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Printed in Scotland by Solway Print, Dumfries 2016 Burns Chronicle

Editor Bill Dawson

The Robert Burns World Federation Kilmarnock The mission of the Chronicle remains the furtherance of knowledge about Robert Burns and its publication in a form that is both academically responsible and clearly communicated for the broader Burnsian community.

In reviewing, and helping prospective contributors develop, suitable articles to fulfil this mission, the Editor now has the support of an Editorial Advisory Board. Articles submitted for consideration will normally be read both by the Editor for general suitability and by a relevant Advisory Board member or other specialist, who can provide any needed feedback about the submission. Academic contributors whose institutions require that publications be formally refereed should notify the Editor at the time of submission so he can ensure the regular review procedure is appropriately implemented. To allow time for appropriate feedback, contributors are asked to submit articles before June 30 each year for the forthcoming volume.

The Editor is always pleased to discuss proposals for articles with potential contributors. The preferred length for full articles is between 1500 and 5000 words, and the Editor also welcomes shorter notes, especially when based on primary source materials. References should be kept simple, and as far as possible included in the text. Contributors are asked to contact the Editor ahead of submission if their proposed article differs significantly from these guidelines.

Editorial Board Dr. Corey Andrews Prof. Liam McIlvanney Prof. Murray Pittock Prof. D. Purdie

Bill Dawson, Editor

2 Burns Chronicle 2016

CONTENTS

Manuscript of “Grizzle Grim” Discovered...... 4 Pamela McIntyre

Mysterious “WR”, an early critic of Burns works...... 8 Patrick Scott

The First Publication of “Tam o’ Shanter” December 1790...... 15 Bill Dawson

Burns North and South, in mid 19thC American Newspapers...... 26 Joseph Durant

The AJ Law Burns Collection and Davidson Cook...... 34 Patrick Scott

The Kilmarnock Manuscript of “Tam o’ Shanter”...... 50 Bill Dawson

Manuscripts at Auction...... 54

Burns and the Covenanters...... 58 David Murray

The McKie Collection...... 69 Ross McGregor

The Monklands Friendly Society Library...... 77 Donald Urqhart

At Whigham’s Inn...... 81 Patrick Scott

Working on the Scots Musical Museum: behind the scenes...... 87 Vivien E Williams

The Scottish Album, Burns Federation presentation to John Gribbel...... 93 Frank Brown Burns Chronicle 2016 3

Irvine Conference Seminar, Engagement with a younger generation...... 101

125 years of the Burns Chronicle...... 106

Descendants of Robert Burns...... 109

Editorial...... 110

William Montgomery, a forgotten Editor,...... 111

Scottish Fire Service Burns Club...... 113 Joe Harkins

A Burnsian Opinion, letter to the Editor...... 116 John Hanlon

Thomas Burns, Lakeland Poet...... 118 Christine Seal

Innerpeffray Library ...... 130 Lara Haggerty

Liverpool Burns Club...... 136

Reviews...... 138

David Smith BEM. Honour for services to the heritage of Robert Burns...... 142

Obituary, Joe Kennedy...... 143

The President...... 144

2015 Conference...... 147

Membership...... 152 4 Burns Chronicle 2016

“note to Robert Burns” Discovered Pamela McIntyre The Houison-Craufurd family trace their ancestry back to 900AD. The First Laird of Craufurdland is known in 1245, when the lands of Ardoch, now known as Craufurdland near Fenwick, were gifted to Sir Reginald de Craufurd, 1st Sheriff of Ayr. The family also held title to land at Braehead, Cramond near Edinburgh. They continue to own and manage the estate at Craufurdland, run by the present Laird, Simon, and his family. In 2004 Simon’s father, Peter Houison-Craufurd, deposited estate and family papers with Ayrshire Archives and volunteers began slowly working through them. Archivist Pamela McIntyre, began working on the collection in 2011, and was delighted when volunteer Nan Henry identified letters in the collection from James Boswell of Auchinleck. Gordon Turnbull of Yale University, Editor of the Boswell Papers, confirmed that the letters shed an interesting light on Boswell’s political aspirations (or famous lack thereof) in the elections of 1788 for the County of Ayr. Intrigued, Pamela began investigating the whereabouts and content of other collections of Houison- Craufurd records in other repositories, and working alongside Alison Rosie of the NRAS, established that there had been a survey completed at Craufurdland Castle in 1971. The survey list that existed in typed format only; permission had never been granted to make it public. On looking through the contents of the survey, tantalising descriptions were identified, such as ‘note to Robert Burns...’ Initially, it was hoped that the survey would support the descriptions created by the volunteers of the 2004 deposit of records. However, it was soon established that the items noted in the survey could not be cross referenced to the collection in the Archive. It was suggested to the family that more documents were still at Craufurdland and a week later Peter came to the Archive with 14 carrier bags. On emptying and sorting through the bags, many wonderful records were identified including: records from the family branch of Walkinshaw from the 1690s, further correspondence regarding James Boswell, interesting correspondence relating to military activity in North America 1758-1762, details of the family’s service in the Austro-Hungarian Army in the 1830s, an account of life on the front line in the First World War, and correspondence received by the family from eminent explorers, politicians, aristocracy and writers, including a letter dated 1750 from Tobias Smollett. There was indeed a ‘note to Robert Burns’, a letter written to Burns as Officer of Excise in 1792 – and, even more importantly, on the reverse, an Burns Chronicle 2016 Pamela McIntyre 5 epitaph in Burns autograph. Pauline MacKay and Jonathan Henderson of the Centre for Robert Burns Studies at Glasgow University worked with Pamela, to establish the authenticity and provenance of the letter and epitaph. Their research, to be published in Studies in Scottish Literature, confirmed the authenticity of the document, as a previously unrecorded holograph of ‘Epitaph [on Grizzel Grim]’. Addressed to Mr Robt. Burns, Officer of Excise, Dumfries, dated 26th June 1792, it reads: Mr Burns Sir I bottled yesterday 32 galls Mor white wine. John Hutton Say thirty two gallons

Written below Mr Hutton’s letter, there is a subtraction in Burns hand, deducting the volume given from a previous quantity. 596 32 564 On the reverse of the letter, again in Burns hand, appears the following: Epitaph Here lyes withe Dethe, aulde Grizzel Grim, Lincluden’s uggely witche O Dethe, & whatt a taist haste thou Canst lye withe suche a bitche!

The fact that there is a hand written epitaph by Robert Burns amongst the Craufurdland collection is indicative of the interest, range and diversity of the other records in the collection. The family’s connection with Ayrshire and their place in its history is reflected in this fantastic range of documents, among them a ‘note to Robert Burns’. 6 Grizzle Grim Burns Chronicle 2016

“Epitaph, written on the reverse of letter to Burns” Burns Chronicle 2016 Pamela McIntyre 7

“Letter to Burns with his subtraction written below” 8 Burns Chronicle 2016

The mysterious ‘WR’ in the First Commonplace Book: a mid-Victorian reminiscence Patrick Scott One of the unanswered puzzles posed by Nigel Leask in his new edition of Burns’s Commonplace Books is the identity of the mysterious “W.R.,” who made a series of significant annotations in the First Commonplace Book.1 Several people, including most notably John Syme after Burns’s death, made later annotations to the same manuscript, but Professor Leask has shown that the earliest were those by W.R., and that the comments W.R. made involve the choice of poems Burns should include in the Kilmarnock edition.2 This sets a date for the annotations in late 1785 or the first months of 1786, and it also makes W.R.’s identity more significant.. In the new edition, Professor Leask reviews several candidates for W.R. He discarded James Currie’s Liverpool friend, the poet William Roscoe, who would have been qualified to offer literary advice, because the annotations are far too early for Roscoe to be involved, and he discarded William Ronald, a farm worker at Lochlie, because the comments seem too acute as criticism and too neatly written. Professor Leask also considered two other William Ronalds known to Burns, a Tarbolton bonnet laird and a Mauchline tobacconist (the solution proposed by William Scott Douglas), but found them equally unlikely.3 The problem of the dating led him also to set aside Arthur Sherbo’s suggestion (discussed below) that WR might be William Reid.4 Last summer, the BBC, the Herald, and the Scotsman all ventilated the question, and Professor Leask raised it also with a roomful of 200 Scottish literature scholars at the World Congress in Glasgow in early July.5 His October blogpost reported that he had been “bombarded with suggestions, but despite some excellent hints, there were no conclusive

1 Nigel Leask, ed. Commonplace Books, Tour Journals, and Miscellaneous Prose [The Oxford Edition of the Works of Robert Burns, vol. I (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 37-38, cited below as Leask, OERB. 2 Both William Scott Douglas and J. C. Ewing also dated the W.R. annotations as from early 1786: see William Scott Douglas, ed., The Works of Robert Burns, 6 vols. (Edinburgh: Paterson, 1877-1879),IV: 52; J. C. Ewing, and Davidson Cook, eds., Robert Burns’s Commonplace Book 1783-1785 (Glasgow: Gowans and Gray, 1938; repr. London: Centaur Press; Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1965), p. ix. 3 Scott Douglas, IV: 52. Douglas had “little hesitation in assigning” the W.R. annotations to the tobacconist, on the ground that they were “absurd and conceited in the extreme.” 4 Arthur Sherbo, “W.R. in Robert Burns’s Commonplace Book 1783-1785,” Notes & Queries, 246:2 (June 2001): 117-118. 5 Cf. http://burnsc21.glasgow.ac.uk/who-is-the-ghostly-wr-in-the-first-commonplace-book/. Burns Chronicle 2016 Patrick Scott 9 answers to the riddle. … the hunt goes on.”6 Recently, I came by chance on an intriguing mid-Victorian anecdote that, however dubious, may bear on this mystery. The passage, a “reminiscence” from John Reid, of Glasgow, is tucked away in the Appendix to Hately Waddell’s Life and Works of Robert Burns: Mr. Reid’s father, the late William Reid, Esq., of Brash and Reid, booksellers, Glasgow, served his apprenticeship with Messrs. Dunlop and Wilson, the most extensive bookselling, publishing, and printing firm in that city, or indeed in the west of Scotland. Mr. Reid himself, then a very young man, had already begun to cultivate the muses, and was even projecting little literary ventures of his own unknown to his employers. One of his correspondents at the date of which we speak, from 1785 to 1788, was Gavin Turnbull of Kilmarnock, … On one occasion, precise date now unknown, a stranger of most remarkable aspect, of rustic appearance and with a shepherd’s plaid on his shoulders, presented himself to Mr. Reid on Dunlop and Wilson’s premises—with an introduction to him, it is believed, from his friend Gavin Turnbull. This stranger’s errand was two-fold—first to obtain publication, or more extensive publication, for a volume of poems, which he had in manuscript, or in printed sheets— uncertain which—in his hand; and second, an introduction through Mr. Reid or his employers to some of the wealthiest merchants in Glasgow, with a view to obtain a settlement for himself in the West Indies. He looked and spoke in the deepest distress—in distress approaching to despair, and was occasionally moved even to tears. The poems he produced at the same time were of so great beauty, that, between sympathy and admiration, Mr. Reid was at a loss what to do. Finally, after discussing all the circumstances of the case and carefully scrutinising the poems, Mr. Reid, though a much younger man, affectionately struck his visitor on the shoulder and said, “Your country, Sir, cannot afford to send you to the West Indies; you must go to Edinburgh and not to Jamaica.” The stranger, we need hardly say, was Robert Burns. It was not in Messrs. Dunlop and Wilson’s line

6 See [http://burnsc21.glasgow.ac.uk/publication-of-volume-1-of-the-new-oxford-edition-of-the- works-of-robert-burns-a-note-from-the-editor-nigel-leask/]. 10 Mysterious WR Burns Chronicle 2016

to publish volumes, much less small volumes of poetry; but Mr. Reid, though still a youth, gave the unknown a letter of introduction to Mr. Creech, with whom he was personally acquainted, and the interview for the present terminated.7 The core incident that John Reid communicated to Waddell, of Burns visiting Glasgow early in 1786 to find a publisher for his poems, though missing from most biographies, is certainly not unnoticed in Burns scholarship: Scott Douglas condemned it as a “manifest fable,” Ewing called it “apocryphal,” James Mackay gave it half a sentence, dismissing it as “unsubstantiated,” and more recently, in a talk about the Mitchell Library, Gerard Carruthers mentioned it parenthetically as “a story that has gone round,” that he thought “a bit dubious.”8 As a trustworthy biographical source, the Reid-Waddell anecdote certainly has all sorts of problems. It is almost too good to be true. When it was first published in part-issue, the bright yellow cover was accompanied by a smaller blue advertising handbill accurately touting it as “BURNS’S FIRST VISIT TO GLASGOW: ROMANTIC PARTICULARS”. What Waddell printed was at best a dramatically-rewritten version of what he had been told by John Reid about a story that he had heard his father William tell and retell years before, about an event that had happened years before that. Though Waddell’s edition included previously-unpublished Burns poems and letters, and is very interesting for its approach to the Burns texts, the Revd. Dr. Peter Hately Waddell (1817-1891), theological gadfly and minister of a breakaway Free Kirk congregation that he renamed the Church of the Future, has never been one of the canonical names in Burns scholarship. In Waddell’s account, John Reid was uncertain about two key points: exactly when the incident was meant to occur, and whether Burns was looking for a publisher for his manuscript poems (i.e. for the Kilmarnock edition) or for a new edition of previously-printed work (i.e. for what became the

7 Peter Hately Waddell, ed., Life and Works of Robert Burns, 2 vols. (Glasgow: Wilson, 1867 [1869]), II: Appendix, p. xxxvii: cf. James A. Kilpatrick, Literary Landmarks of Glasgow (Glasgow: St. Mungo’s Press, 1893), p. 57; “Burns’s Glasgow Haunts,” Burns Chronicle, 1st ser., 15 (1906), 114. John Reid owned two of the Burns letters first published by Waddell, to Robert Muir and Robert M’Indoe: see Waddell, II, pp. 143 and 217, and cf. James Gibson, Bibliography of Robert Burns (Kilmarnock: James M’Kie, 1881), p. 282. 8 Scott Douglas, I: 268; J. C. Ewing, Brash and Reid: Booksellers in Glasgow (Glasgow: Maclehose, 1934), p. 3, n. 4; James Mackay, RB: A Biography (Edinburgh: Mainstream, 1992), p. 232; Gerard Carruthers, “The Mitchell Burns Collection: The Best in the World?,” Robert Burns Lives! no. 133 (February 23, 2012): http://www.electricscotland.com/familytree/frank/burns_lives133.htm]. Cf. also Elizabeth Ewing, “Burns’s Visits to Glasgow: Fiction and Fact,” Burns Chronicle, 2nd ser., 17 (1942), 23-29: “this invention has never been accepted by any serious student of the life of Burns.” Burns Chronicle 2016 Patrick Scott 11

Edinburgh edition). The references to despair and to Burns still wanting an introduction to find a job in the West Indies argue for the first (even though we have no other evidence Burns went to Glasgow before 1788), while the mention of Edinburgh and Creech argue for the second (even though we have no evidence that Burns went to Glasgow in 1787 en route to Edinburgh, and in any case, once he had Blacklock’s letter he would hardly have been bothering to seek publishing advice from Reid). To his credit, Waddell follows the anecdote itself with a remarkably honest discussion of such difficulties, but he concludes firmly: “this remarkable interview, therefore … must have occurred early in 1786; and if so, the poems submitted to Mr. Reid’s examination must have been still in manuscript.” (ibid..). Waddell’s edition came out in 25 monthly parts, over a two-year period beginning in April 1867, and this allowed additional information to be gathered in response to the early numbers and added in later. In effect, part publication functioned for printed books rather as blog comment-windows or crowd-sourcing function now. The Roy Collection has a bound part-issue set, but with the covers bound together at the end after the text pages, unlike the set in the National Library of Scotland, which retains its original arrangement. Robert Betteridge kindly examined the NLS set for me, and found that, instead of the appendix being issued as a final 110-page mega-part, it was added in smaller segments spread over several of the later regular numbers.9 The pages with the Reid anecdote were issued with Part XXIII (probably published in February 1869). A month later, Part XXIV included pp. xlix-xl, allowing Waddell to insert, under a section of “Supplementary Gossip,” a paragraph of “spontaneous collateral testimony” that he had just received from someone whose father had worked as a boy with William Reid, at the Brash and Reid shop, and had heard him tell the same story (Appendix, p. xlix). However, this “collateral testimony” only confirms that such a story was told, not the story itself or the reliability of any detail. It is worth revisiting Mackay’s dismissal of the story. In discussing Burns’s decision to print his poems in Kilmarnock by subscription, Mackay briefly introduced what he called “an unsubstantiated story that Robert sought a publisher in Glasgow, Dunlop & Wilson being mentioned” (Mackay, p. 232). He rejected the story on the negative grounds that “there is no record of the poet visiting the metropolis of western Scotland until November 1787,” and on the a priori assumption that “it would have been logical for Robert

9 See Patrick Scott and Robert Betteridge, “The Part Issue of P. Hately Waddell’s Life and Works of Robert Burns,” forthcoming. 12 Mysterious WR Burns Chronicle 2016 to try a printer closer to hand first” (ibid.). There indeed seems to be no other record of Burns in Glasgow before November 1787, but Mackay leaves the story not only as unsubstantiated but also as unfootnoted, probably picking it up from a later recycling rather than from Waddell himself; in dismissing it, he doesn’t mention the involvement of William Reid, and he seems to have missed the possible link between Waddell’s story and the annotations in Burns Commonplace book. Once one has Waddell’s account, however, William Reid (1764-1831) emerges as a rather plausible candidate for the ‘WR’ of the Commonplace Book, certainly by comparison with the names previously canvassed. The annotations concern the choice of manuscript poems for publication, and none of the earlier candidates save Roscoe seemed qualified as literary advisors. As mentioned above, Arthur Sherbo suggested twenty years ago that WR might be Reid, noting that Reid not only had publishing contacts but also literary interests.10 The entry for Reid in the Scottish Book Trade Index confirms he had followed an apprenticeship to a typefounder with a period at Dunlop and Wilson learning the book trade, and it sets the terminus ad quem for this training as 1790, when he entered partnership with James Brash as a bookseller.11 More important is Reid’s plausibility as someone who might offer literary advice. He was a known admirer of Burns’s writing, composing additional verses for two of Burns’s songs, “Of a’ the airts” and “John Anderson, my jo,” writing a very competent Monody after Burns’s death, and with his partner James Brash making many of Burns’s poems and songs available in chapbook form in their series Poetry Original and Selected (1795-1798). But Sherbo’s argument for WR being William Reid required that the Commonplace Book annotations be dated much later than Leask’s analysis suggests—indeed, it requires them to be dated too late even to influence the Edinburgh edition. Based on a reference in Mackay’s biography, Sherbo takes Burns’s first encounter with Reid as in March 1788, when according to Mackay Burns visited Duncan and Wilson’s shop in the Trongate to

10 Sherbo, as in n. 4 above, and see also Sherbo’s entry on Reid in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004). 11 Scottish Book Trade Index, online at: http://www.nls.uk/catalogues/scottish-book-trade-index; Ewing, Brash and Reid, as in n.8 above; G. Ross Roy, “Robert Burns and the Brash and Reid Chapbooks of Glasgow,” in Literatur-im-Kontext, ed. Schwend et al. (Bern: Peter Lang, 1992), pp. 53-69. Burns Chronicle 2016 Patrick Scott 13 pick up some books for Nancy M’Lehose.12 If Mackay’s date for their first meeting is accepted, Leask’s (and Ewing’s) earlier date for the annotations becomes an insuperable objection to Sherbo’s case for William Reid as the mysterious WR. Mackay’s reasoning is surely circular: if there is even a kernel of truth in Waddell’s retelling of John Reid’s reminiscence of his father’s account of first meeting Burns, with an introduction by Gavin Turnbull, before Burns had found a publisher for his poems, and before Burns abandoned the idea of going to Jamaica, then there is a record of Burns being in Glasgow well before November 1787, indeed before April 1786, when the Proposals or subscription forms for the Kilmarnock edition were printed by John Wilson. If one looks for confirmation of the Waddell-Reid anecdote, and the earlier date for the meeting, then the WR annotations provide possible documentary confirmation that is wholly independent of Waddell himself or oral tradition. The barrier to Sherbo’s suggestion therefore breaks down. And it is not unreasonable to infer some such kernel of historical truth in multi-generational oral sources. People elaborate, and conflate, and muddle, and then try to rationalize, the stories they have heard and are retelling, but there is usually something factual, some historical incident, behind the incremental changes that result from oral repetition. In this case, the rationalization involved mixing up an otherwise-unknown part of the pre-history of the Kilmarnock edition with a well-known event in Burns’s life, his first visit to Edinburgh to arrange publication of a second edition with William Creech, though neither Glasgow nor Reid are appear in the sources for the second event either. Some aspects of the story— the plaid, the tears—may have been elaboration, but other details—that Reid met with Burns in Glasgow while he was still working for Dunlop and Wilson, for instance, or the letter of introduction from Gavin Turnbull— seem much less likely to have been invented. Indeed, once the Kilmarnock edition was out, Burns would not have needed an introduction to Reid from Turnbull, whose own first book would not appear for a further two years. We have inherited from Scott Douglas, Ewing, and the others, the idea that there is a clear line between trustworthy sources and the “manifest fables” of earlier Burnsians. The line is sometimes fuzzier than that. One of the next big frontiers for Burns scholarship might be learning how to interrogate more positively and systematically, though still critically, the murky after-

12 Mackay, p. 407: the relevant Clarinda letter to Burns, dated March 8, 1788, asks Burns, then in Mauchline, to “send for” the parcel so he could bring it with him to Edinburgh, not to visit the shop himself. Elizabeth Ewing, as in n. 8 above, p. 26, dates Burns’s first visit to Glasgow as in June 1787, at the start of his short tour in the West Highlands. 14 Mysterious WR Burns Chronicle 2016 documents of oral history. Waddell’s story is not, obviously, the “conclusive answer to the riddle” one might hope for, but meantime, I believe, it provides our best clue yet for the identity of the mysterious WR. By suggesting a date for Burns’s first meeting with Reid before the Kilmarnock proposals, by providing a reason and occasion for that meeting, and by making the meeting concern the publishability and therefore quality of Burns’s poems, the anecdote makes Reid’s name perhaps the best current match. Once again, I am amazed at the sheer energy of the often-maligned nineteenth-century Burns editors in collecting documents and memories that were fast disappearing. I am amazed also at how much in the older Burnsian printed sources has been dropped from modern scholarly awareness, is literally untraceable, irretrievable, pretty much lost, even in the Age of Google Books. Such mid-Victorian sources as Waddell are indeed mixed in reliability. But it is still worth checking to see what they have to offer.

Cover Illustration The front of the dust jacket for this issue of the Burns Chronicle is an imitation of the cover of the first Burns Chronicle, 125 years ago, paying homage to the great legacy of the Burns Chronicle over these many years as a repository for a mass of knowledge in all aspects of the study of the works and life of Robert Burns. You will note that the original complete title “The Annual Burns Chronicle and Club Directory” is retained, as we continue in the tradition of annual publication with a modern simplified form of listing our membership. The notional publication date is given as 25th January of the issue year although this was adjusted many years ago in favour of an earlier issue to suit the seasonal activities of our enthusiast membership. Burns Chronicle 2016 15

The First Publication of “Tam o’ Shanter” Bill Dawson As every Burnsian knows, Robert Burns’s tale “Tam o’ Shanter” was specially written in 1790 at the request of the antiquarian Francis Grose, and it was duly included in the second volume of Grose’s Antiquities of Scotland, which was published in April 1791.1 For over a hundred years, however, careful scholars have also noted that the poem had been printed in two Edinburgh periodicals dated a month earlier. In 1896, Henley and Henderson recorded that “Ere Grose’s work was before the public, the piece made its appearance in the Edinburgh Magazine for March 1791; and it was also published in the Edinburgh Herald of 18th March 1791.”2 Kinsley describes the two periodical appearances as issued “when the second volume of the Antiquities was getting ready for press,” and Egerer implies a significant gap between the poem’s appearance in the periodicals with “when [it was] finally published in the Antiquities.”3 The exact sequence of events is important, because it affects whether editors of Burns should view the periodical texts as potentially having independent authority. Scholars following Henley and Henderson may have been misled, because re-examination of the publication history suggests that Grose’s Antiquities was indeed the first published version of Burns’s tale. There is no dispute about when the poem appeared in the Herald and Magazine, first in the Herald on March 18th, and then in the Edinburgh

1 Francis Grose, ed., The Antiquities of Scotland, 2 vols. (London: S. Hooper, 1789-1791), II: 199-201. For the classic account of the poem’s genesis, see Gilbert Burns, in James Currie, ed., Works of Robert Burns, 4 vols. [Liverpool: J. M’Creery, 1800], III: 387. My research for this article in the G. Ross Roy Collection, University of South Carolina, was supported by the W. Ormiston Roy Memorial Fellowship. “First published in Studies in Scottish Literature, 40 (2014): 105-115; (c) Studies in Scottish Literature, 2014; reprinted by agreement.” This article first appeared in Studies in Scottish Literature, vol. 40, and is reprinted by permission. 2 W.E. Henley and T.F. Henderson, eds., The Poetry of Robert Burns [The Centenary Burns], 4 vols. (Edinburgh: T.C. and E.C. Jack, 1896), I: 438. 3 James Kinsley, ed., The Poems and Songs of Robert Burns, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), III: 1348; J.W. Egerer, A Bibliography of Robert Burns (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1964), 36. Cf. Andrew Noble and Patrick Scott Hogg, eds., The Canongate Burns, rev. ed. (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2003), 262. 16 Bill Dawson Burns Chronicle 2016

Magazine for March, which was published in the first days of April.4 Nor is there any doubt that the completed volume 2 of Antiquities was published in early April 1791. But the publication sequence behind these dates is complex. For instance, the title page of the first volume of Grose’s Antiquities of Scotland is dated 1789, but the introduction that follows carries a paragraph that must clearly have been printed much later: “To my ingenious friend Mr Robert Burns I have been variously obligated; he not only was at pains of marking out what was worthy of note in Ayrshire, the county of his honoured birth, but he also wrote, expressly for this work, the pretty tale annexed to Alloway Church.”5 At the very earliest, this passage must date from late 1790, after the poem was written, and a more likely date for the introduction is early 1791, when Grose had finished his work on both volumes. Then, immediately following the introduction to volume 1, there is an advertisement dated March 25, 1791, for a new work, the Antiquities of Ireland, that Grose planned to undertake in the summer of 1791, once volume 2 of his Scotland was complete, a further indication that the prelims to the “1789” volume were printed in 1791. In addition, most of the individual plates, along with the names of the artist and engraver, carry a date; 38 of the plates in the first volume are dated 1790, rather than 1789, and many of the plates in the second volume are dated 1790, not 1791. The engraving of Alloway Kirk, illustrating Burns’s poem, carries the date-line “Published May 1, 1790 by S. Hooper.” The key to these apparent anomalies is recognizing that Grose’s Antiquities of Scotland, like his other major works, was not initially published as a whole work, or even volume by volume, but serially, in parts.6 This is made clear in one of the first advertisements for Grose’s work, in the Caledonian Mercury for January 3, 1789, when Grose announced the new work as forthcoming and invited subscribers to take it in parts as they were produced (see Fig. 1).

4 Both the Edinburgh Magazine, and its older rival the Scots Magazine, appeared just after the month for which they were gathering information: see e.g. the Caledonian Mercury for January 4, 1789, which advertised the December 1788 Edinburgh Magazine as “just published.” 5 Grose, Antiquities of Scotland, I: xxi. 6 Grose’s mode of publication was noted briefly, but without mention of Burns or Burns’s poem, in the life of Grose accompanying Kay’s portraits, but its significance seems to have been overlooked by Burnsians: see John Kay, A Series of Original Portraits (Edinburgh: A. & C. Black, 1877), II:47 (same text repeated in 1885 edition, II:45); reprinted in John D. Ross, All About “Tam o’ Shanter” (New York: Raeburn, 1900), 47. Burns Chronicle 2016 Tam o’ Shanter 17

Fig. 1: Advertisement for Grose’s Antiquities of Scotland, from Caledonian Mercury (Saturday, January 3, 1789), p. 4. 18 Bill Dawson Burns Chronicle 2016

At that point, the work was expected to be published in thirty-six parts, each with four views or engravings, or 144 engravings in all. Further advertisements followed in the Mercury, the Edinburgh Evening Courant and other papers, all announcing that the work was to be issued to subscribers in parts. By the time the work was completed more than two years later, it had run to 49 parts with a total of 189 engraved plates, plus two engraved frontispiece plates. While 49 parts might be expected to have had 196 plates, the difference can be explained either from some parts offering fewer than four plates, or as there being 47 or 48 regular parts, with the other part(s) providing the prelims and end-matter—title-pages, preface, indexes, appendices, etc. —that subscribers would need if they wanted to have the separate parts bound into volume form. The “views” all had to be engraved on copper plates, and printed individually, and by law the plates carried the engraver’s name and a date. A much longer lead-time was needed to produce the engraved plates than to set a page of type, and the plates were prepared (and therefore dated) as each illustration became available for engraving. The dates range from late 1788 through to March 1791, in a rough progression, slightly ahead of part publication. Individual illustration may indeed have been available for separate purchase ahead of publication in the relevant parts. As an extreme instance, two plates of Inchcolm Abbey dated November 1788, appear at the end of volume 2, which even in number form would have been published well over two years later. In short, the presence of a date on an engraving is not a reliable guide to the publication date of the relevant part. Each part included also, with its four plates, several pages of explanatory text, averaging twelve pages (six leaves) of text per part, separately printed from letter-press in three pairs of two leaves. The text could run from part to part, rather than each part being complete in itself, so that it is not always obvious from the later bound volumes at which page a part started or ended.7 Confirmation that a set of the Antiquities was in fact originally purchased in parts and bound up later can sometimes be found by the presence of old stab-holes in the inner margins, because parts were normally stitched (stabbed) through the pages themselves, about a

7 Although Grose included instructions to the binder after the index at the front of vol. I, these were not always followed: Where Grose had relatively little to say about the buildings illustrated, later bound sets may have gathered six or more engraved plates in a single sequence, rather than having them spaced evenly as in the part-issue. for this article, I have consulted two copies in the Roy Collection, as well as my own copy. Burns Chronicle 2016 Tam o’ Shanter 19 quarter inch from inner edge of the page, rather than through the folds, as in the binding of regular books. When the parts were bound, the old thread was removed from the stabbed gatherings, but the holes remain. Pairs of matching stab-holes opposite each other on facing pages indicate the middle of a number-part; single stabholes without a counterpart on the opposite page indicate the beginning or end of a number-part. Given that Grose’s Antiquities was issued in parts, it becomes possible to recalculate the date of first publication for the part containing the engraving of Alloway Kirk and of Burns’s poem. Between January 1789 and April 1791, newspaper advertisements or announcements for the Antiquities are intermittent. Grose’s publisher Hooper frequently issued part-works at weekly intervals, but by mid-July, 1789, almost 28 weeks after the first part had been announced, the advertisements are only for parts I – VIII, a rate of one part every three weeks.8 In reality, publication must have been irregular, with long gaps in production, especially while Grose was travelling in Scotland in the summers of 1789 and 1790, gathering material for the later numbers. Nonetheless, an approximate date for the “Alloway Kirk” number can be calculated. The “Alloway Kirk” engraving was Plate 115 of the 189 plates, which at four plates per number, would put it in part 29. If one looks instead at text, the work was paginated continuously through the whole series, not in two separate sequences for the future volume issue, and “Tam o’ Shanter” appeared on pp. 199-201 of 304 regularly- numbered pages of text, not counting the introductory material, and supplements of additional notes at the end of each volume.9 If all parts had similar numbers of pages, pp. 199-202 would have appeared in part 31 or 32 of the 49 parts. After “Alloway Kirk,” at the lowest calculation, there would be at least seventeen further parts to appear before the volume was completed. Since Hooper is unlikely to have published parts at less than weekly intervals, we can estimate that the number with “Alloway Kirk” would have to have been published in London sometime in December 1790. Moreover, if Grose and Hooper were pushing to finish the project so quickly that they could publish the final seventeen numbers in little over three months, we can infer that they would be able to print Burns’s poem very quickly once he had sent it to Grose.

