament with the hope ‘to spark a national conversation about the ecological crisis and climate breakdown, and enable the drastic action required to address it, including the implementation of a Citizens Assembly . . . in the name of the land and people of Scotland’.52 To justify their action, ecologist activists ‘invoked the spirit of Scotland’s radical ecopoet, Robert Burns’.53 ‘Amidst the haggis and whisky’, Extinction Rebellion warned that ‘we are liable to forget that Burns was not only a poet, lover, and patriot, but also a naturalist, farmer, and radical

8053_Malgrati.indd 251

06/03/23 10:55 am

252   Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics

environmentalist’. In other words, according to this statement, there was little doubt that the poet who wrote ‘The Wounded Hare’, ‘The Death and Dying Words of Poor Mailie’, ‘Song Composed in August’, and ‘On the Destruction of Drumlanrig Woods’ would ‘support the goals of Extinction Rebellion Scotland’.54 The activists ended their declaration with a famous quote from Burns’s ‘To a Mouse’: ‘I’m truly sorry Man’s dominion / has broken Nature’s social union’.55 Twenty years after the Scottish Parliament was birthed by Burns’s verse, the poet’s legacy now served to challenge the authority of Scotland’s devolved state in the name of an ecological crisis requiring not national but global solutions. Overall, from feminism to anti-racism and green consciousness, the poetry of Lochhead, Kay and Jamie offers a rich and complex vision of Burns for the twenty-first century aside from the question of Scottish independence. The transformation of Burns into a symbol of Scotland’s constitution was a central trait of the bard’s afterlife during the last century, and it seems unlikely that such a process will be reversed promptly. Nonetheless, beside mainstream political battles which perpetuate the poet’s iconic presence in the public space, the Scottish tradition of radical iconoclasm, developed by cultural avantgardes during the first part of the twentieth century, seems now firmly established. In a manner reminiscent of the Suffragette Frances Parker, who attempted to destroy Burns’s Cottage whilst singing his emancipatory songs, contemporary Scottish poets use Burns’s memory as a convenient touchstone to challenge the comfortable myths of Scottish identity and cultural authority. Their efforts, however disturbing they might appear, reflect the truly memorable legacy of the poet. A pliable material, Burns’s work can be constructed, deconstructed and reconstructed endlessly to meet the political requirements of the present. Yet, more fundamentally, contemporary artists and activists remind us that poetry is a very slippery platform on which to build a national identity. At the end of the night, when suppers and speeches are over, the poet’s words persist. Their ambiguity, their irreverence, their sense of awe, derision and urgency will continue to unsettle our best-established doctrines and our deepest convictions. As we face an uncertain future, when the fate of the British constitution is at stake, Burns encourages us to confront self-satisfied settlements and self-proclaimed authority – including his own. In between doubt and commitment, ‘the glorious

8053_Malgrati.indd 252

06/03/23 10:55 am



Epilogue  253

priviledge / Of being independant’ remains a reasonable ideal, and the thorough examination of Burns’s political afterlives may contribute meaningful lessons to the quest for it.56

Notes  1. Glasgow Herald, 18 December 1999; Evening Times, 6 April 2006; STV News, 30 November 2009. Available at (last accessed 11 December 2018); The Scotsman, 2 May 2016.  2. Daily Record, 25 January 2005.  3. Evening Times, 1 June 2013.  4. Daily Record, 25 January 2000. This result was nuanced on Burns’s 250th anniversary in 2009, when a new survey by The Famous Grouse found that only 38% of Scottish people ignored Burns’s birthday. Evening Times, 19 January 2009.  5. Glasgow Herald, 12 October 2004.   6. ‘Auld Lang What?’, Sainsbury’s Website, 27 December 2017, (last accessed 4 March 2019).  7. Whatley, Immortal Memory, p. 183.   8. Kahn and Calvo (eds), Celebrating Shakespeare, p. 3.  9. At the time of writing, Burns features only as one of the fourteen optional Scottish authors set for Higher English courses. He is not a part of the National 5 Curriculum. See ‘Scottish Set Texts for National 5 and Higher English Courses’, Scottish Qualifications Authority, (last accessed 14 February 2022). 10. Rigney, The Afterlives of Walter Scott, p. 10. 11. Dougal, ‘Robert Burns and the Re-Making of National Memory’; The Edinburgh Reporter, 25 January 2018. Available at (last accessed 5 March 2019). The image of Burns as ‘Che’ Guevara (used as the cover of this book) was commissioned in 2006 by the University of the West Scotland from the agency Atalanta. It has since become a political meme, often used on Scottish social media. 12. Malgrati, ‘Contemporary Burns Suppers’, 127–48. According to this survey, ‘ritualistic’ kinds of Burns Suppers comprise only 14% of the entire database. See also Malgrati and Aitken, ‘Interactive Map of Burns Suppers’, University of Glasgow, (last accessed 17 December 2021).

8053_Malgrati.indd 253

06/03/23 10:55 am

254   Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics 13. Regarding virtual Burns suppers during the COVID-19 pandemic, see the special issue of the Burns Chronicle, 2022, Vol. 131, pp. 121–133. 14. Hutchison, ‘Burns, The Elastic Symbol’, in Simpson (ed.), Love and Liberty, pp. 79–86. 15. Simpson, The Protean Scot. 16. This perspective on Victorian memory-making was advocated by Morton in Unionist-Nationalism and confirmed, in the case of Burns, by Whatley in Immortal Memory. 17. Morton, William Wallace, p. 127. 18. Ibid. 19. See Holderness and Murphy, ‘Shakespeare’s England: Britain’s Shakespeare’, in Joughin (ed.), Shakespeare and National Culture, pp. 19­–32. 20. After the Cold War, international tourism became the key vehicle for the global expansion of Burns Night. See McGinn, The Burns Supper, p. 207. 21. See the report of this study and the transcript of MacAlpine’s intervention in Parliament on the website of the University of Glasgow, (last accessed 2 April 2020). 22. The phrase ‘banal unionism’ is from Kidd, Union and Unionisms, p. 23. 23. See for instance, Nicola Sturgeon’s video shared on Burns Night 2022, (last accessed 31 January 2022), or this other tweet sharing Eddie Reader’s adaptation of ‘A Red, Red Rose’ on 25 January 2020, (last accessed 31 January 2022). The first of such tweets was posted by Nicola Sturgeon on Burns Night 2015, (last accessed on 31 January 2022). 24. The popular Facebook page ‘Independence Memes for Nationalist Dreams’ produces regular Burns Night memes, including one opposing ‘The Virgin Shakespeare’ and ‘The Chad Burns’ in January 2022. Available at (last accessed 31 January 2022). 25. Malgrati and Aitken, ‘Interactive Map of Burns Suppers’. The full database is available at (last accessed 1 February 2022). 26. The video can be found online on Instagram at and on Twitter at (last accessed 1 February 2022).

8053_Malgrati.indd 254

06/03/23 10:55 am



Epilogue  255

27. Hassan, ‘Post-Nationalist Scotland, Post-Nationalist UK’ in Independence of the Scottish Mind, pp. 207–17. 28. See ‘PoW Burns Night 202’, uploaded by ‘Robert Burns’, 24 January 2021, YouTube. Available at (last accessed 1 February 2022). 29. Programme of the Lodge St Servanus Annual Burns Supper, ‘Website of the Freemasons of Lodge St Servanus No. 771’, < http://www. lodge771.com/social-pages/burns-supper-2018.htm> (last accessed 12 March 2019). 30. Interview with Murdo Fraser, 27 November 2018. 31. Ibid. 32. Interview with David Hopes, 20 November 2018. 33. The Times, 24 January 2015. Available at (last accessed 12 March 2019). 34. Malgrati, ‘Contemporary Burns Suppers’, pp. 147–8. 35. The Herald, 22 January 2020. Johnson had to cancel further Burns Night plans in 2021 and 2022 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. 36. ‘Enduring Union’ was the phrase used by Theresa May at her 2018 Burns Supper, see Daily Mail, 22 January 2018. Available at (last accessed 12 March 2019). 37. The Scotsman, 25 January 2017. 38. The French and Scottish Europe Ministers, Ben MacPherson and Nathalie Loiseau, were both present at the ceremony. See tweet by Ben MacPherson, 26 January 2019, (last accessed 13 March 2019). For the Berlin Burns Supper, see Diplomat Magazine, 26 January 2019, (last accessed 14 March 2019). 39. The Guardian, 24 January 2018. 40. Ibid. Letter from Robert Burns to Robert Ainslie, 3 March 1788, L1, p. 251. 41. See Lochhead’s comment on this affair in The Scotsman, 25 January 2018. 42. See a depiction of the exhibition in Olivia Langhorn, ‘Edinburgh Art Festival 2017: ‘Black Burns’ and ‘The Slave’s Lament’’, The Student Newspaper, 29 October 2017, (last accessed 18 March 2013). 43. The Guardian, 30 July 2017.

