Songlines: the Road to Bonnymuir

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SONGLINES: THE ROAD TO BONNYMUIR

AN ANTHOLOGY OF TH TH LATE 18 /EARLY 19 CENTURY POLITICAL SONG

SONGS IN SCOTS AND ENGLISH WITH SONGWRITER BIOGRAPHIES AND USEFUL NOTES ON EACH SONG

Compiled, arranged & edited by Alan Dickson

ROWTH PUBLISHING

SONGLINES: THE ROAD TO BONNYMUIR

An Anthology of Late 18 th /Early 19 th Century Political Song

COMPILED, ARRANGED AND EDITED BY ALAN DICKSON

ROWTH rave on rhyme

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I owe thanks to the Third Age Trust and the Alastair Hulett Memorial Trust for providing funding towards the cost of this publication. Also I wish to thank the Janey Buchan Political Song Collection at Glasgow University, particularly John Powles and Kate Lynch; Carole McCallum from Special Archives at Glasgow Caledonian University, and members of Glasgow West-End and Paisley and District’s University of the Third Age (U3A), 1820 Research Group, particularly Irene Scullion, Helen Glassford and John Revie, which has helped to inform this anthology. Thanks also to Susan Kirkwood (Dunfermline U3A) for suggesting ‘The Reformer.’ This anthology is part of Glasgow West-End and Paisley and District U3As joint local history research project. Thanks also for permission to Freddie Anderson’s family to include ‘Glasgow’s Radical Rising of 1820.’ Other sources are acknowledged in the notes section. I also found Shaun Kavanagh’s essay (from www.academia.edu) ‘Scottish Society and the Radical War of 1820’ and Gordon Pentland’s essay ‘Radical Returns in an Age of Revolutions’ particularly valuable. Images of the Radical Road on inside front cover (from The Hawes end) and inside back cover (from St Margaret’s Well end) are by Auld Angus. All other images are under license from Shutterstock. Any opinions expressed in the anthology are the personal opinions of the author (or those contained in works cited), and cannot be taken to represent the views of those who have contributed funding towards the publication of this anthology. I would be glad to correct any oversights in acknowledgements, permissions or any errors, if they are brought to my attention, in any future reprints of this collection. Alan Dickson

First published in 2020 by Rowth Publishing, Glasgow www.rowth.com Email: [email protected]

ISBN 978-0-9564655-1-1

Printed and bound by Doxdirect

In memory of the Radicals and my great grandmother, Marion Forsyth (b.1870), a worsted winder at Ladhope Mill, Galashiels.

CONTENTS

Preface 9

Runnamede 15 William Ogilvie 15 As O’er the Highland Hills I Hied 16 Scots Wha Hae/Democracy 18 A Man’s a Man 19 Judases All 20 The Downfall of Feudal Tyranny 21 James Kennedy 22 Swinish Gruntings 23 Thomas Muir’s Farewell 25 William Skirving’s Farewell 26 Fletcher of Saltoun’s Lament 27 The Condorrat Sodger 27 The Battle of Vitoria 29 The Plains o’ Waterloo 30 Fair Liberty’s Tree 32 The Wailings of Corruption 32 The Spinning O’t 33 Bannocks o’ Barley Meal 34 Jenny Dang the Weaver 35

Freedom 36 Song for William Cobbett 37 Freedom, Or a Grave O’t 38 The Covenanter’s Lament 38 Bonnymuir 39 Dark Bonnymuir 40 Glasgow’s Radical Rising of 1820 41 The Radical Martyrs 43 Radical Bodies, Gae Hame 44 Sharp Pikes and Radical Clegs 45 Rifle Meeting Song 46 The Reformer 48 The Mucking o’ Geordie’s Byre 50 Sawney, Now the King’s Come 52 The Shuttle Rins 54 The Spinners’ Song 55 The Ballad of Mary McLauchlane 56 The Reformer’s Pocket-piece 57 The Auld Radical 59 The Wark o’ the Weavers 60

Songwriter Biographies 61

Notes 69

Glossary

PREFACE

“Round and round the radical road the radical rascal ran … if you can tell me how many r's are in that you can catch me if you can.” And so the nursery rhyme goes! Of course, the radical road refers to the path that skirts Salisbury Crags in Edinburgh’s Holyrood Park, originally an old track that was paved by unemployed weavers from the west of Scotland who had been involved in the week of civil unrest in April 1820. More on the radical road later, but first a little background on why civil unrest came about.

In early nineteenth century Scotland trouble had been brewing for some time, particularly in the west of Scotland which was experiencing massive levels of immigration, fuelled by the Scottish Clearances and impoverished Irish families seeking work. Housing was in short supply and ordinary people had hoped for better times to come. In addition, following the Napoleonic Wars and the British victory at Waterloo, pay and working conditions worsened and food prices were high. Ex-soldiers found little or no work, or extremely low wages. Trade unions were banned, but despite this, workers continued to press for better pay and conditions, the right to vote and parliamentary reform. This gave rise to the first sustained mass-political movement in our history since the Jacobite uprisings, the significance of which has been downplayed ever since, being relegated to a footnote in Scottish history.