8 Caledonian Mercury (Saturday June 13, 1789), p. 1; cf. the similar advertise-ment in the same paper on Thursday, August 6, 1789. 9 There is a significant anomaly in page numbering at the end of vol. I, which ended its regular page-sequence on p. 170, and then has four pages numbered *173-*176, while vol. II starts on p. 171, suggesting that Grose added these extra pages after the first parts of vol. II had been printed, perhaps only when prelims and indexes were being printed for the eventual volume publication. 20 Bill Dawson Burns Chronicle 2016

Harder evidence for this earlier publication date comes from the letter that Francis Grose himself wrote to Burns on January 3, 1791, which begins: “Dear Sir, The proof Sheet came safe to hand, and I thank you for the dispatch you made in sending it. I shall be very happy at receiving the Kilwinning, as I hope to finish my Scotch Work this Spring, at least all but the Western Isles. Herewith you will receive some proofs of the pleasant Tale of the Grey mare’s Tail, together with some Numbers of the Governor’s Antiquities.... Am I ever to hope to see you in London?..”.10 The “Tale of the Grey mare’s Tail” is of course “Tam o’ Shanter.” Burns had originally suggested to Grose that he include “Alloway Kirk” in the Antiquities in the summer of 1789 and had sent him the three prose tales about the kirk in summer the following year.11 He sent Grose the recently- completed “Tam o’ Shanter,” which he described as “one of the Aloway-kirk Stories done in Scots verse,” in a letter dated December 1, 1790 (Letters II:62). Grose’s letter indicates that within a month of Burns sending the poem, it had been set in type, a “proof sheet” had been sent to Burns and returned, and the text corrected.12 The “proofs” mentioned in Grose’s third paragraph were the twelve off-prints of his poem that Burns received and would distribute to friends, proving that the poem was in final printed form by (at the very latest) January 3. The “Governor” was Grose’s favoured name for Capt Robert Riddell, and the “numbers” were recently-published parts of the Antiquities, to which Riddell was presumably a subscriber. “The Kilwinning” was an illustration (“draught”) that Burns had promised to get

10 Francis Grose, London, to Robert Burns, near Friar’s Carse, January 3, 1791, from Letters Addressed to Robert Burns, 1779-1796, ed. Patrick Scott and Joseph DuRant (forthcoming); first printed in Burns Chronicle, 2nd ser. 9 (1934):8-9; manuscript in NLS, in facsimile in Peter Westwood, comp., The Definitive Illustrated Companion to Robert Burns, 8 vols. (Distributed National Burns Collections Project, 2004), II, pt. 3: 1641-1642. 11 Burns to Grose [June 1790], in G. Ross Roy, ed., Letters of Robert Burns, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), II: 29-31. 12 When sending the MS poem, Burns wrote to Grose that he did not expect there was time to send him a proof before publication, though “otherwise I should like to see them” (Letters, II: 63). If the “proof sheet” that Burns had returned was indeed for “Tam o’ Shanter,” and not for previously-printed Ayrshire descriptions on which Grose wanted Burns’s comments, then this timetable indicates a very tight turnround time for transmission of proof between London and Ellisland. Burns Chronicle 2016 Tam o’ Shanter 21 for Grose, and that he had mentioned in his own previous letter.13 The separately-printed copies of the “Alloway Kirk” pages that Grose sent are mentioned in a number of Burns’s own letters from February 1791, and he writes differently about them when sending copies to correspondents in Scotland and London. When sending some poems, including the off- print, to Archibald Alison, on February 14th, Burns assumes that Alison will not have seen it, writing “I inclose you some poetic bagatelles of my late composition. The one in print is my first essay in the way of telling a Tale” (Letters, II: 71). However, when writing to a correspondent in London, Dr. John Moore, on February 28, Burns shows that he knows that by then the poem would already have reached Grose’s London subscribers: “I do not know, Sir whether you are a Subscriber to Grose’s Antiquities of Scotland.—If you are, the inclosed poem will not be altogether new to you.—Captn Grose did me the favor to send me a dozen copies of the Proof-sheet, of which this is one.—Should you have read the piece before, still this will answer the principal end I have in view: it will give me another opportunity of thanking you....” (Letters II: 72).14 It was only after all the relevant parts had been published that Grose’s Antiquities was offered for sale in volume form, volume I from the summer of 1790, and volume 2, from mid-April 1791. The part issues cost either 3s. 6d. (for large paper copies) or 2s. 6d. (for small paper), per part, a total of £4 4s. or £3 for 24 parts, while the equivalent volumes each cost £5 or £3 11s. 6d., in boards. I have not found advertisements for volume 1 in Edinburgh newspapers and magazines between January 1789 and

13 The section on Kilwinning appeared in vol. II, pp. 212-214, of the Antiquities, or around part 34. Grose (Antiquities I: xix) says that the sketch of Kilwinning Abbey was provided by Captain Henry Hutton, “from an ancient drawing, before the building of the present spire.” The published plate is dated “Published as the Act Directs Feb. 26, 1790, by S. Hooper.” 14 A second letter the same day shows that Burns routed his letter to Moore and the off-print (“one of my latest productions”) through the Rev. George Baird, then in London, giving Baird permission to include the poem in his projected new edition of Michael Bruce’s poetry, a fundraiser to support Bruce’s mother (Letters, II: 76; cf. Baird’s request to Burns, February 8, 1791, in Currie, II:342-344); on March 29, Moore acknowledged receiving “the printed verses on Alloa Church [sic]” (Currie II: 351). Burns sent off-prints also to Alexander Dalziel, on March 10 (Letters, II: 77) and to Alexander Fraser Tytler, who received it (via the Edinburgh bookseller Peter Hill) on March 12 (Currie II: 330): Tytler’s offprint, with his autograph corrections, is in the G. Ross Roy Collection, University of South Carolina Libraries. 22 Bill Dawson Burns Chronicle 2016

April 1791, but the volume was reviewed in two London periodicals, the Critical Review and the European Magazine.15 As noted above, Grose’s introduction to volume I, with its tribute to Burns, could hardly have been written before December 1790, and is probably one of the last sections to be published. The binder’s instructions in this last-printed section indicate that it replaced the simple index of views that had been prepared when vol. I was sold separately in summer 1790: “N.B. the old index must be cancelled” (Antiquities, II: iv). Following completion of the whole part issue, the second volume was advertised for sale in volume form and reviewed in the same periodicals.16 It is worth noting, in view of the prices given above, that the press advertisements in late April and May 1791, offering the Antiquities in “two large handsome volumes,” also announce that the work was again being offered, for the convenience of new subscribers, as forty-nine weekly numbers.17 The probable publication order for the early printed texts of Burns’s “Tam o’ Shanter,” therefore, was, first, in the part-issue of Grose’s Antiquties of Scotland, in December 1790 or early January 1791; second, in the Edinburgh Herald, on March 18; then in the Edinburgh Magazine for March 1791 (published at the beginning of April); and lastly (without variation of text) in the volume form for volume II of the Antiquities. As long as the Edinburgh periodical texts were thought to have been published first, editors have struggled to establish how Burns’s poem reached the two periodicals, attempting to identify from minor variations of text a manuscript source from which the Edinburgh printers could have worked. Manuscript transmission, from Burns to the Edinburgh periodicals, was not on the face of it improbable. The publisher and editor of both the Edinburgh Herald and the Edinburgh Magazine was the same man, James Sibbald (1747-1803), who had written the very first review of Burns’s Kilmarnock poems, in the Edinburgh Magazine for October 1786, to whom Burns had written warmly in January 1787 (Letters, II: 77-78), and whose

15 Critical Review or Annals of Literature, 69 (June 1790): 657-667; vol. 70 (July 1790): 74-79; vol. 70 (August 1790): 139-148 (“we shall look forward with some impatience to the completion of his design,” p. 148); cf. European Magazine or London Review, 18 (1790): 425. 16 Critical Review, new series, 2 (May 1791): 407-415; (August 1791): 407-415; appendix to vol. 2, 557- 567; European Magazine, 20 (July 1791): 45-54. 17 See e.g. Caledonian Mercury (Saturday April 30, 1791), p. 1, headed “TO THE NOBILITY AND GENTRY OF SCOTLAND.” Burns Chronicle 2016 Tam o’ Shanter 23 bookshop Burns had frequented while in Edinburgh.18 For many years, the source of the periodical texts was asserted to be the Adam manuscript of the poem, now in the Rosenbach Library and Museum in Philadelphia, which is endorsed in an unknown hand “This M.S. copy of ‘Tam o’ Shanter,’ which Burns gave to the late Mr: De Cardonnel Lawson, in 1790 a few days after they met at their friend’s Mr. Riddell’s of Friar’s Carse ... seems to be almost the first copy the Poet gave away, as it has the lines on ‘Lawyers and Priests’, which were altered in the copies afterwards printed.”19 Adam de Cardonnel (1746/7-1827: the Lawson came later) was an Edinburgh antiquary, who himself published a Pictorial Antiquities of Scotland that eventually stretched to four volumes (1788-1793).20 More significantly, de Cardonnel shared his own research with Grose and accompanied him on site visits (Grose, Antiquities, I: xx), and Burns had used de Cardonnel as a conduit to forward a letter to Grose.21 De Cardonnel lived in Edinburgh, so if he had been given the “Tam o’ Shanter” manuscript by Burns, and knew it was imminently forthcoming in Grose, there is no intrinsic barrier to supposing him to be James Sibbald’s source for the poem. But the later note on the Adam MS. is certainly inaccurate about when and how de Cardonnel had received it, because Burns had not written the poem when Grose visited Friar’s Carse. Moreover, based on the collation of variants, Kinsley dates the Adam MS as being a relatively late copy. The specific variant cited in the endorsement as evidence for its early date (the four subsequently-cancelled lines after line 142) is shared, not only by the two Edinburgh periodical texts, and the other early Burns manuscripts, but also by the text in Grose’s Antiquities (and by the special

18 On Sibbald, see, e.g., Maurice Lindsay’s brief entry in David Purdie et al., Maurice Lindsay’s The Burns Encyclopaedia (London: Hale, 2013), 287-288, and Warren McDougall, in Oxford Dictionary of National Bibliography (2004-2014): http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/25495?docPos=2. On his two periodicals, see W. J. Couper, The Edinburgh Periodical Press; being a Bibliographical Account of the Newspapers, Journals, and Magazines issued in Edinburgh from the Earliest Times to 1800, 2 vols. (Stirling: Eneas Mackay, 1908), II: 169-173 and 183-187. 19 “One of the Greatest Burns Manuscripts in Existence,” in Robert Burns 1759-1796, A Collection of Original Manuscripts, Autograph Letters, First Editions and Association Copies (Philadelphia and New York: the Rosenbach Company, 1948), 40. 20 Completion of de Cardonnel’s first two volumes is noticed in Scots Magazine (December 1788), 29. 21 The letter to Grose is not extant, but it is mentioned by Burns in a later letter to Alexander Findlater (undated, but assigned to late 1790, Letters, II. 47-48). 24 Bill Dawson Burns Chronicle 2016 proofs or off-prints that Grose sent to Burns at the beginning of January).22 A much simpler explanation of how “Tam o’ Shanter” reached James Sibbald’s papers is that a printed text, either one of Burns’s twelve “proof” copies or the relevant number-part of Grose’s Antiquities, had arrived in Edinburgh and that Sibbald was reprinting the poem from the text in Grose. We know that Tytler, for instance, had seen the poem, via Peter Hill, by March 10, 1791, a full week before it appeared in the Edinburgh Herald. Both the Herald and the Edinburgh Magazine were avowedly on the look- out for literary news, and there was no question of copyright clearance or intellectual property for individual poems, once they had appeared in print: like other eighteenth-century editors, Sibbald had no qualms about simply reprinting any material he thought noteworthy. Almost all the variants collated by Kinsley (as EM or EH, with the Antiquities collated as Grose and the proof-sheet as 91) show the three texts as being identical, and none of the small number of variants in which the two Edinburgh periodicals differ from Grose are ones that would clearly indicate them as being authorial, rather than simply the kind of variation a printer might make in setting type, or the printing-house “Corrector” might make on an in-house proof. Common variants from Grose shared by the two Edinburgh periodicals indicate that the Edinburgh Magazine text reprinted that in the Herald. Little editorial weight need be given to the presence in one, or even both periodicals of an odd variation of spelling, punctuation, or a speech form that a printer might change without any outside authorization, because there is no reason to think that the Edinburgh periodical texts were based on any source other than Grose. For well over a hundred years, careful Burns scholars have been skirting round this issue, making clear that they knew about the Edinburgh periodical versions, anxious not to give a false priority to the text of “Tam o’ Shanter” in Grose’s Antiquities of Scotland, and anxious to take into account the possibility that the two Edinburgh periodical texts might preserve some independent variant reading that came from Burns himself. But the problem never really existed. Grose’s Antiquities was published serially, in number-parts, and the number-part with “Alloway Kirk” was published at the latest by early January 1791. While it remains a theoretical possibility that James Sibbald had obtained for the Edinburgh periodical printings

22 Kinsley, III: 1347-1350, with a selective collation of variants at II: 557-564. Kinsley identifies six manuscript versions. Margaret M. Smith and Penny Bouhmela, Index of English Literary Manuscripts, III:1 (London: Mansell, 1986), 174 (MS BuR 1029-1036) list seven MSS and a transcript, but with the current location for two items now unknown. Burns Chronicle 2016 Tam o’ Shanter 25 an unusually exact manuscript copy of the version Burns sent to Grose, it is much more likely, given this revised sequence of publication dates and the very small variation between the Grose text and the periodical texts, that Sibbald’s text was set directly from the Grose number-part or separate proof-sheet. Burns, after all, had written “Tam o’ Shanter” specifically for publication in Grose’s Antiquities of Scotland, and it now seems that it was indeed first published in the form he had intended.23

23 With grateful thanks to Patrick Scott at the University of South Carolina for much assistance in the pursuit of this research and for his polishing of the completed article. BD

Francis Grose, Antiquarian, 1731-1791 26 Joseph DuRant Burns Chronicle 2016

Robert Burns in Mid-Nineteenth Century American Newspapers Joseph DuRant Interest in the nineteenth-century American response to Robert Burns has tended to focus on his influence on American poets such as Whitman or Emerson and his reception by the literary elite.1 Less attention has been given to geographical differences within the US in responses to Burns. The Civil War centennial provides the opportunity to do so. Individuals craft Burns into a jovial figure, a liberal man of human sympathy, or an icon of poetic talent, often seeming to create a poet that most closely resembles their own self. To better understand Burns’s complexity and malleability as a literary figure, I turned to his reception in the United States just before the Civil War. Interestingly, striking differences exist between the representations of Burns in Northern and Southern Newspapers, one an abolitionist paper, and the other firmly for the institution of slavery. The Daily Dispatch was first published in Richmond, Virginia on October 19, 1850, and holds the distinction of being the first penny newspaper south of Baltimore. Chronicling America, the digitization project jointly sponsored by The Library of Congress and the National Endowment for the Humanities, provides this introduction, “It offered itself to Richmond’s commercial and industrial elite as the best possible source for local, state, and national news.”2 It began as a wholly non-partisan paper, However, as tensions over slavery increased, editor James Cowardin gave his paper an increasing slant towards supporting his Whig politics and the preservation of Slavery.3 Nearly every issue examined has at least one notice of a runaway with a reward, or advertisement for the sale of humans at auction. Examining the Robert Burns presented in this paper illustrates the ease with which he can be used, and shows that varying ideas of him prevail. One Burns displayed by the Dispatch is the passionate, inspired bard.

1 For a number of detailed essays see Robert Burns and Transatlantic Culture eds. Alker, Davis, and Nelson (Farnham: Ashgate (2012), especially Robert Crawford, “Americas Bard”: 99-116 and Leith Davis “The Robert Burns 1859 Centenary”:187-205, among others; Gary Schnhorst, “Whitman on Robert Burns:An Early Essay Recovered.” Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 13 (Spring 1996): 217-220. Available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.13008/2153-3695.1535; James M. Montgomery, “How Robert Burns Captured America,” Studies in Scottish Literature, (1998) Vol. 30: Iss. 1. Available at:http:// scholarcommons.sc.edu/ssl/vol30/iss1/25; Fenrec Sasz Abraham Lincoln and Robert burns, connected lives and legends, (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2008). 2 “About The daily dispatch. (Richmond [Va.]} 1850-1884,” Chronicling America. Web. http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn84024738/ 3 Ibid. Burns Chronicle 2016 Burns North & South 27

In a short snippet of an article printed on November 4th, 1852, the paper announces the death of one Mrs. Patterson, which leaves only one surviving woman of the six Burns wrote about in “The Belles of Mauchline.” On his character is written, “the susceptible heart of the poet was bandied from on to the other,” and, “he could not long remain the victim of his peculiar sensations, without indicating the same in rhyme.”4 Burns is presented as essentially a poet of passion. He cannot feel an emotion without the urge to put the feeling down on the page. Burns is praised as “extremely gallant, always in love, and a great favorite with the ladies.”5 This is very nearly an ideal picture of the genteel young southerner. Choosing this aspect of Burns for a passing bit of news shows an appreciation and approval of this behavior by the readers of The Daily Dispatch. The presentation of this article also suggests a public that is well aware of Robert Burns. If he was not well known by the readership, the notice of the death of the next to last of the six Mauchline Belles would not be printed. The article closes, reflecting on the oddity that fame should come to these ladies just because they were included in a short poem, with: “such is the power of genius, which seems to sanctify everything it touches.” Burns is recognized as a poetic genius, a great author, and a man of passion. The presentation of Burns as a well-known public figure is continued in a short piece printed on October 15th, 1856 on a visit to Mrs. Begg, sister of the poet. Mrs. Begg’s cottage is located near the Burns Monument in Alloway and was a common stop for prominent visitors. The visit was part of a work titled “European Sketches” published by the Central Presbyterian, and the summary relates the pleasant nature of her life in the countryside. Mrs. Begg gets more visitors “from ‘the States’ than any other part of the world,” suggesting a great popularity among wealthy Americans who have the means to make a journey across the Atlantic.6 A pilgrimage to the land of Burns from America would have taken months. It would have been inaccessible for the poor farmer or factory laborer. Perhaps the middle class, educated man would set out to read the sketch of Burns’s home in “European Sketches” as a middle ground to making a physical pilgrimage to his birthplace.

4 “Death of one of Burns’s Heroines.” The Daily Dispatch. (Richmond [Va.]), 04 Nov. 1852. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Lib. of Congress. http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/ sn84024738/1852-11-04/ed-1/seq-2/ 5 Ibid. 6 “Robert Burns and Ayrshire.” The Daily Dispatch. (Richmond [Va.]), 15 Oct. 1856. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Lib. of Congress. http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/ sn84024738/1856-10-15/ed-1/seq-2/ 28 Joseph DuRant Burns Chronicle 2016

Neither of these examples of Burns includes any hint of his sentiment or of the belief of equality of others in, for example, “Man’s a man for a’ that.” What is included in these papers are reminders of a slave society. On the same page as the report on the Mauchline Belles is an advertisement as follows “Wanted for the balance of the year is a colored Nurse, of good character for whom the highest price will be given.”7 On page three following the short piece on Mrs. Begg, is an advertisement for the sale of “Nine Negroes” among notices for dry goods auctions and land for sale.8 On the back is a notice of the capture of a black man who claims to be free but has insufficient documentation, so he is being imprisoned until someone claims him or less likely vouches for his status as a free man.9 Several of Burns’s major poems espouse the ideas of universal equality and sympathy for the less fortunate, which would not seem to align with the institution of Slavery. However, this image of Burns does not have a strong presence in Richmond, Virginia. Burns’s belief in the worth of the common man is shown in one instance in the Daily Dispatch, yet not in such a way as to in any way challenge slavery. On the first page of the February 4th, 1853 paper is a short parable: The Gowd For A’ That.’—Robert Burns, on his way to Leith one morning met a country farmer: he shook him earnestly by the hand and stopped to converse a while. A young Edinburgh blood took the poet to task for this defect of taste. ‘Why, you fantastic,’ said Burns, ‘it was not the great coat, the scone bonnet, and the saunda-r boot hose, I spoke to, but the man that was in them; and the man, sir, for worth would weigh down you and me, and ten more any such day.10 Here is printed straightforwardly with a title from “Mans a man for a’ that” a short parable where Burns praises the common farmer. In an economy where much of the farming is done by slave laborers, this parable seems out of place. Yet the dichotomy that could be suggested here is one between city dwellers and the more honest rural society. In antebellum America, the North was urbanized and industrialized and the

7 The Daily Dispatch (Richmond [VA]) 4 November 1852. http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/ sn84024738/1852-11-04/ed-1/seq-2/ 8 Image 3 http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn84024738/1856-10-15/ed-1/seq-3/ 9 Image 4. http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn84024738/1856-10-15/ed-1/seq-4/ 10 “The Gowd for A’ That.” The Daily Dispatch. (Richmond [Va.]), 04 Feb. 1853. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Lib. of Congress. http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn84024738/1853- 02-04/ed-1/seq-1/ Burns Chronicle 2016 Burns North & South 29

South remained more agrarian, dependent on slave labor. From a southern perspective, their own culture was more honest than the dirty industry of the North. The other stories surrounding this piece are humorous, meant to entertain the reader. That Burns is included here shows he is a popular figure with associations of good feeling and charm. This positive, humorous Robert Burns is so pervasive, that he is used in advertisement. Printed on Christmas Eve of 1859 is the following advertisement:

11

Here a photographer takes lines from “To a Louse,” a humorous satire that denounces hypocrisy, and turns them into an advertisement for a holiday portrait. The lines following it are of absolutely no poetic value. Burns here is a popular figure, an unwilling celebrity sponsor if you will. His lines have been morphed into a request for a self-portrait that is finally possible through technological advances. If the prevailing popular view of Burns was a great poet of human sympathy, or a poet of manly nationalism, this advertisement would not have been created. Because people viewed Burns as approachable and humorous, this advertisement was likely a success. Individuals will see these lines, and perhaps be entertained and buy a daguerreotype. On that same page Burns is placed in the acceptable middle-class canon in an advertisement selling “Presentation Books.” Burns is included in a list of authors whose works are available in “Royal Octavo Volumes,

11 “The Mirror of Art.” The Daily Dispatch. (Richmond [Va.]), 24 Dec. 1859. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Lib. of Congress. http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn84024738/1859- 12-24/ed-1/seq-2/ 30 Joseph DuRant Burns Chronicle 2016 beautifully illustrated, bound in full Turkey, Gilt, Morocco, Antique, and all other various styles of binding, and will be closed out at very low prices.”12 Shakespeare, Byron, Dryden, and Scott are listed with Burns as well as the Irish poet Thomas Moore. Included as well is N.P. Willis (1806-1867), a prolific and financially successful American author. This advertisement seems aimed directly at the middle class. It is not aimed at the literary elite, or at the common man, but at the Southern gentleman looking to purchase a present for the young belle that has caught his eye. Burns is familiar to this audience. He is a safe, jovial figure, while still in some sense retaining a touch of literary sophistication. Yet it is hard to believe that a business would create an advertisement based on lines from Dryden’s pen. Burns holds a special place in the culture of the American South that does not have any obvious equal. The Burns presented in a Northern state in the Anti-slavery Bugle in Ohio, differs in notable ways, yet remains similar in other aspects. Founded on June 20th, 1845, the first issue of the Bugle states: “Our mission is a great and glorious one. It is to preach deliverance to the captive, and the opening on the prison door to them that are bound; to hasten in the day when ‘liberty shall be proclaimed throughout all the land, unto all inhabitants thereof.’”13 The paper was first printed in New-Lisbon, Ohio, but moved its place of operation to Salem, Ohio which was more receptive to radical ideas. It was read much more widely than in the community from which it originated, reaching Iowa, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Indiana.14 The representation of Burns that this paper presents leans more towards the sentimental, family oriented Burns than the jovial, gentleman bard of the southern paper. Burns was a figure appreciated and widely known to abolitionists.15 In the paper of July 24th, 1846 “Frederick Douglass’s A Visit to the Birth-Place

12 Ibid. 13 Anti-slavery Bugle. (New-Lisbon, Ohio), 20 June 1845. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Lib. of Congress. http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83035487/1845-06-20/ ed-1/seq-1/ 14 “About Anti-slavery Bugle,” Chronicling America. Web. http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/ sn83035487/ 15 See Robert Burns in Transatlantic Culture, esp. Carol McGurck. For discussions of Burns’s Relation to slavery see Gerard Carruthers, “Robert Burns and Slavery”The Drouth (Issue 28 (Winter 2008), Corey E. Andrews “‘Ev’ry Heart Can Feel’: Scottish Poetic Responses to Slavery in the West Indies, from Blair to Burns.” International Journal of Scottish Literature, Iss. 4 (Spring/ Summer 2008); Nigel Leask “Burns and the Poetics of Abolition,” in The Edinburgh Companion to Robert Burns, ed. Gerard Carruthers Edinburgh: (Edinburgh UP, 2009): 47-60; Murray Pittock “Slavery as a Political Metaphor in Scotland and Ireland in the Age of Burns,” in Robert Burns and Transatlantic Culture: 19-30. Burns Chronicle 2016 Burns North & South 31 of Robert Burns by a fugitive slave” is reprinted from the Albany Evening Journal. This account had first been published in theNew York Weekly Tribune on July 18th, 1846, and was reprinted in other abolitionist papers.16 This was a well-known account. What is the Burns that Douglass shows to his readers? He appreciates Burns’s poetic ability and the beauty of the land in Ayrshire. Of the Bard himself he writes “He Became Disgusted with the pious frauds, indignant at the bigotry, filled with contempt for the hollow pretensions set up by the shallow-brained aristocracy. He broke loose from the moorings which society had thrown around him.”17 He paints Burns as a revolutionary, as a protester of a sort, using language that suggest Burns was enslaved. Douglass could almost be describing himself when he is describing the poet. The poems Douglass mentions at the end of his essay support this idea of Burns as a progressive. He lists “Mans a man for a’ That,” “Cotter’s Saturday Night,” “Tam o’ Shanter,” “To my Mary in Heaven” and “Man was Made to Mourn.” Of these, “Tam o’ Shanter” and “To my Mary in Heaven” have the least to do with the protester Burns presented by Douglass, yet they are popular pieces and very good poems. “Man was Made to Mourn” includes a stanza that makes it clear why Douglass included it, 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?18 Later in the poem Burns addresses the baseness of man’s inhumanity to man. This selection shows the Scots Bard with all the sentiment and sympathy for the downtrodden that is absent in the Virginia papers. Douglass’s essay may have changed few minds on Burns, but it is likely reprinted in all of these papers because the readers already know and appreciate Burns for these liberal sentiments. Because he had been a slave,

16 Douglass, Frederick. 1846. “A fugitive slave visiting the birth-place of Robert Burns”. New York Weekly Tribune. 5 (45). Held in University of South Carolina Rare books & Special Collections Scottish Literature Collection. 17 Anti-slavery Bugle. (New-Lisbon, Ohio), 24 July 1846. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Lib. of Congress. http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83035487/1846-07-24/ ed-1/seq-4/ 18 Poems vol. I: 64, p. 116-19. 32 Joseph DuRant Burns Chronicle 2016

Douglass participating in the tradition of the Burns pilgrimage carried out by white men for decades is notable. He speaks with Mrs. Begg, the poet’s daughter, just as every other pilgrim to Ayr reports doing. It seems that he is also using an approachable form to ease people into accepting the equality of humans with a different skin color. That Burns was not just understood as a progressive aligned with the views of the paper, but a popular figure as well, can be seen by the inclusion of a speech by Charles MacKay. The February 6th, 1858 Anti- slavery Bugle prints a speech given at the Commemoration of Burns’s 99th birthday (January 25th) in Cincinnati. MacKay’s speech gives a nod to the greatness of America followed by an effusion on the greatness of Scotland and especially the worth of Robert Burns as the epitome of Scottish-ness.19 MacKay, a Scottish poet and liberal journalist, supported the abolition of slavery. He toured America in 1857-58 giving lectures on “Songs National, Historical and Popular.”20 This speech, unlike the account of visiting the birthplace by Douglass, has nothing to do with slavery or liberalism. It is straightforward praise of Burns, probably printed in this paper simply because people enjoyed hearing about him. Many of the readers could have viewed him as Douglass did, and would from this appreciate hearing more about him. McKay’s speech makes sense in this paper because the editors would know that his views generally aligned with theirs, and the speech was given in Ohio. Another short article relating to Burns shows his popularity while also revealing the character of the Burns the readers of the paper likely hold for themselves. On page 4 of the July 5th, 1856 Bugle, a story of Robert Chambers visiting Mrs. Begg is reprinted from the Evening Post. Robert Chambers writes that he made a trip to visit Mrs. Begg to deliver £200 in proceeds from the sale of his Life and Works of Robert Burns, intentionally showing his humanitarian and caring side.21 This short account of Chambers’ visit would not be printed if Burns was not a figure people wanted to know more about. These updates on Burns’s surviving children and grandchildren read like celebrity news. This article gives a sentimental

19 MacKay, Charles “Speech of Charles MacKay,” Anti-slavery Bugle. (New-Lisbon, Ohio), 06 Feb. 1858. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Lib. of Congress. http://chroniclingamerica.loc. gov/lccn/sn83035487/1858-02-06/ed-1/seq-4/ 20 Angus Calder, ‘Mackay, Charles (1812–1889)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn May 2011 http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/17555. 21 “A visit to the home of Robert Burns” Anti-slavery Bugle. (New-Lisbon, Ohio), 05 July 1856. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Lib. of Congress. http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/ sn83035487/1856-07-05/ed-1/seq-4/ Burns Chronicle 2016 Burns North & South 33 romanticized story of Burns’s death “recalled distinctly” by Mrs. Begg “as related in Chamber’s Burns.” Burns murmurs calm words to his daughter and passes this judgment on his son, Robert “Misled by fancy’s meteor ray,/ by passion driven.”22 These are lines from “The Vision,” printed in 1786.23 This is an overly romanticized Burns, but it must be the Burns with whom the readers of the Anti-slavery Bugle identify. Looking back at these uses of Burns and seeing the differences in the North and South of a nation on the cusp of a terribly bloody conflict holds a special resonance. Today’s readers of Burns hold many different pictures of the poet in their minds. This is one of the most fascinating characteristics of Burns: his ability to speak to a wide range of people. Clearly the readers of the Daily Dispatch and the Anti-Slavery Bugle gravitated towards different aspects of the same man. Their reasons clearly seem to justify their different ways of life. Burnsian might, upon seeing this, ask themselves what aspects of Burns they see that are reflected in their own values. Is our own Burns the “true Burns” or is he simply the Burns that is true to us?