8053_Malgrati.indd 255

06/03/23 10:55 am

256   Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics 44. Poem reprinted in the Scottish Review of Books, Vol. 12(4), August 2017, p. 12. 45. See critique of the play by Mark Fisher in The Guardian, 20 November 2020. 46. Extract of the play published in The Scores, 10, 2021. 47. See ‘Scotland’s Makar Kathleen Jamie reads’, uploaded by ScottishPoetryLib, 23 January 2022, YouTube. Available at (last accessed on 2 February 2022). 48. Ibid. 49. Jamie, The Tree House. 50. See Jamie’s tweet from 24 January 2022, (last accessed 2 February 2022). 51. Ibid. 52. The Guardian, 25 January 2019. 53. The statement was uploaded on the website of Extinction Rebellion, 25 January 2019, (last accessed 2 February 2019). 54. Ibid. 55. Ibid. 56. Robert Burns, ‘Epistle to a Young Friend’, P1, ll. 55–6, p. 250.

8053_Malgrati.indd 256

06/03/23 10:55 am

Bibliography

Alker, Sharon, Leith Davis and Holy Faith Nelson (eds), Robert Burns and Transatlantic Culture (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012). Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 2006). Anderson, Carol (ed.), Opening the Doors: The Achievement of Catherine Carswell (Edinburgh: Ramsay Head, 2001). Andrews, Corey E., ‘Radical Attribution: Robert Burns and “The Liberty Tree”’, Studies in Scottish Literature, 41(1), 2015, pp. 174–90. Anon, Burns Belongs to the People (Glasgow, c. 1936). Ascherson, Neal, Stone Voices: The Search for Scotland (London: Granta, 2002). Atkinson, Harriet, The Festival of Britain: A Land and its People (London: I. B. Tauris, 2012). Barke, James, The Wind that Shakes the Barley (Edinburgh: Black & White, 2008). Barke, James, The Well of the Silent Harp (London: Fontana, 1975). Barke, James, The Wonder of all the Gay World (London: Fontana, 1975). Barke, James (ed.), Poems and Songs of Robert Burns (London: Collins, 1956). Barr, James, Lang Syne: Memoirs of the Rev. James Barr (Glasgow: William MacLellan 1949). Bell, Eleanor, and Linda Gunn (eds), The Scottish Sixties. Reading, Rebellion, Revolution? (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2013). Blake, George, The Shipbuilders (Edinburgh: Black & White Publishing, 1993). Blair, Kirstie, Working Verse in Victorian Scotland: Poetry, Press, Community (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). Boas, Jacob, Writers’ Block: The Paris Antifascist Congress of 1935 (Cambridge: Modern Humanities Research Association, 2016). Bold, Alan, MacDiarmid: Christopher Murray Grieve: a Critical Biography (London: London Murray, 1988). Bort, Eberhard (ed.), Anent Hamish Henderson (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016). Boudrot, Pierre, L’écrivain éponyme. Clubs, sociétés, et associations prenant nom d’écrivain en Occident depuis la Révolution française (Paris: Armand Colin, 2012).

8053_Malgrati.indd 257

06/03/23 10:55 am

258   Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics Boudrot, Pierre, ‘Robert Burns, héros de la nation écossaise, fondateur de son identité collective’, Hypothèses, 5(1), 2002, pp. 191–203. Bowd, Gavin, Fascist Scotland. Caledonia and the Far Right (Edinburgh: Birlinn 2013). Brown, Ian and Gerard Carruthers (eds), Performing Robert Burns: Enactment and Representations of the ‘National Bard’ (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2021). Brown, Wendy, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995). Browne, Ronnie, That Guy Fae the Corries (Dingwall: Sandstone Press, 2015). Browne, Sarah, The Women’s Liberation Movement in Scotland (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014). Buchan, John, The Northern Muse (London: Nelson, 1924). Burns, Robert, The Letters of Robert Burns, ed. J. DeLancey Ferguson, second edition, ed. G. Ross Roy (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985). Burns, Robert, The Oxford Edition of the Works of Robert Burns. Volume I: Commonplace Books, Tour Journals, and Miscellaneous Prose, ed. Nigel Leask (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). Burns, Robert, The Oxford Edition of the Works of Robert Burns. Volume II and III: The Scots Musical Museum, ed. Murray Pittock (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). Burns Robert, The Poems and Songs of Robert Burns, ed. James Kinsley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968). Butter, P. H., Edwin Muir: Man and Poet (Edinburgh: Oliver Boyd, 1966). Cairney, John, Immortal Memories (Edinburgh: Luath, 2003). Cairney, John, The Man who Played Robert Burns (Edinburgh: Mainstream, 1987). Callaghan, John, Cold War, Crisis, and Conflict. The CPGB 1951–68 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2003). Campbell, J. R., Burns, the Democrat (Glasgow: Caledonian Books, 1945). Carnie, Robert Hay, ‘Hugh MacDiarmid, Robert Burns, and the Burns Federation’, Studies in Scottish Literature, 30(1), 1998, pp. 261–76 Carrigan, Daniel, ‘Patrick Dollan (1885–1963) and the Labour Movement in Glasgow’, MPhil thesis, University of Glasgow, 2014. Carruthers, Gerard, ‘The Canongate Burns: misreading Robert Burns and the periodical press of the 1790s’, Review of Scottish Culture, 18, 2006, pp. 41–50. Carruthers, Gerard (ed.), The Edinburgh Companion to Robert Burns (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009). Carruthers, Gerard, ‘New Bardolatry’, Burns Chronicle (Kilmarnock: Burns Federation, 2002), pp. 2–13. Carruthers, Gerard, ‘The Problem of Pseudonyms in the Burns “Lost Poems”’, Studies in Scottish Literature, 33, 2004, pp. 97–106. Carruthers, Gerard, Robert Burns (Tavistock: North Cote, 2006).

8053_Malgrati.indd 258

06/03/23 10:55 am



Bibliography  259

Carruthers, Gerard, ‘Robert Burns and Slavery’, The Drouth, 26, 2008, pp. 21–6 Carruthers, Gerard, ‘The Word on Burns’, Drouth, 3, 2002, pp. 10–15. Carruthers, Gerard and Don Martin (eds), Thomas Muir of Huntershill. Essays for the Twenty-First Century (Edinburgh: humming earth, 2016). Carruthers, Gerard and Johnny Rodger (eds), Fickle Man: Robert Burns in the 21st Century (Dingwall: Sandstone Press, 2009). Carswell, Catherine, The Life of Robert Burns (London: Chatto & Windus, 1930). Challinor, Raymond, John S. Clarke: Parliamentarian, Poet, Lion-Tamer (London: Pluto Press, 1977). Champagne, John, Aesthetic Modernism and Masculinity in Fascist Italy (London: Routledge, 2012). Clarke, John Smith, Robert Burns and his Politics (Glasgow: Glasgow Labour College, 1925). Clarke, John Smith, The Story of Robert Burns. A Lecture (Glasgow: Scottish Workers’ Committees, 1920). Clarke, John Smith, What Robert Burns Thought and Wrote on Toryism and Socialism, Riches, Poverty and War (Glasgow: Civic Press, 1925). Coleman, James J., Remembering the Past in Nineteenth Century Scotland (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014). Colvin, Calum and Rab Wilson, Burnsiana. Artworks and Poems Inspired by the Life and Legacy of Robert Burns (Edinburgh: Luath, 2014). Connerton, Paul, How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). Corrie, Joe, The Image o’ God (Edinburgh: Porpoise Press, 1937). Corrie, Joe, The Rake o’ Mauchline. A Play in One Act (Glasgow: Brown, Son & Fergusson, 1938). Corrie, Joe, Robert Burns (Glasgow: Brown, Son & Fergusson, 1943). Craig, Cairns, The Wealth of the Nation: Scotland, Culture, and Independence (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018). Craig, Iona, ‘The Influence of Robert Burns on Scottish Labour Leaders’. Undergraduate thesis, University of Stirling, 2017. Crawford, Robert, Bannockburns. Scottish Independence and Literary Imagination, 1314–2014 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014). Crawford, Robert, The Bard. Robert Burns: A Biography (London: Jonathan Cape, 2009). Crawford, Robert, Devolving English Literature (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992). Crawford, Robert, A Scottish Assembly (London: Chatto & Windus, 1990). Crawford, Robert (ed.), Robert Burns and Cultural Authority (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997). Crawford, Robert (ed.), New Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect (Edinburgh: Polygon, 2009).

