It gives me great pleasure to open this debate to mark the centenary of Dr Hamish Henderson, who was one of the most brilliant Scots of his age. Members might notice that a large number of people are in the public gallery to hear the Parliament pay tribute to Hamish: our visitors include his wife, Kätzel, his daughters, Tina and Janet, and his grandson David.
I also welcome people who are attending from the department of Celtic and Scottish studies at the University of Edinburgh, who are supporting a celebratory event after the debate, along with people from the Hamish Matters festival in Blairgowrie and the Scottish Poetry Library. I am delighted that the Deputy First Minister will speak at the event, given his constituency interest and his great interest in this debate.
The great American folk musician Pete Seeger once said that Hamish loved Scotland as much as he loved life itself. He was right. Now, Scotland is reciprocating that love, with a flurry of events for his centenary.
For many years, Hamish Henderson dominated Scotland’s intellectual landscape. He linked the 1920’s literary renaissance, spearheaded by that unapologetic elitist Hugh MacDiarmid, with the unapologetically egalitarian folk revival of the 1950s, of which Hamish was the driving force.
Hamish’s work with the school of Scottish studies, recording and popularising the living tradition of Scotland, is unsurpassed. The singers and songs that Hamish discovered inspired a generation of artists, including the young Bob Dylan. Like Robert Burns, Sir Walter Scott and James Hogg in previous centuries, Hamish collected, preserved and promoted the lives and concerns of otherwise invisible people in bothies, mills, fields and factories. He also added wonderful songs of his own.
Hamish Henderson was born in Blairgowrie a year after the armistice, on 11 November 1919, to Janet, a single mother. His earliest years were spent in the Spittal of Glenshee, where he first learned to appreciate the songs that his mother pointed out could not be found in books.
Poverty forced Janet to go into service in Somerset, but she died when Hamish was just 13 years old, leaving him completely alone in the world. Hamish won a scholarship to Dulwich College in London, which he attended by day while living in an orphanage in Clapham in the evening. He then went to Cambridge, on another scholarship, to study modern languages.
From an early age, Hamish had a strong sense of social justice. As a student, he spent summers in Germany, where he was horrified by Nazism and helped young Jewish people escape. During the war, he served with distinction as an intelligence officer in north Africa and Italy, where he collected ballads from the soldiers, including his captives, and wrote songs, including the famous “The 51st Highland Division’s Farewell to Sicily”.
Put in charge of one prisoner, Marshal Rodolfo Graziani, Hamish helped to write the order demanding the surrender of all Axis troops in Italy. He also had the job of liaising with Italy’s anti-fascist partisans and, through them, discovered the work of Antonio Gramsci, whose prison letters he later translated into English. His collection, “Elegies for the Dead in Cyrenaica”, is considered to be among the finest poetry of world war two and won the Somerset Maugham prize in 1949.
Hamish then assisted the American folklorist Alan Lomax in capturing Scotland’s undiscovered traditional singers for Columbia Records with the latest technology—the reel-to-reel tape recorder. That is perhaps the defining experience of his life, because he went on to pursue that field collection work at the newly formed school of Scottish studies at the University of Edinburgh, where he worked until his death in 2002, latterly as an honorary fellow. The school of Scottish studies archive is one of the most important collections in Europe—it is an aural and visual record of the lives of Scotland’s working people, their social conditions, customs, beliefs, songs and stories.
Hamish’s recordings are among the 33,000 that are held in the archives, around 10,000 of which are field recordings. Support from the lottery and other partners, including the Scottish Government, allowed online access from 2010 to a selection of extracts from the school’s collection through the Tobar an Dualchais/Kist o Riches website. The university is exploring future approaches to providing online access to the collection, and we support it in that important work.
Hamish recorded and popularised tradition bearers such as Jeanie Robertson in the north-east, the berry-picking Stewarts of Blairgowrie, Aberdeenshire bothy singer Willie Mathieson and Jimmy MacBeath of Portsoy, a farm servant and wandering bard. There are many more.
Some of the best singers were from the marginalised travelling community. Hamish lived among them as a true friend, and many of those singers performed at the people’s ceilidh that he launched at the Edinburgh festival in 1951, which marked the beginnings of the folk revival in Scotland.
The singer-songwriter Adam McNaughtan, writing in Chapman Magazine in 1985, had this to say about Hamish’s contribution:
“Three strands are distinguishable in the Scottish folksong revival: the academic, the club/festival movement and the traditional. Perhaps the only person who has striven to intertwine the three has been Dr Henderson.”
Hamish believed that it was important to add to the vibrant “carrying stream” of folk tradition with new work. This he did with great verve. His contributions include “Farewell to Sicily”, “John MacLean March” and “Rivonia”, which called for the release of Nelson Mandela long before the world woke up to the true injustice of his imprisonment. When Mandela came to Glasgow after his release, it was Hamish whom he embraced on stage.
“The Freedom Come All Ye” was written in 1960 for the protests against Polaris in the Clyde. It is sometimes suggested as a national anthem for Scotland, although I understand that Hamish did not approve of that idea. It is an international anthem of peace. It condemns the impact of colonial wars on the working-class Scots who fought them and the families in Africa and Asia who suffered as a consequence. In the second verse, he imagines an end to all of that:
“Nae mair will the bonnie callants
Mairch tae war when oor braggarts crousely craw
Nor wee weans frae pit-heid and clachan
Mourn the ships sailin’ doon the Broomielaw.
Broken faimilies in lands we’ve herriet,
Will curse Scotland the Brave nae mair, nae mair”.
The song has been recorded and performed by dozens of artists and it will be sung again in the Parliament tonight, in a concert featuring different generations of singers, including Hamish’s friends, Margaret Bennett and Sheena Wellington. For the younger generation, Mike Vass of the school of Scottish studies archive and pipe major Callum Douglas of Hamish Matters have composed new work in Hamish’s honour.
Last month saw the launch of “The Darg”, a collection that was inspired by Hamish and edited by Jim Mackintosh for the Poets’ Republic press—and available today, I am glad to say, from the Scottish Parliament’s shop. Next week will see a celebration by the Association for Scottish Literary Studies, and Hamish Matters takes place in Blairgowrie in November, as does the carrying stream festival, in the Edinburgh Folk Club. A memorial plaque will be unveiled at the school of Scottish studies on Hamish’s birthday, and there will be a symposium at the university in December, followed by a concert in the Queen’s Hall. His collected poems will be published by Birlinn before the year’s end.
There is, however, something fitting about this particular tribute in our national Parliament. The folk revival in which Hamish was pivotal changed Scotland. It began a steady, subtle growth of national self-confidence that led eventually to the opening of the Scottish Parliament, and it is appropriate that we honour him here, in this way, on this day. [Applause.]