In ‘The Real Foundations: Literature and Social Change’ David Craig reminds us (Chapter 4, ‘Militant Culture’) that in the early 1800s, working class people were more knowledgeable and aware of their situation and the circumstances that gave rise to their difficulties. In 1801 the first national Census had been undertaken. As a result, workers were able to enquire systematically as to how the system exploited them. No longer were they in the dark, about levels of population, what the national income was and how unequally it was distributed. Cheap lending-libraries were also being established and by the early 1820s Glasgow workers had set up an institute and engaged their own teachers of science and technology. And so, armed with this knowledge, a

9 strike of some 60,000 workers took place in April 1820, mainly in West and Central Scotland. Some not only went on strike but armed themselves as well, which resulted in a series of small armed uprisings with a "provisional government" being declared in Glasgow. The authorities moved to quell the uprising and to smear the campaign for reform. This resulted in protest leaders across the country being arrested and some executed or transported to the colonies for their actions.

Following the failed uprising, Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832), the man who single-handedly changed the course of Scottish literature, for better or worse, and whose monument towers over the east end of Princes Street, Edinburgh, had the bright idea of using the weavers to improve the path around Salisbury Crags. This was seen as a form of work relief, intended to rid these handloom weavers of any further ideas of insurrection through hard labour. Back in the day, to add insult to injury, Edinburgh children grew up chanting the radical rascal nursery rhyme as a way of mocking the weavers, a tradition that has spanned the generations, and I’m sad to say it was still alive and well when I was growing up in Leith. I was none the wiser as to its origins, or what it meant, and I’m sure my brothers and sisters or any of my friends were equally in the dark. At least we learnt to roll our r’s! As for the Scott Monument, that’s something I’ve still to climb! Scott’s novels never really interested me either. I was encouraged to read Robert Louis Stevenson novels by my mother.

I first became aware of the 1820 Radical Rising, in the 1970s as a student in Dundee. George Kinloch’s statue stands there in Albert Square, a leading political figure who was involved with mass meetings in 1817 and 1819 agitating for parliamentary reform. I often passed his statue on my way down to the Tay Road Bridge, with guitar in hand, to hitch a lift back to Edinburgh. But it was not until a review of the political song project ‘Songs from Under the Bed,’ which I had been involved in, appeared in the magazine ‘Radical Scotland’ in May 1990 that I was made more aware of events. Sitting alongside was a review of Peter Berresford-Ellis and Seumas Mac A' Ghobhainn’s book ‘The Radical Rising: The Scottish Insurrection of 1820.’ When I finally got around to releasing my first CD in 2015 ‘This Land is Our Land,’ bolstered by debates around the Scottish Referendum, it was natural to include a song about the Radical Rising, and Dark Bonnymuir came to mind. Tom Johnson had referred to the song in his book ‘The History of the Working Classes.’ After digging about a bit I sourced the lyrics and added a

10 tune. As far as I know it was first time that it had ever been recorded. Adam McNaughtan has since made a recording, as part of the University of Glasgow’s ‘The People’s Voice’ project.

‘Dark Bonnymuir’ centres on a band of Scottish Radicals, mostly weavers, that marched on the 5th April 1820 to take over the Carron Ironworks , near Falkirk, the largest single ironworks in Europe that had supplied the guns to defeat Napoleon. Their intention was to seize armaments to overthrow the government. They were met by Scottish troops of the Stirlingshire Yeomanry, and a battle took place at Bonnymuir, though it was more of a skirmish, but a major one at that in the so-called Radical War. Of those captured, the ring leaders, John Baird and Andrew Hardie, both weavers and ex-soldiers, were tried and executed and nineteen others were subsequently transported to New South Wales, Australia. Baird had been a rifleman in the 95 th 2nd Battalion and had fought in Spain against Napoleon. I was surprised to learn that Baird was a deserter from the British Army, failing to rejoin his unit in Spain after being on leave in Scotland. An additional reason, perhaps, why he was hanged!

I was starting to realise that the road to Bonnymuir was a long and treacherous one, with many twists and turns, and that Bonnymuir actually represented the climax of unrest that had been simmering away ever since Thomas Paine’s ‘The Rights of Man’ was published in the 1790s. This sparked my interest and I set about gathering songs that would help shed light on this forgotten chapter in Scottish history, through to the 1830s when those who had been executed or transported received a royal pardon.

I was in for a surprise! Scottish Radicalism of this period is not awash with political song, in contrast to the many political songs associated with opposing the union with England and supporting the Jacobite factions. It’s possible that songs were lost, not collected or erased from history in the wake of the Clearances, and at a time when Britain was a virtual police state. Thousands of people were displaced and dispossessed; traumatised by industrialisation, with the movement into towns and cities or emigration to the colonies. In the words of Lorna Goodwin, Poet Laureate of Jamaica, reflecting on her own country’s past (in her book ‘Redemption Ground’), she says you have to take what is available even if much has been lost, and give it a presence, a reality through your imagination. As an artist you have to write yourself into the story any way you can.