8053_Malgrati.indd 259

06/03/23 10:55 am

260   Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics Crawford, Robert (ed.), The Scottish Invention of English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Crawford, Robert and W. N. Herbert, Sharawaggi (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1990). Crawford, Thomas, Boswell, Burns and the French Revolution (Edinburgh: The Saltire Society, 1990). Crawford, Thomas, Burns: A Study of the Poems and Songs (Edinburgh: Canongate Academies, 1994). Crawfurd, Helen, ‘Autobiography of Helen Crawfurd’, Marx Memorial Library, https://www.marx-memorial-library.org.uk/project-section/ww1documents. Currie, James, The Life of Robert Burns. With a Criticism on His Writings, To Which are Prefixed Some Observations on the Scottish Peasantry (Liverpool: J. McCreery, 1800). De Staël, Germaine, De la literature (Paris: Flammarion, 1999). Donaldson, William, ‘The Glencairn Connection: Robert Burns and Scottish Politics, 1786–1796’, Studies in Scottish Literature, 16, 1981, pp. 61–79. Dougal, Josephine, ‘Robert Burns and the Re-Making of National Memory in Contemporary Scotland’ Authorship, 1(2), 2012, pp. 1–14. Dunn, Douglas, Poll Tax: The Fiscal Fake (London: Chatto & Windus, 1990). Dunn, Douglas, St Kilda’s Parliament (London: Faber and Faber, 1981). Eagleton, Terry, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996). Eaton, James, and David Renton, The Communist Party of Great Britain Since 1920 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002). Eliot, Valerie, and John Haffenden (eds), The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Volume 8: 1936–1938 (London: Faber and Faber, 2019). Finlay, Alec (ed.), The Armstrong Nose. Selected Letters of Hamish Henderson (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1996). Finlay, Richard, Independent and Free, Scottish Politics and the Origins of the Scottish National Party, 1918–1945 (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1994). Geddes, Patrick, ‘The Scots Renascence’, reprinted in Edinburgh Review, 88 (1992), 17–23. Gibson, Corey, The Voice of the People: Hamish Henderson and Scottish Cultural Politics (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015). Gifford, Douglas, ‘Sham Bards of a Sham Nation? Edwin Muir and the Failures of Scottish Literature’, Studies in Scottish Literature, 35(1), 2007, pp. 339–61. Gifford, Douglas (ed.), Addressing the Bard: Twelve Contemporary Poets Respond to Robert Burns (Edinburgh: Scottish Poetry Library, 2009). Glass, Rodge, Alasdair Gray, A Secretary’s Biography (London: Bloomsbury 2008).

8053_Malgrati.indd 260

06/03/23 10:55 am



Bibliography  261

Goldie, David, ‘Hugh MacDiarmid, Sir Harry Lauder and Scottish popular culture’, International Journal of Scottish Literature, 1(1), 2006, pp. 1–26. Goldie, David, ‘Robert Burns and the First World War’, International Journal of Scottish Literature, 1(6), 2010, pp. 1–20. Grassic Gibbon, Lewis, Grey Granite (London: Pan Books, 1973). Grassic Gibbon, Lewis, Sunset Song (Edinburgh: Canongate, 1988). Gray, Alasdair, Lanark: A Life in Four Books (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2007). Grieve, Christopher Murray, Albyn or Scotland and the Future (London: Kegan, 1927). Halbwachs, Maurice, On Collective Memory, trans. Lewis A. Coser (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). Hames, Scott, The Literary Politics of Scottish Devolution. Voice, Class, Nation (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019). Hassan, Gerry, Independence of the Scottish Mind: Elite Narratives, Public Spaces and the Making of a Modern Nation (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). Hassan, Gerry (ed.), The Modern SNP: From Protest to Power (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009). Hassan, Gerry, The Strange Death of Labour in Scotland (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012). Heaney, Seamus, An Open Letter (Derry: Derry Field Day Theatre Company, 1983). Herbert, W. N., Cabaret McGonagall (Hexham: Bloodaxe Books, 1996). Heron, Andrew, Kirk by Divine Right, Church and State: Peaceful Coexistence (Edinburgh: St Andrews Press, 1985). Hogg, Patrick Scott, Robert Burns: The Lost Poems (Glasgow: Clydeside Press, 1997). Hogg, Patrick Scott, Robert Burns, The Patriot Bard (Edinburgh: Mainstream, 2008). Hogg, Patrick Scott and Andrew Noble (eds), Canongate Burns. The Complete Poems and Songs of Robert Burns (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2001). Holland, Harry, Robert Burns: Poet and Revolutionist, ed. Dougal McNeil (Wellington: Steele Roberts, 2016). Hopes, David, ‘Scoping Study’, Distributed National Burns Collection Project, Burns Scotland, April 2004, http://burnsscotland.com/media/229206/ scoping_study_report.pdf. Jamie, Kathleen, The Tree House (London: Picador, 2004). Johnston, Tom, Memories (London: Collins, 1952). Joughin, John J. (ed.), Shakespeare and National Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997). Kahn, Coppélia and Clara Calvo (eds), Celebrating Shakespeare, Commemorations and Cultural Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). Kaloh Vid, Natalia, Ideological Translations of Robert Burns’s Poetry in Russia and in the Soviet Union (Maribor: Zora, 2011).

8053_Malgrati.indd 261

06/03/23 10:55 am

262   Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics Keith, Christina, The Russet Coat. A Critical Study of Burns’s Poetry and of its Background (London: Hale, 1956). Keith, Thomas, ‘Robert Burns’ Life on the Stage: A Bibliography of Dramatic Works, 1842–2019’, Studies in Scottish Literature, 47(2), 2021, pp. 69–112. Kenefick, William, Red Scotland! The Rise and Fall of the Radical Left, c. 1872–1932 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007). Kennedy, Adam, Orra Boughs (St Andrews: The Modern Scot, 1930). Kelly, Stuart, Scott-land. The Man Who Invented a Nation (Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2011). Ker, William Paton, Collected Essays, Vol. 1 (London: Macmillan, 1925). Ker, William Paton, Two Essays (Glasgow: Maclehose, 1918). Kidd, Colin, Subverting Scotland’s Past (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). Kidd, Colin Union and Unionisms: Political Thought in Scotland, 1500–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). Kidd, Colin and Gerard Carruthers, Literature and Union: Scottish Texts, British Contexts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). Kirk, John, Michael Brown and Andrew Noble (eds), Cultures of Radicalism in Britain and Ireland (London: Taylor and Francis, 2015). Kirkwood, David, My Life of Revolt (London: Harrap, 1935). Kristjansdottir, R. ‘Communists and the National Question in Scotland and Iceland, c. 1930 to c. 1940’, Historical Journal, 45(3), 2002, pp. 601–18. Kristmannsson, Gauti, ‘Ossian, the European National Epic (1760–1810)’, European History Online, November 2015, http://www.ieg-ego.eu/ kristmannssong-2015-en. Labourn, Keith, Marxism in Britain: Dissent, Decline and Re-emergence, 1945–c.2000 (London: Routledge, 2006). Langhorn, Olivia, ‘Edinburgh Art Festival 2017: “Black Burns” and “The Slave’s Lament”’, The Student Newspaper, October 2017, http://www. studentnewspaper.org/edinburgh-art-festival-2017-black-burns-andthe-slaves-lament/. Leneman, Leah, A Guid Cause: The Women’s Suffrage Movement in Scotland (Edinburgh: Mercat Press, 1995). Letwin, Shirley R., The Anatomy of Thatcherism (London: Fontana, 1992). Lochhead, Liz, Bagpipe Muzak (London: Penguin, 1991). Lockhart, John Gibson, Life of Robert Burns (Edinburgh: Constable and Co., 1828). Lockhart, John Gibson, Memoirs of Sir Walter Scott, 10 Vols (Edinburgh: Robert Cadell, 1839). Looby, Robert, ‘Adam Mickiewicz: Poland’s National Poet’, Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, 87(346), Summer 1998, pp. 135–41. Low, Donald A. (ed.), Critical Essays on Robert Burns (London: Routledge and Regan Paul, 1975). Lowe, David, Burns: Poet of Peace and War (Cupar: Craigwood House, 1915).