22 Ibid. 23 Poems vol. I: 61, p. 103-113 lines 237-38.

Contributions Articles for inclusion in the Burns Chronicle should be emailed to [email protected] in a word document or similar. Illustrations should be included separately as jpeg or similar. Copy deadline for the next, 2017, edition is June 30th 2016 and all articles should be submitted by that date. Earlier submissions at anytime will be most appreciated by the Editor. An acknowledgement of receipt of an article from the Editor should not be taken as a signal that the article will be included in the Chronicle. The Editor cannot give any prior undertaking that anything submitted will be included. Articles may be referred to other advisors for qualified opinion, and will be edited for publication. 34 Burns Chronicle 2016

A “Lost” Collection of Robert Burns Manuscripts: Davidson Cook, Sir Alfred Law, and the Honresfield Collection Patrick Scott Towards the end of his life, when Ross Roy was being interviewed about editing The Letters of Robert Burns (1985), he commented on the difficulty of tracing Burns manuscripts through changes in ownership: “The problem is, of course, that over the years letters have disappeared into private hands. There was a collection in the Burns field of manuscript material owned by a man by the name of Law, and since the time Ferguson was working on these in the early nineteen thirties nobody knew where they were. The original man, Law, had died, and you know these are private things, they get passed on to somebody, or he might even have given them away before he died. I tried through his lawyers and the firm that he owned, and no trace of it. They still haven’t turned up. They will, because material like that doesn’t get destroyed, but it can disappear.1 “ In the edition itself, he reported the problem more formally: “The Honresfield Collection, owned by Sir Alfred Law of Honresfield, when Ferguson collated seventeen letters in it, cannot now be traced.”2 Very similar statements will be found running through the notes of James Kinsley’s Poems and Songs, in the Robert Burns entry in the Index of English Literary Manuscripts, and in James Mackay’s biography.3 It sounds like a dead end, but in the 1920s and 1930s, a great deal of information was recorded by the Burns scholar Davidson Cook about the “Honresfield” Collection. Cook’s efforts culinated in 1938 with the Ewing-Cook facsimile of the collection’s greatest treasure, Burns’s First Commonplace Book. Many (indeed most) of the Honresfield Burns items that are “untraced,” and no longer available to present-day Burns scholars, have in fact been very fully described over the years. It seems worth

1 G. Ross Roy, interview with Andrea L’Hommedieu (interview 3): South Caroliniana Library Oral History Collection, SCOH 022 (February 3, 2012). A first version of this article was published on Robert Burns Lives!, ed. Frank R. Shaw, no. 210 (February 5, 2015), and it appears here in revised form with the original editor’s agreement. 2 G. Ross Roy, The Letters of Robert Burns, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), I: lxiii; for previous use of the manuscripts, see J. De L. Ferguson, ed., The Letters of Robert Burns, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1931), I: xlvi. 3 James Kinsley, The Poems and Songs of Robert Burns, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1968); Margaret M. Smith and Penny Boumelha, comps., “Robert Burns,” in Index of English Literary Manuscripts, vol. III, Part I (London and New York: Mansell, 1986), 93, 95; James Mackay, RB: A Biography of Robert Burns (Edinburgh: Mainstream, 1992), 88. Burns Chronicle 2016 Davidson Cook & AJ Law 35 while putting something on record about this, both to put the mystery in perspective, and perhaps to save future Burnsians some head-scratching. Behind Ross Roy’s seemingly-casual remark lies a fascinating story. The story starts in the generation before Sir Alfred Law. His two uncles, Alfred and William Law, owned a factory, Durns Mills, in Littleborough, near Rochdale, in Lancashire in the northwest of England. William was born about 1836, and Alfred in 1838. Neither brother was married, or if they were, neither was survived by a wife or children. The firm of A. and J. Law is listed in an 1879 trade directory as “fulling millers” (that is, involved in the thickening and finishing of cloth), who manufactured “flannels, baize, blankets, etc.” Honresfield House, just outside Littleborough, where the two brothers lived, was a large, plain two-story red brick structure, which had been built for William in 1879 at a cost of £5068.4 William Law was the brother who first became prominent as a collector of literary manuscripts. In 1894, he bought two major items: Walter Scott’s manuscript for Rob Roy, for £600, and Robert Burns’s First Commonplace Book, previously owned by John Adam of Greenock, and subsequently by John Duff of Greenock and Thomas Arthur of Ayr. In 1896 he loaned the Commonplace Book, and the manuscript of Burns’s song “The Fornicater,” for the great Glasgow Burns Exhibition.5 He also provided James C. Dick with photographs of another significant Burns item, the four-page list of songs for the third volume of the Scots Musical Museum that Burns sent to James Johnson on April 4, 1789 and that Dick reproduced in his edition of the Burns songs.6 William was a local benefactor, funding a new organ for the Littleborough parish church (Manchester Courier, October 4, 1890), and he was a devoted Shakespearean also, donating a new stained glass east window for the church in Stratford-on-Avon.7 Early in 1901, the Law brothers’ warehouse and mills suffered extensive damage from fire (and then water), with much of the stock needing to be sold off, and William Law died on July 27 that year, aged 65, leaving an estate of just £20,000, including £10,000 to his nephew Alfred Joseph Law.8

4 Clare Hartwell, Matthew Hyde, and Nikolaus Pevsner, Lancashire: Manchester and the South-East (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), p. 252. 5 Memorial Catalogue of the Burns Exhibition: held in the Galleries of the Royal Glasgow Institute … 1896 (Glasgow: W. Hodge, and T. & R. Annan, 1898), items 1095, 1098. 6 James C. Dick, ed., The Songs of Robert Burns Now First Printed With the Melodies for which They Were Written (London: Henry Frowde, 1903). 7 Manchester Courier, October 4, 1890; Leamington Spa Courier, August 25, 1894; May 11, 1895. 8 Sunderland Daily Echo, April 11, 12, 1901; Manchester Courier, Oct. 31, 1901; Times, London, November 2, 1913, p. 16. 36 Patrick Scott Burns Chronicle 2016

The other uncle, Alfred, survived his brother by a decade, till March 1913, and he too made the same nephew his primary heir. The older Alfred Law’s estate was much more substantial than William’s: he left an estate with net value of £548,812, which, after smaller bequests to a neice, Emma Dixon, and to another nephew totalling £65,000 and after death duties (estate tax) of £90,000, left some £400,000 for Alfred Joseph Law, that is, some £40 million (or $65 million) in current value.9 Alfred Joseph Law was the son of William’s and Alfred’s brother John, of Dearnley. A. J. Law had been born in 1860, so was 53 when he inherited both Honresfield House and his uncle William’s library. Something of the library’s range can be seen in a news story from 1915, about a visit to Honresfield by the Rochdale Literary and Scientific Society to see “the collections formed by the late Mr. William Law, uncle of the present owner.” Items on display included a first folio of Shakespeare, two quarto Shakespeare plays, “manuscripts of Walter Scott novels and some cantos of ‘The Lay of the Last Minstrel,’ Brontë relics, Burns’s commonplace book, and letters by many English authors.”10 But A. J. Law was less interested in literature than politics. He started in local politics in the 1880s, serving on the Littleborough School Board, and as first chairman of the Littleborough Urban District Council.11 In 1894, he was a Conservative party nominee as a magistrate or Justice of the Peace, using the initial J.P. after his name, and from 1897 to 1908 he was chairman of the local Conservative Association. Shortly before the Great War he was named parliamentary candidate for Rochdale (normally a liberal stronghold), and in the first post-Armistice election, in late 1918, a Conservative landslide, he won the seat, though losing it again inevitably in 1922. He was knighted in 1927, under a Conservative government, for political services, becoming “Sir Alfred Law.” Soon afterwards, in 1929, he returned to parliament, but for a much safer Conservative seat, High Peak in Derbyshire, and he then remained an M.P. till he died ten years later, on July 18, 1939, aged 79. He remained “Governing Director” of Alfred and William Law and Co., till early 1939, and clearly regarded himself as a progressive employer, introducing “a co-partnership plan by which employees became shareholders after a qualifying period.”12 But the mill

9 Manchester Courier, June 27, p.9. 10 Rochdale Observer, Sept 18, 1915. 11 This summary of A.J. Law’s career is drawn from the obituary in Yorkshire Post, July 19, 1939, p. 5, and annual volumes of Who’s Who. 12 Yorkshire Post, as in n. 11 above. Burns Chronicle 2016 Davidson Cook & AJ Law 37 wasn’t his only business interest. Other business roles included being chairman of the Rochdale Canal Company and of S.S. Whalley and Co. Ltd., along with several directorships, notably for the London and Lancashire Fire Insurance Company. In 1937, he endowed a nursing home “for patients with post-encephalytic Parkinsonism.”13 Even after such philanthropy, and despite the impact of the Depression, Law’s estate was nonetheless probated at £448,802 (or about £25 million).14 In many ways, the older Law brothers were fortunate in their chosen heir. Honresfield had one owner continuously from 1913 to 1939, a period during which many other families, houses, and libraries faced unexpected death duties (estate taxes) when recent heirs were killed in the trenches or died young of war injuries. Moreover, A. J. Law was financially secure, lessening the temptation to sell off his uncle’s treasures piecemeal, as often happened to similar collections in the 1920s, during the American boom in auction prices, and (more dispiritingly) in the 1930s, as the Depression began to take hold. That we still know so much about the Honresfield Collection is owing, not only to A.J. Law himself, but to the Burns scholar who gained his confidence, Davidson Cook. On the face of it, Cook was an unlikely figure to get privileged access at Honresfield. He was not a professional scholar, and not university educated. Nonetheless, Cook did a quite remarkable job, not only for the Honresfield Burns manuscripts, but also for the other major Honresfield collections, of Walter Scott and of the Brontës. Cook himself wrote and published about all three collections, but equally importantly he contacted and networked with other researchers, helping them gain access to the Honresfield material and collaborating with them on the production of the facsimiles and editions that would provide scholarly access for the future. Surprisingly, despite Cook’s many contributions to Burns scholarship, the Burns Chronicle never carried an obituary or other tribute.15 T. Davidson Cook (1874-1941), born at Ballieston, Lanarkshire, spent his whole career working in the clothing stores of various Co-operative Societies, working in Dalziel, Alloa, Glasgow, and Newcastle, before settling in Barnsley, Yorkshire, in 1908, where he would spend the next thirty-one years as 13 British Medical Journal, Sept. 18, 1937, p. 603. 14 Derbyshire Times, November 17, 1939. 15 This summary draws on the obituaries of Cook in Yorkshire Post, December 12, 1941, p. 8; Motherwell Times, December 19, 1941, p. 8, but cf. also H. G. Farmer, “Foreword,” in The Songs of Robert Burns, by James C. Dick, together with Annotation of Scottish Songs by Burns, by Davidson Cook (Hatboro, PA: Folklore Associates, 1962). 38 Patrick Scott Burns Chronicle 2016 drapery manager for the Barnsley British Co-operative Society. In his own way, like A.J. Law, Cook lived a life of public service: he was involved in local government as a member of the Barnsley Library and Education Committees, he was president of Barnsley Book Lovers’ Club and Barnsley Table Tennis League, and he served as honorary organizer for the local Citizen’s Advice Bureau. The two men had two other things in common: neither had been to university, and neither had seen military service during the Great War of 1914-1918. Law, fifty-four when war broke out, would have been too old, and running a blanket factory would have been part of the war effort. Cook, just forty in 1914, though married with two children, was luckier to escape the trenches, especially in the last year, when married men up to age forty-nine were liable to conscription; the World War I Memorial for the Barnsley Cooperative Society lists 32 employees who died in the war. It was during the Great War that Cook began writing for the literary periodicals. For instance, he contributed articles to The Bookman, a London-based illustrated monthly founded by W. Robertson Nicoll, on Burns and Stothard in 1917, on Burns and Peter Pindar in 1918, and on Burns and Aberdeen in 1920. By 1922, Cook was being described as “that assiduous delver into overlooked corners of Burns tradition.”16 In 1922, he had his first great coup, when he recognized some Burns manuscript notes newly published in the Kilmarnock newspaper as being missing sections from Burns’s notes in the interleaved Scots Musical Museum, and so exonerated Cromek from James C. Dick’s accusations of forgery. His article on these annotations, published in the Burns Chronicle, issued as a separate pamphlet, and later reprinted alongside Dick’s earlier studies, made Cook a name to be reckoned with among Burnsians.17 We don’t know where Cook first came on a reference to the Law manuscripts, but it could well have been by following up the credit acknowledgement in Dick’s Songs of Scotland to the facsimiled manuscript as being “lately in the possession of Mr. William Law, of Littlesborough.” What is certain is that, by mid-1925, Cook had been welcomed at Honresfield to examine its treasures, and that he had already begun to write about them. His first article, in the Bookman for September 1925, was a general report on “Literary Treasures at Honresfield.” Over the next ten years, he worked, not just on the Burns material, but on Honresfield’s two other major

16 Aberdeen Journal, February 18, 1922, p. 3. 17 Davidson Cook, “Annotations of Scottish Songs,” Burns Chronicle, 1sr ser., 31 (1922): 1-21, also separately issued as Annotations of Scottish Songs by Burns: An Essential Supplement to Cromek and Dick (Dumfries: Robert Dinwiddie, 1922). Burns Chronicle 2016 Davidson Cook & AJ Law 39 manuscript collections, of the Brontes and Walter Scott. In both cases, as well as contributing articles himself, Cook collaborated with other scholars, and encouraged Law to make his collection more widely available. For the Brontës, he worked with an American scholar, C. W. Hatfield, and in 1934 Law allowed high quality photographs of Emily Brontë’s poetic manuscripts to be included in the standard Shakespeare Head Brontë edition.18 He was similarly unpossessive about the Honresfield manuscripts of Walter Scott; he persuaded Law to donate seven bound volumes of Scott manuscript letters, nearly four hundred letters in all, to the recently-established National Library of Scotland in 1928, and he persuaded H. J. C. Grierson, Regius Professor of Rhetoric and English Literature at Edinburgh University, to head up a huge new edition of Scott’s letters, published by Constable in twelve substantial volumes over a six-year period.19 From the Scott edition’s inception to the mid-1930s, Cook worked steadily as Grierson’s assistant, traveling widely in the hunt for manuscript letters, despite his full-time job back in Yorkshire with the Co-operative Society. For the Honresfield Burns manuscripts, Cook played the major role, though here too he collaborated with others. He started by producing a very thorough survey, published in three parts in the Burns Chronicle in

18 Davidson Cook, “Brontë Manuscripts in the Law Collection,” The Bookman, 69 (November 1925): 100-104, and “Emily Brontë’s Poems: Some Textual Corrections and Unpublished Verses,” Nineteenth Century and After, 100 (August 1926): 248-262; C.W. Hatfield, ed.,The Complete Poems of Emily Jane Brontë (New York: Columbia University Press, 1941); Thomas J. Wise and A. J. Symington, eds., The Poems of Emily Jane Brontë and Anne Brontë [Shakespeare Head Brontë vol. 17] (Oxford: Blackwell, 1934). 19 H. J. C. Grierson, assisted by Davidson Cook, W.M. Parker, and others, eds., The Letters of Sir Walter Scott, 12 vols. (London: Constable, 1932-1937), but note also Davidson Cook, “Murray’s Mysterious Contributor: Unpublished Letters of Sir Walter Scott to John Murray,” Nineteenth Century and After, 101 (April, 1927): 605-617; “Lockhart’s Treatment of Scott’s Letters,” ibid., 102 (September 1927): 382-389; “Unpublished Letters of Sir Walter Scott to John Gibson Lockhart,” The Sir Walter Scott Quarterly, I:3 (October, 1927); and New Love-Poems by Sir Walter Scott (Oxford: Blackwell, 1932). The NLS news release about the donation (valued at between £10,000 and £15,000, or well over £500,000 in current money) reported that “Sir Alfred has an idea that his uncle, the late Mr. William Law, intended to give or bequeath the letters to the Scottish National Library, and considers there is a moral obligation upon him to carry this into effect” (Aberdeen Journal, Nov. 20, 1928). Cook was also involved in making another valuable collection, including Burns-related material, accessible to researchers, when the 17th and 18th century song music collected by Frank Kidson (1855-1926), of Leeds, a relative of Cook’s, went to the Mitchell Library, Glasgow (Yorkshire Post, July 18, 1929). 40 Patrick Scott Burns Chronicle 2016

1926-1928.20 He was rightly proud of this research, and he had the three parts reissued as a separate publication (unfortunately getting Law’s middle name wrong on the cover).21 The list enumerates 29 manuscripts, though several of them include texts of two or more individual poems or songs. With one exception, Cook gives quite extensive and well-researched descriptions of all the manuscripts, with full text of items where he judges the Honresfield manuscript to preserve a unique text or unique passages. In the second part (1927), he also included a four-page facsimile of the letter that Burns wrote in December 1781 from Irvine to his father back at Lochlea (MS. xi; cf. Roy, Letters, I: 6-7). The one exception, given only the briefest description, was, of course, the manuscript of Burns’s First Commonplace Book (MS. xxix), perhaps because it had been put into print by its previous owner in 1872, but more probably because Cook recognized it would justify separate and much fuller treatment. Moreover, as news leaked out of its whereabouts, the Burns establishment led by J. C. Ewing, the new editor of the Burns Chronicle, had their eyes on the manuscript’s philanthropic owner as their next John Gribbel. The final sentence of Cook’s third Honresfield article in the Chronicle sounds more like Ewing than Cook, first noting that the Second Commonplace Book was at Alloway, and then adding unctuously: “All Scotland may cherish the hope that the companion volume may one day find a permanent home in the place that above all others is meet for such a treasure” (Chronicle, 1928, p. 17). Law might be philanthropic, but he wasn’t to be pressured. Even so, Law allowed Cook to have the Commonplace Book photographed, and the Burns Chronicle for 1930 announced imminent publication of a folio-sized photographic facsimile, “by kind permission of its owner, Sir Alfred Law, M.P., of Honresfield,” edited with a transcript, annotations and an introduction by Cook and Ewing (in that order); even though publication would be delayed eight years, the Ewing-Cook facsimile (in that order) has remained the standard reference

20 Davidson Cook, “Unpublished Manuscripts of Burns: Mr. A.J. Law’s Collection,” Burns Chronicle, 2nd ser, 1 (1926): 60-69; “Mr. A.J. Law’s Collection of Burns Manuscripts. Part II. Poems and Letters Now Correctly Printed for the First Time,” Burns Chronicle, 2nd ser, 2 (1927): 14-27; “Sir A.J. Law’s Collection of Burns Manuscripts. Part III. (Including the First Commonplace Book),” Burns Chronicle, 2nd ser, 3 (1928): 11-17. Future references to the Chronicle series are given in parentheses in the text, either by MS. number, or by year and page. 21 Davidson Cook, Burns Manuscripts in the Honresfield Collection of Sir Alfred James Law (Glasgow: printed for private circulation by W. Hodge and Co., 1928); some copies have Law’s name hand-corrected in ink on the cover and title-page. Burns Chronicle 2016 Davidson Cook & AJ Law 41 for that manuscript until the recent Oxford edition edited by Nigel Leask.22 Most important, with Burns, as he had done with Scott and the Brontës, Cook happily shared his discoveries with other scholars. The American Burns scholar, J. DeLancey Ferguson, was already at work on the first full scholarly edition of the Burns letters, much to the suspicion of the Burns establishment; Duncan M’Naught had been shocked that Ferguson planned to print the bawdy letters uncensored, and J. C. Ewing, M’Naught’s successor as editor, preferred that previously-unpublished Burns letters should appear first in the Chronicle rather than in Ferguson’s edition. Cook, however, collaborated with Ferguson, who, in addition to using transcripts made by Cook, was able to examine in manuscript for himself almost all the Burns letters at Honresfield. All this activity attracted the interest not only of scholars and enthusiasts, and curators, but also of the book dealers. Here the available facts become more inferential, because the first major dealer to get his foot in the Honresfield library door was Gabriel Wells, of New York, who is reputed never to have issued a printed catalogue of the books he had for sale.23 Wells had excellent connections with major private collectors, but more often he sold on what he bought to other dealers, leaving little trace in public records. In 1928, for instance, Wells persuaded Law to sell him the Honresfield Shakespeare First Folio, which William Law had bought at Sotheby’s in 1897 for £415, which Wells sold on immediately to the London dealer Maggs.24 Solid information is also available about the fate of at least some of the Honresfield Brontë manuscripts. In March 1933, a group of them (though not the Emily Brontë “E.J.B.” poems manuscript) was auctioned at Hodgson’s, in London, listed as “The Property of a Collector” rather than with Law’s name attached.25 In the early thirties, auction prices had fallen, and not all the items sold, but some have since resurfaced at the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth, so becoming available for

22 Burns Chronicle, 2nd ser., 5 (1930), pp. 138-139; J. C. Ewing and Davidson Cook, eds., Robert Burns’s Commonplace Book 1783-1785 (Glasgow: Gowans and Gray, 1938; repr. with intro. by David Daiches, London: Centaur Press; Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1965); Nigel Leask, ed. Commonplace Books, Tour Journal, and Miscellaneous Prose [The Oxford Edition of the Works of Robert Burns, vol. I (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). 23 William Baker, “Gabriel Wells,” American Book Collectors and Bibliographers, First Series [Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 140] (Detroit, MI: Gale Research, 1994), 304-310 (p. 306). 24 Anthony J. West, The Shakespeare First Folio, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), II: 261- 262. It would eventually be auctioned in Hamburg in 1960, for DM 350,000, then “the second highest price ever paid at auction for a book.” 25 Christine Alexander and Margaret Smith, The Oxford Companion to the Brontës (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 290-291; cf. Book Prices Current, 1933, 119-121. 42 Patrick Scott Burns Chronicle 2016 research.26 Nonetheless, for Brontë scholars the inaccessibility of many Law manuscripts remains a “major stumbling-block.”27 Two of the Burns items illustrate how items can disappear and then reappear. In Davidson Cook’s Chronicle listing, Honresfield MS. xxviii is described as inserted into the copy of The Caledonian Pocket Companion that William Law had loaned for exhibition in 1896. Cook thought that the manuscript (which included the song “To daunton me,” and instructions to James Johnson about an extra verse for “Here awa, there awa”) didn’t really belong with the book (Chronicle, 1928, p. 15). Because of the instructions to Johnson, Ferguson treated the manuscript as a letter (Letter 111), dating it as May or June 1787, and when his edition came out, in 1931, his location note shows it was no longer at Honresfield, reading “Transcribed by permission of Mr. Gabriel Wells, New York.”28 Wells, though, did not yet own the book, because three years later he was the successful bidder at £340 when it was auctioned at Sotheby’s, and when soon afterwards Cook published an article about the book and its insert, he commented ruefully that he had had to rely on “adequate notes” that taken at Honresfield years before, which were “doubly valuable today, for Burns’s ‘Oswald’ is now treasured in the Land of the Almighty Dollar.”29 Wells apparently held onto the Caledonian Pocket Companion, rather than selling it. Some years after his death in 1946, his unsold stock was for the first time cataloged, in four batches, with a fifth list in 1949 for the leftovers, where item 85 is “The Caledonian Pocket Companion … ROBERT BURNS’ COPY. Of the greatest importance,” priced at $750, and even then the only definite evidence his executors unloaded it was in an auction in 1952 at Parke-Bernet Galleries, where it fetched a mere $275.30 The Wells catalogue doesn’t mention the manuscript, or say if it was still in the book, but the auction record refers to it having “autograph markings.” Kinsley refers to the existence of the manuscript, with a reference to Ferguson, 26 Barbara Rosenblum and Pamela White, “The Brontës,” in Index of English Literary Manuscripts, vol. IV, Part I (London and New York: Mansell, 1982). 27 Christine Alexander, A Bibliography of the Manuscripts of Charlotte Brontë (Haworth: Bronte Society and Meckler Publishing, 1982), xviii-xix. 28 Ferguson (1931), as in n. 2 above, I: 94. 29 Sotheby’s, London, March 6, 1934, lot 363, reported in Book Prices Current, 48 (1934), p. 544 (under “Oswald” not Burns: £340 was approx. $1700); Davidson Cook, “Burns’s ‘Oswald’: The ‘Caledonian Pocket Companion’,” Scots Magazine, 19:5 (1933): 379-381 (p. 374). 30 Boesen, Charles S., comp., Sale of the Remaining Stock of the Estate of Gabriel Wells representing Unsold Items from Wells Catalogs [Wells catalogues vol. V] (New York: n.p., 1949), item 85; Parke-Bernet Galleries, New York, December 9, 1952, lot 113, reported in Book Auction Records, 50 (1953, p. 288, again under “Oswald.” . Burns Chronicle 2016 Davidson Cook & AJ Law 43 but gives no location or any information that wouldn’t have been in Cook or Ferguson.31 It would seem that its next stop was in the ownership of a noted private collector in New York City, Mrs Hannah D. Rabinowitz, as when it turned up again it had her distinctive red leather label. However, by the early 1960s, when Ross Roy was reediting the Burns letters in the 1960s, and therefore the “letter” from the Caledonian Pocket Companion, he discovered it was back in Scotland. His updated note reads: “Here collated with the original manuscript in the Birthplace Museum, Alloway. It is a half-sheet which is laid into a copy of James Oswald’s The Caledonian Pocket Companion.” 32 (Roy, Letters, I: 169). And what was once lost without trace is now more visible than ever before: both the book cover and Burns’s manuscript can now be viewed on the Burns Birthplace Museum’s website.33 Slightly more mystery attaches to Cook’s MS. xii. This was, Cook wrote, “a beautiful holograph of ‘The Fornicator’; six stanzas, of which the first four have been printed in The Merry Muses of Caledonia, the Songs and Ballads of Robert Burns (1823, p. 265) and the Aldine Edition … (1893, vol. i., p. 59)” (Chronicle, 1928, p. 11). This was another item that William Law had loaned for the 1896 Glasgow exhibition.34 Cook does not print the manuscript text, even for the additional stanzas: he was after all publishing in the Burns Chronicle in the 1920s. Kinsley’s source-note includes “MS. not traced” (Kinsley, I: 101n), and Kinsley relies for his text on a transcript attributed to Prof. Robert Dewar of Reading University, from whom he had taken over the Clarendon edition in the late 1950s, and who had started work on it in 1930; the Roy Collection includes Dewar’s marked copy of Cook’s pamphlet on the Honresfield Burns manuscripts, and it seems more likely that the transcription was made by Cook than by Dewar himself. However, fifteen years after Kinsley, Smith and Boumelha give entries for two separate manuscripts of “The Fornicator”: the Law manuscript, BuR 314, which they listed as “unlocated,” but also a second manuscript, BuR 313, described as “Autograph fair copy, indicating the tune ‘Clout the Caldron’,” which they track back to the early 1930s through the auction records, to

31 Kinsley, as in n. 3 above, I: 398; cf. Smith and Boumelha, as in n. 3, p. 178 (BuR 1086). Kinsley may also have notes on the copy from Robert Dewar; cf. Dewar’s letter in Times Literary Supplement, October 25, 1928, p. 73. 32 Roy, Letters, I: 169. In revising Ferguson’s edition, Professor Roy redated and renumbered this letter (it now become Letter 147°, dated October or November 1787, rather than Letter 111, from May or June). 33 Object no. 3.3010: http://www.burnsmuseum.org.uk/collections/object_detail/3.3010. 34 Memorial Catalogue, item 1098. 44 Patrick Scott Burns Chronicle 2016 sales at Hodgson’s in 1933 and again after the War at Sotheby’s in 1949, before its acquisition for the University of Texas.35 However, under their entry for the Law manuscript, BuR 314, Smith and Boumelha also include the conjecture that it is “possibly identical with BuR 313 above,” i.e. with the Texas manuscript, as indeed the sale through Hodgson makes likely.36 There may well be a few more stories like these two that could be reconstructed about individual Burns manuscripts, but it does not seem that even in 1933 Sir Alfred Law sold off Burns manuscripts on the same scale as he did Brontë manuscripts. Few libraries have complete runs of all the older auction house catalogues or of the catalogues issued by individual book dealers that one needs to have at hand for such reconstruction, and as the story of the Caledonian Pocket Companion shows, sales between individuals don’t usually leave a published record. In any case, it appears that the majority of the Burns manuscripts stayed in the Honresfield library throughout the 1930s, till Law’s death. Like the two uncles from whom he had inherited the house and library, Sir Alfred Law never married. At the time he died, in November 1939, other things must have been more important for his executors than sorting out the library at Honresfield. While the Texas-based Brontë scholar Fannie Ratchford asserted that by 1941 the library had already been “dispersed,” it seems that some collections, including the manuscript of Scott’s Rob Roy, were still in the house in 1948, after the end of the War.37 They must have been removed sometime in the late 1940s or early 1950s, because in 1959, Honresfield House became a residential care home, part of the group of homes for the disabled founded by Group Captain Leonard Cheshire, V.C. One clue as to the date may be the appearance at Sotheby’s in 1952 of another significant Burns item, a manuscript of “Auld lang syne,” lines 9-24, i.e. the verses without the opening or refrain.38 This was bought for the Burns Birthplace Museum and is duly noted by Kinsley, as the “Alloway MS” and by Smith and Boumelha as BuR 48.39 Neither Kinsley, nor Smith and Broumelha, however, refer to the manuscript of “Auld lang syne,” with the same verses, that was listed by Davidson Cook as Honresfield MS. x(b) 35 Hodgson, July 6, 1933, lot 187; Sotheby’s, May 21, 1949, lot 541; Smith and Boumelha, as in n. 3 above, p. 123. 36 The Harry Ransom Center catalogue lists BUR 313 as “Autograph fair copy, 2 pp., undated.” (http:// norman.hrc.utexas.edu/fasearch/findingAid.cfm?eadid=00860). 37 Ratchford (see Ratchford, p. 266), (Parker, p. xvi) 38 Sotheby’s, June 24, 1952, lot 50.[CHECK] 39 Kinsley I: 443-444; Smith and Boumelha, as in n. 3 above, p. 104). A digital image is available on the Birthplace web-site, at (http://www.burnsmuseum.org.uk/collections/object_detail/3.6172. Burns Chronicle 2016 Davidson Cook & AJ Law 45

(Chronicle, 1927, p. 24); Cook did not transcribe or facsimile it, just listed the first line of each verse. The logical inference is that the manuscript at Alloway is the one formerly in the Law collection. The Law/Honresfield manuscript had four pages (i.e. one large sheet folded once), and “Auld lang syne” only took up one page, p. 4. Cook focuses much more attention on the other item in the manuscript, MS. x (a), which was the unique autograph source for Burns’s early song “On Cessnock banks” (Kinsley I: 17; IELM, BuR 937). Cook had printed a complete transcript of this second item. Neither Kinsley nor Smith and Boumelha recorded any location for the “Cessnock banks” manuscript, and Kinsley used Cook’s published transcript for the Oxford edition text (Kinsley I: 17; BuR 937). “Cessnock banks” certainly isn’t listed on the Birthplace web-site, like “Auld lang syne.” Puzzled, I looked at again at the “Auld lang syne” image, and realized it showed only the front, without the verso. Through the kindness of Dr. David Hopes of the Birthplace Museum, I got an image of the verso, but instead of showing, as I had hoped, part of “Cessnock banks,” it carried only the annotation, in a later hand, “a Scotch [perhaps Scotish] song / in the hand writing of / Burns.” But the on-line images showed that the manuscript had been repeatedly folded, unfolded, and refolded over the years; it was much worn and had been repaired on the right margin of the page with “Auld lang syne,” so that the right hand half of the final stanza (ll. 21-24) was missing. Perhaps “Cessnock banks” had been written on pp. 1-2 only, and accidentally with wear, or more deliberately before the 1952 sale, the two leaves had been separated. Since the Law manuscript version of “Cessnock banks” has thirteen verses, totaling fifty-two lines, this means that Burns had written 26 lines of verse to a page. Page 4, with “Auld lang syne,” carried 16 lines, or perhaps (if Burns wrote the opening words of the refrain under for each stanza) 20 lines. If the Alloway manuscript is not the Honresfield one, then there is an important manuscript of “Auld lang syne” from which any textual variants have never been recorded. But if it is the Honresfield one, it shows there was a further dispersal of manuscripts from the collection going on in 1952. As far as the Burns manuscripts were concerned, when James Kinsley and Ross Roy were working on their Burns editions, in the 1960s, the Honresfield manuscripts had indeed vanished without trace. The disappearance posed (and poses) less of a problem for the letters than for the poems and songs. While Ross Roy would have preferred to re-collate the Honresfield letters against manuscript for himself, he could rely with reasonable confidence on the Ferguson text, for which in almost every instance Ferguson had done his own collations. Cook had listed nineteen 46 Patrick Scott Burns Chronicle 2016 letters at Honresfield: Ferguson had collated seventeen of these for himself, plus the “letter” in the Caledonian Pocket Companion that he treats not as a Honresfield item, but as in the possession of Gabriel Wells. There was only one letter for which he had had to rely on Cook to check the manuscript for him, Burns’s letter to Cleghorn [January 1, 1792], for which his source-note reads “Here corrected by Mr. Davidson Cook from the original MS. formerly in the Honresfield Collection,” which suggests that by 1931 the Cleghorn letter had already moved elsewhere.40 “Corrected” is important: Ferguson had used as his basis the text of the letter in Scott Douglas (VI: 101), expanding the two lines from Burns’s song “There was twa wives” given by Scott Douglas by substituting the six lines (out of sixteen in the letter manuscript) printed by Cook in the 1928 Burns Chronicle: the Chronicle in the 1920s would not have admitted the second stanza, any more than it would have published a transcription of “The Fornicater” manuscript). Cook corrected Ferguson’s text from the manuscript, without adding in the remaining ten lines. Despite this example, overall, for the letters in the Law Collection, even if scholars since Ferguson haven’t seen the original manuscripts, there are full and trustworthy texts available. On the other hand, in editing Burns’s poems and songs, Kinsley faced evidence that was less complete, and for which he had to rely more heavily on Cook. The situation was, however, not as dire as one might imagine if one looked only at those endless footnotes about manuscripts that can no longer be located. By my count, there were forty-four manuscript poems in Burns’s hand in the Honresfield collection. Twenty-five of these were poems in the First Commonplace Book, itself unlocated by Kinsley, but for which he could reasonably use the 1938 Ewing-Cook facsimile and transcript: indeed, in his list of sources, Kinsley includes the Commonplace Book under Manuscripts, but only references the facsimile as his source (Kinsley III: 968). Of the nineteen autograph manuscript poems not in the Commonplace Book, one, “Keen blaws the wind o’er Dornocht-head” (Cook MS. xxi), was a song for which Burns explicitly disclaimed authorship (Roy, Letters, II: 316). Which makes eighteen. Then, by the time Kinsley was at work, three manuscript items had found their way to the Burns Birthplace Museum: the extra stanzas for two songs that were in the Caledonian Pocket Companion, and, if my conjecture is right, the manuscript of “Auld lang syne.” Which leaves fifteen. For ten of these fifteen, Davidson Cook had printed full transcriptions in the Burns Chronicle. Though the Chronicle under Ewing would not have

40 Cook MS. xiv: Ferguson II: 103 [letter 488]; cf. Roy, II: 126-127 and n. Burns Chronicle 2016 Davidson Cook & AJ Law 47 welcomed the two more bawdy or scatological poems for which the Law collection held the unique holograph manuscripts, Cook (or perhaps Dewar himself) made full transcripts of both, and Kinsley used both transcripts. Cook was dead long before Kinsley took over the edition, and Kinsley’s acknowledgements and textual introduction (Kinsley I: viii-x; III: 963-994) contain no indication that he had had direct access to Davidson Cook’s own papers (or of their whereabouts), so if Cook rather than Dewar made the two transcripts, he had shared them with Dewar. For “The Fornicater’s Song,” only the first thirty-two of forty-eight lines had been included in the 1799 Merry Muses; Kinsley published the first full text in any edition of Burns’s poetry, for which his source-note credits a transcript by Dewar (see Kinsley, I: 101 n); an editor working now would of course be able to check the Cook-Dewar-Kinsley text against the original manuscript at Texas. For “There was twa wives,” where the unique source is the Cleghorn letter mentioned above, the Kinsley edition provides the first printing in a Burns edition of the full sixteen-line version, which it credits to Cook.41 In summary, of the forty-four poetic manuscripts at Honresfield, Kinsley had reasonably full evidence from facsimile or transcription for forty-one. What about the other three? These were the manuscripts in Burns’s hand of the song “O wat ye wha’s in yon town” (Cook MS. xxii: Kinsley, II: 772), the song “Sweet fa’s the e’en on Craigieburn” (Cook MS. xxiii; Kinsley, II: 763), and two stanzas from “Address to the Toothach” (Cook MS. ii(b); Kinsley, II: 791-792). For these, Cook had listed the items but had not printed transcripts. Kinsley’s textual notes for the three items include no mention of the Law/Honresfield manuscripts, even to note their unavailability. The “Address to the Toothach” was not published in Burns’s lifetime, but there are early printed texts of both songs, in Johnson’s Scots Musical Museum, 5 (1796), song 458, and Thomson’s Select Collection, I, set 2 (1798), song 32, respectively, and an editor working now might well not share Kinsley’s preference for manuscript over published texts. We can’t know why Cook shortchanged these three manuscripts, but the inference based on the other instances in which he did not publish transcriptions must surely be that they were fair copies in which he had found no, or no significant, textual variants from the published texts. Of course, in an ideal world, every manuscript of a major author would be readily and permanently accessible to every interested scholar. Since the 1930s, not only successive Burns scholars, but those doing research on

41 Kinsley, II: 595; MS. listed as BuR 1050, but still unlocated, in Smith and Boumelha, as in n. 3 above, p. 175; but cf. also James Barke and Sydney Goodsir Smith, eds., The Merry Muses of Caledonia (New York: Putnam, 1964), p. 72. 48 Patrick Scott Burns Chronicle 2016

Emily Brontë or Walter Scott, have lamented the disappearance of the Law manuscripts from Honresfield. As the survey above indicates, the situation is not as bleak as it might seem, largely because of the remarkable work in the 1920s by Davidson Cook. Moreover, there is published evidence that key portions of the Law collection survive and are still in family ownership. The 1995 Oxford edition of Emily Brontë’s poems had to rely for the Honresfield manuscript (the “E.J.B.” notebook) on the Shakespeare Head facsimile, along with photographs from the notebook in the Brontë Parsonage Museum, Haworth.42 For the major Scott edition, however (the Edinburgh Edition of the Waverley Novels), the general editor, Prof. David Hewitt, had been able, after a twenty-year search, to get in contact with Law’s heirs and make special arrangements to study Scott’s original manuscript of Rob Roy, “the last of Scott’s major manuscripts to be privately owned.”43 Nigel Leask, Pauline Mackay, and the Glasgow team did not have similar access for their recent edition of the First Commonplace Book, but they were able in 2011, with the permission of the present owner, to have their new transcription from the Ewing-Cook facsimile checked on some important points against the original manuscript by Professor Hewitt.44 For the present, however, most scholarship must continue to rely gratefully on the work of Davidson Cook, which makes one wonder: what happened to Cook’s papers, photographs, and transcripts, after his death in 1941? There are typescript copies of his Brontë transcripts at Haworth, and in 2012 a further batch of his Brontë transcripts, both typed and manuscript, was put up for sale by a North Yorkshire auction house, estimated at £80 to £120, and selling for £220.45 Following his retirement in 1939, Cook had moved back from Barnsley to the Glasgow area. There are five volumes of his writings about Burns in the Mitchell Library, Glasgow, and typescripts of Cook’s bibliographical work on George Thomson in the

42 Derek Roper and Edward Chitham, eds., The Poems of Emily Brontë (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), p. 14; and cf. Alexander and Smith, as in n. 25 above, pp. 291, 315. 43 Hewitt, David, ed., Rob Roy, by Walter Scott [Edinburgh Edition of the Waverley Novels, vol. 5] (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008). When the Rob Roy volume was published, Hewitt acknowledged the generosity in allowing this of “the late David Law Dixon” (p. Ix). His account of the manuscript’s provenance (p. 357) recounts that, when he was at work on the volume, the manuscript “had passed by inheritance to the late David Law Dixon;” cf. the bequest to “Emma Dixon” in the older Alfred Law’s will in 1913, noted above; Emma Law Dixon, wife of William Hodgson Dixon, died at Farnworth, Lancs, in 1954, aged 87; her children had included William Law Dixon, born February 6, 1906, baptized in Holy Trinity Church, Littleborough). 44 Nigel Leask, Commonplace Books (2014), p. 39. 45 Roper and Chitham, as in n. 41 above, p. 14, n.1; Tennants Auctioneers (Leyburn, North Yorkshire), September 5, 2012, lot 59. Burns Chronicle 2016 Davidson Cook & AJ Law 49

National Library of Scotland; in addition, J. DeLancey Ferguson donated his own correspondence with Cook about the Burns manuscripts to the Mitchell Library. What Ross Roy said about the Law manuscripts would also apply to Davidson Cook’s papers: “these are private things, they get passed on to somebody, or he might even have given them away before he died.” My instinct is that there was more, and that Cook himself would have arranged for the preservation of his Burns materials in Scotland, rather than in Yorkshire. Many Burnsians would be glad to hear of any additions to what is noted here.