8053_Malgrati.indd 262

06/03/23 10:55 am



Bibliography  263

Lyall, Scott, Hugh MacDiarmid’s Poetry and Politics of Place: Imagining a Scottish Republic (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006). MacCaig, Norman (ed.), Honour’d shade: An anthology of new Scottish poetry to mark the bicentenary of the birth of Robert Burns (Edinburgh: Chambers, 1959). MacCormick, John, The Flag in the Wind (Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2013). McCrone, David, Understanding Scotland: the Sociology of a stateless Nation (London: Routledge, 1992). McCulloch, Margery Palmer, Scottish Modernism and its Context, 1918– 1959, Literature, National Identity, and Cultural Exchange (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009). McCulloch, Margery Palmer (ed.), Modernism and Nationalism. Literature and Society in Scotland 1918–1939 (Glasgow: Association for Scottish Literary Studies, 2004). MacDiarmid, Hugh, Burns Today and Tomorrow (Edinburgh: Castle Wynds, 1959). MacDiarmid, Hugh, Complete Poems, 2 Vols., eds Michael Grieve and W. R. Aitken (Manchester: Carcanet, 1993). MacDiarmid, Hugh, A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle, ed. Kenneth Buthlay (Edinburgh: Polygon, 2008). MacDiarmid, Hugh, The Letters, ed. Allan Bold (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1984). MacDiarmid, Hugh, Penny Wheep (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1926). MacDiarmid, Hugh, The Raucle Tongue: Hitherto Uncollected Prose, Vol. 1, eds Angus Calder, Glen Murray and Alan Riach (Manchester: Carcanet, 1996). MacDiarmid, Hugh, Sangschaw (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1925). MacDiarmid, Hugh (ed.), Robert Burns, 1759–1796 (London: Benn, 1926). McGinn, Clark, The Burns Supper. A Comprehensive History (Edinburgh: Luath, 2019). McGinty, Walter, Burns and Religion (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003). McIlvanney, Liam, Burns the Radical. Poetry and Politics in Late EighteenthCentury Scotland (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 2002). Mackay, James A., A Biography of Robert Burns (Edinburgh: Mainstream, 1992). Mackay, James A., The Burns Federation. 1885–1985 (Kilmarnock: Burns Federation, 1985). Mackay, Pauline, ‘“Low, tame, and loathsome ribaldry”: Bawdry in Romantic Scotland’, European Romantic Review, 27(4), 2016, pp. 433–48. Macmillan, Donald, Burns and the War; His Message to the Nation: An Address Delivered Before the Glasgow and District Burns Association, in St. George’s Parish Church, on 28th January, 1917 (Glasgow: Glasgow and District Burns Association, 1917). McNeil, Dougal, ‘Bobby Burns on the Wallaby: Scottish Literature and Antipodean Labour’, Scottish Literary Review, 9(2), 2017, pp. 19–40.

8053_Malgrati.indd 263

06/03/23 10:55 am

264   Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics McNeil, Dougal, ‘Labouring Feeling: Harry Holland’s Political Emotions’, Journal of New Zealand Studies, 21, 2015, pp. 1–11. Macqueen, Kirsty, ‘Burns in the USSR’, Burns Birthplace Blog, November 2016, https://burnsmuseum.wordpress.com/2016/11/01/burns-in-the-ussr. Malgrati, Paul, ‘Geography and Typology of Contemporary Burns Suppers’, Burns Chronicle, 130(2), 2021, pp. 127–48. Malgrati, Paul, ‘Joe Corrie Website’, Faculty of Arts, University of St Andrews, April 2019, https://arts.st-andrews.ac.uk/joe-corrie/. Malgrati, Paul, ‘MacDiarmid’s Burns: The Political Context, 1917–1928’, Scottish Literary Review, 11(1), 2019, pp. 47–66. Malgrati, Paul, ‘Scott Hames, 2019, The Literary Politics of Scottish Devolution. Voice, Class, Nation’, Études Éossaises, 21, 2020. Mangan, J. A. (ed.), Shaping the Superman: Fascist Body as Political Icon – Aryan Fascism (London: Frank Cass, 1999). Manson, John, ‘Did Barke Join the Communist Party’, Communist History Network Newsletter, 19, 2006, pp. 5–11. Marshak, Samuil, Poems of Robert Burns (Moscow: Goslitizdat, 1947). Mitchell, James and Gerry Hassan (eds), Scottish National Party Leaders (London: Biteback Publishing, 2016). Mitchell, Leslie, Hanno: Or the Future of Exploration (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co, 1928). Montefiore, Janet, Men and Women Writers of the 1930s: The Dangerous Flood of History (London: Routledge, 1996). Morgan, Edwin, Sonnets from Scotland (Glasgow: Mariscat Press, 1984). Morton, Graeme, Unionist Nationalism. Governing Urban Scotland, 1830– 1860 (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 1999). Morton, Graeme, William Wallace: Man and Myth (Stroud: Sutton, 2001). Morton, Graeme, William Wallace: A National Tale (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014). Muir, Edwin, Latitudes (New York: Huebsch 1924). Muir, Edwin, The Narrow Place (London: Faber and Faber, 1943). Muir, Edwin, Scottish Journey (London: Heinemann, 1935). Murphy, Sean, ‘Broadly Speaking: Scots Language and British Imperialism’. PhD thesis, University of St Andrews, 2016. Murphy, Sean, ‘“A Great Weyahaerin”?: Popular Poetry, the Press, and Women’s Suffrage in Scotland’, Scottish Literary Review, 10(2), 2018, pp. 95–119. Mutch, Alexander, Robert Burns from a Soldier’s Standpoint (Aberdeen: Rosemount, 1915). Nairn, Tom, The Break-up of Britain: Crisis and Neonationalism (London: London New Left Books, 1981. Napier, Theodore, Scotland’s demand for home rule or local national selfgovernment: an appeal to Scotsmen in Australia (Melbourne: Scottish Home Rule Association, 1892).

8053_Malgrati.indd 264

06/03/23 10:55 am



Bibliography  265

Neat, Timothy, Hamish Henderson: A Biography, 2 Vols (Edinburgh: Polygon, 2009). Nora, Pierre (ed.), Les Lieux de Mémoire, La République (Paris: Gallimard, 1984). Paton, Norrie, ‘Why Should We Idly Waste our Prime’, Burns Chronicle (Kilmarnock: Burns Federation, 2002), pp. 47–8. Peebles, William, Burnomania: the Celebrity of Robert Burns Considered: In a Discourse Addressed to All Real Christians of Every Denomination (Edinburgh: G. Caw, 1811). Petrie, Malcolm, ‘Anti-Socialism, Liberalism and Individualism: Rethinking the Realignment of Scottish Politics (1945–1970)’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 28, 2018, pp. 197–217. Petrie, Malcolm, Popular Politics and Political Culture: Urban Scotland, 1918–1939 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018). Pilditch, Jan, Catherine Carswell. A Biography (Edinburgh: John Donald, 2007). Pittock, Murray, The Invention of Scotland. The Stuart Myth and the Scottish Identity, 1638 to the Present (London: Routledge, 1991). Pittock, Murray, The Road to Independence?: Scotland since the Sixties (London: Reaktion Books, 2008). Pittock, Murray (ed.), The Reception of Robert Burns in Europe (London: Bloomsbury, 2014). Pittock, Murray (ed.), Robert Burns and Global Culture (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2011). Phillips, Jim, Collieries, Communities, and the Miners’ Strike in Scotland, 1984–1985 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012). Plain, Gill (ed.), Scotland and the First World War. Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Bannockburn (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2017). Power, William, Robert Burns and Other Essays and Sketches (London, Glasgow: Gowans & Gray 1926). Power, William, Should Auld Acquaintance . . . An Autobiography (London: Harrap, 1937). Pugh, Michael, Liberal Internationalism: The Interwar Movement for Peace in Britain. (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). Purdie David, Kirsteen McCue and Gerard Carruthers, Maurice Lindsay’s the Burns Encyclopaedia (London: Robert Hale, 2013). Rigney, Ann, The Afterlives of Walter Scott: Memory on the Move (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). Rigney, Ann, ‘Embodied Communities: Commemorating Robert Burns, 1859’, Representations, 115, 2011, pp. 71–101 Roberts, Mary-Louise, Civilisation without Gender. Reconstructing Gender in Post-war France. 1917–1927 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). Scott, Hew, Fasti Ecclesiae Scoticanae: The Succession of Ministers in the Church of Scotland From the Reformation, Vol. 3 (Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1920).

8053_Malgrati.indd 265

06/03/23 10:55 am

266   Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics Scott, Hew, Fasti Ecclesiae Scoticanae: The Succession of Ministers in the Church of Scotland From the Reformation, Vol. 8 (Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1950). Shaw, Michael, The Fin-de-siècle Scottish Revival: Romance, Decadence and Celtic Identity (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019). Shaw, Michael, ‘The Suffragettes and Robert Burns’, in Catriona MacDonald (ed.), ‘The People’s Voice’, Universities of Glasgow and Strathclyde, 2018, https://thepeoplesvoice.glasgow.ac.uk/wpcontent/uploads/2018/02/ Shaw.pdf. Simpson, Kenneth, The Protean Scot. The Crisis of Identity in Eighteenth Century Scottish Literature (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1988). Simpson, Kenneth (ed.), Burns Now (Edinburgh: Canongate Academic, 1994). Simpson, Kenneth (ed.), Love & Liberty: Robert Burns, A Bicentenary Celebration (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 1997). Smith, George Gregory, Scottish Literature, Character & Influence (London: Macmillan, 1919). Sood, Arun, Robert Burns and the United States of America. Poetry, Print, and Memory, 1786–1866 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). Stafford, Fiona, The Sublime Savage. James Macpherson and the Poems of Ossian (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1988). Stafford, Fiona, and David Sergeant (eds), Burns and Other Poets (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012). Stewart, William, Burns and the Common People (Glasgow: Independent Labour Party Publication Department, 1910). Stewart, William, J. Keir Hardie. A Biography (London: Independent Labour Party Edition, 1921). Symon, Peter, ‘Music and National Identity in Scotland: A Study of Jock Tamson’s Bairns’, Popular Music, 16(2), 1997, pp. 206–16. Szasz, Ferenc Morton, Abraham Lincoln and Robert Burns: Connected Lives and Legend (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2008). Taylor, Elinor, The Popular Front Novel in Britain, 1934–1940 (London: Haymarket Books, 2018). Thatcher, Margaret, ‘Speech to Scottish Party Conference, 10 May 1985, Online archives of Margaret Thatcher, https://www.margaretthatcher. org/document/106046. Thomson, Alex, ‘Renaissance’ to referendum? Literature and critique in Scotland, 1918–2014’, Journal of Scottish Thought, 8 (2016), 63–87. Torrance, David, The Scottish Secretaries (Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2006). Torrance, David, ‘We in Scotland’: Thatcherism in a Cold Climate (Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2009). Trumpener, Katie, Bardic Nationalism. The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997). Whatley, Christopher, Immortal Memory. Burns and the Scottish People (Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2016).