Appeal for Information Readers of the above article will have noted the author’s appeal for any information on the whereabouts of papers formerly belonging to Davidson Cook. I would like to extend that further to an appeal for information on the whereabouts of any collection of Burns materials, whether manuscripts, early editions, or notes and writings of Burnsian scholars of their day. Past generations of Burnsians have been no less enthusiastic in their study and collection of all things Burns, but their collections may have passed into local repositories and have been lost from sight of the present generation. Information on anything please, to [email protected] . 50 Burns Chronicle 2016

A Mystery Solved, (partially) Bill Dawson On a recent visit to Kilmarnock to view East Ayrshire’s “Tam o’ Shanter” manuscript, I was surprised to notice peculiar feature. The first page of the manuscript has a later annotation “Printed vol 3. pa 327” and there is what appears to be a page a number “41” in the top right corner of the sheet. These lead to the conclusion that this manuscript had been removed from Burns’ Second Commonplace Book as these inscriptions are similar to those found there.

Part of MS of Tam o’ Shanter, East Ayrshire Collection showing endorsement and page number

The Second Commonplace Book was passed to Dr James Currie while he prepared his “Works of Robert Burns, with an account of His Life” published in 1800. Tam o’ Shanter does appear on page 327 of volume 3, although this manuscript text was not employed, Dr Currie preferring the text as printed in the 1793 edition of “Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect”, the second Edinburgh edition of Burns works. The Second Commonplace Book, now in the Birthplace Museum, has ten similar endorsements giving volume and page numbers etc.. Burns Chronicle 2016 Kilmarnock Manuscript 51

Extract from Second Commonplace Book, in the Robert Burns Birthplace Museum. Page 34 with typical annotation The pages of the Second Commonplace Book were numbered by Burns up to page 100, pages 23-26 and 41-59 are missing from the volume. Examination of the numbering on the manuscript and comparison with other numbering in Second Commonplace Book shows that this is Burns’ hand. The Second Commonplace Book was in possession of Dr Currie and his successors from 1797 until it was disposed off through an auction house in 1862. James Stillie, the Edinburgh manuscript dealer, reported the contents in detail in 1864, noting that the volume ran to page 40 – the pages were missing by that time. This manuscript was purchased for the Kilmarnock, Kay Park, Monument Museum from Messrs Kerr & Richardson, Glasgow on 2nd September 1885 for the sum of £235.00. Richardson had bought the MS at Sotheby, Wilkinson & Hodge a short time previously. It was not believed to have been on general sale prior to that time. On the pages following “Tam”, acquired as part of the purchase from Kerr & Robinson, is a manuscript of “Lament of Mary Queen of Scots”, a further three pages, and similarly endorsed.

Part of MS of Lament of Mary Queen of Scots, showing page number, 50, (top LHS) Dr Currie did not use the text from this manuscript, again preferring that in the 1793 Edinburgh edition. The song fills two full pages, 50 and 51, with the last two lines on page 52. There follows a stanza copied from Hurdis’ “Adriano”, possibly for future use as a compliment to Maria Riddell. 52 Bill Dawson Burns Chronicle 2016

In volume 1 of the, recently published, new Oxford Edition of the Works of Robert Burns, Prof. Nigel Leask wondered what, if anything, may have been on the pages 41–58 removed from the Second Commonplace Book?, that question is now two thirds answered. The manuscript can now be examined in the context of its origination in the Second Commonplace Book, and that manuscript volume viewed with the knowledge that it included an early draft of “Tam o’ Shanter”. These pages show that the Second Commonplace Book by that time, summer of 1790, was no longer used as a true commonplace book repository or for fair copy finalised works but simply as a notebook for works in progress. The Kilmarnock “Tam o’ Shanter” MS has several amendments to the poem, indicating that this was an early draft; the poem was revisited, edited and improved as it was developed and refined before reaching its final state, ready for publication. The image facing is of the fifth page of the manuscript showing several amendments, deletions and notably the four lines written in the margin “Coffins stood round, like open presses, that shaw’d the Dead in their last dresses; And by some devilish cantraip slight Each in its cauld hand held a light” to be inserted where two lines about illumination of the kirk are struck through The torches climb around the wa’,; Infernal fires, blue bleezing a’; and deleted. Further down the sheet, two further lines, describing other items on the haly table are struck out so we do not have Seven gallows pins, three hangman’s whittles, A raw o’ weel-sealed Doctors’ bottles in the finished version of the poem. There are many revisions to words and phrases throughout the Kilmarnock manuscript of which the above are some of the most significant and well known. The extensive and special collection of Burns manuscripts held by East Ayrshire Council is not as well recognised or as well viewed by the public as it deserves to be, but it can be seen online at www.futuremuseum.co.uk Burns Chronicle 2016 Kilmarnock Manuscript 53 54 Burns Chronicle 2016

“Letters” at Auction

Letter from Burns to Francis Grose, The letter from Burns to Francis Grose, dated December 1st 1790, which enclosed the poem Tam o’ Shanter, one of the Aloway-kirk stories, done in Scots verse” was sold by auction at Christies on 21st May 2014. It escaped notice of the Chronicle until the 2015 edition was at the press and the Editor apologises for this lapse. The letter was published for the first time, with facsimile images, in the Burns Chronicle of 1935 at which time the letter was in the possession of Hon. J.P. Mackay. Prof J. De Lancey Ferguson did not have this letter for his work, “The Letters of Robert Burns”, Oxford 1931, but Prof. G Ross Roy included the letter as No. 427A. in his 1985 edition. Subsequent to the recent sale, the manuscript has not appeared in any of the recognised major public collections; the Editor will be obliged if anyone can enlighten him to the current ownership.

Letter from Burns to Robert Ainslie The following image is of a MS of a supposed letter of Robert Burns to Robert Ainslie which was offered at auction in Connecticut. Scholarly opinion on this manuscript is that it is an accurate facsimile; the item was dropped from internet auction sites although still offered by the saleroom. The letter came with an authentication vouched by a professional appraiser. The letter from Burns at Ellisland, dated 14th June 1788, to Robert Ainslie was given in the 1931 edition “Letters of Robert Burns” edited by J DeLancey Fergusson, collated from the privately owned MS, which the later editor of the letters, Prof G Ross Roy was unable to trace. He collated the letter in his edition from a facsimile in an early, 1832, edition of Burns Works. Burns Chronicle 2016 Letters at Auction 55

Letter offered for sale at Connecticut.

Scholars lately compared the full, Connecticut, letter with a fragment which came from the estate of the late Henryk Minc, shown on the following page. The letter and its history were described and analysed in detail by Henryk Mink in an article in the Burns Chronicle of 2001, p 191 56 Letters at Auction Burns Chronicle 2016

Fragment, previously Minc collection.

The similarities are quite striking, a warning to all would be collectors of Burns MS.

Letter from Burns to William Burns The following letter appeared in a catalogue for an auction in England. It was catalogued as a letter from Burns to his brother William, It is the early19thc transcript of the letter of 14 August 1789. No Burns autograph MS is known for this letter, and the transcript therefore constitutes the earliest known source and as such is a most useful reference for current scholars. When Professor J Delancey Ferguson edited “The Letters of Robert Burns”, Clarendon Press 1931, he used the text as it had been first published by P Hately Waddell in his 1867 “Life of Burns”, noting that the MS could not be traced. When Professor G. Ross Roy re-edited the Letters for the 1985 publication he substantially corrected the text from a photograph of an early transcription and noted that “the copyist apparently tried faithfully to reproduce the original” The letter was withdrawn from the advertised sale, Burns Chronicle 2016 Letters at Auction 57

Transcription of Burns’ letter to his brother William 14th August 1789. 58 Burns Chronicle 2016

A Wee Mystery: Robert Burns and the Covenanters David Murray For many years, I have been asking myself the question “Why did Robert Burns write so little about the Covenanters, the men and women who had such a profound effect on the history of 17th century Scotland?” I ask this because at least three of his near contemporaries in Scottish literature had a lot to say about the Covenanters. These writers were all born in the 1770’s when Burns was alive; they were James Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd (born 1770), Sir Walter Scott (born 1771) and the Ayrshire man who came to Canada and founded the City of Guelph, John Galt (born 1779). Each of them wrote a full length historical novel about the Covenanters (The Brownie of Bodsbeck, Old Mortality and Ringan Gilhaize, respectively). Hogg also wrote several short stories about them and composed several poems about their exploits, as did Walter Scott. And yet Burns wrote very little about them----why? Of his more than 700 poems, I have found only one short poem of 4 lines about the Covenanters and there is one other about an election in Dumfries when Burns lived there in which he does mention the Covenanters but only in six lines out of 162. It is curious that both these poems only came into the public domain after his death. Only two of his many songs are indirectly related to the Covenanters. One is the song Killiecrankie, but he did not mention the Covenanters by name and he did not publish the song under his own name. Another, a bawdy song, Dainty Davie, was based on a tale of a Covenanter minister but this was in his “reserved canon” and, again, did not appear to the general public until well after his death. It seems as though he did not want to share his works on this topic with his public and you have to wonder why. Why did he virtually ignore these people who played such an important role in the history of Scotland? Some may ask, who were the Covenanters and why should Burns have been interested in them? In brief, they were the Presbyterian men and women (and their successors) who upheld the National Covenant in 1638 and the Solemn League and Covenant in 1643 in defence of their religion. At first, most of the Scottish population supported the National Covenant and so, at the beginning, most Scots could be regarded as Covenanters. These people opposed the last three Stuart kings of Britain because the latter totally ignored two basic beliefs of the Scottish nation. The first was the special relationship that had existed for centuries between the Scots and their monarch. It was always understood that the Scots allowed themselves to be ruled by a monarch who had the good of the nation at Burns Chronicle 2016 David Murray 59 heart. If not, the people could replace the monarch with a more appropriate individual. This ancient principle was documented in the Declaration of Arbroath as far back as 1320. In 1579, George Buchanan emphasised this again, stating that the source of all political power was the people, that the king was bound by those conditions under which the supreme power was first committed to his hands, and that it was lawful to resist, even to kill, tyrants. (Arthur Herman, 2001, How the Scots Invented the Modern World page 16). The later Stuart kings did not go along with this understanding and believed in the so-called Royal Prerogative, the Divine Right of Kings, a doctrine imported by James Sixth and First of Great Britain from Europe. These latter day Stuarts believed that the monarch ruled by the will of God, not by the will of the people. This meant that whatever the King wanted was really what God wanted and what God wanted, God and therefore the King got! Again, the Stuarts ignored the special attachment that the Scots had for their Presbyterian Kirk. From James VI on, the Stuarts disliked the Kirk, not on religious grounds but because it was---and still is--- a self-governing organisation that was established by the people, not by the monarch as it was in England. And this meant that the Stuarts had absolutely no control over it. The Stuarts preferred the Anglican model, the Episcopal Church over which they were the supreme rulers and which they controlled through their bishops. James VI tried to change the Scottish Kirk to this model. He managed to appoint a few bishops to the General Assembly but he quickly realized that the Scots would not tolerate any more interference with their beloved Kirk and he wisely backed off. But the later Stuart kings persisted. When the Covenanters, and their successors, were declared rebels in the 1660’s and Presbyterianism was abolished, they resorted to open air religious services, known as conventicles. But they were savagely persecuted, with imprisonment, torture, banishment and even execution without trial. Many hundreds, particularly in the western Lowlands and Borders were killed in the ensuing battles or executed for preaching at or even attending the conventicles. This only ended when Presbyterianism was restored in 1690 after the “Glorious Revolution” when James II was ousted and Mary and William came to the throne. People to this very day have very different views about the Covenanters. Some believe that they were heroic martyrs for their belief, courageous fighters for freedom of thought and religion while others believe that they were fanatical bigots who sought to impose their version of religion on 60 Burns & the Covenanters Burns Chronicle 2016 others, using force if necessary, an early version of ISIS. These differing views reflect the rather complex history of the Covenanting movement (see, for example Raymond Campbell Paterson, 1998, A Land Afflicted John Donald Publishers Ltd Edinburgh: Claire Watts, 2011The Covenanters NMS Enterprises Limited Edinburgh). This is part of the fascination of the Covenanters. This is why Scott, Hogg and Galt were drawn to them but not, apparently, Burns! Again, consider Burns’ background. He spent most of his life in Ayrshire and in Dumfriesshire, both regions with strong Covenanting traditions. Why did he ignore these traditions? His own ancestors, on his mother’s side, are said to have had strong Covenanting connections (see, Franklyn Bliss Snyder The Life of Robert Burns New York Macmillan Co. 1932). Why did he ignore these? And, of course, there are his political views. Burns was a radical. He believed passionately in the brotherhood of man, in the rights of the ordinary man and in civil liberties. And these were precisely the beliefs of the Covenanters and these were why they fought for their nation’s liberties against the actions of three autocratic kings. Yet Burns, despite his political beliefs, Burns who so admired and wrote so much about the American and French Revolutions had little to say about this Covenanting Revolution. And I find this very mysterious. I want to mention some events in their complicated history which, I think, should have inspired Burns to write more about them. Charles I wanted to achieve what his father had not; he wanted to establish an Episcopal Church in Scotland with himself as the Head. He wanted absolute control of the Church. Thus, in 1637, he decided that the Scots had to have a Book of Common Prayer modeled on the Anglican version. He issued a Royal decree that such a book must be used in the every Scottish church, a major step toward the Episcopalian form of worship. On Sunday 23rd August 1637, Dean John Hannah rose in St Giles Cathedral, Edinburgh to read from this Book of Common Prayer for the first time. The story goes that a woman called Jenny Geddes stood up, brandishing the three-legged stool on which she was sitting and shouted, “Ye false thief: may the devil gripe your guts with the colic: daur ye preach mass in my lug?” She threw the stool at the unfortunate Hannah. A great riot broke out with all sorts of missiles flying at the Dean who hurriedly left the pulpit. The Bishop of Edinburgh, David Lindsay replaced Hannah on the pulpit hoping to calm things down but his presence, in his entire bishop’s finery, enraged the congregation and even more missiles flew at him. He fled in terror from Burns Chronicle 2016 David Murray 61 the church and escaped in a friend’s coach, and it said that he soiled himself for fear of what the mob might do to him (Raymond Campbell Paterson, 1998, A Land Afflicted page 10). I think that Burns could have written a very humorous poem about this but he did not! Burns must have known this story because he did name his favourite mare Jenny Geddes and wrote quite a bit about the horse. In a letter to his friend, James Smith, on the 30th June 1787, he wrote that he would record, in a few weeks, why his mare was called Jenny Geddes. As far as I can ascertain, he never did---and we have to wonder why. This riot in St. Giles was duplicated in virtually every parish church south of the Grampians. Public outrage led to the National Covenant that was drawn up in February 1638.This was a carefully worded document, designed not to appear revolutionary but reminding the King of his legal duty to uphold the Presbyterian Kirk and the laws of Scotland. It implied that Scots were prepared to fight not only for their religious freedom but also for what they saw as an attempt to take away their civil rights and privileges. Later that year, the General Assembly of the Kirk was held in Glasgow and it condemned the new prayer book as unlawful an excommunicated all the bishops, abolishing their roles. Charles was enraged at this apparent affront to his authority He regarded it as sedition and essentially declared war on his Scottish subjects. He was determined to bring them to heel! On June 5 1639, an invading English army crossed the River Tweed near Coldstream and was confronted near the town of Duns by a smaller but better equipped, disciplined Army of the Covenant. Many of the Scottish troops were veterans of the religious wars in Northern Europe and their commander was Alexander Leslie, former Field Marshall of the King of Sweden. The English refused to do battle and Charles was forced to negotiate a truce. Thus, on June 18, the Pacification of Berwick ended this First Bishops’ War. It is curious that Burns never wrote about this great bloodless victory for the Scots considering that he visited the site of the confrontation between the English and the powerful Army of the Covenant. Burns stayed several days in Duns at the home of one of his friends, Robert Ainslie, in May, 1787. In the following year, 1640, Charles was still determined to discipline his Scottish subjects. He started raising another army but the Scots, in a pre-emptive strike, invaded the north-east of England with the intent of occupying Newcastle. At the end of August, 1640, the English Army again confronted the Army of the Covenant at Newburn on the banks of the River Tyne. A few shots were fired and again the English soldiers fled the field. 62 Burns & the Covenanters Burns Chronicle 2016

Winston Churchill in his History of the English-Speaking People (Volume 2 p.210) quotes a contemporary as saying “Never so many ran from so few with less ado”. This was the end of the Second Bishops’ War. These wars had resulted in the total defeat of the English armies and humiliation, as well as bankruptcy, for Charles. It is difficult to understand why Burns chose to ignore these two Scottish victories over the English. As Churchill wrote (ibid. p.199) “the torch was lighted which began the vast conflagration (of the Civil War)” In 1643, two years after the outbreak of the English Civil War, the English Parliamentarians and Covenanters joined forces against Charles drawing up the Solemn League and Covenant. This was a military deal whereby the Scots supplied their army and were supposed to receive compensation from the English, who also guaranteed that they would defend the right of the Scots to have their own chosen religion and they also guaranteed that that they would reform the Church of England to impose Presbyterianism. This was rather ironic. The Covenanters fought against attempts to abolish their form of worship and here they were trying to impose it on others. This should have been a great theme for Burns’ ironic sense of humour! This alliance swung the balance of the conflict against Charles. However, the English reneged on some of their guarantees. This eventually led to a split with England and to so much infighting within the Covenanting movement that it fell apart into warring factions. About the same time, one of the original champions of the National Covenant, James Graham, 5th Earl of Montrose, decided that to fight for religion was one thing but to fight against the King for the English Parliament was another. He raised an army on behalf of Charles, composed mainly of Highland clans and Irishmen. Few Lowlanders supported him but he won some brilliant victories in Scotland for Charles and was created Marquis in 1644. However, he was defeated at Philipshaugh near Selkirk in September of that year and escaped to Europe. In 1650, he returned to Scotland to fight for Charles II, recently crowned by the Scots, but was captured, brought to Edinburgh and hanged on May 21 1650. Burns mentions Montrose and the Covenanters in one verse in his Election Ballad for Dumfries Burghs, 1790: Nor wanting ghosts of Tory fame; Bold Scrimgeour follows gallant Graham; Auld Covenanters shiver-- Forgive! Forgive! Much-wrong’d Montrose! Now Death and Hell engulph thy foes, Thou liv’st on high for ever. Burns Chronicle 2016 David Murray 63

Of note, in the previous verse Burns wrote the line the muffled murtherer of Charles, explaining in a footnote that Charles I was executed by a man in a mask. While Burns sent copies of this poem to some of his friends, he did not publish it. According to Noble and Hogg in The Canongate Burns 2001 (page 740), this poem did not appear to the public until 1811 in The Edinburgh Magazine. During the Civil War and the subsequent Cromwellian Republic, the fighting within the Covenanting movement increased leading me to wonder why Burns did not write a poem about these “tulzies” along the lines of The Twa Herds. This lack of unity meant that the Covenanters were in a very weak position when Charles II was eventually restored to the throne of Britain on May 14 1660. He had previously been acclaimed as King by the Scots in January 1649 at which time he had signed both covenants but he reneged on them when he was crowned King of Britain. Charles, like his father and grandfather, did not like Presbyterianism. He is reputed to have observed that the Presbyterian faith “was not a religion for gentlemen” (The Land Afflicted 1998, page 225). You would think that Burns should have said something about that! Charles forced the Scottish Parliament to abolish the Presbyterian Church and set up the Episcopal Church in its place. Many of the original Covenanters submitted to this because they were too weak to oppose Charles and, anyway, they were fed up with all the wars and infighting. Their everyday life and mode of worship were not affected: all they had to do was to accept Charles as head of the Church of Scotland and the oversight of his bishops. However, almost one third refused to accept this, particularly in the Central Lowlands and South West and parts of the Borders. They refused to attend the newly established Episcopal Church of Scotland and resorted to “conventicles” open air services in the countryside, with their ministers preaching the Gospel on the bleak moors of the Lowlands and high hills of the Borders. Charles and the Scottish authorities did not like this, believing the conventicles to be hot beds of sedition. In 1662 the authorities declared the conventicles to be illegal with heavy penalties for attending them. Ministers conducting them were imprisoned or transported to Barbados as a punishment while attendees were heavily fined. By 1679, the authorities imposed the death penalty for anyone preaching at a conventicle. One such Covenanting preacher was Reverend David Williamson who, when being pursued by dragoons, was sheltered by Lady Cherrytree of 64 Burns & the Covenanters Burns Chronicle 2016

Galloway. To hide him, she put him to bed with her daughter, with the inevitable consequences. Burns wrote a bawdy song about this episode entitled Dainty Davy (Maurice Lindsay’s The Burns Encyclopaedia 2013, page 334). His song was not published until well after his death. To enforce these harsh measures, the authorities sent in troops and armed rebellion followed. This is when the hard men appeared. On the Government side, there was Tam Dalyell of the Binns, who came to be known as “Bluidy Tam” because of his relentless pursuit of conventiclers. Another government man was John Graham of Claverhouse who became known as “Bluidy Clavers” because of his relentless pursuit of the Covenanters. On the Covenanters’ side was one Richard Cameron, a fiery fundamentalist preacher whose followers became known as the Cameronians, fierce fighting men who became crack shots and delighted in killing dragoons when they attacked the conventicles. Others included James Renwick and Alexander Peden. Several pitched battles ensued. 1666 saw the Battle of Rullion Green, south west of Edinburgh, near Penicuik when Tam Dalyell defeated the Covenanters. After the battle, 33 men were hanged on the spot and more transported to the colonies. There was now a state of virtual civil war and, on June 1, 1679 Claverhouse and his dragoons confronted a conventicle of several thousand people at Drumclog, near Strathaven. With the Covenanters was a fighting force of around 1500, mainly Cameronians. They outnumbered the dragoons and the government forces were defeated and chased from the field. But three weeks later, just north of Hamilton, on Sunday June 22 1679, 5000 Covenanters faced 15000 Government troops at Bothwell Bridge. The Covenanters were defeated and their army destroyed, many were killed during the battle and after it many were executed on the spot while about 1400 were made prisoner. Some escaped with their lives, including, it is said by some authorities (Snyder 1932), 2 maternal ancestors of Burns. In a letter to Gavin Hamilton (7th December 1786), Burns suggested that his birthday might be classed with such wonderful events as, among others, “the battle of Bothwell bridge” He made no reference to the cause of this battle or to his maternal ancestors. Why not? After Bothwell Bridge, the struggle was continued mainly by Richard Cameron and his Cameronians. On the anniversary of the battle, June 22 1680 in Sanquhar, a place well known to Burns, Cameron issued a declaration declaring war on Charles as a tyrant, a usurper and a traitor who had renounced the Covenants. This was treason and Cameron was Burns Chronicle 2016 David Murray 65 a marked man. On July 22 1680 Government forces caught up with him and some of his followers at Airdsmoss, North of Auchinleck in Ayrshire. A pitched battle ensued during which Cameron was killed along with some of his men, including, it is said by some, Burns’ own maternal great- grandfather. The poet made no mention of this. On February 6, 1685, Charles died and was succeeded by his Catholic brother, James VII of Scotland, II of Britain. Things got even worse. An Act was passed by the Scottish Parliament declaring that to be a Covenanter or to refuse to accept the King as head of the Church of Scotland was punishable by death. It was decreed a crime even to give shelter to Covenanters. This was the Killing Times. Between Decembers of 1684 and 1685, there were at least 150 executions under this law and more were killed on the field “trying to escape”. This is when James Hogg said: “Clavers traversed the country more like an exterminating angel, than a commander of a civilized army.” One such event occurred on May 1 1685, when a man was executed outside his cottage in Priesthill, North East of Muirkirk, for refusing to accept the King as head of the Church. He was shot in cold blood by dragoons acting on the orders of Claverhouse right in front of his wife and small children. His name was John Brown and he, too, was said to be an ancestor of Burns’ mother. Whether or not that is true, it is well documented that Burns’ great-grandmother and family were persecuted for sheltering Covenanters. In the same month of May 1685, 167 Covenanters, 125 men and 42 women, were force-marched from Edinburgh, where jails were overflowing, to Dunnottar Castle, near Stonehaven in Kincardineshire. There, they were confined in a dank, airless cellar which still exists and called the Whigs’ vault. Their crime was that they had refused to acknowledge the King as the Head of the Scottish Church. Conditions were horrendous and many died in the dungeon or trying to escape by clambering down the cliff, falling and being killed. They were buried in a communal grave in Dunnottar Churchyard and a memorial stone tells their story. The survivors were all marched back at the end of August to face transportation if they would not take the oath of allegiance. Burns visited Stonehaven in September of 1787, during his tour of the north east of Scotland. He spent a few days there, meeting relatives. He may well have visited Dunnottar Churchyard where his paternal grandparents are buried. If he did make that visit, he made no mention of the fate of this group of Covenanters. Again in May 1685, in the town of Wigtown, Margaret MacLachlan, aged 66 Burns & the Covenanters Burns Chronicle 2016

63, and Margaret Wilson, aged 18, were found guilty of refusing to abjure the Covenant and of refusing to accept the King as Head of the Church. As punishment, they were tied to stakes on the Solway shore and drowned by the incoming tide. Burns must have heard of these “Wigtown martyrs” when he lived in and around Dumfries but there is no mention of them in his works. As time went on, opposition to James for his intolerant and arrogant ways rose not only in Scotland but also in England, particularly after the birth of his son on June 10th 1688. William and Mary, James’ son in law and daughter, were asked to help subdue James. William assembled a force of at least 15,000 men and 500 ships, four times the size of the Spanish Armada. His propaganda said he had been called by the nation to have a free and lawful Parliament, to save the Church of England and the ancient constitution of England. His real aim was to prevent James from bringing England into an alliance with France and to get England to join the military coalition of the Dutch against Louis XIV. On November 5 1688, William landed with an army in the south of England. James fled to France, abandoned by his two Protestant daughters, Mary and Anne, and by his army and navy. He tossed the Great Seal into the Thames, thereby giving up legitimate government. He was deemed to have abdicated. William and Mary were proclaimed joint sovereigns of England on February 13 1689 and of Scotland on May 11 1689. It is interesting to reflect that, at that time, Scotland could have separated from England. The Scots had three free choices. They could have kept James as King of Scotland or become a republic with no monarch but, after three months of debate, they chose Mary and William as joint rulers. The Glorious Revolution had occurred, the Presbyterian Church was restored as the official Church of Scotland and the killings ceased. However, John Graham of Claverhouse – the man who was a distant relative of Montrose and known to the Covenanters as Bluidy Clavers and, later, to Walter Scott as Bonnie Dundee – rallied the Highland clans and launched a bid to restore James as king. This was the first Jacobite Rebellion. On July 27 1689, Claverhouse inflicted a heavy defeat on a government force at Killiecrankie. However, he was fatally wounded by a stray bullet, dying within a few hours of his victory but more clans gathered, planning to take Scotland for James. And then, on August 21 1689 at Dunkeld, a Jacobite force of about 4000 men met a much smaller force of about 1000 Cameronians, now a respectable government regiment. There was a brief but bloody battle with house to house fighting. In the narrow streets of Dunkeld, there was no Burns Chronicle 2016 David Murray 67 chance of the Highland charge which had won Killiecrankie. After 4 hours of facing the deadly marksmanship of the Cameronians, the Highlanders withdrew. The Highlanders morale was broken and they were finally and decisively defeated on May 1 1690 near Grantown-on-Spey. What is strange about this is that Burns visited both battle sites during his tour of the North East in August and September of 1787. He wrote the well-known song about the Battle of Killiecrankie but did not publish it under his own name. He never even mentioned the decisive Battle of Dunkeld. So why did he write so little about the Covenanters? Here, we must speculate on possible reasons.Perhaps he did write more poems and songs about the Covenanters and these are hidden away in some private collection. Now and again, some lost works of Burns do surface and, some day, we may hear of more references to the Covenanters. Again, Burns had a great nostalgic admiration for the Stuarts. If he did write about the Covenanters, he would have had to acknowledge the ignorant arrogance of the last 3 Stuart kings. Perhaps this is why he wrote so little. Perhaps it was because, by the time of his sojourn in Edinburgh, just after the time of the Scottish Enlightenment, the Covenanters were regarded by some as fanatical religious bigots. Certainly, that was how Walter Scott portrayed them in “Old Mortality”. But this was a very narrow view of their true nature and that is, to some extent, why James Hogg and John Galt wrote their novels rebutting Scott’s view. But I think the key to this wee mystery was something more personal. During his North East tour in 1787, Burns visited the Duke and Duchess of Athol at their home, Blair Castle, near both Killiecrankie and Dunkeld. It was at Blair Castle that Burns first met Robert Graham of Fintry, newly appointed as a Commissioner of the Excise. It was this man who engineered Burns’ appointment to the Excise and defended him when he got into trouble over his political views. Burns knew that Robert Graham was very proud to be a direct descendant of none other than John Graham of Claverhouse, Bluidy Clavers himself! I think that this put Burns in a spot, right on the horns of dilemma. Burns could not write anything openly about the Covenanters for fear of offending his powerful friend and patron. And on the other hand, he could write nothing in praise of Claverhouse because that would raise the anger of his family and friends in Ayrshire and Dumfries, many of whom were of covenanting stock. So, as a canny Scot, he kept his thoughts to himself and published nothing in the open. But what were Burns’ thoughts about the Covenanters? I believe they are revealed in the words of that wee poem I mentioned at the beginning 68 Burns & the Covenanters Burns Chronicle 2016 of this article. The poem was not published until 1834. It was found in Dumfries Public Library in a copy of Sir John Sinclair’s book, ‘The Statistical Account of Scotland’ published in 1794. At the entry on Balmaghie parish with its Covenanters Stone, Burns has written (possibly in 1795) this: 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. As Gerard Carruthers has said about this poem, “Writing after the French Revolution Burns says, effectively, that the covenanting cause too was one about democracy and freedom of conscience. He helps brings the Covenanters back in from the historical cold, when for a hundred years or more they had been consigned to the dustbin, seen simply as fanatics.” (http://www.electricscotland.com/familytree/frank/burns_lives216.htm). I agree with this opinion and believe it to be true but I still ask the question ““Why did Robert Burns write so little about the Covenanters and why did he hide what he did write about them from the general public?” Alexander Findlater (1754 — 1839)

Alexander Findlater was Burns’ Excise Supervisor and became a great friend of the Poet. He defended Burns against the charges of disloyalty in 1792 and substantially refuted the slurs on Burns character after death The above portrait was probably painted when he was later Collector of Excise in Glasgow where he lived during the later part of his life. Does anyone know the identity of the artist or where the original is to be found? Any information gratefully received by the Editor, [email protected] Burns Chronicle 2016 69

James McKie: Kilmarnock’s Burns Publisher Ross McGregor Introduction James McKie was born on 7th October 1817 in Kilmarnock. Upon his death on 5th October 1891, the Kilmarnock Standard stated that he “was probably the most widely known and most outstanding Kilmarnock man of the generation to which he belonged.”1 As a printer, publisher, bookseller, bibliographer and collector, his work ensured that the town’s association with Robert Burns was kept alive long after John Wilson printed Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect in 1786. In this respect “his work and position were unique, as history will tell, for his labours were extensive and the results will remain in a permanent form.”2 In early 2015 a new exhibition of James McKie’s collection and career at the Dick Institute in Kilmarnock used these words as a way of reminding a local, national and international audience of the significant contribution McKie made to Burns culture in the 19th century. This article expands on this aim, focusing primarily on McKie’s career as a publisher and printer in 19th century Kilmarnock. It is impossible to consider McKie’s career without looking at the broader context of Kilmarnock’s (and Ayrshire’s) book history. McKie’s career, in terms of its length, achievements and impact, far exceeds that of any other printer or publisher from the town or county. It is also impossible to consider McKie’s career or any other aspect of Kilmarnock’s book history without reference to John Wilson and the book he printed for Robert Burns from his premises near Kilmarnock Cross. Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, its success and its connection to Kilmarnock, played a central role in McKie’s career, driving his successes and fuelling his ambition. Unlike any other Ayrshire printer or publisher in the years after 1786, McKie grasped the significance of the connection between the town and Robert Burns, inspiring him in his life’s work. He also exploited and maximised the connection as a marketing tool for his business and for his own stature as an authority in the Burns world of the 19th century. This in turn placed Kilmarnock at the centre of this world, where Burns the brand established itself in the national psyche. During the latter part of McKie’s career, Burns statues, monuments, clubs, editions, and all sorts of paraphernalia had grown into the Burns culture we recognise today. McKie played a part in this – he was central to the movement for the Kilmarnock monument in the 1870s, and his collection of Burnsiana filled the monument’s museum

1 Kilmarnock Standard, 5th October, 1891 2 Kilmarnock Standard, 5th October, 1891 70 McKie Burnsiana Burns Chronicle 2016 for almost a hundred years. However, as a publisher and bibliographer of Burns, it could be argued that his ambitions were more concerned with Burns’s achievements and impact as an artist; producing new editions, faithful reprints, bibliographies and comprehensive compendiums of Burns collections (including his own). All of this activity suggests McKie was striving to contribute to the reading public’s understanding and appreciation of the poet’s work (at a time when Burns was being celebrated and criticised in equal measure), rather than purveying mild Burnsiana to feed a growing cult. McKie was certainly central to the growth of that cult, both in Scotland and abroad, from 1860s to 1880s. However, the scope and ambition of his publishing transcends this. Early Years James McKie was born just over thirty years after the publication of Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect. By 1817 Kilmarnock, like many towns, had changed its shape and appearance to accommodate and reflect its growing prosperity, industry and commerce. John Wilson had ceased printing in Kilmarnock in 1790, moving to Ayr, but retaining his bookselling premises there. Between 1790 and c1805 Kilmarnock did not have a printer to call its own. Presumably, the Wilson business was capable of supplying demand in both Ayrshire towns. By 1805 Kilmarnock began to change radically. It “was a town that had recently shed the shackles of its past, beginning to exchange the cramped, narrow streets of its old town for a townscape of greater regularity and efficiency.”3 King Street had formed in 1804, creating a brand new central street leading from south (Ayr) to north (Glasgow). By 1805 the new Cross, with a new bridge and town house, dominated a now handsome and fashionable town centre. At the same time the first new printer since Wilson began operating. H. and S. Crawford, working from the old Wilson premises near the Cross, produced books and pamphlets similar in range to that produced by Wilson, namely, religious and instructional work, usually with local connections. They also produced some local poetry and song pamphlets. Hugh Crawford took over the family business in c1810 and continued to produce mainly local work, including some key publications in the area’s print history (including the account of the Reform demonstration of 1816). Crawford also began to print an increasing range of poetry, and catalogues of both the Kilmarnock Library and his own circulating library.4

3 Harris, Bob and Charles McKean, The Scottish town in the age of enlightenment, 1740 – 1820 (Edinburgh University Press, 2014) p. 129. 4 Gardner, Careen S. Printing in Ayr and Kilmarnock (Ayr: AANHS, 1976) gives an indicative list of title printed in Kilmarnock from 1783 – 1920. Burns Chronicle 2016 Ross McGregor 71

In the year of McKie’s birth Crawford printed Kilmarnock’s first periodical, for local poet, editor and ex-volunteer rifleman, James Thomson. The Ayrshire Miscellany; Or, Kilmarnock Literary Expositor appeared before any newspapers were printed in the town. It contained poetry, essays, and local titbits expected of a newspaper, for example market prices and death notices. In the same month another periodical was produced in the town, the Coila Repository and Kilmarnock Monthly Magazine, published by J. Mennons. For the first time, Kilmarnock had more than one printer, producing literature for, we assume, an expanding market. By the time James McKie started his working life aged 11, as an apprentice book-binder to Hugh Crawford in the late 1820s, there were a handful of booksellers / printers operating in the town – Crawford, Mennons, Mathie and Lochore / James Mathie, and James Paterson. Naturally, this produced a broader range of literature for (mainly local) audiences. Kilmarnock’s population was growing. Workers were moving to the town for employment in textiles, weaving, mining and manufacturing. It was expanding its schools and churches as well as trade and infrastructure. In 1831 the town produced its first newspaper, the Kilmarnock Chronicle, published by James Paterson. The Chronicle was a radical newspaper and lasted for less than two years. Paterson then launched another newspaper, The Reporter (nicknamed The Wee Cannon), again a radical print principally concerned with the first election after the Reform Act of 1832.5 Yet another radical newspaper appeared in 1833 – the Ayrshire Reformer and Kilmarnock Gazette, published by Dr John Taylor. All were short-lived. Then in 1834 Crawford published the Kilmarnock Journal, a more conservative newspaper, while McKie was still an apprentice at the firm. Crawford published the newspaper for 20 years, during which time various other titles were produced in the town, reflecting the competing political ideologies of the day. It may have been this experience at Crawford’s that inspired McKie’s later foray into newspaper publishing in the 1850s with the Kilmarnock Weekly Post. Interestingly, McKie also edited this newspaper, and given the content of some of the series of articles – Robert Burns, Ayrshire printers, the local clergy, some of which he also published in pamphlet form - it is possible that McKie also had a role as a writer. Other key work printed by Crawford during McKie’s apprenticeship was the poetry of John Ramsay. Ramsay was a significant Kilmarnock poet from the 1830s until his death in 1879, his collections being reprinted many

5 Paterson, James Autobiographical reminiscences (Glasgow: Maurice Ogle, 1871) 72 McKie Burnsiana Burns Chronicle 2016 times and sold in Glasgow and Edinburgh. Ramsay was openly indebted to Burns. Ramsay and McKie’s paths undoubtedly crossed many times throughout their respective careers. McKie published one of Ramsay’s final collections in Gleanings in the Gloamin in 1877. Poignantly, in old age Ramsay contributed a poem for the movement for the Kilmarnock Burns Monument, compiled in one of McKie’s scrapbooks6. The Publisher After completing his apprenticeship, James McKie took on a bookselling business in Saltcoats in 1835 and remained there until 1844. It was from Saltcoats that he began his career as a publisher, with the literary magazine The Ayrshire Inspirer (1839). Another early publication highlights an interesting feature of McKie’s career. Catalogue of books in the circulating library of James McKie, bookseller, binder, printer and stationer was published in 1841, when McKie was just 24 years old and over forty years before his library became arguably the most significant Burns collection of its time. It suggests that at this very early stage in his career he was collecting. (There is no known copy of this catalogue so the contents of his library at this time, and the extent of any Burns collections within it, is not known). It also indicates his willingness to combine his personal collection, his bookselling business, and his publishing ventures, as a way of establishing his reputation as an authority in Ayrshire’s book world. This wasn’t unusual – Hugh Crawford published a similar self-referencing catalogue in 1820. McKie however built on this and later in his career reaped the benefits of self-promotion as a Burns authority. His comprehensive bibliographical works of the 1860s – 1880s often referenced and advertised his own collection and the editions he was by then publishing. His Title pages and imprints in the private library of James McKie, Kilmarnock (1867) even included his portrait on the frontispiece. In 1843 he published and edited The Ayrshire Wreath, a handsome literary annual printed by his old employer Hugh Crawford, which received favourable reviews in the national press. Then in 1845 he returned to Kilmarnock, purchasing the business of Crawford & Son, where his career began. Aside from his venture into newspaper publishing and editing, he also published some of the most well known local writers such as Archibald McKay and Marion Aird, whose readership extended well beyond the county. By the 1850s Kilmarnock had numerous printers producing books and pamphlets, and numerous publishers issuing competing newspapers.

6 Sneddon, David Catalogue of the McKie Burnsiana library: holograph MSS., paintings, etchings, engravings, photographs and relics (Kilmarnock: Standard Printing Works, 1909) Burns Chronicle 2016 Ross McGregor 73

The town’s manufacturing was establishing itself as a global force. Johnnie Walker & Son, Glenfield and Kennedy, Blackwood & Son, Barclay Engineering – these were some of the brands emanating from Kilmarnock into the wider world. The townscape was adding Victorian grandeur to its Georgian improvements – Duke Street, John Finnie Street and its Opera House, the Corn Exchange Hall. Meanwhile McKie was establishing himself as a publisher with a reach beyond Ayrshire, and his growing ambition was intrinsically linked to, and inspired by, Robert Burns. McKie and Burns In the 1860s McKie took advantage of his connections, via Hugh Crawford, to the famous John Wilson press, by beginning a new chapter in his career – as a printer and publisher of Robert Burns. The market for facsimiles and new editions of Burns’s work was growing at home and abroad, particularly after the 1859 centenary of the poet’s birth. McKie’s entrance into the Burns marketplace was clever. He executed a dual role – as significant Burns collector and bibliographer, and as a printer with a direct lineage to John Wilson’s Kilmarnock press (in promotional material he billed himself as ‘successor to John Wilson’). In 1866 McKie published a book called Bibliotheca Burnsiana: life and works of Burns, title pages and imprints of the various editions in the private library of James McKie. Soon after, and exploiting his connection to the John Wilson press and recognising the desire for ‘authenticity’ in the Burns market, his next Burns book was a facsimile of the Kilmarnock edition, published in 1867 in a limited run of 600 copies (with another limited edition of 50 copies on large paper for London bookseller Willis and Sotheran). The facsimile was an exact reprint of the Kilmarnock edition, and was acknowledged as superior in paper, type and binding (the plain grey covers also replicating the 1786 book’s exterior). He was able to source and use types cast from the matrices originally used by John Wilson in 1786.7 In every way his facsimile was very deliberate back to basics reprint. The promotional material for the large paper edition is revealing, showing samples of the ‘authentic’ Kilmarnock edition ornaments used on the title page8. Bibliotheca Burnsiana was also offered as an insert in the special edition. As a statement in the Burns marketplace, it was in stark contrast to the lavish editions being produced in Edinburgh and London. McKie was placing his products distinctly in this marketplace; using

7 Gardner, Careen S. (1976) 8 The McKie Collection, held in the Dick Institute, Kilmarnock (East Ayrshire Leisure / East Ayrshire Council) 74 McKie Burnsiana Burns Chronicle 2016

Kilmarnock and John Wilson to show that his books were closer to the ‘original’ Burns. Again in 1867 he produced another volume highlighting his collection, the aforementioned Title Pages and Imprints in the Private Library of James McKie, Kilmarnock. His international reach grew with American and Canadian editions of the facsimile. There followed similarly faithful editions of Songs, Edinburgh poems, and Posthumous poems (all 1869), again limited to 600 copies and replicating the aesthetics of the 1786 edition, and again with additional very limited large paper editions being produced for London booksellers. These successes lead to his publishing a new, revised and annotated popular edition of the work of Burns, edited by William Scott Douglas (1871), who later in the decade went on to edit the significant six-volume Edinburgh edition (1877 – 1879). McKie produced a revised version of the Scott Douglas edition in 1876, then reissued this again in 1886. He also had Scott Douglas contribute notes to his People’s Statue edition of Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect (1877). Very little is known about McKie’s relationship with Scott Douglas and how they came to work together (McKie also published Scott Douglas’s In Ayrshire: descriptive picture of the county of Ayr (1874)). The McKie Collection contains numerous scrapbooks, including correspondence from Scott Douglas. At the time of writing the contents of the scrapbooks haven’t been fully catalogued or researched. During the 1870s McKie entered a business partnership with his step- son, William Drennan. From 1874 to 1879 they operated as McKie and Drennan, producing, in addition to the revised Scott Douglas edition and the People’s Statue edition, Burns and his Kilmarnock friends by Archibald McKay, and the Manual of religious belief written by William Burnes (1875). Bookending this venture with Drennan, McKie produced two books that signalled his legacy as a Burns publisher and collector. The Burns Calendar (1874) and Bibliography of Robert Burns (1881) were both written by James Gibson, although the correspondence and notes contained in McKie’s scrapbooks suggest he had a significant editorial role. While the Burns Calendar contains various facts, contextual information and quotations from the poems, the Bibliography seeks to list all editions, contributions to Burns literature, and locations of known manuscripts and relics. Again exploiting his position as Burns publisher and collector, the Bibliography highlights McKie’s own status as an authoritative source on Burns. Although not the last book he published, the Bibliography can be seen as the apex of McKie’s career, and arguably, alongside the opening of Burns Chronicle 2016 Ross McGregor 75 the Kilmarnock Monument in 1879, the apex of Kilmarnock’s contribution to Burns culture. Legacy James McKie is widely credited, along with James Rose, with originating the movement for a monument to Robert Burns in Kilmarnock. In January 1877 a public meeting was held in the George Hotel, where a resolution to erect a statue to Burns was unanimously passed. A committee was appointed immediately, with James McKie as joint secretary. An extraordinary level of fundraising resulted in more ambitious plans for an ornamental building to house the statue. The enthusiasm of the committee and the public resulted in the memorial stone being laid in September 1878, witnessed by huge crowds in the Kay Park. Local newspapers regularly featured celebratory poems about the joy and pride of the movement for a Burns Monument in the town (‘Kilmarnock! Lift your head this day!’).9 For the statue, W. G. Stevenson, the sculptor from Edinburgh, was chosen by the committee after a public competition. There was also a poetry competition for the new monument, won by Alexander Anderson. The monument was unveiled in August 1879, “before the largest assemblage of people that the burgh perhaps ever witnessed.”10 At the request of Kilmarnock Burns Club in 1882, James McKie agreed to sell his collection to the town for £350. An interesting omission from this purchase was McKie’s copy of the Kilmarnock edition of Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect (the town was gifted another copy, by Dr McLaren of London). An appeal to the public for subscriptions to purchase the collection was very successful, so that within a year it was deposited in the museum of the Burns Monument. A Burns Monument Committee was formed within the town council, with representatives of the Burns Club, and later, the Burns Federation. McKie continued to produce books, including centenary editions of Scott Douglas’s Burns and the facsimile in 1886. When he retired his business was succeeded by D. Brown and Company, who reissued McKie’s Scott Douglas edition more than once into the 20th century. The end of McKie’s career coincided with a sharp decline in Kilmarnock’s and Ayrshire’s book production into the 1890s and 1900s. The number of printers reduced and their output was limited to local interest books and pamphlets, for example for the local history and tourism markets. McKie’s role in the wider Burns world (beyond book publishing) has 9 Kilmarnock Standard, 21st September, 1878 10 Kilmarnock Standard, 16th August 1879 76 McKie Burnsiana Burns Chronicle 2016 not been pursued in this article. However, his scrapbooks show he was extremely active in the creation and spread of Burns culture and Burns memorialising throughout Britain and abroad, establishing connections with clubs, publishers and collectors. Similarly, McKie’s role as a publisher in the context of Edinburgh and London’s Burns production in the period 1860s – 1880s could be examined in more detail, as could his editor – publisher relationship with William Scott Douglas. His place at the peak of Kilmarnock’s Burns culture in this period has hopefully been established but this too could be examined further. Although it has been Kilmarnock’s Burns collection for over 130 years, the McKie Collection remains an as-yet untapped resource for many avenues of new Burns research.

Digitising the Chronicle Archive The project to digitise the past editions of the Burns Chronicle, from its first edition in 1892 up to and including this one and all future volumes, for reading on the web in a searchable format has at last begun. Literature Convener Mike Duguid, at some expense to himself, has had a dozen volumes scanned, corrected, and made searchable. He demonstrated the usefulness of these historic articles at the Conference seminar session in Peebles to enthusiasm from the audience. He will now progress these onto the world wide web. For continuation of this work, funding is required for the digitisation etc, £50 per annual volume, and there is opportunity to have a sponsor’s name, Club or individual, shown on the lead page of the volume. From the interest and enthusiasm at Peebles there will no doubt be a number of immediate offers of sponsorship. Others who wish to attach to this most valuable historic project should contact the Federation office with their own offer as soon as possible, Burns Chronicle 2016 77

The Monkland Friendly Society Library 1789-1791, and Robert Burns, Librarian. Donald Urquhart At Ellisland there is a fine bookcase once the property of Robert Browning. It contains a varied collection of books some of which were gifted from Dunscore Library when it closed in 1931. At their final meeting the Library Committee, chaired by the Reverend Logan, determined to gift to the Ellisland Trustees such old volumes appropriate to the Library stock during Burns’ involvement, albeit not necessarily the original volumes. After settling any debts any surplus money was to be paid to the Ellisland Trustees. The rest of their stock was split between two local organisations. Membership had been falling and other libraries had established in the locality. The Joint Secretary, Treasurer and Librarian were Mr Harkness and Miss McDowall. It is not possible to identify any of the books which were in the original library of the Monklands Friendly Society but a comparison with lists of books held by the MFS when Robert Burns was its Librarian gives strong possibilities that volumes of The Mirror and of The Lounger, both published by Creech, could have been in the original Library. There are other volumes listed from those early years but they are later editions. Many sources refer to the MFS but there is often a gap or a comment that raise more questions than answers. For more than ten years I have been privileged to represent the Friends of Ellisland on the National Distributed Burns Collection now reconstituted as Burns Scotland. Their Website is www.burnsscotland.com and worth viewing. At a recent meeting our Chairman, Professor Gerry Carruthers produced an advance copy of the Oxford Edition of the Works of ROBERT BURNS Volume 1 {2014}, edited by Nigel Leask, [Oxford University Press] and of which Professor Carruthers is the General Editor. I looked at the Index and saw Chapter 8 The Monklands Friendly Society Library 1789-1794. Eleven pages of scholarship. I would commend this series even though it will be expensive. I was given access to this source and this brief article is largely based on that Chapter. The MFSL was founded by Robert Burns and his friend Robert Riddell of Friars Carse about March 1789. Robert Riddell was clearly the instigator as the area covered was largely his estate. In a letter to Peter Hill by Robert Burns of 2nd April 1789 Burns describes how a similar 78 Monklands Friendly Soc. Burns Chronicle 2016 library was being established under the patronage of Mr Stuart Menteith in the nearby village of Closeburn. Its name was taken from, “the barony of Monkland, or Friars Carse, in this Parish” Dunscore. The members met monthly in a house on the main street of Dunscore village. It took the form of a circulating library and is described in Burns’ letter to Sir John Sinclair of Ulbster and this letter is included in the third Volume of the 1791 Statistical Account of Scotland. Friendly Societies were at that time being set up to provide social insurance and welfare provision. Robert Burns would be familiar with the Machlin (sic) Friendly Society and the Ayr Library Society of which his father was a member. The Leadhills Subscription Library was open to all its miners in the 1740s. K. A. Manley in Books, Borrowers, & Shareholders notes that ‘’by 1800 approximately a hundred subscription libraries can be identified in Scotland of which at least a half could be described as working class. Only two comparable working class libraries existed in England, in Birmingham and Kendal.’’ Robert Burns took up his lease on Ellisland on 25 May 1788 and started work on his farm on 11 June 1788. On 7 September 1789 he was appointed as an Excise Officer. He surrendered the lease on 10 September 1791 and moved on 11 November 1791 to the Wee Vennel in Dumfries. While set up on a three year undertaking the library’s original term ended sometime around mid 1791 at the early part of the third year. This was probably triggered by Burns’ intention to give up Ellisland. This is likely as we have to accept his key role in the workings of the Library. Robert Riddell was generous in attributing the real labour to Robert Burns who was in whole charge of this small concern. He was treasurer; librarian and censor of the Library. He ordered the books to be purchased and arranged for payment to be made and his literary status gave rise to donations of books from Robert Riddell and other friends. The Library was promptly reconstituted and continued in Dunscore until February 1931 (1789-1931). Robert Burns almost certainly drafted the rules for the Society. It was a ‘dividing book club’ and not intended to be a permanent collection. Members paid five shillings entry fee and a further sixpence at the monthly meetings and undertook not to withdraw from their funds for three years except in exceptional circumstances. At the end of the three year period the books were to be auctioned among the members-‘’and each man had his share of the common stock, in money or in books as he Burns Chronicle 2016 Donald Urquhart 79 chose to be a purchaser or not’’. In 1791 Burns notes that the Library contained more than 150 volumes. Presumably unsold volumes passed on to the reconstituted Library which then changed to a regular subscription Library where the books were kept as a permanent collection rather than being sold on to members. The volumes in the original collection were mainly philosophical, histories or theological with a few novels such as The Man of Feeling. Robert Burns continued to take an interest in the new Library as in 1794 he was in correspondence with Peter Hill concerning delivery and payment of books for the Library. On his move to Dumfries he assisted in establishing a Public Library which opened in late 1792 and although not a subscriber he presented a copy of the First Edinburgh Edition of his Poems within a few days after it was founded, (J.Mackay- A Biography of Robert Burns p527). William McDowall’s, History of Dumfries (1972) on pages 646 &647, tells how the Dumfries Library Committee ‘’by a great majority, resolved to offer him free of the usual admission money (10s 6d) out of respect and esteem for his merits as a literary man’’ and he became a member on 5th March 1793. He presented in return ‘’Humphrey Clinker’’; ‘’Julia de Roubigne’’ ‘’Knox’s History of the Reformation’’ and ‘’De Lolme on the British Constitution’’. He had inscribed the De Lolme with ‘’Mr Burns presents this book to the Library and begs they will treat it as a Creed of British Liberty- until they find a better R.B.’’ The next day he realised this could be held against him and had the pages gummed together to prevent this being read. The book is on display in the Dumfries Robert Burns Centre. It has been claimed that in 1750 75% of Scottish adults were literate. However, we must remember that books were expensive costing 4 or 5 shillings. Five shillings was a quarter of an Exciseman’s weekly salary. Books came with a paper cover and a board or leather binding was an extra cost. In the evening a candle was the main source of light. The Bible was the most widely available book and newspapers were in short supply outside towns. This was the Age of the Scottish Enlightenment and demand for books was waiting to be satisfied. Robert Burns played an active part in establishing our Library system and so the next time you borrow a book from your Library remember Robert Burns, Librarian of The Monklands Friendly Society Library. 80 Monklands Friendly Soc. Burns Chronicle 2016

Editor’s Note Among the residual volumes from the Monklands Friendly Society library is “Some Information Respecting America”, “Collected by Thomas Cooper” published in 1794. Robert Burns, although resident in Dumfries town, maintained an interest in the Library and this volume, a guide to what may be expected by immigrants to America, would surely have attracted him, given his one-time interest in emigration. The other interesting connection with this volume is with the author, his well known political position, and of his life in America that followed this volume. Thomas Cooper had interests in the law, medicine and chemistry but it was his active role in the dissenting politics of the times that led to his move to the freedom of America. He visited America in 1793, gathered some experience of the country and returned to England where he published this volume before again travelling to America, this time with his family and relocating permanently. He maintained his political activity, and pursued careers in law and chemistry, eventually teaching at the new South Carolina College and was shortly elected President of the College, now the University of South Carolina, where the Library bears his name. The Thomas Cooper Library held the Ross Roy collection of Robert Burns and Scottish Literature which is now housed in the magnificent Ernest F Hollings Special Collections Library which is annexed to the rear. Burns Chronicle 2016 81

“At Whigham’s Inn” Mrs. Provost Whigham’s Lost Kilmarnock, the Allan Young Census, and an Unexpected Discovery Patrick Scott

There are still many poems attributed to Burns for which basic information seems elusive. One of these has been the short poem “At Whigham’s Inn, Sanquhar,” first included among Burns’s poems in the editions by Henley and Henderson and Chambers and Wallace, both published in 1896.1 While the 1896 editors noted the poem as originally scratched by Burns into a window pane at the Queensberry Arms in Sanquhar, where Edward Whigham (1750-1823) was innkeeper and later Provost, they seem to have relied for their text on a recent article in the Burns Chronicle for 1896, issued late the previous year.2 The 1896 article mentioned that, in addition to the window pane itself, still in Sanquhar, there was a transcription of the poem in a copy of the Kilmarnock that Burns had presented to Mrs. Whigham, which was then owned by a Mr. J. R. Wilson.3 Just six lines long, the poem extols the virtue and hospitality of Whigham’s home: Envy, if thy jaundiced eye, Through this window chance to spy, To thy sorrow thou shalt find, All that’s generous and kind, Friendship, virtue, every grace, Dwelling in this happy place.4 There is no external evidence for dating the poem, but it has generally been assigned to 1789, when Burns was establishing a home at Ellisland for Jean and his own young family. As Bill Dawson has pointed out, a good

1 W. E. Henley and T. F. Henderson, eds., The Poetry of Robert Burns, 4 vols. (Edinburgh: T.C. & E.C. Jack, 1896 [-1897]), II: 245 and 436n.; Robert Chambers and William Wallace, eds., The Life and Works of Robert Burns, 4 vols. (Edinburgh: W. and R. Chambers, 1896), IV: 439. 2 Kirkwood Hewat, “Burns and Upper Nithsdale,” Burns Chronicle, 1st ser., 5 (1896), pp. 86-97 (p. 93). On Burns’s friendship with Whigham, see David Purdie, Kirsteen McCue, and Gerard Carruthers, eds., Maurice Lindsay’s Burns Encyclopaedia, 4th ed. revised (London: Robert Hale, 2013), p. 330. 3 In 1896, the window-pane was reported as being “owned by the representatives of the late Mr. David Barker,” who also owned other Burns material (Hewat, pp. 93-94); in 1988, it was said to be in New Zealand: James Mackay, Burns-Lore of Dumfries and Galloway (Ayr: Alloway, 1988), p. 144; but see also below. 4 James Kinsley, ed., The Poems and Songs of Robert Burns, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), I: 459. 82 Whigham’s Inn Burns Chronicle 2016 number of the “window poems” attributed to Burns are spurious, but “At Whigham’s Inn” has been accepted as authentic by all recent editors, who like their predecessors have relied for their text on the 1896 article.5 This past summer, new evidence about the poem has surfaced, casting light not only on the text of the poem, but the degree to which it might be authentic Burns. I have been working with Allan Young to update and bring to publication his census of the surviving copies of the Kilmarnock edition, undertaken some years ago but never published.6 Mr. Young’s original research has held up very well, and we do not expect the total number of surviving copies to edge up very much (though we have found some). He and I would both be delighted if any Chronicle reader can send us information or leads to help in locating further copies, perhaps in smaller libraries or still in private ownership. Most of the research this past few months, however, focuses on finding out more about copies previously recorded, as for instance at auction or in one of the major Burns exhibitions. Our goal is to match these older reports with current ownership, to answer the question Mr. Young posed in the Chronicle in 2011: “Where Are They All Now?” When I was checking the Princeton University library web- site for information on a Kilmarnock donated there in 1949, I saw a very short catalogue entry that seemed to be a second copy. It turned out to be an acquisition record for a damaged and incomplete Kilmarnock that the library had purchased in 2012 but not yet fully researched. One of the Princeton rare books staff, Jennifer Meyer, kindly sent me a detailed description, and photographs.7 These make clear that Princeton had bought Mrs. Whigham’s Kilmarnock, and they let us piece together its previous history. Following the 1896 article, the copy was loaned by Mr. Wilson for the Glasgow Burns exhibition

5 Bill Dawson, “Burns’s Inscriptions on Windows, Part 1: Inscriptions on the Tours,” Burns Chronicle, Winter 2012, pp. 4-12; Kinsley, loc. cit. and III: 1300; 59, and note at III: 1300; James A. Mackay, ed., The Complete Works of Robert Burns, 2nd ed. (Ayr: Alloway Publishing, 1990), p. 350; Andrew Noble and Patrick S. Hogg, eds., The Canongate Burns (Edinburgh: Canongate Classics, 2001; revd. ed., 2003), p. 711. 6 Allan Young, An Enquiry into the Locations of the Extant Copies of Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, by Robert Burns, Printed by John Wilson, Kilmarnock, 1786 (The Kilmarnock Edition) (Drafts: December 2003; revised, September 2008; revised, March 2009); List of Owners of Known Extant Copies (July, 2009); “612 ‘Kilmarnock’ Editions: Where are they all now?,” Burns Chronicle (Summer, 2011), pp. 4-5. 7 The images in this article are reproduced courtesy of Rare Books, Princeton University Library. I should like to thank Jennifer Meyer for her help with this inquiry. Burns Chronicle 2016 Patrick Scott 83 in 1896, and briefly described in the great Memorial Catalogue.8 Fourteen years later, it was auctioned at Sotheby’s, in July 1910, and described in more detail: “wants all before p. 11, pp. 203-206, some leaves stained and a few torn,” “orig. half binding,” inscribed “This copy of Burns’s Poems was presented to Mrs. Provost Whigham of Sanquhar by the Immortal Author Robert Burns,” with a transcription at the end of “six lines written by Burns on a pane of glass at the Queensberry Arms, Sanquhar.”

Inscription ca. 1877, front pastedown, Mrs Provost Whighams Kilmarnock Courtesy of Rare Books, Princeton Library.

8 Catalogue of the Burns Exhibition Galleries of the Royal Glasgow Institute of the Fine Arts, 175 Sauchiehall Street, Glasgow (Glasgow: William Hodge, 1896), p. 415; Memorial Catalogue of the Burns Exhibition held in the Galleries of the Royal Glasgow Institute of the Fine Arts … from 15th July to 31st October, 1896 (Glasgow: William Hodge and T. & R. Annan, 1898), p. 400, item 1224. 84 Whigham’s Inn Burns Chronicle 2016

Inserted in the copy in 1910 were a letter dated 1863 from Robert Burns, “the Poet’s son,” relating to the Poet’s funeral, a notification of the funeral for Jean Armour in 1834, and an unrelated letter from Mary Carlyle Aitken.9 Sotheby’s knocked the copy down for £26 10s, to J. W. Hornstein, the London book dealer who sold the Glenriddell Manuscripts to John Gribbel. For the next hundred years, the Whigham copy seemed to have disappeared from the public record, until it turned up at Princeton in 2012, with the binding more battered, missing a few more pages, and without some of the previous inserted material, but recognizably the same copy.10 The inscription on the front pastedown (inside cover) reads as reported in 1910, with only one minor difference (“their” for “the”). A note certifying the copy as a true Kilmarnock, signed by the Burnsian James M’Kie, at the foot of the front pastedown, is dated September 14, 1877, suggesting the date at which the then-owner was trying to add documentation of the copy’s provenance. The transcription, on the back free endpaper, gives the poem as it was printed in 1896, again with two small variants, in line 2 (“pry” for “spy”) and in line 4 (“all that’s kind” for “and kind”):

“Transcription “At Whighams Inn”; rear endpaper, Mrs Provost Whighams Kilmarnock Courtesy of Rare Books, Princeton Library.