8053_Malgrati.indd 266

06/03/23 10:55 am



Bibliography  267

Whatley, Christopher, ‘“The Kirk’s Alarm”: Burns and the Presbyterians in mid-Victorian Scotland’, in Burns Chronicle, 131(1), 2022, pp. 1–20. Whatley, Christopher, ‘“It is said that Burns was a Radical”: Contest, Concession and the Political Legacy of Robert Burns, ca. 1796–1859’, Journal of British Studies, 50(3) 2011, pp. 639–66. Will, William, Burns as a Volunteer. Some Fresh Facts Which Further Help to Confound the Poet’s Critics (Glasgow: J. Smith, 1919). Wilson, Gordon, SNP: The Turbulent Years, 1960–1990: A History of the Scottish National Party (Stirling: Scots Independent, 2009). Wilson, Rick, The Other Robert – Fergusson: The Poet Who Inspired Burns (Glasgow: Neil Wilson Publishing, 2018). Wood, Wendy, Yours Sincerely for Scotland. (London: Barker, 1970).

8053_Malgrati.indd 267

06/03/23 10:55 am

8053_Malgrati.indd 268

06/03/23 10:55 am

Index

Aberdeen, Annual Folk Music Festival, 155 ‘Address to General Dumouriez’, 10 ‘Ae Fond Kiss’, 12 Ainslie, Robert, 178, 179, 249 Alloway Burns Club, 96 Burns Festival, 165 Burns’s birthplace, 35, 37 Land of Burns Centre, 165 Robert Burns Birthplace Museum, 216–17, 218, 227, 228, 244 see also Burns Cottage Alloway Burns Monument Trust, 210 American jazz and blues, 93 Anderson, Jessie Annie, 55 Anderson, Moira, 164, 165 Angelou, Maya, 192, 193–4 anniversaries Burns’s 250th (2009), 207–8, 210, 211–12 see also bicentenaries; festivals antifascism, 100–1 Armour, Jean, 79, 178, 249 Attlee, Clement, 113, 118, 123 ‘Auld Lang Syne’, 3, 6, 12, 43, 125–6, 143, 208, 246 ‘Author’s Earnest Cry and Prayer, The’, 8–9 ‘Awa Whigs Awa’, 63 Ayr, 15–16, 145 Ayr, ‘International Burns Festival’, 189–90, 244 Baker, Richard, 222 Baldwin, Stanley, 58, 69 Bandung Conference, 1956, 152 Bannockburn, battle of, 39–40 Barke, James, 24, 135, 137, 181

8053_Malgrati.indd 269

early realistic novels, 116 response to Dollan’s 1949 declarations, 134 The Well of the Silent Harp, 117, 137 The Wind that Shakes the Barley, 116, 117–19 The Wonder of all the Gay World, 133 Barr, James, 69–70, 111–12, 120 Barrowman, John, 190, 223–4 Baudelaire, Charles, 21 Bayoh, Sheku, 250 BBC, 164, 165 bicentenary (1996) documentaries, 190–3 ‘lost poems’ documentary, 213–14 postage stamp controversy, 140 survey report on Burns’s heritage, 208–9 Benn, Anthony Wedgwood, 157–8 ‘Better Together’ campaign, 222–4, 229 Beveridge Report, 111, 112, 243 bicentenaries 1959, 139, 142–5, 151 1996 (of Burns’s death), 188–9, 190–4, 197 biographies of Burns, 15, 77–84, 215, 225 Black Lives Matter, 250 Blackshirt, The, 98 Blackwood’s Magazine, 15 Blake, George, 94 Border TV, 191–2 Boswell of Auchinleck, Alexander, 210 Boudrot, Pierre, 13 Bowhill People’s Burns Club, 102, 109 Braveheart, 190, 229 British Empire, and the Home Rule movement see Home Rule movement

06/03/23 10:55 am

270   Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics British Government, stamp policy, 156, 157–8 British Parliamentary Recruiting Committee, 40, 243 British Union of Fascists (BUF), 97–8 Bruce, Robert, 10–11 Bruce, Sir Robert (president of Burns Federation), 58–9 Buchan, John, 47, 59, 60, 65 Buchanan, George, 57 Burgoyne, Jane, 178 Burns, Robert 1790s politics, 9–12, 80–1, 144 anti-imperialist depiction of, 118–19 anti-puritanical stance, 7–8 see also Calvinism ‘bardship’, 6–7 bawdy writings, 134, 179 bicentenaries see bicentenaries bilingualism, 188 birthplace at Alloway, 35, 37, 95 communism and see Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB); USSR decline and death, 6, 12, 175 dissenting protestant view of, 8–9 enlistment in Dumfries Volunteers see Dumfries Volunteers (local militia) folksong compilations, 5–6 ‘Immortal Memory’, 95 internationalist view of, 45–6, 160 letters, 11, 57, 69, 134, 178, 206, 221 ‘lost poems’ see ‘lost poems’ MacDiarmid and see MacDiarmid, Hugh monuments to see monuments of Burns national bard, 5–6, 13 pacifist vision of, 44–6 patriotic and martial interpretation of, 39–40, 103–4 a ‘people’s poet’, 99–100 and Pitt, 41–2, 58 Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, 5, 42, 175–6 political ambiguity of, 8, 39, 188 portrait, 1787, 241 ‘realist’ celebration of, 96–7 revolutionary principles see French Revolution and the Scottish Enlightenment, 7 and women see women on self-rule, 205–6

8053_Malgrati.indd 270

socialist/Labour visions of, 81, 111–12, 115, 120, 141, 157–60, 207 unionist-nationalist reading of, 14, 41–2, 46–7, 142–3, 160–1, 188, 246–8 universal ode to friendship, 43 vernacular virtuosity and ‘bardship’, 13–14 see also devolution; Home Rule movement Burns, William (Burns’s father), 117–18 Burns Chronicle, 58, 108, 109, 112–13, 214, 240 on Burns and women, 179 on Carswell’s Burns, 83–4 conservatism, 46 Dollan’s anti-communist speech, 132–3 militarist interpretation of Burns, 91, 103 modernisation of, 135–6 report of Grieve’s talk, 56 reverts to old content/title, 137 Burns clubs, 15, 18 on Carswell’s Burns, 83 and class, 16, 17, 102 conservatism, 246–7 declining influence of, 193 growth in, between 1919 and 1933, 95 Labour’s support for, 96 loyal toasts, 246 and patriotism, 40–1, 43 and women, 178 Burns Collection Project, 210 Burns Cottage, 36, 37, 193 decrepit state of, 209 new museum, 210–11, 212, 216–17, 227 referendum campaign, 2014, 228 visitor numbers, 95 Burns Federation, 25, 40, 91 1927 conference, 72 1949 conference, 133–4, 135 anthem, 65 anti-communism, 132–4 bicentenary, 1959, 142–3 conservatism of, 18, 46, 58 cultural activism, 48, 54, 59 declining influence of, 193 female president, 178 Grieve and, 54–5, 56, 58–9 and Labour, 95–6, 107–15 Marshak and, 145

06/03/23 10:55 am

myth of Burns the Volunteer, 103–4 opposition to Labour politics, 120–2 postage stamp controversy, 140–1 SND project, 96, 108, 109 state funding for heritage, 210 as Victorian creation, 71 see also Burns Chronicle Burns Festival, Ayr, 15–16 Burns nights/suppers, 16–17, 42–3 1979, 166 1995 survey of tabloid editions on, 188 and ‘Bardocracy’, 5 Centenary, 4 in European capitals, 247 first established, 2–3 interactive map of contemporary, 245 international, 138 Liberty on, 49 MacDiarmid’s poetic critique of, 62–3, 65–9 May and, 1–3, 4, 19–20 survey of contemporary, 241 Burns stamp controversy see postage stamps Burns stanza (Standard Habbie), 194, 195, 196–7 Buthlay, Kenneth, 63–4, 68 Butler, Marilyn, 11 Cairney, John, 164, 165, 179 Callaghan, James, 165 Calvinism, 7, 8, 9, 10, 74, 120 ‘Cam ye o’er frae France’, 155 Cameron, David, 219–20 Campbell, J. R., 115–16 Campbell, Mary, 79 Canongate Books, 183 Carruthers, Gerard, 7, 9, 79–80, 212, 214, 216 Carswell, Catherine, 24, 116–17 and communism, 100 critique of MacDiarmid, 76–7 Life of Robert Burns, 77–84, 92 Open the door! 76 Castlehill colliery, 180–1 Celtic International Film and Television Festival, 182 censorship, 133 Centenary, 16–17 Centre for Robert Burns Studies, 216 Chapman, 192

8053_Malgrati.indd 271

Index  271 ‘Charlie Is My Darling’, 22 Chartists, 16, 38, 115 Chesterton, G. K., 67 Christ’s Kirk stanza, 194, 213, 214 Church of Scotland, 182 Claim of Rights, 182–3, 186 Clarke, John S., 57–8, 74 Anniversary Sermon, 119–20 on Barke’s The Wind, 119 and the Burns Federation, 95–6, 109–14 on Carswell’s Burns, 82–3 ‘Immortal Memory’ speeches, 108–9 opposition to language activism, 59 Story of Robert Burns, 45, 46 class, 16–17 Cockburn, Rev. Harold, 103–4 Cold War, 126, 134, 135, 138, 145–6 Coleman, James, 14 Colvin, Calum, 227–8 Comin Thro’ The Rye (film), 123–4 Communist International, 99 Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), 100, 115, 143 bicentenary, 1959, 152 Burns Belongs to the People, 99–100 pacifist actions, 137 supports Barke, 134 Connerton, Paul, 4 Connolly, Billy, 182, 189 Conservatives, 167, 206–7; see also Scottish Conservatives; Tories; individual names of MPs ‘Corn Rigs’, 12, 179 Corrie, Joe, 24, 101–2, 227 Corries, The, 155 ‘Cotter’s Saturday Night, The’, 7, 16, 17, 101–2, 160 Covenanters, The, 10, 102 Cowie, Sam, 181 Craig, Cairns, 4 Crawford, Robert, 13, 185, 194, 225, 228 Bannockburns, 225–6 The Bard, 215, 225–6 Devolving English Literature, 187–8 A Scottish Assembly, 186 Sharawaggi, 187 Crawford, Thomas, 8 Crawfurd, Helen, 36–7 Cunninghame Graham, R. B., 75 Currie, James, 15, 213

06/03/23 10:55 am

272   Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics ‘Dagger, The’, 213, 214 Daiches, David, 8 Daily Express, 222–3 Daily Record, 20, 38, 40, 72–3, 108, 166 1995 survey of Burns Night editions, 188 on Burns and the poor, 180 on Burns and women, 178 Carswell’s Burns, 77–82 referendum campaign, 2014, 225 Daily Worker, 115–16, 119, 134, 143 Darien Scheme, 161, 166 ‘Death and Dying Words of Poor Mailie, The’, 252 Dempsey, James, 160 Dent, Arthur, 123–4 devolution, 24, 165–7, 173, 182–3, 199, 244–5; see also Scottish National Party (SNP) Dewar, Donald, 198, 207 diaspora, Scottish, 19 Distributed National Burns Collection (DNBC) Project, 209 Dobbie, Joseph, 73, 83, 91 ‘Does Haughty Gaul Invasion Threat’, 12, 22, 41, 44, 103, 104, 144, 225 Dollan, Patrick J., 108, 109–13, 119, 124, 125–6 anti-communist declarations, 132–5 President of the Burns Federation, 132 Dougal, Josephine, 212 Douglas-Home, Alex, 156 ‘Dream, A’, 8 Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle, A see under MacDiarmid, Hugh Dumfries, 15, 109, 193 Dumfries Burgh elections, 11–12 Dumfries Volunteers (local militia), 42, 46–7, 82, 137 ‘Dumfries Volunteers, The’, 41, 45, 80, 116 Dunbar, William, 61, 70, 72 Dundee, Burns Night, 1916, 42–3 Dunlop, Mrs, 10, 69, 120, 206, 224 Dunn, Douglas, 188, 194, 195, 208 Poll Tax: The Fiscal Fake, 184–5 St Kilda’s Parliament, 175–7 Dylan, Bob, 155 eco-poetry, 251–2 Edinburgh Arts Festival, 249 Burns Club, 15, 133

8053_Malgrati.indd 272

Burns monument, 15 Burns’s Centenary, 17 Fringe Festival, 220–1, 222 People’s Festival, 152 ‘poets’ pubs’, Rose Street, 152 St Giles cathedral, 142 Edinburgh Agreement, 220 Edinburgh Gazetteer, 213 Edinburgh University Folksong Society, 155 education, 25, 219 Education Scotland, 222 Edwards, Nat, 209 electoral reforms, 21 elites, Scottish, 14–15, 20 Elizabeth II, 197, 199 ‘English Literature’, Crawford’s deconstruction of, 187 Enlightenment, Scottish, 7 Erskine of Marr, 48, 74 European Parliament, Strasbourg, 247 European Union, UK’s membership, 4 Ewing, Winnie, 156, 161, 178, 207 Extinction Rebellion, 251–2 Fairgrieve, John, 178 fascism, 97–9 feminism, 177–8, 179, 240, 249 Ferguson, J. Delancey, 116, 134 Fergusson, Robert, 6 festivals Alloway, 165 Ayr, ‘International Burns Festival’, 1996, 15–16, 189–90, 244 Edinburgh Art, 249 Edinburgh Fringe, 220–1 Festival of Britain, 124–5 folk music, 155 and GDP, 208 Homecoming, 2009, 207–8, 210, 211–12, 244 National Shakespeare Festival, 156 St Andrews, poetry, 211–12 Finlay, Alec, 153 First World War see Great War Floyd, George, 250 folk bands/folk revival, 152, 154–6 Forward, 37, 44–5, 49, 53, 57, 59, 74, 110, 119, 135 Fraser, Murdo, 222, 228, 246–7 Freemasonry, 2–3, 18 French Revolution, 8, 9–10, 80–1, 110, 116, 124, 137, 213, 214–15

06/03/23 10:55 am

Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 4 Gaelic revivalism, 48 Gallacher, William, 115, 116, 134 Geddes, Patrick, 71 ‘Ghost of Bruce, The’, 213 Gibson, Mel, 190 Gillieson, Rev. Phin, 103 Glasgow, 45 Haggis Club, 73 and Labour/Scottish Socialist Party, 108–9 myth of Burns the Volunteer, 103–4 Glasgow Herald, 182 Glasgow University, 216, 245 Goldie, David, 39 Google Trends, 230 Gordon, Douglas, 249–50 Govan, ‘Ye Cronies’ Burns Club, 43 Gramsci, Antonio, 152, 154 Grassic Gibbon, Lewis, Scots Quair, 92–3, 94–5 Gray, Alasdair, 174, 217 Great War, 39–40, 41, 44, 53, 107; see also patriotism ‘Green Grow the Rashes’, 179 Greer, Germaine, 178 Grieve, Christopher Murray, 53–4, 55–7 avant-gardist project at the Federation, 55 Scottish Chapbook, 55–6, 62 see also MacDiarmid, Hugh Grigor, Barbara, 182 Guardian, 189, 226, 249 Halliday, James, 163 Hames, Scott, 173 Hardie, Keir, 37 Hayman, David, 190 Heaney, Seamus, 188, 194–5 Henderson, Hamish, 152–5, 181 Hendry, Joy, 192, 193 Herald, 225 Herbert, A. P., 142–3 Herbert, W. N., 187, 191 Cabaret McGonagall, 195–7 heritage see museums and collections ‘Highland Laddie’, 12 Highland Mary, 79 Hitler, 103 Hogg, James, 65 Hogg, Patrick Scott, 191, 212–14, 224–5 Holland, Harry, 45–6