9 Book-Auction Records, 7 (1910), p. 509; cf. Book Prices Current, 24, 1910, p. 683. This was not a rock bottom price--in May 1911, a stained copy, lacking the last four pages, but apparently still with its title page, sold at Sotheby’s to another dealer for just £3: see Book Prices Current, 25 (1911), p. 503. 10 Jennifer Meyer reports the copy now lacks not just the title page and the last four leaves (pp. 233- 240), but also pp. 1-12, 29, 47, 203, 205, 219, 221, and 223, probably extracted to “perfect” other Kilmarnocks in which those leaves had been lost or damaged. Burns Chronicle 2016 Patrick Scott 85

Certainly, even if the copy itself had indeed been a gift from Burns, none of this added material has any immediate link to Burns himself or to Whigham. By 1877, even Whigham’s son John, who remembered Burns, had been dead more for more than twenty years. In fact, if one reads carefully, the 1896 article never claims to have taken the poem directly from the window-pane, or even from Mrs. Provost Whigham’s Kilmarnock. The paragraph about the poem in the article was taken verbatim from James Brown’s History of Sanquhar, published five years earlier.11 The first published reference to the verses that I have found are in 1886, when the Dundee Evening Telegraph reported that a newly- published guidebook to Sanquhar printed two new epigrams by Burns, both scratched on window-panes at the inn, one (“Ye gods, ye gave to me a wife”) taken from the window pane itself (then “in the possession of the present proprietor”), the other (“Envy if thy jaundiced eye”) having been “procured … from Miss Allison, a grand-daughter of Provost Whigham, who repeated them from memory,” because “a few years ago, when the house was undergoing repair, one of the panes was accidentally broken.”12 Miss Allison’s memory closely matches the transcription in the Kilmarnock, except for line 3 (“wilt” for “shalt”). Either the transcription in the copy at Princeton, or Miss Allison’s version, must surely now constitute the “best” source for the poem. However, while I was looking for these earlier published references, I found something else. The search turned up a scholarly article from 1906, in German and apparently unknown to any recent Burns editor, that identified “At Whigham’s Inn” as a slightly-modified version of an earlier but frequently-reprinted epigram by the early 18th-century poet and dramatist John Hughes (1677-1720):

11 James Brown, A History of Sanquhar, … to which is added the Flora and Fauna of the District (Dumfries: J. Anderson, 1891), p. 266. 12 Dundee Evening Telegraph, Wednesday, August 25, 1886, p. 2; William Wilson, The Visitor’s Guide to Sanquhar & Neighbourhood (Sanquhar: Wilson [1886]), which I have not yet seen. The second poem mentioned, “Ye Gods, ye gave to me a wife,” is so dubious or spurious as to be omitted both from Kinsley’s Dubia section and Mackay’s Appendix B, in his Burns A-Z (Dumfries: Mackay Publishing, 1990); it had been widely published long before Burns was born, as in, e.g., The Hive, A Collection of the Most Celebrated Songs, 4th ed., 4 vols. (London: J. Walthoe, 1733), II: 156. 86 Whigham’s Inn Burns Chronicle 2016

Written in a window of Wallington-House, then the seat of Mrs. Elizabeth Bridges, 1719. Envy! If thy searching eye Thro’ this window chance to pry, To thy sorrow thou shalt find All that’s gen’rous, friendly, kind, Goodness, virtue, ev’ry grace, Dwelling in this happy place: Then if thou wouldst shun this sight, Hence for ever take thy flight.13 There seems little reason to doubt that the verses known as “At Whigham’s Inn” were once scratched on the inn window-pane in Sanquhar, and perhaps they were even scratched there by Burns. Certainly, as the transcription in Mrs. Provost Whigham’s long-lost but newly rediscovered Kilmarnock attests, they were treasured by the Whigham descendants. But if it was Burns who incised them, they were in the nature of an apt quotation in tribute to the Whighams, rather than an original poem. After all, he never published them, or claimed authorship. Editors of Burns’s songs are accustomed to a spectrum of originality, from songs Burns wrote from scratch, through ones that he reworked heavily or added a new stanza, to ones where he merely tinkered with the odd word here or there. A work can be to some degree authentically Burnsian, without being wholly, or even mainly, by Burns. It would be good to have such categories for some of Burns’s shorter epigrams. Perhaps instead of being swept away as spurious, “At Whigham’s Inn” could be given a similar partial reprieve, but it should no longer be included

13 Otto Ritter, “Burnsiana,” Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen, 117 (1906): 47- 57 (pp. 48-49), citing John Hughes, Poetical Works (Edinburgh, 1779), I: 113, and cf. also Hughes, Poems on Several Occasions, 2 vols. (London: Tonson, 1735), II: 166. Burns Chronicle 2016 87

The Oxford edition of the Scots Musical Museum: behind the scenes Vivien E Williams This piece is about my work behind the production of the second and third volumes of the new Oxford University Press edition of Robert Burns’ works. Since October 2013 I have been working alongside Professor Murray Pittock, the editor of the volume on the Scots Musical Museum, as his Research Assistant in Musicology on ‘Editing Robert Burns for the 21st Century’ a major project led by Professor Gerard Carruthers with Professors Nigel Leask, Kirsteen McCue, Murraay Pittock and Jeremy Smith. I have largely – though not exclusively – been handling the more strictly musical material. The wider picture and the outcome of the research will emerge once the volume is out in 2016, but this update aims to provide an insight into some of the work that has gone into this new critical edition of the Scots Musical Museum, and the methodology behind it. I have engaged in a number of different tasks, the workload has been varied, and not always as straightforward as expected. The essential philosophy behind the research was to leave no stones unturned and to take nothing for granted, and this has rewarded (and surprised) us all with unexpected discoveries. Issues and problems have cropped up when we thought research would be smooth and even redundant, and other tasks we expected to find tough proceeded more easily than we had foreseen. My work was never a question of focusing on one task only, and I often had several jobs underway at the same time. The workload was also not always even, and quieter times were alternated with intense periods when more tasks were underway. To give an insight into the kind of research I have been involved with, I will illustrate some of the main tasks I have handled. Tunes: sources and settings A considerable part of my job, especially at the beginning, was to ascertain the sources for the songs in the Scots Musical Museum – being the Research Assistant in Musicology; I was mainly dealing with the scores. This entailed a good deal of looking at manuscripts1: sometimes musty seventeenth or eighteenth century crumbling paper in various libraries, and sometimes online thanks to digital archives and databases. It also entailed trying to master eighteenth century lute tablature2 – for which many thanks to Dr David McGuinness – and match it to the staff notation in the Museum. The purpose of tracing down the possible first appearance 1 E.g. The Robert Riddell MS and the George Skene MS, both at the National Library of Scotland. 2 E.g. the Blaikie MS, at Dundee Central Library. 88 Scots Musical Museum Burns Chronicle 2016 of the tune was sometimes to check the correctness of what Burns and his correspondents stated in their letters, and sometimes to verify the accuracy of previous Burns criticism. We have had a few surprises, which will be revealed in detail in the book. I also looked at settings of given songs which appear in the Museum and compared them with other song collections of the time,3 and noted whether the melody was indeed the same, or whether it strayed from what we find in the Museum. Sometimes I found the song was pretty much exactly the same, though other collections had heavily embellished scores compared with the Museum – which shows Johnson’s collection was to a degree more faithful to its purpose: he was keen to stress that “the original simplicity of our Ancient National Airs is retained unencumbered with useless Accompaniments & graces depriving the hearers of the sweet simplicity of their native melodies”, as we read in the title-page of the sixth and final volume of Johnson’s publication. Sometimes I found the setting started off similar then strayed,4 and not infrequently I found that there was no resemblance whatsoever between the two scores.5 On other occasions I would find the same tune under different titles, or I would find that a given manuscript had scores with no title, and at that point it was near-impossible to match up the tunes. It was not a straightforward process; quite challenging and, at times, frustrating. Variant lists This is a task I have had to deal with very meticulously; it has been tough on the eyes and could be a little fiddly when dealing with more than two texts at a time. In this kind of job every comma, dot, period, or dash counts – as do spaces, line-breaks, hyphens, and stanza arrangements. A first portion of this work was dealing with the variants between the first editions of the Scots Musical Museum dedicated to the Catch Club, and the 1803 collected edition dedicated to the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland. This process has taken longer than expected as it has been challenging to find a complete, intact first edition of volume V – I will not venture to begin to acknowledge those who collaborated in this phase as I’m sure that by the time this piece will be published the list will have

3 E.g. Musick for Allan Ramsay’s Collection of 71 Scots Songs, James Oswald’s Caledonian Pocket Companion, and Patrick Macdonald’s Collection of Highland Vocal Airs. 4 E.g. ‘A Robaidh, tha thu gòrach’ (Patrick Macdonald’s Collection of Highland Vocal Airs) vs. ‘The Captive Ribband’ (Scots Musical Museum). 5 E.g. ‘I wish my love were in a myre’ (Musick for Allan Ramsay’s Collection of 71 Scots Songs) vs. ‘I wish my Love were in a Mire’ (Scots Musical Museum). Burns Chronicle 2016 Vivien Williams 89 grown, but I am grateful for the help and goodwill I have encountered. This part of the collation has revealed more than foreseen. What I have found was an unexpected amount of discrepancies between the first edition and the 1803, both in the text and in the scores. Often it was a case of variations in the punctuation, other times it was about correcting little mistakes; but in one case a whole stanza was added in the 1803 edition! As regards the music, again a few mistakes were corrected in the 1803 edition by, for example, adding a sharp or correcting the dynamics; in a few occasions though, the ‘corrections’ made no sense as they did not improve the tune at all – on the contrary, they created discordance. It is difficult to establish what triggered these cases of what we can think of perhaps as ‘musical hypercorrection’. Other corrections also showed a will to ‘improve’ or embellish the accompaniments, by conforming to more ‘modern’ bass- lines according to the current gusto. The changes between the first and 1803 editions are crucial, as most texts of the Museum depend on the 1803 collected edition, a later printing of which is used in Donald Low’s facsimile. Other variants I have dealt with have been between manuscripts and what actually appeared in the printed volumes: what appeared in the manuscript did not always get published verbatim, but underwent a few editorial interventions – often nothing more than a change in punctuation, though at times whole words or lines could be substituted. Similarly I have checked the transcriptions of the manuscripts as they appear in a number of scholarly texts of Burns criticism, and found that they were more inaccurate than would be expected. It was therefore really important to look at the original manuscripts, and not to go with what appears even in established scholarship. The Kinsley papers In order to leave no stone unturned, I went to Nottingham University to view the papers of Professor James Kinsley. There I found file after file of correspondence to and from scholars, libraries and collectors, photostats of manuscripts, photocopies, Professor Kinsley’s own corrected and annotated transcriptions (including the entirety of Burns’ Journal), and others sent to him as transcribed by scribes from various institutions, facsimiles, auctions lists and details, handwritten notes and typed lists of libraries holding Burns material, and items to consult. The papers were in no particular order, and it was not very easy to plough though and make sense of such a wealth of data, but it did give us an insight as to what were Kinsley’s editorial procedures, and how some of the errors we have found in his edition of Burns’ works may have occurred. 90 Scots Musical Museum Burns Chronicle 2016

The fact that some of the versions he published of Burns’ manuscripts derived from transcriptions he received from third parties may account for a few of them, and this further confirmed that what was needed in a new edition of Robert Burns’ works was to trust nothing but the original sources – digitised versions of them at the most. Working with manuscripts There is nothing more exciting than handling a sheet of eighteenth century paper, with a poem and the famous “RB” initials scribbled at the bottom. Second-best to that is looking at Burns’ calligraphy on a screen, with the possibility of zooming in and out of the image to properly decipher the handwriting, for example where the ink has faded, and notice details otherwise impossible to see with the naked eye. Since this edition of the Scots Musical Museum has a priority to trust nothing less than the original sources, I have had to do a fair bit of manuscript reading, handling, and transcribing, both from the original and from the digitised versions, by Burns or other authors and correspondents. It was particularly pleasing to be able to solve a few ‘puzzles’ of troublesome words, thanks to experience I have in the field and also thanks to the possibilities offered by technology to play with contrast and definition. This enabled me to follow the pattern of the handwriting and the trace of the ink on the page, which ultimately told me how the author’s calligraphy worked. It was also enjoyable to try and work out unidentified names from their initials, and add them to the wider picture of Burns’ contemporaries. The Scots Musical Museum: quotations, indexes, editions and details Some of the work I had to do on the Scots Musical Museum specifically, rather than its sources, criticism and manuscripts, was about sourcing some of the quotations which can be found for instance in the title pages of the volumes.6 We have not taken for granted the authorship of given songs or tunes as specified both in Burns’ works (such as his letters and notes) and in Burns criticism, so that I have spent quite some time verifying this kind of information. This has entailed trawling through online databases and checking through manuscript or music indexes. I have also had to make a note of the attributions of the songs in the Museum, how these changed through the various editions, and their (in) consistencies between the indexes, the song pages, and the attribution letters Johnson included at the bottom of the page, hoping for a pattern to emerge. This fairly mechanical work could turn confusing when certain

6 E.g. a quotation from Robert Blair’s ‘The Grave’ which appears in the title page of volume II of the Scots Musical Museum. Burns Chronicle 2016 Vivien Williams 91 incidents would upset the flow of the work – for instance, when I found a song altogether absent from the index (song 295, volume III), or when the attributions in the index seem to follow exactly what is specified on the song page and actually for some reason I found a hiccup where the index lacked the attribution, for no apparent reason. Finding the right editions of the Museum, as I have briefly mentioned above, has not always been a straightforward process. The volumes are often badly catalogued, or have ambiguous details which have often proved wrong. We needed primarily a first edition of the work, and the requirement was for it to be intact, well-preserved, and well-printed, so that it could be digitised in high resolution for publication. Some volumes were badly preserved with the ink too faded, some were badly printed and blurry; some were incomplete and had leaves missing, or were bound together with doubtful, unmatched title-pages; so I’ve had to locate a number of different first editions before we could settle on a specific one. These are but some of the main tasks I have dealt with during my time working on the project ‘Editing Robert Burns for the 21st Century’. I hope I have given a taste of some of the research that has been going on behind the production of this new edition of the Scots Musical Museum, though the details and facts will of course be revealed in the edition itself. The work has never been dull, never the same, and I feel I have learned a lot about Burns and about editorial processes – of yesterday and today. BLENDED SCOTCH WHISKY ALSO AVAILABLE.

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The Scottish Album Frank Brown 94 Burns Chronicle 2016

The story of the Glenriddell manuscripts and their gift to Scotland by John Gribbel of Philadelphia to the people of Scotland was well recounted in the 2014 edition of the Burns Chronicle. John Gribbel visited Scotland in the summer of 1920 and was royally entertained by the Burns Federation at a dinner in the Grand Hotel Glasgow and it was at this event that he was presented with the commemorative Album which had been produced by the Federation to express their gratitude for the exceptional generosity of his gift of the Glenriddell volumes. The committee charged with producing a commemorative gift had as their remit “A memorial at once sumptuous and impressive, worthy of the Scottish givers and not unworthy of the American recipient” They produced a magnificent Presentation Album, a book almost three feet square bound in dark green Levant morocco leather and encased in a leather bound case, Burns Chronicle 2016 Frank Brown 95

it was described in the Burns Chronicle of 1921 as follows;- “It consists of 36 original artists’ watercolours or drawings each mounted and a leaf of vellum with the Artists signature prefixed. These, with a specially-prepared print of Archibald Skirving’s noble drawing of the Poet ; an ” historical note” telling the 130 yeas’ history of the Glenriddell Burns Manuscripts from their inception by Burns or Riddell until their gift to Scotland in 1913 ; and the Burns Federation’s Address of thanks, constitute the offering to Mr Gribbel The address, written throughout in black and red heightened by gold, is dated from “Kilmarnock 17th September 1914” and is signed by the Earl of Roseberry and the other Honorary Office-bearers of the Federation, by the eight members of the Album Committee and by the Lord Provosts of Glasgow and Edinburgh at that date- Sir Robert K. Inches and Sir D.M. Stevenson. Address and drawings have been bound in Levant morocco of dark green with the “end-papers” of green watered silk ; and the boards have been decorated in severely-plain and dignified style, the “arms” of the Poet, as sketched by himself being introduced. The volume is enclosed in a morocco-covered case, the whole forming a memorial at once sumptuous and impressive” Mr John Amos in his speech of presentation voiced the wishes of the Federation in that Mr Gribbel should “Accept the Album accompanied by our earnest hopes that it will be cherished by yourself and descendants as a reminder of a nations gratitude called forth by your munificence”, Gribbel’s reply included the comment that had he known of the embarrassment he would face in hearing how highly his act had been regarded, then Scotland may well have received the MSS anonymously. He went on to vow; “He would contract to take this volume to the United States, to preserve it among his most treasured possessions and to hand it down to his children as one of the dearest things he had to leave them, with the intention that they in turn would hand it down to their children and remember that their father or grandfather as the case might be, was a bounden debtor to Scotland”. I had read the 1921 Chronicle account of the dinner and presentation to Gribble several years ago and as part of a presentation to my own Burns Club, Paisley, and had begun to research the whereabouts of this 96 Scottish Album Burns Chronicle 2016 magnificent Album, it surely must be on display in one of the many collections of Burns memorabilia around the World, but alas after much internet digging no trace or even mention of the Album could be found. John Gribbel was a fascinating man but unfortunately is hard to get much detail on, he was a wealthy Philadelphia business man involved in commerce, banking and publishing, his great passion was collecting autograph letters, manuscripts and rare books and he was particularly keen on Burns having within his collection, two Kilmarnock editions, Robert Riddell’s copy of the Scots Musical Museum annotated with about 3,000 words by Burns and Robert Burns’ own copy of an Edinburgh edition of Poems, chiefly in the Scottish dialect and many more along with other very significant items by, for example, Lincoln, Dickens and Clemens and even a Doves Press, Paradise Lost, printed on vellum.

Dunure Castle by David Murray, one of the watercolours included in the album Gribbel was an immensely significant collector whose collection might well have been retained as an entity and displayed for posterity. Unfortunately this was not the case; the collection was broken up and Burns Chronicle 2016 Frank Brown 97 auctioned firstly in 1940, four years after his death, when however one of his sons, John Bancker Gribbel purchased many of his Fathers collection but finally in 1947 he also passed away. My researches for the Presentation Album had uncovered the catalogues for both these sales but no mention within them of the book I sought, I had reached a dead end until in a moment of true serendipity I made a chance remark to a member of the staff of the National Library of Scotland while leaving an evening exhibition of some of their rare manuscripts, I had commented that I had been disappointed not to see the Glenriddell as I was doing some research on Mr Gribbel, she then informed me that she had been corresponding with his great grandson and would be happy to pass my email address to him to see if he might be prepared to help with my research and thus I made contact with John Gribble III and found to my delight that he knew the whereabouts of the Presentation Album or as the family termed it “ The Scottish Album”

Watercolour of Burns Cottage, as included in the album 98 Scottish Album Burns Chronicle 2016

Engraved scroll presented to John Gribbel by The St Andrews Society of Philadelphia

It was not on display in some august institution but instead nestled in its own custom made wooden crate in the basement of John’s home!! , well at least it was in safe and secure hands, he was able to share with me some rather poor quality images of the Album and its contents and even at their low resolution it was obvious this book was absolutely magnificent. Burns Chronicle 2016 Frank Brown 99

Some correspondence took place between John and myself with regard to the Album being exhibited somewhere or better photographs being produced, not much progress on the exhibition due to a number of factors but John’s son and daughter in law have produced a set of much higher quality photographs and even a Facebook page. My quest had come to some kind of conclusion if not a satisfactory end, and while John Gribbel’s vow to hand the album down for his family to cherish as his most treasured possession and reminder of his “bounden debt” to Scotland has not failed. It is clear that the album, which was created and forms part of the fascinating tale of events surrounding the return of a true national treasure to Scotland, should have much greater visibility, It not only represents the very genuine gratitude of a Nation but contains sufficient significant Scottish artistic endeavour and craftsmanship to be an important National artefact in its own right. I, for one, will continue to explore avenues to bring “The Scottish Album”, if not home, then at least to a wider audience. Continued Over 100 Scottish Album Burns Chronicle 2016 Burns Chronicle 2016 101

Taking Burns to New Generations (Is Burns Cool and Can He Be?) As part of its contribution to the 2014 RBWF Conference, Irvine Burns Club hosted a seminar for delegates on the above theme. This took place on the Saturday afternoon of the conference as an optional activity. The theme reflected the dual interests of Irvine Burns Club of taking an active role in working with young people in the Irvine area on Burns’ themes and also looking at a matter dear to the hearts of all Burns Clubs – that of membership, retention and recruitment. The aim was to highlight issues, provoke discussion and encourage debate with the hope that different experiences could be illustrated and perhaps new ideas shared and taken back to clubs for further discussion. At no time was the content of the IBC presentation put forward as a panacea. Far from it. Had a universal solution to membership been available IBC would surely have patented it and made a fortune thereafter. Rather the aim was to use the IBC example as a catalyst and use discussion methods with groups led by experienced RBWF leaders to bring back examples of good practice around the world as known by delegates. At the outset of this plan IBC directors had speculated on both uptake and involvement in the seminar. We need have had no fears – the delegates rose to the occasion and both discussion and feedback were lively and informative. And it was fun! As a Burns Club we chose to illustrate two aspects of communication with local young people. In January 2104 we welcomed our 5000th Primary school pupil to our home at Wellwood over a nine-year period and indeed, at the time of writing, we have added a further 400 with this year’s programme of school visits. In addition our annual verse-speaking competition for Primary school pupils saw 131 P1-P7 local pupils take part in March 2015. We have forged strong partnerships with North Ayrshire Council and can call upon the full support (and expertise) of the members of Irvine Lasses Burns Club. On the face of it our communications are strong, links successful and the future should be promising. But and it is a big But, we have to face up to a number of negatives. Despite strong efforts we have only fluctuating and irregular contacts with our local secondary schools. Contact depends upon having a keen and dedicated member of staff in each school to drive things forward and at present these are not generally apparent. This is not a criticism but comes about through a combination of factors – a crowded curriculum, tightness 102 Conference Seminar Burns Chronicle 2016 of staffing and resources, lack of confidence among members of staff to lead students through Burns and the language of Burns. The issue for membership is of course that we love having the contact with our primary age visitors but future members are more likely from the older age groups of secondary students. As part of the preparation for our seminar we approached Greenwood Academy on the outskirts of Irvine and were given access to a group of senior pupils who were asked a number of prepared questions by a volunteer member of staff. The questions and responses are given as Appendix One. As you will see they are an eye-opener, remembering that these students were all local and had all come from the very Primary schools who visited IBC at Wellwood in their day. As a club we also presented some issues which could be a potential barrier to recruitment - Can we really expect young people to sit through around five hours of inactivity and minimal participation at a traditional Burns Supper? Is the timing of the event suitable? Is the food suitable in an age of awareness of excess fat and potential obesity? Is the musical input acceptable to all? Are we meeting the needs of a reduced attention span in an age of instant communication? Do we really believe that our annual traditional event is really relevant to young people anymore? This is not to say that there is no longer a place for our traditional ceremonies but rather that options and alternatives, perhaps in addition, require to be explored. What the groups thought The feedback from the groups reflected the intensity of discussion. One group highlighted how young people watching a similar age group performing Burns, bringing it alive, whether a good reader, good singer, or whatever, can inspire others. It also suggested that we need to embrace young teachers at a time, and in a way, that suits them, perhaps by little snippets, more often. The next group agreed that emotional involvement would attract young people, even to write their own poetry. General agreement followed that the traditional annual evening can be overwhelming and boring, and that a more relaxed approach, in dress code, in item length, and so on, would better suit the next generation. The Canadians referred to short Immortal Memories being a bolt on to an evening of entertainment and harmony that would bring people back and time and time again, mainly at a later stage, making it more relevant for clubs to target 30-year-olds than younger adults. Resources also need to be up-to-date, using current technology. Changes that seem scary at Burns Chronicle 2016 Conference Seminar 103 first – and often negative – can quickly become less scary and a positive force for the future. The fourth group thought in terms of champions – each school having a Burns champion who would take things forward. That group re-iterated the earlier point that kids enjoy having a platform and once they perform, whether as a singer, piper, or reader, they get that thrill, see that their contribution is appreciated, and will progress. Communication in the 21st century At Irvine Burns Club we take pride in our user-friendly web-site. To the young adults of today this is old hat. They live with Face Book, Twitter, text, e-mail and all methods of instant communication and use them as a matter of course. The challenge for us is to break into this cycle of communication and use it to our advantage. Have we the means and ability to do this and do we really want to? Can we be bothered? The closing thoughts of the seminar were posed as questions - Where do we go from here as individual federated Burns Clubs? Can we make Burns real and relevant to a wider group in our society (can we make Burns cool)? Do we really want to? Appendix Pupil interview questions and main answers. The Federation is indebted to Mrs Carrie Boax of Greenwood Academy for conducting the interviews and to its Senior Technician Mr Alec Cochrane for capturing them on video for the seminar. Q1: If Robert Burns was appearing in the town this month, would you buy a ticket for the evening? If not, why not? A: (i) No, it’s boring. (ii) Not something I’d be interested in. (iii) Yes, because I’m really interested in poems. Q2: If the Burns Club wanted to attract you to something, what would that something be? A: (i) Don’t know. (ii) No clue. (iii) Kind of like what they’ve done at the Robert Burns Museum – that’s pretty interesting – it’s a more interesting way to learn about it, because it’s interactive. Q3: Did any of you take part in verse-speaking competitions at primary? And if so, are you still interested, and if not, why not? A: (i) I did at primary, but not anymore – I don’t find him interesting 104 Conference Seminar Burns Chronicle 2016

any more. (ii) I had to do it at primary, but now that I don’t need to, I don’t want to any more. Q4: Do you think Robert Burns’ poetry is relevant to you in the 21st century? A: Not really, no. – I don’t need it for anything. Q5: Have you had any experience in the past of Robert Burns’ poetry and the language? A: (i) My papa would read it to me – like all the time. (ii) we had to hear people like every year recite like the biggest poem he ever done and you’d sit there for half an hour just listening to it and you be like ‘Right, we’ve heard this every year’ – Tam o’ Shanter – but they read – like – literally all of it out and you’d sit there like ‘okay – we’ve heard it – we get it’. Q6: What’s your image of a Burns Club? A: (i) Scottish flags everywhere. (ii) A very old building. I’d imagine a building that’s full of old people as well. Q7: What would there need to be at a Burns Club to attract you to attend? A: (i) Good music. (ii) It would have to have a more modern vibe about it as well – maybe a cooler uniform or something like that. (iii) Scottish stuff – just Scottish food and different cultural things. Q8: If you were in a Burns Club, what would you like to be doing there? A: (i) Making our own poems – and that’s a good idea! Making some songs with the cool words that he uses – that’s another one. (ii) I wouldn’t want to be there in the first place! (iii) Maybe making a new Robert Burns like a more modern one with modern poems - someone who’s alive! Q9: Are your parents or family members interested in Burns? A: (i) None of my parents or family are. (ii) Mine are. Last year my uncle was the President of a Burns Club. (iii) Maybe my gran, dunno, cos she’s old. Burns Chronicle 2016 Reviews 105

Cool Dunedin Burns Club teaming up with Toitu Otago Settlers Museum for The Dunedin Robbie Rocks competition. There are multiple categories for modern interpretation of Burns songs and the Dunedin Club puts up one of the major prizes, $250 for the People’s Choice Prize. The competition attracts bands and musical groups from miles around giving performances of Burns works in their own style for the entertainment of the crowds who gather to hear Robert Burns being performed for all

“line drawing” who won the Youth Section

“The Ward Family” who won the open section See how Dunedin engages with everyone, find it on facebook, www.facebook.com/pages/Robbie-Rocks-Dunedin . The Club also sponsor a Burns Song Section in the Senior Vocal Festival of Dunedin performing Arts and has a Youth section in the poetry competition run by Dunedin Public Libraries. 106 Reviews Burns Chronicle 2016

125 Years of Burns Chronicle The concept of an annual publication for the Burns Federation Membership arose during the summer of 1891 and it was formally proposed, “that the Federation publish a yearly Chronicle”, at the annual meeting of The Burns Federation at Kilmarnock on 4th September 1891 by Colin Rae-Brown, seconded by President Peter Sturrock. The Burns Chronicle was thus instituted by the acclaim of the meeting, The first edition appeared only a few weeks later in January 1892 and it has been in continuous publication since making this edition the 125th year of publication. An anniversary for substantial pride and due celebration. The Editor for this first edition was John Muir of Kilmarnock, who was actually listed as “Acting Editor” in 1892 perhaps signifying some reluctance on his part to take on this burden. It had been intended to publish by early January, not surprisingly with a first edition, there were some delays, and a number of printer’s and other errors. Present day students, reading between the lines of Chronicle history, cannot avoid the conclusion that there was considerable criticism of John Muir in spite of his remarkable achievement of producing a substantial Chronicle from scratch in only some three months. Muir stepped down as Editor, although listed as “Acting Manager” for the next edition. The first Chronicle, with a publication date of 25th January 1892, carried articles about Burns influence on American Literature, a Memoir of “Bonie Jean”, a Life of Burns, Posthumous History, Portraits of Burns, Burns from a Musical Point of View, an extensive Bibliography, together with a directory of Burns Clubs and Scottish Societies which had sent in their details to the Federation, including many Clubs which were not affiliated. There were 30 pages of advertisements including two pages from James Stillie, the Edinburgh book and manuscript dealer strongly defending his reputation as an expert following his association with the “Antique” Smith affair. The 1892 Chronicle cast the mould for future Burns Chronicles and at least boldly set out to “narrate Burnsiana events of the year” with “important articles on Burns Clubs, Portraits, Monuments, Bibliography, Notes on the Poet’s Family, and many other interesting contributions from Burnessian scholars of prominence and recognized ability.” Burns Chronicle 2016 125 years of Burns Chronicle 107

Front cover of the 1892 first edition,ANNUAL Burns Chronicle AND Club Directory 108 125 years of Burns Chronicle Burns Chronicle 2016

On the image shown over, note the printer, D Brown and Sons, Kilmarnock. This is an interesting link to Burns printer John Wilson. After Wilson removed to Ayr shortly after printing his most famous issue, the printing premises were taken over by H&S Crawford with whom James Mckie served an apprenticeship. After establishing himself in the book trade McKie bought over the Crawford business, sometimes promoting himself as “successor to John Wilson” and on retiral sold his enterprise to D Brown, providing a link, albeit weak, for the first Burns Chronicle with Burns first edition. The Chronicle has also recorded the history and development of the Burns Federation. Access to a complete series of Burns Chronicles is a valuable asset for any enthusiast of Burns or of Club history, containing as it does an archive of Club activity and annual reports with detailed articles on all manner of Burns related subjects, much of it not published elsewhere. Many Chronicle articles have been republished as standalone pamphlets and booklets. The Burns Chronicle continues to be a well referenced source for detailed research about all aspects of the Poet’s works, his life and that of his contemporaries, in many instances breaking news about important fresh work and discoveries by Club members and leading academics in the field of Burns and Scottish literature giving our publication and the Federation significant status among similar journals. From the early years it was recognised that an index to the articles in the Chronicles would be a valuable aid and the first of these, and an index of 1892 – 1921, was produced by Albert Douglas of Washington USA in 1921. In 1935 the Federation then published an index to the First Series, 1892 – 1925, the second series, 1926-45, index following in 1945. Despite some good intentions, the Federation has not continued that practice but a complete directory 1892 – 2005 has appeared and, we understand, an update is in hand. The articles in the Chronicle are widely valued and a Federation project to scan past volumes and make these available on the internet is planned but awaiting the necessary funds. The Board of The Robert Burns World Federation appreciate this value and continue to support the position of the Chronicle as a leading publication in the field of Burns studies for the past 125 year and for a bright future enhancing the true and accurate memorialisation of our Bard. Burns Chronicle 2016 109

Descended from Robert Burns Robert’s eldest daughter Bess married John Bishop, farm overseer to the Baillie family of Polkemmet where she died on 8 December 1816, allegedly giving birth to her seventh child. Bess’s younger daughter Jean married James Weir from whom was descended Lord Weir of Cathcart, the only descendant of the poet to be enobled.1 In 1871 brothers George and James Weir founded the engineering firm G&J Weir and produced innovative pumping for steam boilers amid the growing Clyde shipbuilding activity. The company grew substantially on the strength of their engineering brilliance and ground breaking inventions including desalination and pumping technology, moving to a Greenfield site in Cathcart in 1902. The Great War led to adaption into munitions and aircraft manufacture and by 1918 Weir were employing over 10,000 people at Cathcart, around half of them women. In 1918 Douglas Weir was appointed Secretary of State for Air, challenged to combine the naval and army air services into the Royal Air Force. Expansion and acquisitions continued the growth and diversification as markets changed taking Weir into many specialist fields often with leading technological advances. Weir continues to trade globally in many fields adapting to 21st century demands.

1 Burns: A Biography of Robert Burns, James Mackay 1992, p685 110 Burns Chronicle 2016

Editorial Not unexpectedly, the “Editor’s Opinion” in last year’s Chronicle attracted more than a few responses – most were supportive in agreement and only one dissenter was moved to write to me. I know several at the “grass roots” were vociferous in their retorts to my overstated “opinion” but can I restate that it was not aimed at them; it is a statement of the position for the Burns Chronicle, at least under my Editorship. I trust I have exercised due care in the assembly of this issue, and that quotations, verses, titles etc. are in line with the “policy” as stated last issue. A letter to the Editor, suggesting similar thoughts on popularised but erroneous portrayal of Burns in today’s celebrations is carried, as is a précis of an extract from the critical message from an enthusiast. Letters from readers are most welcome and may be included, regardless of their support or otherwise of the Editor’s Opinion. [email protected] This edition of the Burns Chronicle breaks news of discovery and rediscovery of Burns manuscript items, I am sure these will be read with interest by our members and referenced by researchers for years to come. The articles on the Mysterious WR, and on the Kilmarnock “Tam o’ Shanter” manuscript updates knowledge from that in the very recently published Oxford edition, reaffirming the position of the Burns Chronicle as a leading reference source for the latest details in the Burns story. The Burns Chronicle earns the RBWF significant status for this constant permanent record of developing Burns knowledge, in this world of fast moving technology, it is reassuring to know that this volume will be read by enthusiasts and academics 125 years from now as John Muir’s first Chronicle of 1892 can be read today. That does not nullify the advantages that new technology offers. Next generation enthusiasts are very web led and we have to move with these times. The RBWF has exciting opportunities to offer Burns knowledge with the same standards of accuracy on the latest platforms in all media. I wonder if it will be as permanent there as the Burns Chronicle. Bill Dawson Burns Chronicle 2016 111

William Montgomerie, Editor 1950 -1951 When recounting the history of the Burns Chronicle and its Editors only a few names come to notice. The many years of service given by Duncan McNaught (33 ) James Ewing (23) and James Vietch (24) are often heralded, John Muir gets an occasional mention as the Editor of the inaugural issue and the many years of Jim Mackay and Peter Westwood are recent memory. One who is often overlooked in all this is the Editor who was given the task of the most dramatic change to the Burns Chronicle, William Montgomerie who was appointed to the post for the 1950 edition and was at the helm for the ill-fated “The Scots Chronicle” for 1951 before he was the unfortunate victim of the backlash which forced the return to tradition the following year. William Montgomerie was a Teacher and a Poet, having published several volumes of his works, contributed to magazines and newspapers, and edited anthologies. He had also edited a critically acclaimed collection of essays “Robert Burns: essays by six contemporary writers” in the New Judgements series, and contributed several articles to the Burns Chronicle He was a friend of several poets, Hugh McDiarmid, William Soutar, J.B.Pick, Edwin Muir et al and he was well known on the Burns Club circuit around Dundee and Angus for his Immortal Memory orations. He was eminently qualified for the task of editing the forward looking Burns Chronicle. There was a revival in Scots Literature of that time and the broadening of the position of The Burns Federation and the Burns Chronicle. It is most unfortunate that the renamed Scots Chronicle of 1951 was not received with the total acclaim of the Membership. Not least because following a number of years of surplus, the Chronicle, together with the related yearbook, made a small loss. As happens often within our douce circle, the personalities who supported the embracing of the revised volume had prevailed without challenge until the deed was done and then the opposition over-reacted to the result. The reactionary voice rang loudest, we wanted our BURNS Chronicle, The Scots Chronicle had to go, and with it our learned Editor. William Montgomerie continued to contribute to the Burns Chronicle, but Scots Folklore became the focus for his energies. On retiring from the Chronicle he took a sabbatical from work at considerable disadvantage to himself to study for a PhD in Folklore from Edinburgh University and was rewarded by Dundee Council with a demotion of post. With his wife, Nora he travelled widely over Fife, Angus and Perthshire recording with the most rudimentary equipment traces of traditional folklore where ever 112 William Montgomerie Burns Chronicle 2016 he found it. He and his wife rose to become the most renowned scholars in the field and their work was a foundation which following researchers built on, their volumes of folk tales, rhymes and stories preserving the oral tradition for future generations. William Montgomerie’s poetry continued to be published widely in magazines and anthologies and his collection “From Time to Time – selected poems” was published in 1985 to celebrate his 80th birthday.