8053_Malgrati.indd 273

Index  273 ‘Holy Fair, The’, 62 ‘Holy Willie’s Prayer’, 7, 74 Holyrood, 208 Home Rule movement, 19, 22, 24, 141, 206 1995 survey of Burns Night tabloids, 188 Home Rule bill, 1924 and 1927, 57, 69–70 late 1970s, 165–7 late 1980s, 182–3 Liberty newspaper, 48–9, 75 post-war movement, 122–3 Hopes, David, 209, 210, 217, 223, 228, 247 Hovey, Serge, 181 Hughes, Emrys, 120, 124, 138, 139–40, 145 Hutchison, David, 188, 189, 193, 242 Hutton, James, 174–5 Imperial Highland Regiments, 40 ‘improvement’, 6 Independent Labour Party (ILP), 36, 57, 74 on Burns, 37 Forward, 37, 44–5, 49, 53, 59, 110 and Home Rule, 69–70 see also Labour; individual names of MPs India, 118 Ingram, Adam, 209, 210 Ioanisyan, G. Z., 145 ‘Is There for Honest Poverty’ (‘A Man’s a Man’) see ‘Man’s a Man, A’ Jacobinism/Jacobitism, 8, 9, 10, 11, 213, 215 songs, 155–6 Jamie, Kathleen, 251 Jenkins, Ian, 207 ‘John Barleycorn: A Ballad’, 61 Johnson, Boris, 247 Johnson, James, 5 Johnston, Thomas, 57, 96, 107–8, 109, 114, 125, 138 and the Federation’s ‘Appeal to Donors’, 114–15 ‘Jolly Beggars, The’, 22, 60, 68, 97, 99, 133, 179 Kailyard School of Scottish fiction, 56, 59 Kay, Billy, 155, 184, 228

06/03/23 10:55 am

274   Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics Kay, Jackie, 249–50 Keith, Christina, 137 Kennedy, Adam, 77 Ker, William Paton, 41–2 Kidd, Colin, 11, 19 Kilmarnock, 209 Kirk, 61, 74, 101, 142 Kirkland, Bailie, 39 ‘Kirk’s Alarm, The’, 7 Kirkwood, David, 57 Kitchener, Lord, 40 Labour, 39, 45, 57, 222 on Carswell’s Burns, 82–3 and devolution, 165–6 electoral victory, 1945, 113 and the Federation, 95–6, 115, 117, 120–3 female politicians, 178 Festival of Britain, 124–5 and Home Rule, 69–70, 182–3 MacDiarmid and, 73, 74 and the NPS, 75 postage stamps and, 139–40, 157–8 see also Independent Labour Party (ILP); individual names of MPs Laing, Eleanor, 220 language activism see Scots language Lauder, Harry, 43 Lavery, Hannah, 250 Lawrence, D. H., 76, 78, 80, 188 Lee, Jennie, 178 Leonard, Tom, 184 letters see under Burns, Robert Liberal Democrats, Labour-Liberal Democrat coalition, 1999–2007, 206, 207 Liberals, 18–19, 122, 182 Liberty, 48–9, 75 Liddell, Helen, 167 Linklater, Eric, 93–4, 95 literary magazines, 174 Local Government (Scotland) Act, 243 Lochhead, Liz, 217–18, 226–7, 249 London Burns Club, 18, 43, 46–7, 54, 73 Burns monument, 18 see also Vernacular Circle ‘lost poems’, 191, 213–14, 216 Loudon, Helen, 163 ‘Lovely Lass o’ Inverness, The’, 63 Lowe, David, 44–5

8053_Malgrati.indd 274

MacCaig, Norman, 152–3 MacColl, Ewan, 155 McColl, Rev. John, 73 MacCormick, John, 122–3 McCue, Bill, 164 McCue, Kirsteen, 164, 247 McCulloch, Margery Palmer, 79–80 MacDiarmid, Hugh, 23–4, 136, 164, 188, 217 Albyn or Scotland and the Future, 70 avant-gardist project at the Federation, 55–7, 58–9, 63, 72 ‘Ballad of the Five Senses’, 60 ‘birth’, 55 ‘Bonnie Broukit Bairn’, 59 on the Burns supper, 241 Burns Today and Tomorrow, 143–4 on Carswell’s Burns, 81–2 co-founds the NPS, 74 and the CPGB, 100, 143 denounces the ILP and Labour, 74 A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle, 63–9, 71, 92, 163 edits collection of Burns’s poems, 63 and Henderson, 153–5 and Home Rule, 69–70 Penny Wheep, 62–3 in the Radio Times, 76 reformationist approach to Burns, 72–4 Sangschaw, 60 Second Hymn to Lenin, 100 and the SNP, 163 ‘Your Immortal Memory, Burns!’ 62–3 see also Grieve, Christopher Murray MacDonald, Margo, 166, 178 MacDonald, Ramsay, 73, 95 McGinn, Clark, 3–4, 23, 211 McIlvanney, Liam, 8–9, 214–15 McIlvanney, William, 184 McKay, David, 18 Mackay, James, 213 McKechnie, 121 McKellar, Kenneth, 164 Mackenzie, Compton, 74 MacKenzie, Henry, 5, 118 McKerrow, M. H., 103, 112 MacLean, Sorley, 100 Macmillan, Harold, 156 postage stamp controversy, 138, 141 MacMillan, Rev. Donald, 43–4 McNaught, Duncan, 18, 46, 56, 58

06/03/23 10:55 am

McNeil, Dougal, 45 MacPherson, Ian, 43 Macpherson, James, 6 Macpherson, Niall, 125 McVie, John, 109, 114 Machin, George, 162 Makars, 61, 72; see also individual names of Makars ‘Man Was Made to Mourn’, 60, 110–11, 116, 205–6 ‘Man’s a Man, A’, 16, 18, 22, 56, 93, 162, 198–9, 207 conservative assessment of, 137 popularity of, 239 referendum campaign, 2014, 230 Scottish Parliament reopening ceremony, 197–8 STV screening of, 164 Thatcher’s co-option of, 180 Mapstone, Sally, 2 Marples, Ernest, 139, 140 Marshak, Samuil, 138–9, 145 Robert Berns v perevodakh, 131–3, 140 Marxism, 132–3 ‘Mary Morrison’, 159 Masonry, 246, 247 Maxton, James, 57 May, Theresa, 1–3, 4, 19–20, 247 ‘Merry Hae I Been Teethin’ A Heckle’, 63 ‘Merry Muses of Caledonia, The’, 134 Military Service Act, 45 miners’ strikes, 180–1 Ministry for tourism and culture, 210 Ministry of Information, 112 Mitchell, Leslie see Grassic Gibbon, Lewis Mitchison, Naomi, 100 Modern Scot, 77 Montgomerie, William, 135–6 Montrose Burns Club, 54 monuments of Burns, 15, 18, 209, 240 Moore, John, 221 Moore, Thomas, 141 Moorhead, Ethel, 35–6, 38, 39 Morgan, Edwin, 173, 174–5, 186, 217 Morris, Lord, 47 Morrison, Herbert, 124 Morton, Graeme, 13 Mosley, Oswald, 97–8 Muir, Edwin, 24, 117, 136, 177 Latitudes, 60 Scottish Journey, 94, 95 Muir, Robert, 221

8053_Malgrati.indd 275

Index  275 Muir, Thomas, 110, 116 Muirhead, Roland, 70, 75 Mundell, David, 2, 206–7 Murdoch, John, 8 Murray, William J., 178–9 museums and collections, 208–10, 212, 216–17 Musselburgh Burns Club, 41 Mutch, Alexander, 83 Mylchreest, Tam, 181 Nairn, Tom, 14, 162 Napier, Theodore, 19 Nasmyth, Alexander, 241 National, The, 20 National Covenant, 1638, 10 National Party of Scotland (NPS), 74–5, 93, 97 National Trust for Scotland, 210–11, 239, 243 nationalists, Scottish, 122, 123, 244–5; see also Scottish National Party (SNP) Neat, Timothy, 181–2 neoliberalism, 180 New Left, 154 New Left Review, 152, 162 newspapers 1995 survey of Burns Night editions, 188–9 bicentenary, 1996, 193 Conservative, 167 unionism in, 222 see also individual titles of newspapers Nicol, W. Bernard de Bear, 124–5 Nicoll, Robert, 16 Noble, Andrew, 191, 213–14 Non-Aligned movement, 152 Northern Star, 16 Nutini, Paolo, 230 ‘Ode On The Departed Regency Bill’, 213 O’Hagan, Andrew, 189, 190–1, 193–4 ‘On the Destruction of Drumlanrig Woods’, 252 opinion polls, 239 Ossian, myth of, 4 Paisley, Burns Anniversary Society, 16 ‘Parcel of Rogues in a Nation’, 19, 20, 155–6, 162, 221, 226 Park, Anna, 79 Parker, Frances, 35–6, 38, 39, 40

06/03/23 10:55 am

276   Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics Paton, Lizzie, 79 patriotism, 39–40, 47, 103–4, 246; see also folk bands/folk revival Patronage Act, 1711, 7 Paul, Rev. Hamilton, 2–3 Peattie, Cathy, 207 PEN (Poets, Playwrights, Editors, Essayists and Novelists), Scottish, 71–2, 74–5 People’s Journal, 40, 42–3 Perth Prison, Ayr, 36, 38 Petrie, Malcolm, 121 Pilgrim Trust, 114–15 Pitt, William, 41, 42, 58 Pittock, Murray, 3, 216, 244 Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, 5, 42, 175–6 Poems of War and Battle, 40 Poll Tax, 184–5 Pollock, John, 158 Pope, Alexander, 7 Popular Fronts, 99, 100 postage stamps 1950s controversy, 139–42, 244 Labour’s official Burns stamp, 157–8 Wood’s Burns stamps, 156–7 Power, William, 24, 74, 93 on Carswell’s Burns, 81 Robert Burns, 60–1, 67 in the Scots Observer, 73–4 Presbyterianism, 142 Price, Richard, 94–5 ‘Prologue, spoken by Mr. Woods at Edinburgh’, 13 Purdie, David, 224–5 Radio Times, 76 Rae Brown, Colin, 18 Ratcliffe, Sandra, 178 Reader, Eddie, 208 Reasoner, The, 152 Reception Theory, 4 ‘Red Red Rose’, 63, 68, 155, 219 Redpath, Jean, 165, 181–2 referenda, 247 Scottish devolution, 1979, 24, 166–7, 173 Scottish independence campaign, 2013–14, 4, 22, 206, 220, 225, 227–31, 243 UK’s membership of European Union, 4 Reid, George, 198

8053_Malgrati.indd 276

Reid, Jimmy, 180 Riddoch, Lesley, 179 Rifkind, Malcolm, 167 ‘Rights of Woman, The’, 179 Rigney, Anne, 12–13, 17 ‘Robert Bruce’s March to Bannockburn’ see ‘Scots wha hae’ Robert Burns Birthplace Museum, 216–17, 218, 227, 228, 244 Robert the Bruce, 40 Rodger, Alexander, 16 Roman Catholic Church, 182 Rosie, George, 193 Ross, Fiona, 197 Ross, William, 139, 140, 159–62, 167, 180 Rowe, Eric, 190 Royal Dumfries Volunteers, 12 Russia see USSR Russian literature, 68 Salmond, Alex, 205, 211–12, 247 the Edinburgh Agreement, 220 new Burns museum inauguration, 217, 218–19 referendum campaign, 2014, 219–21, 231 Saltire Society, 243 Saville, John, 152 Scotland on Sunday, 212 Scots Chronicle, 136 Scots Independent, 75, 162–3 Scots language, 7, 47–9, 59, 70, 96, 187; see also Scottish National Dictionary (SND); Vernacular Circle Scots Magazine, 73 Scots Observer, 61, 73–4, 78 ‘Scots wha hae’, 10–11, 22, 36, 37, 39–40, 47, 75, 97, 110, 125, 223 Scotsman, The, 142, 157, 166, 190 bicentenary, 1996, 193 ‘The Folksong Flyting’, 153–4 Scott, Walter, Sir, 12–13, 21–2, 41, 65, 117, 175, 188 Scottish Chapbook, 55–6, 62 Scottish Conservatives, 121, 179–80, 246–8; see also Conservatives; Tories Scottish Constitutional Convention, 182–3 Scottish Council of Social Service, 113 Scottish Covenant Association, 122–3 Scottish Daily Express, 167, 193, 222–3 Scottish Daily Mail, 167 Scottish Field, 119

06/03/23 10:55 am

Scottish folk revival, 152, 154–6 Scottish Home Rule see Home Rule movement Scottish Home Rule Association (SHRA), 19, 69 Scottish Labour, 167, 207 Labour–Liberal Democrat coalition, 1999–2007, 206, 207 see also Labour Scottish National Dictionary (SND), 96, 108, 109, 114–15 Scottish National Party (SNP), 22, 100, 121–2, 166, 205, 246 and folk bands, 156 and Labour, 183 and MacDiarmid, 163 majority government, 2011, 219 minority government, 2007–11, 206 publications, 75, 162–3 rise of, 156, 161, 162 see also Salmond, Alex Scottish Parliament, 22 1999 reopening ceremony, 197–8, 199, 205 debate on Burns, 206–7 and Europe, 247 funding for Burns’s heritage, 210 inauguration at Holyrood, 208 Scottish Patriots, 156–7 Scottish PEN, 71–2, 74–5 Scottish Presbyterianism, 7–8 Scottish Renaissance writers, 71, 74, 116, 135, 195 on Carswell’s Burns, 81–2 Chronicle on, 136 second wave, 92 see also individual names of writers Scottish Secretariat, 70, 75 Scottish Socialist Party, 108 Scottish Television, 164, 224 Scottish Tourist Board, 165 Scottish Trades Union Congress, 182 Second World War, 103–4, 107 Seeger, Peggy, 155 Selkirk, George Douglas-Hamilton, Earl of, 120–1, 142, 143 Shakespeare, William, 156, 161 Sillars, Jim, 158–9, 160, 163, 197, 221–2 ‘Slave’s Lament, The’, 192, 250 social media, pro-independence interventions, 244–5 Soutar, William, 135

8053_Malgrati.indd 277

Index  277 Soviet Union see USSR Spence, Lewis, 75, 81, 96–7 Stalin/Stalinism, 151, 154 Standard Habbie (Burns stanza), 194, 195, 196–7 ‘Star o’ Robbie Burns, The’, 65 Stephen, Mark, 220–1 Stewart, Andy, 164 Stewart, William, 37, 117 Stirling, 123 Struthers, John, 189–90 Sturgeon, Nicola, 244 Sturrock, Peter, 18 STV, 164, 224 suffragettes, 35–9 Sun, The, 188 Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 71 ‘Tam o’ Shanter’, 13, 64, 97 Tannahill, Robert, 16, 175, 176 Tarbolton Bachelors’ Club, 179 Taylor, Wilfred, 142 television bicentenary, 1996, 190–3 Burns-themed, 164–5, 178, 181–2 Thatcher, Margaret, 24, 167, 173–4, 179–80, 185 There was a Man (play), 164–5 Thompson, E. P., 152, 154 Thomson, Alastair, 136 Thomson, Alex, 228–9 Thomson, D. C., 42–3 Thomson, George, 5–6 Times, 197 ‘To A Louse’, 208 ‘To A Mouse’, 63, 195, 249, 252 ‘To Mary in Heaven’, 60 toasting, 3 Tories, 15–16, 41–2, 58, 102, 167, 206–7 Federation activists, 18 and Home Rule, 70 opposition to Labour control of the Federation, 120–1 see also Scottish Conservatives; individual names of MPs Torrance, David, 180 tourism industry, 207–9, 212 Town and Country Planning Act, 118, 121 translations, 131–3; see also Marshak, Samuil

06/03/23 10:55 am

278   Robert Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics Treaty of Union, 1707 see Union ‘Tree of Liberty, The’, 11, 181 Trumpener, Katie, 6 ‘Twa Dogs, The’, 8, 158, 161 Unicorn, 136 Union, Treaty of Union, 1707, 13, 14, 19, 161, 221 unionism, 39, 160–1, 246–8 ‘Better Together’ campaign, 222–4, 229 Unionist Party, 121, 123, 141 United States of America, 16, 92, 95, 138 USSR bicentenary, 1959, 144–5 and Burns clubs, 109 Cold War, 126 international Burns supper, 138 postage stamp controversy, 139–42 in Second World War, 102–3 Stalin/Stalinism, 151, 154 Veitch, James, 137 Vernacular Circle, 47–8, 54, 55, 56, 59 Victorians, 38 visual culture, rise of, 241 Wallace, William, 10–11, 229 war poetry, anthologies, 40 wars see Great War; Second World War wartime propaganda/rhetoric, 40, 41, 103–4 Wash, Rev. Walter, 75 Wason, Eugene, 41 Watt, Lauchlan Maclean, 83–4 weaver poets, 16, 115 Welfare State, 111, 113, 116, 137–8, 243 Wellington, Sheena, 22, 197, 205 West Fife, Bowhill People’s Burns Club, 102

8053_Malgrati.indd 278

Whatley, Christopher, 23, 39, 102 Immortal Memory: Burns and the Scottish People, 14–15, 17, 239–40 ‘When Princes and Prelates and hetheaded zealots’, 10 Whiggism, 8, 9 Who’s Who in Scotland, 239 ‘Why Should We Idly Waste Our Prime’, 11 Whyte, James H., 77 Will, Willliam, 46–7 Williamson, Alexander, 120 Wilson, Gordon, 162 Wilson, Henry, 121 Wilson, John, 175, 177 Wilson, Rab, 227 Wolfe, Billy, 163 women and Burns clubs, 247 and the Burns Federation, 18 Burns’s lovers, 79 feminism and Burns, 177–9 poets omitted from MacCaig’s anthology, 152 suffragettes, 35–9 Wood, Wendy, 156–7, 178 Woodburn, Arthur, 123, 124, 139–40 working class, 16, 17, 79, 173–4; see also Independent Labour Party (ILP); Labour; Welfare State ‘Wounded Hare, The’, 252 Wright, Tom, 164–5, 227 Yeats, William Butler, 214 ‘Ye Banks and Braes’, 12, 207 ‘Ye Jacobites by Name’, 230 Year of Homecoming, 2009, 207–8, 210, 211–12 Young, Douglas, 122, 140 YouTube, 230

06/03/23 10:55 am