William Montgomerie, portrait by Norah Montgomerie © Dian Montgomerie Elvin Burns Chronicle 2016 In Memoriam 113

Club No 2190 “The rank is but the guinea’s stamp” By Joe Harkins The inaugural meeting of the new Scottish Fire and Rescue Service (SFRS) Burns Club was held on Thursday 22nd August 2013 at Perth Fire Station when interested Burns firefighters gathered and formed the club. As the Fire Service is a disciplined Service where rank is essential for the chain of command at serious incidents, disasters and lifesaving rescues, it was proposed that a suitable strapline that tied both Burns and the Fire Service together would be “the rank is but the guinea’s stamp” and this was duly agreed on as the first decision of the new Burns Club. Whilst at work within SFRS or on the fireground rank takes its place - but off duty – “the Man ’s the gowd for a’ that.” There have been organised Burns Suppers within various parts of the Fire Service throughout Scotland for many decades and with the formation of the new SFRS it was felt that there should be a unified Burns Club to represent the new SFRS itself . The first recorded Burns Supper in the Fire Service was held in the East Fire Station in Glasgow in the 1890’s. At that time the conditions were such that the firemen lived and worked in their home stations. As was the practice at the time all firemen in Glasgow and throughout Scotland had to be tradesmen and they attended fires and special services through the day from the fire station as well as working at their trade in the station premises doing repairs and maintenance. At night time they attended fires from their tied Fire Brigade station house; therefore the working regime didn’t allow for much socialising. On January 25th 1898 an Inquiry into the deaths of four firemen killed at Grahams Square in Glasgow on Christmas Eve 1897 was held so this precluded any thoughts of celebrating the Bard’s birthday. Again in 1927 four firemen were killed on duty on the 6th January at Renfield Street, Glasgow which again disallowed any celebration that year. During the Second World War under the National Fire Service there were three published occasions when Burns suppers were held in Auxiliary Fire 114 Fire Service BC Burns Chronicle 2016

Service stations in Western Zone No. 1, which covered the Strathclyde Area; in Alexandria (Dunbartonshire) in 1943; Birrell (Knightswood, Glasgow)in 1943; and Bankhead ( Knightswood, Glasgow) in 1941, that was their last gathering as the station received a direct hit and a large number of firemen were killed during the Clydebank and Glasgow blitz of 13th/14th March. The Glasgow Salvage Corps held their first Burns Supper of the modern era in 1973 at their new Headquarters in Maitland Street. They invited their colleagues from Glasgow Fire Service and subsequently Strathclyde Fire Brigade to successive Burns Suppers till the closure of the Salvage Corps in 1984. Thereafter the ex-Salvage Corps stalwarts continued ex officio, planning and running Burns Suppers at various Fire Service locations until 1990 when Strathclyde Fire Brigade under Firemaster Halliday took over. The Brigade continued hosting the annual Burns Suppers throughout the tenure of Firemasters Jamieson, Ord and Sweeney right up until the formation of the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service in 2013 when the first Fire Service Burns Suppers were held. The bench mark of all of our Burns Suppers was the standards set by the Salvage Corps Officers and the stalwarts were guided by Joe Smith in the formative years of the Brigade Suppers. The standards are very high with excellent guest speakers and musicians, from within and outwith the Fire Service family; Paraig MacKay being the longest serving contributor. Members joining the SFRS Burns Club pay a one-off joining fee of £15 covering the entirety of their membership with no annual fees, the Club being financed by sponsorship at the annual Burns Supper and the sale of bespoke merchandise. The benefits SFRS Burns Club membership include early notification of the SFRS Burns Supper before tickets go on general sale to SFRS staff, subsidised outings to Burns related locations, regular newsletters, bespoke merchandise, advice and guidance on all things Burns related and the chance to perform at the SFRS Burns Supper. The first Burns Supper was held on Friday 17th January 2014 at the SFRS Training Centre, Westburn Drive, Cambuslang, where an outstanding venue played host to a Top Table that would be skilled enough to grace any Burns Supper. All the performers were from within SFRS itself or retired members of the Retired Employees Association. With guests and members making up the 150 dinner places we had people from “a’ the airts” of Scotland represented. The backing from the sponsors means that the Burns Supper pays for itself and helps our own charity, the SFRS Family Support Trust continue its great work for our colleagues. Burns Chronicle 2016 Joe Harkins 115

Our Burns Club has also had evening talks and discussions to learn more about Burns poems, their meaning and cultural references in them, which went down really well with those attending where they discussed “the Selkirk Grace” amongst other poems. A Presidents outing took place in October 2014 to Dumfries where members visited the myriad of Burns sites, dined in the Globe and stayed overnight to enjoy the hospitality of the ‘Doonhamers’. Bespoke club merchandise is on order with club ties, lapel badges, polo shirts and T-shirts now being made. In another show of Burns and Fire Service tie-ins the T-shirts will have the anon American slogan that states “the greatest example of man’s humanity to man is the sight of a speeding fire engine “. Says it all really.

From a letter to the Editor, re 2014 “Editor’s Opinion” “you stress a point which I disagree with strongly. Re the use of the term Rabbie. I would happily take a bet with you that, were he to be alive, Robert Burns would have roared and laughed at such purist nonsense, as I am sure it was a familial term used to or about him perhaps even by Jean. You certainly have no ‘proof’ to allow you to describe it as a ‘misnomer.’ As you state, it was a term in use in those days as well as in the present.” 116 Burns Chronicle 2016

A Burnsian Opinion Dear Editor, The “Editor’s Opinion” in the 2015 Burns Chronicle rang more than a few bells with me, particularly in the area of the delivery of Burns’ works at Suppers. I have spent a good deal of my adult life overseas, working in many oil rich regions of the world but have generally managed to find a Burns Supper each January to celebrate the universal appeal of our Bard. In my youth I attended suppers in Scotland, accompanied by my uncle who thought himself a connoisseur of Burns works, and when I returned to retirement in Scotland a few years ago I sought out suitable gatherings each January. I have to say I have been often a little disappointed in what I have found, Immortal Memories lack substance, Toasts to The Lasses can be the most basic of humour with little or no reference to the poet, and the standard of portrayal of the poems and songs has slipped badly over this past 40 years, variety of material has declined, raucous humour has overtaken revered memory. Many of the flaws consistently repeat themselves, these seemingly having become the normal form of performance, which in itself has grown at the expense of the work, this pattern running through the whole evening, wherever I buy a ticket. The address “To a Haggis” is often curtailed to the minimum of a few lines, accompanied by over exaggerated gestures, as if we cannot follow the meaning of the words in this best known and most often recited poem. The energy spent on the acting-out of the lines should be more properly applied to the correct interpretation and delivery. Many pause between warm and reekin’ not giving the hyphenated “warm-reekin”. For those who do not know, reekin in old Scots meant smoking, and smelling (foul), whereas warm-reekin translates into modern use as steaming, ie reekin because it is warm. The other major faux-pas which particularly raises my ire in The Haggis is the belching which has become prevalent when the auld guid man rives. The Scottish National Dictionary of gives six meanings for rive, none of which relate to belching, “Maist like to rive” more readily translates to ‘likely or fit to burst’, indeed SND gives this interpretation, rather than to break wind,. Burns uses the word “rive” in half a dozen poems, never meaning the burp of modern colloquialism. I saw the haggis performed thus once in my supper ventures in the seventies, and my uncle shook his head in disbelief; the practice seems to have spread to become almost universal, at least in Scotland, where raising an extra laugh has become the criteria instead of good delivery of this mock heroic poem. Burns Chronicle 2016 117

There are so many great poems but the funny ones now dominate the programme of so many suppers, Performers frequently resort to fancy dress to get the extra laugh, often detracting from the delivery of the poem, “Jimmy” wigs and other ridiculous enhancements to comic highland dress do little but reinforce the Scottish stereotype. “Holy Willie” is generally depicted in nightgown, which is fair enough, but does he have to adopt exaggerated senility, he was after all less than forty years of age when Burns depicted him. “Willie Brewed a Peck o’ Maut” is frequently performed while acting out all manner of irrelevant drunken behaviour in priority over giving us the opportunity to experience the great humour that Burns put into this fine song. I find it sad. The repertoire of poems and songs has severely declined while I have been overseas. When before one could enjoy a variety of Burns works, the programme is now limited to a few repeated standards. In years back I would have heard, To the Toothache, The Twa Dogs, Cotter’s Saturday Night, Ay Waukin O, Wert Thou in the Cauld Blast, Bonnie Wee Thing, but now these have all but disappeared from the programme. I am not a dour auld-licht Calvanist; I enjoy a drink and laugh on a night out and when I go to a Burns Supper I want to commemorate the memory of the genius that gave so much to Scotland and the world with a broad and varied selection from his many wonderful works delivered with style and grace. Bring on the humour, but show a little reverence to the bard. Yours, John Hanlon Editor’s Note; The above letter is not the only communication I have on this theme. The correspondents are unfortunate not to find a quality supper such as those produced by well established Federated Clubs. There has been an upsurge in the number of popular Burns Suppers, many organised by commercial enterprises without any substantial Burns interest, but celebrations organised by a Burns Club are in general of a higher quality character, indeed I have been quite cheered in recent years by the variety and quality of material performed, despite the occasional cringe. It is incumbent on Federated Burns Clubs to maintain the standard of Burns celebrations with speeches of quality and a varied programme demonstrating the depth of the Burns canon, Clubs that I know, in general, achieve this ambition. 118 Burns Chronicle 2016

Thomas Burns; life and poetry Christine Seal While researching the First World War, I found poetry written by Thomas Burns, F.R.S.L., 21 poems written between the beginning of the war and December 1915. I assumed this poet was in the military, but I was wrong, in December 1915 there appeared an obituary for him. Thomas was described as a retired “Divisional Officer in the School Attendance Department of Newcastle School Board.1 Intrigued, I started further investigation into his history and what an interesting history he had. Thomas was born in 1848 and baptized at Morebattle Free Church. No father was listed at the baptism except the surname “Burns” and “Laidlaw” appeared on the baptism record. His mother was Elizabeth Laidlaw and in the Kirk Minutes she “confessed to the sin of fornication” and was restored to the communion of the church. At this time the father of Thomas was not known, but in the same Kirk Minutes the name ‘John Burns’ appeared admitting that he was “guilty of the sin of uncleanness with Elizabeth Laidlaw, also of Cessford, which led to him being “suitably admonished by the Moderator” and restored to church privileges.2 Cessford is a hamlet in the parish of Eckford and comprises Cessford Castle, Cessford Burn and Cessford Moor. A place name from the Gaelic “ceis” and means ‘the wattled causeway over the ford’. Cessford Castle is a ruin and last inhabited in 1650.

Cessford Castle Today (C. Seal 2014)

1 Hexham Courant (HC) 11 December 1915 2 Eckford Parish Session Minutes Burns Chronicle 2016 Christine Seal 119

The castle lies equidistant between the Royal Burgh of Jedburgh and Burghs of Kelso and Kirk Yetholm and was the principal stronghold of the Kerrs, notorious Border Reivers. Cessford, the Writer’s Birthplace O Cessford, dear Cessford; thy Castle I love, Its form is before me wherever I rove; From the valleys of Tyne, that debouch on the sea, The heart of thy song-child turns fondly to thee.

Still fancy reverts, as by Eckford I roam, To the tombs of my sires, to my childhood’s fair home; The plains of the East in their beauty I see, Still the loveliest spot but reminds me of thee.3 Thomas lived in the village of Morebattle with his Uncle, John Laidlaw, until he was 13,. The house at Morebattle comprised just two rooms and John’s family were five plus Thomas. Morebattle is a border village, on the edge of the Cheviot Hills. The village takes its name from the Anglian “mere-botl” meaning lake dwelling. The parish has a history of religious dissent. His mother Elizabeth lived there initially and then obtained a house servant post at Linton. Thomas attended Eckford School under Schoolmaster Henry Lawrie, described as a parochial teacher, and also at Morebattle school under schoolmaster John Swanston.

Lady Waterford Hall, Ford (C Seal, 2014)

3 V, 1,2 p. 190 Visions 120 Thomas Burns Burns Chronicle 2016

His education did not last long and an article written in 1904 by John McQuillen states “he was trained in rudimentary knowledge. Although a promising pupil he was not allowed to continue his education.”4 He became an agricultural labourer before age 13, and was hired at Kelso fair to a Ford farmer. Ford and Etal were in the area of Northumberland known as Glendale. The Poet in Glendale His books were then the fields and skies, The meadow and the moor, His teachers were the lisping sighs That hung round Nature’s door; The heath, the moss, the sward, the rill, Made music on his ear, The ridgy steep, where stars stood still, Kept grandeur’s vision clear.5

In the 18th and 19th centuries the owners of Ford and Etal took a considerable interest in the welfare of the local people. The Marchioness of Waterford lived at Ford Castle from 1859-1891. She was very popular with the villagers because she did so much to help them, especially the poor. A new village school was built in 1860, now known as Lady Waterford Hall. She decorated the school with paintings depicting scenes from the bible. While yet at the plough Thomas attracted the attention of the Marchioness of Waterford, who, recognising the young poet’s ability, did much to stimulate and encourage him in his efforts, and up to the date of her death she was one of his most enthusiastic admirers and patrons. The social circle in which Thomas was born and bred rendered his life, in its earlier stages, peculiarly trying and severe. Till nineteen years of age, his life was spent in the hard and ceaseless toils of husbandry amid the northern villages of Northumberland. He enjoyed only for a few months the benefits of a school education. All he knew, in this respect, was taught him by his worthy and pious mother, and the range of her literary culture was confined within the boards of her bible – after all the best and purest manual of the English language in the land. A great and manifest change, amounting to a thorough mental and religious resurrection, came over Thomas when about 20 years of age. He then awakened to an earnest sense of his manifold deficiencies. He became

4 Border Magazine 5 V. 4, p. 48 Visions Burns Chronicle 2016 Christine Seal 121 sensible of the utterly neglected and uncultivated state of his intellectual faculties. He felt that he knew nothing, and had learned nothing, but implicit obedience to the calls of routine, drudgery and bondage.”6 Farming was very important on Ford and Etal Estates in the 19th century, as it is today. Crops included oats, barley and turnips. Farms were leased to tenants who employed shepherds, hinds (farm labourers) and bondagers (part time workers who were often related to the hinds’ families). There was an annual migration of farm workers in May when many families would move to work on different farms. Hence we find Thomas moving from Ford to Lilburn, still in northern Northumberland. Ford Castle Deal gently, Time, with this old relique grand, Of ages gone, in its decay how fair, ‘Midst nature’s loveliest scenes behold it stand, With much of wealth and ornament laid bare: Bright Fancy through its windows still can stare On hill and vale the finest in the land! How many a faint heart found safe shelter there, And pining want, and pain, the helping hand, When fair Louisa did her life unfold! Pray, Time, be gentle with the good that shone, And ivy-like, with tender pity hide, What human weakness marred, those deeds of old Still let their charity for faults atone, Long may Ford flaunt her flag o’er Till’s clear tide.7 Ford Village Sweet is the scene, apart the tall tree rows A sunny islet opens where we stand; With vernal tints the moss-rose thicket glows, And flowery curtains hang on every hand; Gay lights and shadows tinkle on the ground, While here and there luxuriant creepers run, The solemn murmuring bees keep flitting round To rob the blossoms smiling to the sun; The insect myriads in their solar dress Dance to and fro like intermingling beams.8

6 Introduction to Poems, James Graham Potter 7 P. 39 Visions 8 P. 39 Visions 122 Thoma sBurns Burns Chronicle 2016

Thomas married Margaret in 1869, just 20 years of age, and they were living at Lilburn Towers Farm in the 1870s. Land around Pallisburn and Lilburn was owned by Mr Askew Robertson, a patron of Thomas. There were three children born to Thomas, Elizabeth born in 1870 at Eglingham, Mary born in 1874 at Rothbury and Thomas John born in 1876 in Newcastle. It is difficult to establish how much of what Mr McQuillen wrote in the Border Magazine article was correct, I fear that some was “artistic license” and not necessarily the reality. It was said that Thomas was involved in “progress to emancipate the farm labourers from a vexatious thraldom. He used both pen and voice, and doubtless helped to bring the agitation to a successful issue, the rate of wages being raised at once from 12s per week to 18s.”9

Thomas Burns

9 Border Magazine, p. 122 Burns Chronicle 2016 Christine Seal 123

The Rev Potter elaborated further on Thomas’ education: “The simplest elements of education, except reading, were entirely beyond the boundaries of his acquired knowledge. But no sooner was he impressed with the conviction of his deplorable condition than he set himself manfully to rectify the evil. Without teacher, or any assistance whatever, he applied himself to the study of arithmetic, writing, grammar, phonography, and composition; and whilst thus engaged in his searching after all knowledge, he abandoned the plough, and joined the police force of Newcastle.”10 Thomas moved from North Northumberland and was appointed a police constable in Newcastle in May 1876. He progressed to 2nd class police constable just 3 months later, and to a 1st class constable in 1877. By April 1879 he moved into plain clothes and resigned 3 months later to take up the School Board Officer post.11 Sadness came to Thomas when his wife died in 1880. His mother, Elizabeth, came to look after the family until her death later in the 1880s. Thomas remarried in 1885 to Janet White and went on to have a daughter, Olive, who sadly lived for just two years. Thomas was appointed a school attendance officer in September 1879, to the Newcastle School Board, which had existed from 1871 to 1903. The duties of officers were to make house to house visits, enquiring after absentees, serving notices upon defaulting parents, and taking legal proceedings whenever necessary, much as happens today. A portion of their time was also taken up in making enquiries into the circumstances of applicants for remission of school fees. The Board reported that 74 attendance orders had been obtained between 1877 and 1880, under Section II of the Elementary Education Act of 1876.12 In September 1885, 112 people were summoned for not causing their children to attend school regularly, 78 were fined, 1 child was sent to an industrial school (the purpose of which was to keep vulnerable children away from crime and to introduce the children to activities that could help them in their working lives), 10 attendance orders were granted and the remaining 23 either withdrawn or adjourned.13 Thomas was later provided with a free house attached to Diane Street School, an infant school of 190 pupils, and received coals, gas and water free, in addition to free rent. In the earlier days the attendance officers were provided with a uniform but in the late 1880s the Board ceased to provide a uniform, but instead paid an allowance of £6 per annum. Thomas had his salary increased from 33s (£1.65) to 35s (£1.75) a week in 1890, or £85 to £91 per annum.

10 Introduction to Poems, James Graham Potter 11 Police Service Records 12 School Board Minutes 13 Northern Evening Express, 24 September 1885 124 Thomas Burns Burns Chronicle 2016

A School Board Officer’s Song I’d like if you’d come with me, sir, While I visit my daily rounds, You’ll get an important lesson, For much wisdom e’en here abounds, Through alleys and courts we’ll ramble, For this is an officer’s rule; You’ll hear the professional grumble As I order the children to school.

Tread light on the crazy stair, sir, Or they’ll lock the door in our face; It needs a good deal of caution, Where women are scanty of grace; Describe if you can the hovels- So grim, dirty, and damp, and small; Mind where you step on the floor there, And witness the filth on the wall.

The first’s an exceptional case, The mother is not very well, Excuses and reasons are many For keeping the children from school Mary she helps with the washing, While the errands are run by Tom, And Lily the song is singing, Oh, “I wish your mother would come.”

The children they number eight, sir, And Emily, Ellen, and Jane Portray the fact in their features That life is an ordeal of pain; There’s other two lying in bed, As dirty as pigs in a stye, I question if ever their equals

Between 1885 and 1906 Thomas wrote 12 books. Only five books have been located so far, comprising 374 poems. The first book, Poems was dedicated to George Anthony Fenwick Esq of Bywell Hall, and published in Burns Chronicle 2016 Christine Seal 125

1885. The second book, Chimes from Nature, was published in 1887. The Rev James Graham Potter, a Presbyterian minister from Newcastle, provides an introduction to this book and the book is dedicated to Mr Watson Askew. The third book, Flowers from Philosophy, was published in 1890 and “consists of a series of miscellaneous pieces beginning with an address to the reader and ending with an account on the banks of the Tyne, from the days when Nature’s virgin had first given impulse to the wind and wave to the days of commerce, furnaces, shipping and engineering skills.”14 This work was dedicated to the Duke of Northumberland and the dedication states “To the most noble Algernon George, Duke of Northumberland, KG. By his Grace’s generous permission, and near whose extensive estates I spent the early years of my humble life, I dedicate this volume, written during the spare hours of an arduous profession.” I know there are a further four books published between 1890 and 1901 and these include Poems and Songs; The Romance of a Life; Scottish Songs and their authors; and Tours in the highlands of Scotland. Was Thomas following the same course as Robbie Burns by taking a tour of the Highlands? So far, despite the efforts of the British Library and the National Library of Scotland, and enquiries with patrons, no trace has been found of these books. City Songs was published in 1901, and is fronted by the words “Poetry is the bloom of truth and the harmony of wisdom”. The volume was dedicated to the Chairman, Vice Chairman and members of Newcastle upon Tyne School Board and includes a poem to Queen Victoria, on her death, and in Memoriam to the late Right Hon W E Gladstone. A further three books were published between 1901 and 1906 and the titles are referred to as Tours in the Borders; Holidays Sketches; and A Panegyric on the Life and Works of Robert Burns. These three books are referred to in Visions from Nature published in 1906. It is headed up “Fellow of Royal Society of Literature of the UK; Fellow of the Royal Society of Antiquities of Ireland; Member of the Society of Arts.” The principal poem on Northumberland was not composed with regard to historical accuracy but its main interest was on the scenic aspects of the County. The volume contains antique and historic illustrations. It also contains a prefatory note by the Rev J R Fleming. Thomas’ love of nature is reflected in the poems covering: “mountain and meadow, tree and flower, the heavens above and the earth beneath, sea and shore, stately man and winsome women, love and hatred, fair-play and foul, incidents recorded in Holy Scripture, in history, and in daily life amongst ourselves”15

14 Alnwick and County Gazette, 16 August 1890 15 Rev James Potter 126 Thomas Burns Burns Chronicle 2016

The poems of Northumberland reveal intimate knowledge of historic places, and the scenic attractions within the confines of the great county. Poetic allusion was made to the villages of Bamburgh, Lindesfarne, Ford, Chillingham, and Kielder, amongst many others. In the Kelso Chronicle of January 1907, the literary notes review “Visions of Nature” and, are “produced during the little relaxation he is able to snatch from the labours of a busy life and indicate he is in possession of marvellous skill and perseverance on the part of the author.”16 City Songs was published by T French Downie in London, under the patronage of the Duke of Argyle; the four other books were published by local publisher, J M Carr of Newcastle upon Tyne. Reviews of his books appeared not only in the Newcastle papers but in the Alnwick Guardian, Kelso Chronicle, Berwickshire News, The Hawick Telegraph, and even The Scotsmen. He also contributed poetry to newspapers and magazines. Patronage has included The Lady Louisa, Marchioness of Waterford, Mayor and Councillors of Newcastle, Sheriff of Newcastle, W A Watson-Armstrong of Cragside, Lord Percy, The Lord Bishop of Newcastle, the Bishop of Hexham and Newcastle, Professor Blackie in Edinburgh and a long list of Vicars from Newcastle and the surrounding villages. The book, North Country Poets: poems and biographies, edited by Wm Andrews in 1889, finds John Waller describing Thomas’s life. Unfortunately the facts presented on page 83 are entirely wrong, listing the first book as published in 1887, 2 years later than the first book of poems. The 11th Series of Modern Scottish Poets is a better reflection of Thomas’s life. Thomas was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1904, in recognition of his contributions to literature. Both these books were written in the early days of Thomas’s life as a poet so his life from 1890 was not accessed. Apart from the theme of nature, which appeared regularly in his books, there were at least 28 poems that used either a reference to the bible or had connections to the Christian calendar or life. Included is The Beatitudes17; Evening Hymn, tune “Grace is flowing like a river”18; Gospel Warfare, tune “Onward Christian Soldiers”19 uses Psalm xliv, 5 as its basis or Many shall be purified, made white and tried, tune “The Lion of Judah”.20 There were four poems dedicated to Robert Burns. The first was Lines on the Anniversary of

16 Kelso Chronicle January 1907 17 P. 11 City Songs 18 P. 105 Flowers 19 P. 108 Flowers 20 P. 166 Chimes Burns Chronicle 2016 Christine Seal 127

Robert Burns and starts: I the fervour of feeling our spirits o’erflow, As the mem’ry leaps back to where Robbie was born, On the banks of the Doon, with a patriot’s glow, The song-roll of time to exalt and adorn.21 A second poem with the same title but published in Chimes of Nature starts: Let adverse time research her urns, And bring her relics out to gaze; Few greater names extant than Burns, None more deserves a poet’s praise.22 The Burns’ Anniversary Song, 1889 was given a tune title, Kelvin Grove and comprised four verses with three of the lines ending in “bonnie laddies, O!”23 The last of the Robert Burns poems forms part of the Sonnets which attempt to describe the spirit of the most notable of the British Poets including Milton, Burns, Chaucer, and Wordsworth, among many others. The poem contains only 14 lines as follows: IV Burns Low in a vale within love’s choice retreat, The peasant bard in blazing glory stands; Near where the temperate gales repress the heat, He shows to heaven his toil-innured hands; Full ankle-deep in intermingling flowers, Sun-painted beds, a variegated show, Yes, there he stands; while round in wild-wood bowers, Each high-shrined beauty bids her offspring blow; Gay nature here her richest garment wears, Her rustic limbs in royal purple clad; She views Burns through alternate smiles and tears, Then blushing drops her nectar-dropping head. Contending cupids play about the grove, Where he is standing wreathed in flowers of love.24 Thomas retired in 1913 and moved to Horsley Cottages at Wylam. He had served 35 years with Newcastle Education Committee. He also wrote 21 war poems between 1914 and December 1915 which were published in the Hexham Courant. Thomas died on 6 December 1915 and his obituary 21 P. 92 City Songs 22 P. 30 Chimes 23 P. 56 Flowers 24 P. 114 Vision 128 Thomas Burns Burns Chronicle 2016 described him as having a “genuine poetical gift, and his contributions to “newspapers” were always marked by scholarly thought and literary insight.”25 The last poem Thomas wrote, which was published after his death, was Mass up the Guns. Mass up the guns! The might universe Thrills at the mandate of their awful crash, While rolling waters and untrodden hills Reverberate beneath their murderous flash, Increasing and increasing still they come, Albeit, it with a dreadful fiendish glare, The erst-dull valleys and phantasmal rocks Reflect like mirrors ruin’s maddened stare.

The seas that wandered aimlessly and grave O’re precipices tenantless and deep, Through gloomy caverns lost to voice and sound Are stirred and wakened from eternal sleep, And churn up sluggish and uncertain waves Upon their surgy bosoms wild and weird, To shores that scarcely know the touch of life, Save from the insect, reptile, brute or bird.

“Mass up the guns” on land, and sea, and air, Belch out red streams of radiance near and far, Let mountain peaks reverberate and sigh And fountains cloud with mist both sun and star, While man, the crown of all creative work, With fearless eye, and dauntless heart replies, “Fill up the spaces with death throbbing shells, We’ll not demean proud peace by compromise!”26 Thomas certainly moved in higher society in his School Attendance Officer days, as the dedications and patronage have shown. So from an illegitimate birth, little education and hard work as an agricultural labourer, Thomas improved his life considerably, although he appears not to have much money at the end of his life as no will, probate or letters of administration have been found.

25 HC 11 Dec 1915 26 Vv1-3 Hexham Courant 11 December 1915 Burns Chronicle 2016 Christine Seal 129

“Jessie, the Flower o’ Dunblane” – Jenny Tennant, the sweetheart and muse of Robert Tannahill

One of Scotland’s finest love songs is undoubtedly “Jessie, the Flower o’ Dunblane” composed by Robert Tannahill, Paisley’s weaver- poet. Tannahill aficionados have attempted to identify the girl immortalised in the song and it is believed that the real ‘Jessie’ was Jenny Tennant, who had been Tannahill’s sweetheart and muse for three years. Jessie/Jenny was born in Braeport, Dunblane. A later (1808) cottage on the site of her birthplace, can still be seen. The 1920 Valuation Roll reads; “Cottage, site of Birthplace of ‘Jessie, the Flower of Dunblane’, Robert Tannahill Windyhill Cot.”

This painting is supposedly of “Jessie, the Flower o’Dunblane”, a traditionally romanticised Victorian scene. The original by Raymond Lynde is in Dunblane Museum, a fascinating place with a collection of most interesting artefacts. 130 Burns Chronicle 2016

Innerpeffray Library Lara Haggerty

Introduction Scotland’s Oldest Free Public Lending Library was founded in 1680 in rural Perthshire, by David Drummond, third lord Madertie: just anticipating The Kirkwall Bilbliotheck and Allan Ramsay’s circulating library in Edinburgh’s Luckenbooths 45 years later. Cicero is often quoted as saying ‘If you have a garden and a library you have everything you need’ and I’m sure our Founder would have agreed: he certainly had Cicero in his library- his books reflect a wide range of interests - and they include a First Edition of The Scots Gard’ner, by John Reid, the first book to be written specifically for the Scottish climate, and one of our most popular books today. But his life was lived in one of Scotland’s most turbulent centuries. His was not to be the quiet life of contemplation and learning, planting and growing, his life was filled with turmoil, civil war, the death of friends and family, and disruption to state and religion. We don’t have his portrait, or his biography, rather we have tantalising glimpses into the life of the man who gave us such an intriguing legacy. He was born in 1611, and lived until 1692 – or 94. From this early beginning the Library grew, through the 18th and 19th centuries to become an unique microcosm of the Scottish mind. Today we are trying to live up to his legacy of books ‘for the benefit of all’.

The Drummonds Who was this quiet revolutionary? The Drummonds, in two large and lavishly illustrated volumes, from the 19th century trace their origins to Attila the Hun: the wavy lines of their coat of arms indicating they came from over the sea, and the family arrives in Britain after the Norman invasion. The Drummonds were rewarded with land in Perthshire for their services to the King. Their motto, Gang Warily, is certainly good advice, and as further illustration of the nature of their times, you have only to look at the ground beneath the feet of the ‘wildmen’ who support the shield: it is strewn with caltrops – those lethal anti-horse weapons, supposedly introduced by the Drummonds.

David, 3rd Lord Madertie When Lord Drummond’s grandson James received the title Lord Madertie in 1609 he built a castle on the banks of the Earn, close to Burns Chronicle 2016 Lara Haggerty 131 the Chapel and just 10 miles as the crow flies from Drummond Castle. It is still visible as a romantic ruin today despite being occupied for only three generations. The first Lord Madertie was grandfather to the Library Founder and the castle was David’s home from 1623 when his father succeeded to the title. As a boy he played with young James Graham and his sister Beatrix, from the neighbouring estate of Kincardine, both of whom would play important parts in his life in later years. The Drummonds had a noble and warlike past, and his childhood friend grew up to be The First Marquis of Montrose: it is perhaps not surprising then, that when his old friend came to plead the case for his mission to serve the King, Madertie joined Montrose in his Royalist campaign. As friend, companion, campaigner with Montrose, Madertie saw battle, imprisonment and exile in Europe. Perhaps it was these wanderings in Europe that whetted David’s appetite for learning, and started his collection of European literature that can still be enjoyed at Innerpeffray today. Did he dream up the idea as he walked the countryside of Strathearn?, or as he sat beside Beatrix, his wife in her final illness in the 1680s. He had already drawn up the will describing the school and library as it then was, and leaving 3000 Scottish merks. He was to increase this to 5000 merks after Beatrix’s death. We will probably never know his true intention, whether he wanted to leave behind him the chance of a better life for his people, gain immortality for himself, or perhaps simply do his duty as a Knight and Gentleman. The picture of him that we can draw from his books shows a widely read man, as keen on natural history as politics, of learning about the wider world, reading the classics as well as contemporary history and theology. In the little attic room at the west end of the chapel of Innerpeffray legend has it Madertie used to sit with a small fireplace and his books.

A New Home The fine Georgian building where the Library now resides was the legacy of his great nephew who inherited responsibility for the trust in 1739. Born one hundred years after Madertie, he seems to have shared his love of books. Archbishop Robert Hay Drummond is an intriguing character as well. Completely different in background from Madertie, his great nephew was born in London and brought up in England. Academically 132 Innerpeffray Library Burns Chronicle 2016 successful he went to Westminster School and Christ Church Oxford, and the library holds one of his school books with his initals RH on the title page. He too toured Europe, but not in political exile, but as part of the 18th century Grand Tour so popular for young men of the period. He did see battle, accompanying King George on campaigns in Germany, but as chaplain to the King and he preached the sermon on thanksgiving after their victory. He was notably the man of the church in attendance on the King at the battle of Dettingen: the last European war where the monarch appeared in person. Despite many calls on his time, Hay Drummond asked his son to deputise for him and kept in touch with the Trustees at Innerpeffray. On his orders they instructed an architect for the new library building which was finished in 1762. The first book borrowed was described in the Register as Rapin History (History of England 1732, a translation of Histoire d’Angleterre of Paul Rapin de Thoyras), borrowed by Mr James Scot of Muthil (some 5 miles across the river).

A Community of Readers The Register is another of Innerpeffray’s extraordinary treasures. It is handwritten, often by the borrower themselves, or at least signed by them, though some ‘declare they cannot write’. The entry is scored off when the book is returned (sometimes to the obliteration of the entry). The borrower enters their name, and full address, which often includes their occupation. This record of the reading habits of a rural area of Scotland is a feast of information, a very personal piece of cultural heritage. Today people come from all over the world seeking information about their ancestors and it is a real treasure to discover the book they borrowed from the Library. In 2011 we began a project with the University of Stirling, to record and analyse the Borrowers’ Register. We heard earlier this year that we have been successful in a bid for a PhD Studentship in partnership with the Universities of Stirling and Dundee and hope to appoint someone this summer who will be uncovering even more about the early years of the Register. The initial research has already meant some lovely nuggets of details such as the furthest travelled borrower in this period being a Mr James Harley from Lochland some 40km away, who borrowed Ferguson’s Astronomy and Mechanics in 1784. And this epitomises the appeal of the Library for me today. It is not just a place of ‘antiquarian interest’ or for lovers of old books, though of course it is both of these. The Library of Innerpeffray is about real people and their everyday Burns Chronicle 2016 Lara Haggerty 133 life, and how the Library and its books, thanks to the legacy of a few individuals, touched them, and touches us today.

The Scottish Collection Finally, I’d like to say a word about a new collection that has just been gifted to us. You might say that we can’t ‘improve’ on the Library in its original form: a unique and awe-inspiring place, where you can literally touch the past. However, time does not stand still. The Governors of the Library rely on visitor income, investments and grants to keep the library open and in good order, and they are very determined to do so. They are not unaware of the fragile nature of public funds, the vagaries of the financial world and the fickle ways of the tourism industry. They are also aware that visitors have a right to expect decent facilities – like level access and more than one toilet. When an offer was made several years ago by an American lady of Scottish descent to gift to the Library her personal collection of over 400 Scottish first editions, an opportunity was acknowledged that could help assure the Library’s future.

The Innerpefray Library The collection gifted by Mrs Janet St Germain is astounding: from the early printed Scottish books through the works of great authors 134 Innerpeffray Library Burns Chronicle 2016 of the Enlightenment, to novelist such as Scott, Stevenson and the works of Robert Burns. The Governors decided to seize the thistle, and launched an ambitious scheme: to keep Innerpeffray as the special, almost hidden, treasure whilst converting the underused downstairs of the Library to both house the new books and provide more up to date facilities – as Madertie intended: for the benefit of all. With the assistance of a world renowned firm of designers, architects’ plans were drawn up and the fundraising process begun. This created significantly more exhibition area, disabled access, and flexible space for other uses. After a long haul £200,000 was raised from Heritage Lottery Fund, The Gannochy Trust, The Barcapel Foundation and others. Work was completed in June 2013 and the donor, Mrs St Germain, showed her books in person to visitors at the opening. The Scottish Collection, as these books are now known, also includes a very special tribute to Robert Burns. This is a manuscript in the Bard’s own hand of Wilt Thou Be my Dearie? personalised to ‘Jeanie’ or Janet Millar.

“Burns dedication to Janet Millar on MS of Wilt Thou be my Dearie, Burns changed “Lassie” in the second stanza to “Jeanie” in lines 10,15 & 17”

Burns stayed nearby in October 1787 with Sir William Murray of Ochtertyre. Some of the locally inspired pieces include ‘On scaring some waterfowl on Loch Turrit’ and ‘Flower of Strathmore’ inspired by Euphemia Murray, cousin of his host, who was staying at Ochtertyre. As a lover of the literary did he visit Innerpeffray, some 10 miles from Ochtertyre? I’d love to think he once climbed the stone stairwell to gaze Burns Chronicle 2016 Lara Haggerty 135 at the collection, but all I can tell you is he didn’t borrow any books, as the register records no borrowing in his name for this date. Results of his travels are also now at Innerpeffray in George Thomson’s Select Collection of Scottish Airs for the voice. We also have an Edinburgh Edition, a London edition, a Philadelphia Edition, and a Kilmarnock Edition. There is also a superb 1808 edition with illustrations by Bewick, and more music in The Scots Musical Museum. As well as Burns the collection includes his contemporaries Sillar and Lapraik, Allan Ramsay and James Thompson. I hope you may be inspired to visit and see the original collection and the new, you will be made very welcome. As always with new additions, I’m learning all the time about the collection and would be most grateful for your insights into what we now have, The Library of Innerpeffray Open 1 March – 31 October Innerpeffray, By Crieff, Perthshire, PH7 3RF Scotland, www.innerpeffraylibrary.co.uk 136 Burns Chronicle 2016

Liverpool Burns Club 1924 – 2014 The Club was founded by lovers of the works of Robert Burns and by Scots who had moved to the Liverpool area for work. The Club has had 58 Presidents, the first, Rev. John Love JP and for the last three years Mrs Irene Lunt. The Club had a band and a piper and held socials and summer rambles as well as meeting to discuss Robert Burns and for Scottish Country Dancing. Speakers were frequently brought from Scotland to propose The Immortal Memory at the annual celebration and latterly this invitation has been given to the President of The Lancashire and Cheshire Federation of Scottish Societies. Although numbers declined in recent years the Haggis was still piped in with style and addressed by the President. After the dinner and toasts the evening continued with dancing. Liverpool Burns Club joined the Burns Federation in 1925 and in 1968 hosted the Federation Conference in Liverpool. Falling membership numbers led to the club going into abeyance following the celebrations of their 90 years as a club at the President’s Night of April 2014. The fine President’s chain of office has been passed to The Robert Burns World Federation for safe keeping. Making Teacakes for your Thomas Tunnock Ltd., 34 Old Mill Road, Uddingston G71 7HH Tel: 01698 813551 Fax: 01698 815691 Email: [email protected] enjoyment www.tunnock.co.uk

22208_OTM 297x210 1205.indd 1 12/05/2011 14:18 138 Burns Chronicle 2016

Robert Burns in Edinburgh An Illustrated Guide to Burns’ Time in Edinburgh Jerry Brannigan, John McShane illustrations by David Alexander This book details a multitude of places, people, events and anecdote of everything that is Burns related in Edinburgh. It is subtitled “An Illustrated Guide to Burns’ Time in Edinburgh – His several visits: 1786 -91” and is subdivided into areas of the town listing the many associations with the Bard under these headings, with a map of each area preceding the chapter, The very detailed text is supported with extensive illustrations and photographs. It is both a most informative guidebook for the tourist to Edinburgh and an essential addition to the library of Burns enthusiasts, giving extensive details on all subjects and personalities that Burns may have encountered during his time in the capital. The photographs throughout belie the nature of the Scottish climate showing Edinburgh at its very best. An appendix gives details of the discovery and investigations of the previously unknown portrait of Burns by Alexander Nasmyth known as “The Shaw Burns”. This brilliant compilation of freshly researched material captures the essence of Burns times in Edinburgh and his associations all coming from three Burns enthusiasts from Glasgow. I commend this book to you, you may wish to refer to the details of individual subjects but I wager you will not be able to resist reading it from cover to cover at the first sitting. Robert Burns in Edinburgh Jerry Brannigan, John McShane illustrations by David Alexander ISBN 978 1 84934 171 4 Waverley Books £9.99

Robert Burns the Book Lover From Reader to Writer J. Walter McGinty This is not simply a derivation of all that Burns read, shown from his references in the poems or letters. Walter McGinty studies these volumes, and gives an opinion on what made Burns read, and what impact these reading choices had on him as a man and a writer. McGinty’s study traces Burns reading from his early education, and exposure to great novels. A key theme explores Burns in relation to Romanticism. Appendix A seeks parallels in the works of Diderot and Burns while Appendix B is the expected Burns Chronicle 2016 139

Authors and Books read by Burns, listed over seven pages. This is another fine work by Walter McGinty. As the foreword by Dr. Kenneth Simpson says “original research made readily accessible, there is much here to interest scholars and general reader alike”. Robert Burns the Book Lover From Reader to Writer J. Walter McGinty ISBN 978 1 84622 047 0 Humming Earth £ 35.00 Bevel William Letford Known as the “Roofer Poet”, an appellation which he has become almost comfortable with, William Letford, until recently, worked as a roofer writing poems as the muse took him, about the work on the roof and of everyday life which in so many ways parallels the life and poetry of Burns that we all should be interested in his output. He was recently Writer in Residence at Burns House Mauchline where he was a popular hit. Bevel, his first collection of poems, is mixed between English and his natural dialect, I like them a lot, many made me laugh, most made me think, and they were all a pleasure to read. I look forward to his next book, or a personal performance of his poems. Bevel William Letford ISBN 978 84777 192 6 £9.95 Carcanet Press.

Perth As Others Saw Us Edited by Donald N. M. Paton This is compiled by Donald Paton, long time Secretary of Perth Burns Club and occasional author about the Fair City. This is a compilation of writings from John Taylor in 1618 through to Her Majesty the Queen in 2012, and offers a picture of Perth and its people across five centuries. Includes entries by Robert Burns, Walter Scott, Billy Connolly and Stuart Cosgrove in a most pleasurable volume. Perth As Others Saw Us Donald N. M. Paton ISBN 978 0 9563374 7 4 £12.50 Tippermuir Books 140 Burns Chronicle 2016

Chronicle readers know that this journal has an affinity with Studies in Scottish Literature which carries so many interesting papers on Burns. Vol 41, just published is another fine example. An extension of SSL is the Scottish Poetry Reprints occasional series which has heralded the revival of the series with 3 volumes this year, of which two are briefly reviewed here. The reprints are published through CreateSpace and are available from CreateSpace, Amazon, and AmazonUK, not from the University Libraries.

A Bard Unkend Selected Poems in the Scottish Dialect By Gavin Turnbull Edited by Patrick Scott Gavin Turnbull was a younger contemporary of Robert Burns who for the firstpublished two books of poetry before emigrating to America in 1795. Patrick Scott’s dozen pages of introduction to the poems gives a synopsis of Turnbull’s life, his time in Kilmarnock and associations with Burns and an overview of his works. The selection of poems is preceded with an illustration of the half title page from “POETICAL ESSAYS IN THE SCOTTISH DIALECT” (1788). Drawing on advance research for the first collected edition of Turnbill’s work, the selection includes verse in Scots from all phases of Turnbull’s career, including poetry in Scots published in America. Scottish Poetry Reprint Series, 10 A Bard Unkend By Gavin Turnbull Edited by Patrick Scott ISBN 978 1514348512 £6.00 University of South Carolina Burns Chronicle 2016 141

The Prayer of Holy Willie A canting, hypocritical, Kirk Elder By ROBERT BURNS The 1789 Kilmarnock Chapbook Edited by Patrick Scott It was long thought that the poem of “Holy Willie’s Prayer” was not published until after Burns’ death in 1799, but it had in fact been printed 10 years earlier. This reprint makes the 1789 version readily accessible to scholars and enthusiasts alike. In his introduction, Patrick Scott details the history of the poems and its publication history, demonstrates that it was likely to have been printed by John Wilson in Kilmarnock and argues that this early version is more authentic than the later manuscript versions. The poem is given in facsimile on eight pages and there is an appendix of “Some Early Comments on Holy Willie’s Prayer”, which in themselves are worth the price of the pamphlet. It is all extensively referenced and an essential read for those who wish to understand, and those who wish to perform, the poem better. Scottish Poetry Reprint Series, 8 The Prayer of Holy Willie Edited by Patrick Scott ISBN 978 1514814307 £6.00 University of South Carolina 142 Burns Chronicle 2016

“for services to the heritage of Robert Burns”

David receives his honour

David Smith - British Empire Medal The letter from the Cabinet Office stated that “the Prime Minister has asked me to inform you that, having accepted the advice of the Head of the Civil Service, he proposes to submit your name to the Queen recommending that Her Majesty may be graciously pleased to approve that you be awarded a British Empire Medal (Civil Division) in the New Year Honours List”. I initially thought it was a joke but after reading the letter several times, I came to the conclusion that it was not and have to say that I am extremely proud to receive an award for what has been my hobby for many years. The citation read “for services to the heritage of Robert Burns” and the only other Burnsian to be so honoured was the late George McKerrow who received the MBE. The medal was presented by HM Lord Lieutenant of Dumfries, Mrs. Jean Tulloch, at a pleasant ceremony in the Municipal Chambers in Dumfries on 19th April. I suspect that my fellow members of the Burns Howff Club had a hand in this but they have not let it go to my head. David Smith Burns Chronicle 2016 143

Joseph Kennedy, 28.11.47 – 10.2.15 Joe was born in Sturrock Street, Kilmarnock and spent almost his entire life living in the town. He had several jobs before spending over 31 years employed by British Rail, latterly as an Inspector. He did say of his time with the railway that he had to look out for himself as a railwayman had once been reported for breaking sweat and became the subject of a major public enquiry. He had many hobbies and pastimes including chess, bowling and football where he served as an SFA official but it as a Burnsian he was probably best known. He was a past President of Kilmarnock No 0 Burns Club, a Past President of the Ayrshire Association of Burns Clubs and a member of Mauchline Burns Club. He was also very active for many years in the Robert Burns World Federation serving for a time as Heritage Convener. Joe was a gifted public speaker with the ability to engage with any audience which meant he was always very busy during the “Burns Season”, normally delivering a heartfelt and humorous Immortal Memory. He was diagnosed with a heart complaint leading to early retirement from the railway in 2007 which allowed him more time to indulge in holidays with his wife Susan and his love of the works of Robert Burns. His abiding thought of the Burns Movement being the warmth, fellowship and friendship he had received every time he attended a meeting, function or event. His health continued to deteriorate and in late December 2014 he was given a terminal prognosis. He spent the last few weeks of his life at home with his family being visited by friends enjoying their company as he had done all his life. As he had not managed a Burns Supper in 2015, close friend Jimmy Gibson, organised one to come to him. Seven days before his death 6 well known Ayrshire Burnsians turned up with songs, stories, poems, good cheer and some haggis which he thoroughly enjoyed. Joe is survived by his wife Susan, daughter Jennifer and son Michael. Jim Thomson 144 Burns Chronicle 2016

The Robert Burns World Federation President 2015 - 2016 Dr Peter T Hughes OBE Burns Chronicle 2016 145

A Message from the President

To be elected President of the Robert Burns World Federation is the ultimate accolade for any Burnsian and I am keen to take the Federation forward following the hard work and dedication of my immediate predecessors, Jim Thomson and Jane Brown.

Like many organisations, we face a number of challenges as we seek to strengthen and enhance the reputation of the Robert Burns World Federation as the fount of all knowledge on all things in relation to Robert Burns.

I know that his work inspired and excited me when I was at school, but I also know that there followed a significant gap when I lost sight of the Bard for several decades. Our real challenge is to find a way of maintaining the strong links, forged via our Annual Schools Competitions, such that younger people in their teens, twenties and thirties retain an active interest via their local Burns Clubs and the Federation. We have a number of Burns Clubs who are succeeding in this regard, but unfortunately they are in the minority. If we can share their best practice, we have the opportunity to ensure that we have more of an age balance than we currently enjoy.

I would encourage everyone associated with the Robert Burns World Federation to come forward with their thoughts and ideas thereby helping the Board to establish an appropriate plan of action for our future development.

Bearing all that in mind, I would take this opportunity to thank our Past President, Jim Thomson, for his excellent leadership as we worked together to strengthen the Federation finances to allow us 146 Burns Chronicle 2016 to go forward with confidence in the coming years. Jim’s unstinting efforts, at a time when his health was giving him challenges, are testimony to a man, steeped in Burns and who is dedicated to working for the wellbeing of the Robert Burns World Federation. I eagerly anticipate wearing that wonderful chain of office which Jim has worn with such distinction.

My first official engagement following our Annual Conference will be the Tam O’ Shanter Competition at The Globe, Dumfries for quickly followed by a trip to Canada for the Seventh Jolly Beggars Banquet in Medicine Hat, Alberta.

In conclusion, I am looking forward to meeting Burnsians worldwide during my term in office and I will be delighted to hear from our members with their thoughts and aspirations for the Federation. Meantime, if you have any concerns then please raise them with me and I will do everything in my power to ensure that they are addressed. Your support in taking our organisation forward will be greatly appreciated.

Dr Peter T Hughes OBE Burns Chronicle 2016 147

Conference 2015 The 2015 Robert Burns World Federation AGM & Conference was held at Peebles Hydro, Peebles on 4th- 6th September 2015, almost 140 delegates attended. Dinner on Friday evening was informal with several delegates providing enjoyable entertainment. President Jim welcomed a large number of delegates to the AGM on Saturday morning. Overseas representatives introduced themselves and received a warm welcome. A sombre list of Obituaries was given by the President and a minute silence observed. President Jim Thomson gave a brief resume of his year in office and said that the Board and management structure was being changed and full proposals will be brought to an AGM for ratification. An explanation was provided on the annual accounts and delegates were advised that a full break down of all financial transactions was available in addition to the published accounts, providing an accurate overview of the current financial position. Adding to the Marketing Report, Director Murdo Morrison reminded us that we are a membership organisation and we must beat the drum for publicity. Any Federation mention in the press is good. Martin Cassidy asked about an option for a Federation flyer that could be distributed when visiting outwith the Federation, enabling recruitment. He was advised that flyers are available. Social media was also discussed – we are working to create a strategy to ensure published is appropriate and accurate. Delegates were also advised that school membership will be free from this point – 32 Local Authorities will be contacted – hopefully progressing youth membership. The Chronicle Editor added to his report, - 124 yrs ago at the annual meeting of the Burns Federation in Kilmarnock a motion was proposed to have an annual Chronicle, thus it began 124 yrsago. The last 2 editions had over 100 pages and struggled to find a buyer outside members – this next issue will be similarly substantial – spread the word – buy extra copies and pass around – pursue local libraries to obtain the Chronicle – there is very good material in next edition – it deserves to be widely read today as will be read 125 years from now. All other reports were as published. Election of office bearers: Appointed by Acclamation: Peter Hughes - President Bobby Kane - SVP 148 Burns Chronicle 2016

American Director – Les Strachan Canadian Director – Ronnie O’Byrne Pacific Rim Director – Jim O’Lone There were 2 nominations for Junior Vice-President, Ian McIntyre and Jim Jamieson, both were invited to the podium to give a short presentation to Conference. Votes were then collected and postal votes added. Ian McIntyre was duly elected and joined the top table. Election of Conveners: Literature - Mike Duguid Heritage - Ian McIntyre Conference - Jim Gibson Schools - Patricia Leslie Marketing - Murdo Morrison Following her retiral as Schools Convenor, Isa Hanley and was presented with a Certificate of appreciation in recognition of her many years of service. President Jim Thomson then annonunced that Walter Watson had been elected to Honorary Life Membership of the Federation in recognition of his many years of outstanding service to the Federation. President Jim presented an illuminated certificate to Walter. A National Prize Draw was announced – the draw will be at next year’s conference with books of tickets available for sale prior to Burns season in January. The first prize will be a car, then a holiday and 3 other prizes. Conference was updated on our stalled removal to town centre premises, there had been difficulties but the premises were now vacated, officers of the Federation will meet shortly with the Local Authority to discuss required – council paying for renovations and we will meet them soon and inform you when this happens and then our new president will do an official opening and invites will be sent out – it will happen in not too distant future. Conference Convenor, Jim Gibson announced that the 2016 Conference will again be held in Peebles over the weekend of 9th-11th September 2016. On Saturday afternoon, Prof. Gerry Carruthers presented a seminar on “Burns Brotherhood” following which Mike Duguid gave a demonstration of his digitsed Burns Chronicles At the dinner on Saturday evening with Peter Hughes received the Presidential Chain of Office from Jim Thomson before presenting Jim with his Past President’s Medal. The dinner and speeches was followed by dancing Sunday Morning Worship was led by Margaret Anderson concluding a memorable conference. Burns Chronicle 2016 149

The Robert Burns World Federation Limited (A company limited by guarantee)

Statement of financial activities (incorporating the income and expenditure account)

For the year ended 30 April 2015

Unrestricted Restricted 2015 2014 funds funds Total Total Notes £ £ £ £

Incoming resources Incoming resources from generating funds: Voluntary income 2 80,000 20,534 100,534 88,607 Activities for generating funds 3 9,083 - 9,083 17,255 Investment income 4 1,131 - 1,131 1,131 Total incoming resources 90,214 20,534 110,748 106,993

Resources expended Costs of generating funds: Cost of generating voluntary income 5 6,677 - 6,677 11,726 Charitable activities 6 75,429 17,280 92,709 124,218 Governance costs 7 2,040 - 2,040 2,040 Total resources expended 84,146 17,280 101,426 137,984

Net income/expenditure for the year 6,068 3,254 9,322 (30,991)

Other recognised gains and losses Losses on revaluation of investment assets 11 (292) - (292) (2,384) Net movement in funds 5,776 3,254 9,030 (33,375)

Total funds brought forward 64,143 28,791 92,934 126,309 Total funds carried forward 69,919 32,045 101,964 92,934

The notes on pages 8 to 16 form an integral part of these financial statements.

Page 5 150 Burns Chronicle 2016

The Robert Burns World Federation Limited (A company limited by guarantee)

Balance sheet as at 30 April 2015

2015 2014 Notes££ ££

Fixed assets Tangible assets 11 3,573 4 Investments 12 40,817 41,109

44,390 41,113 Current assets Stocks 8,174 6,710 Debtors 13 4,327 2,738 Cash at bank and on hand 59,614 59,919 72,115 69,367 Creditors: amounts falling due within one year 14 (11,166) (17,546) Net current assets 60,949 51,821 Total assets less current liabilities 105,339 92,934 Accruals and deferred income 15 (3,375) - Net assets 101,964 92,934

Funds Restricted income funds 32,045 28,791 Unrestricted income funds: Unrestricted income funds 70,211 47,444 Revaluation reserve (292) 16,699 Total unrestricted income funds 69,919 64,143

Total funds 16 101,964 92,934

The notes on pages 8 to 16 form an integral part of these financial statements.

Page 6 Burns Chronicle 2016 151

The Robert Burns World Federation Office Bearers, Directors and Conveners PRESIDENT Dr Peter T Hughes OBE CARLUKE [email protected] SENIOR VICE-PRESIDENT JUNIOR VICE-PRESIDENT Bobby Kane Ian McIntyre Blackburn Kirkcudbright [email protected] [email protected]

SCHOOLS HERITAGE Patricia Leslie Ian McIntyre East Kilbride Kirkcudbright [email protected] [email protected]

CONFERENCE MARKETING Jimmy Gibson Murdo Morrison Symington Wishaw, [email protected] [email protected]

LITERATURE PACIFIC RIM Mike Duguid Jim O’Lone Twynholm Fremantle [email protected] Western Australia 61060 [email protected] USA Leslie Strachan CANADA Bedford, VA 24523 Ronnie O’Byrne [email protected] Ontario L0R 2C0 [email protected] PAST PRESIDENT James Thomson ARCHIVIST Kilmarnock Bill Dawson [email protected] Alloa [email protected] Office Manager, Margaretann Dougall Assistant, Beverley Thomson

The Robert Burns World Federation Kilmarnock 01563 572469 [email protected] www.rbwf.org.uk 152 Burns Chronicle 2016

The Robert Burns World Federation 2015 Patrons Honorary Presidents East Ayrshire Council George & Enez Anderson Isle of Arran Distillers Shirley Bell Thomas Tunnock Ltd John Cairney Weir Group Joe Campbell Alex & May Crawley Honorary Members Alistair Gowans James Boyd John MacMillan Robert Dalziel Murdo Morrison Allan Dunsmore James Todd, Provost of East Ayrshire Patricia Ferguson MSP Anne Gaw Corporate Members Grange Academy Centre for Robert Burns Studies, University Mac Irvin of Glasgow May McGuffog Dumfries & Galloway Libraries & Archive Helen McIlwraith Service St Petersburg Gymnasium. National Burns Memorial Homes University of Glasgow Crichton Campus. National Library of Scotland Peter & Ann Westwood Robert Burns Birthplace Museum Robert Burns Quiz West Sound Radio

230 no. Individual Members 77 no. Family Members

Clubs

Ayrshire Afton Lily Burns Club (Cumnock) Largs St Columba Burns Supper Alloway Burns Club Lodge Royal Arch West Kilbride Ayr Burns Club Logangate Burns Club (Cumnock) Ayr Police Burns Supper Lugton Burns Club Ayrshire Association of Burns Clubs Mauchline Burns Club Barr & District Burns Club New Cumnock Burns Club Barrmill Jolly Beggars B C Newmilns Burns Club Cumnock Cronies Burns Club Prestwick Burns Club Cumnock Jolly Beggars BC Skelmorlie “Poosie Nansie’s” Burns Club Dailly Jolly Beggars West Kilbride Burns Club Dalry Burns Club Schools Dundonald Burns Club Ayr & District Youth RBC Garnock Burns Club Braehead PS Howff Burns Club (Kilmarnock) Beith Primary School Irvine Burns Club Burns Bairns Irvine Lasses Burns Club Caledonia Primary School Kilbirnie Rosebery Burns Club Catrine Primary School Kilmarnock Burns Club Dalry Primary School Kilwinning Burns Club Doon Academy Robert BC Lamlash Burns Club Doonfoot PS Robert Burns Club Largs Cronies Burns Club Burns Chronicle 2016 153

Holmston Primary School Portobello Burns Club Kyle Academy Robert BC Scottish Parliament No 1 BC Kilmaurs Primary School Seton Burns Club Loanhead Primary School Tranent 25 Burns Club Mauchline Primary School Thorntree Mystic Burns Club Muirkirk Primary School New Cumnock Primary School Schools New Farm Primary School George Watson’s College Patna Primary School, Balgreen Primary School Sacred Heart Primary School Dean Park Primary School St Patrick’s Primary School Linlithgow Bridge Primary School Sorn Primary School Tynewater Primary School Wellington School Winyknowe Primary School

Dumfries & Galloway Glasgow Annan Ladies Burns Club Blane Valley Burns Club Dalbeattie & District Burns Club Bridgeton Burns Club Dumfries Burns Club Clarinda Burns Circle Dumfries Burns Howff Club Cotter’s Burns Club Dumfries Ladies Burns Club No. 1 Glasgow & District Burns Assoc Friends of Ellisland Glasgow Haggis Club Gatehouse of Fleet Burns Club Lodge Robert Burns 440 Hole I’ The Wa’ Burns Club (Dumfries) Ouplaymuir Burns Club Kirkcudbright Burns Club Partick Burns Club Langholm Ladies’ Burns Club Sandyford (Glasgow) BC Newton Stewart Burns Club Thistle Burns Club Sanquhar Black Joan Club Whitecraigs Golf Club Solway Burns Club (Annan) Schools Southern Scottish Counties Assoc. Busby Primary School St Michael’s Burns Club (Dumfries) James Aiton Primary School Stranraer & District Burns Club Eaglesham Primary School Thornhill & District Burns Club Whithorn & Dist Burns Club Renfrewshire Schools Alamo Burns Club (Paisley) Kirkinner Primary School Gourock Burns Club Greenock Burns Club Edinburgh & The Lothians Kilbarchan U C Burns Society Airts Burns Club (Musselburgh) Lodge Greenock St John’s No175 Armadale Bessie Burns Club Paisley Burns Club Balerno Burns Club Renfrewshire Assoc of BC Edinburgh Burns Club Schools Edinburgh District BC Assoc Aileymill Primary School Fauldhouse & Crofthead B C Houston Primary School Grants Braes Burns Club Ralston Primary School Harburn Men’s Rural Institute Burns Club Ravenscraig Primary School Liberton “Top O’The Hill” Lodge Liberton Marchbank Burns Club Newton Lads Burns Club 154 Burns Chronicle 2016

Dumbarton, Argyll and Bute Strathdevon Primary School Alexandria Burns Club Whitecross Primary School Dumbarton Burns Club Helensburgh Burns Club Scottish Borders Lochgoilhead Burns Club Borders Association of BC Coldstream Burns Club Schools Eyemouth Clachan Burns Club Colquhoun Park Primary School Galashiels Burns Club Craigdhu Primary School Hawick Burns Club Drymen Primary School Kelso Burns Club Whitecrook Primary School St Machan’s Primary School Fife Adastral Burns Club (Kingskettle) Lanarkshire Balmullo Burns Club Airdrie Burns Club Bowhill People’s BC (Cardenden) Allanton Jolly Beggars BC Cupar Burns Club Cumbernauld & Kilsyth District BC Dunfermline United Burns Club Hamilton Burns Club Earlsferry Burns Club Kilbryde Burns Club Fife Association of BC Lanarkshire Association of Burns Clubs Lodge Coupar o’ Fife No 19 Larkhall Burns Club Markinch Burns Club Larkhall Prof & Businessmen Pittenweem Burns Club Lodge Blantyre Kilwinning St Andrews Burns Club Ravenscraig Burns Club The Poosie Nansie Ladies BC (Kirkcaldy) Uddingston Masonic Burns Club Whifflet Burns Club Schools Auchtermuchty Primary School Schools Cairneyhill Primary School Carbrain Primary School Carleton Primary School Carluke Primary School Coaltown of Balgownie School Dulloch Primary School Stirling, Clackmannan, Kennoway Primary & Community School & West Perthshire Park Road Primary School Ben Cleuch Burns Club (Tillicoultry) Pitteuchar Primary School Denny Cross Burns Club South Park Primary School Dollar Burns Club Torbain Primary School Falkirk Burns Club Friday Night B C, (Falkirk) Greenloaning Burns Club Higginsneuk Burns Club Morton Family Burns Club Sauchie Burns Club Stirling Burns Club Stirling Clack & W Perth. Assoc Wheatsheaf Burns Club (Falkirk) Schools Alva Primary School Bainsford Primary School Deanburn Primary School Dunblane Centre Youth BC Burns Chronicle 2016 155

Tayside England - North Arbroath Burns Club Barleycornians Burns Club (Blyth) Burns Club of Abernethy Barnsley & Dist Scot Soc Dundee Burns Club Burns Federation, Yorkshire Kinross Jolly Beggars Caledonian Society of Sheffield Lodge Camperdown 317 (Dundee) Caledonian Society of Doncaster Montrose Burns Club Chester Caledonian Association Perth Burns Club Clumber BC Robert Burns Lodge of Dundee Corby Grampian Burns Club Strathearn Burns Club Corby Stewarts & Lloyd’s BC Durham & District Cal Soc Schools Huddersfield St Andrew Soc Abernethy Primary School Humberside Burns Soc Ancrum Road Primary School Grimsby & Dist Caledonian Society Warddykes Primary School St Andrew’s Soc of Bradford. St Andrew Soc of York North of Scotland Wakefield Cal. Soc. Aberdeen Burns Club Whiteadder Burns Club Elgin Burns Club Ellon Burns Club England - Midlands Fettercairn Burns Club Birmingham & Midlands Scot Soc Fraserburgh Burns Club Coventry Jolly Beggars Burns Club Inveraray Burns Club Chesterfield & District Cal Assoc Inverness Burns Club Derby Scottish Assoc & Burns Club Peterhead Burns Club Nottingham Scottish Assoc. Rosehearty Burns Club Leicester Caledonian Soc. Stonehaven (Fatherland) BC Tamworth & Dist Scottish Soc. Strathpeffer Burns Club Walsall & Dist Scottish Soc. The Enthusiasts Burns Club (Inverness) The Stick Lum Street BC (Rosehearty) London and South England Wester Ross Burns Club Burns Club of London Schools Cal Soc of Colchester & District Banff Primary School Caledonian Society of London Bervie Primary School Caledonian Club Trust Ltd Bracoden School Cheltenham Scottish Society Buchanhaven Primary School Dover & East Kent Scottish Society Clerkhill Primary School Harrow & District Caledonian Soc Duncan Forbes Primary School Herefordshire Burns Club Dunnottar Primary School Robert Burns Clubs of Guildford Ellon Primary School RT Burns Club (Dagenham) Hatton of Fintray Primary School Swindon & Dist Cal Soc Lairhillock School Laurencekirk Primary School Lhanbryde Primary School Newburgh Mathers Primary School New Elgin Primary School New Deer Primary School Ordiquhill Primary School Port Erroll School

156 Burns Chronicle 2016

Ireland Canada & U.S.A. Belfast Burns Association Ayr (Canada) Burns Society Stephenstown Pond Trust Ltd Burns Club of Atlanta The Dublin Burns Club Burns Club of Sarasota (FLa) Burns Club of Vancouver Rest of Europe Burns Society of the City of New York The Clansmen E.V. Calgary Burns Club Robert Burns Society of Maastricht Detroit Burns Club The Scottish Society of Jersey Edmonton Burns Club Halifax Burns Club Schools Halton/Peel Burns Club Kyiv School N.56 Heather & Thistle Society (Houston TX) Junior Burns Club of Secondary School of Medicine Hat Burns Club Plosk “Young Ukrainian Burnsians Nanaimo Burns Club Niagara Falls (Canada) BC Rest of World Ottawa Burns Club Auckland Robert Burns Association Robert Burns Association of North America Bendigo & Dist Caledonian Soc Inc Robert Burns Soc of Annapolis Buenos Aires Tartan Army Robert Burns Soc of Kilmarnock, Canada Burns Club of Launceston Robert Burns Soc of Midlands(SC) Canberra Highland Society & Burns Club Schiehallion Scot Heritage Soc (AB) Dubai Caledonian Society Winnipeg Robert Burns Club Dunedin Burns Club Fremantle Burns Club Non-Geographic Clubs Robert Burns Club of Melbourne Association of Past Presidents Robert Burns Assoc of the Pacific Rim. Robert Burns Guild of Speakers Wanganui River City Robert Burns Club Robert Burns Guild of Performers Western Viti Levu (Fiji) Burns Club Scottish Fire & Rescue Services BC Scottish Presidents’ Assoc (England) The mission of the Chronicle remains the furtherance of knowledge about Robert Burns and 2016 its publication in a form that is both academically responsible and clearly Edited by BILL DAWSON communicated for the broader Burnsian community.

Bill Dawson EDITOR

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robertburnswhisky www.robertburnswhisky.com No. 125 Price: 25th January, 2016. £30.00 Arran BurnsAd DRAM 210x265mm 090914.indd 1 ISBN 978-1-907931-52-909/09/2014 11:53 www.rbwf.org.uk DUMFRIES Price SOLWAY PRINT ISBN 978-1-907931-52-9 9 781907 931529 BURNS CHRONICLE £30.00