Scotland Hasnae Got A Queen

The song-making impulse and sense of celebration of nationhood given new life by the ‘Lifting o the Stane’, led to renewed interest in old Scots songs and the creation of new songs supporting Scottish independence that applauded acts of resistance to authority, and worked to support a developing sense of shared identity and aspiration. The ubiquitous ‘Rebels Ceilidh Songbook’ was then the essential source of political songs.
Marion Blythman, wife of Morris Blythman who wrote under the name Thurso Berwick, says, “When they were blowing up pillarboxes because of the Elizabeth the Second inscription, Morris wrote ‘Nae Liz the Twa, Nae Lillabet the Wan’ in response to that. Some people say Hamish was the bomber, but naw! That wasn’t Hamish’s style! When Morris wrote ‘Sky High Joe’ we knew that whoever was doing it had got the dynamite from the Carron Iron Works. ‘I want it for a special job, I want the real Mackay.’
“Morris always said the Orangemen had the best tunes. The first time the BBC wanted me to ask Morris about broadcasting, I said they’d have to play the ‘Coronation Coronach’. ‘Oh’ says the woman, ‘They’ll not like that – it’s the tune to ‘The Sash’.’ I told her to forget it! Morris wasn’t an Orangeman. My mother got his politics right, she put her finger on it once. ‘You two would be all right in the Morris Blythman Party.’ He liked the Orangemen’s tunes, and he wasn’t anti-Catholic, but the whole magic, mystic nature of the Catholic Church was anathema to Morris. I would say he was philosophically against the darkness of the Catholic Church, the way the people didn’t really know what was going on, all the stuff about faith. But he wasn’t anti-Catholic, and his friend Hugh MacDonald kept on being a sort of Catholic, I think.” Marion Blythman
Blythman himself wrote that the 1952 announcement that the new Queen, Elizabeth, was to be styled The Second, though there had never been a first Queen Elizabeth of Great Britain, “sparked off a wave of anti-Royalist songs, and the ‘National Weekly’ published many of them. We also pushed them by singing everywhere and anywhere we could. People were shocked by this sort of thing. The Scots then had been brainwashed into a complete fear of and respect for authority.”
Blythman used shock tactics. “In the early days of the anti-Royalist songs I was put out of the Scottish Youth Hostels Association’s annual meeting, was put out of Scottish National Party meetings, frowned upon everywhere. Nowadays they are common parlance.”
The Edinburgh People’s Festival was ‘proscribed as a Communist Front’ and killed off in 1954, but the Bo’ness Ceilidhs continued to thrive. New political songs responding to events had a place where they could be sung and celebrated. In the same year as the demise of the People’s Festival a chapbook style booklet of song lyrics was published, ‘The Rebels Ceilidh Song Book’. The 35 songs mix old and new Ceilidh favourites in Scots and Gaelic. The cover, by Bo’ness art teacher Jimmy Dewar, packs together references to songs and personalities. In one example, a Scots terrier harasses the policeman in pursuit of the couple running away with the Stane. The terrier’s teeth are the initials HH for Hamish Henderson. Henderson’s connection with the 1953 newly formed School of Scottish Studies within Edinburgh University gave him at last a secure base to develop his collecting and documenting work on Scottish traditional song and story.
The ‘Rebels’ booklet seems to have been assembled and edited jointly by Morris Blythman, Willie Kellock and Angus McGillveray. In 1994 McGillveray wrote that the Ceilidh Song Book was published in 1951, and the Introduction to Song Book No 2 in 1965 gave the publication date of Book 1 as 1951/2. However, unless there was a first edition of which no copies have been traced, and which omits several songs in the edition that was widely distributed, the correct date is late 1954 or 1955. Three songs in what appears to be the first edition of the Song Book tell of the February 1953 blowing up by ‘Sky High Joe’ of pillar boxes that bore the EIIR symbol. Another song details aspects of the November 1953 trial of four seditious young members of the Scottish Republican Army.

O, Sky-High Joe is on the go, some gelignite tae buy
So he gangs tae the Carron Iron Works for tae get a guid supply
When the Pillar Box sees Sky-High Joe it blanches deadly pale
“Staun back, staun back, wi yuir hair sae black, Ah dinnae want your air-mail”
But when ye’re postin Valentines wi a yaird o fizzin fuse
Ye hinnae ony time tae be polite, ye’ve an awfy lot tae lose
Tune The Overgate, words Thurso Berwick

An were ye up in Embro, Jock, an were ye quate an douce?
Ir were ye packan gelignite aa roun St Andro’s Hoose?
Ah gaed tae the High Coort Pantomime, the law wis daean a play.
They hed fowr fellies in the dock they cried the S.R.A.
Sky-High Pantomime, tune Harlaw, words Thurso Berwick

The 1954 Rebels’ St Andrew’s Nicht Ceilidh of 27th November 1954 in Bridgeness Welfare Hall helps us get closer to the correct date of the first edition of the Song Book. The Bo’ness newspaper report tells of the singing that night of the ‘new ballad The Lea-Rig’, written as ‘a hansel sang’ for the birthday night of the Bo’ness pub that had received its licence in November 1953.

O, Tam Dalyell cam sookin in, he’s a frightfully decent chap, “I’ve fotch my Saft Soap Bottle, Heah! Would you like a tiny drap?”
Sydney Smith wis mair nor there, his elbows moved sae free, ye’d swore it wis the links o Forth Gaun doon tae meet the sea
Twas Berwick-Kellock rimed this song, an they were warst av a’. Yer whisky’s blunt, it willna write, juist hand me doon a saw
The Lea-Rig, tune To The Begging We Will Go, words Morris Blythman and Willie Kellock

“The November 1954 Ceilidh programme ended with the singing of that new Bo’ness ballad ‘The Lea-Rig’, which was composed jointly by Thurso Berwick, the Glasgow poet, and William Kellock.” It was sung by John McEvoy and Enoch Kent, accompanied on guitar by Josh McRae, and “great enthusiasm swelled the chorus, ‘To the Lea-Rig we will go’.” The band was Alisdair Hunter’s Ceilidh Band, and among the many other artistes were Ian M’Rae (Josh McRae) and his Glasgow College of Art Guitarists, and Hamish Henderson.
Twenty verses from the October 1954 ‘The Lea-Rig’ are included in the ‘Song Book’. The song is a Rabelasian account of excessive alcohol consumption, cut down ‘for safety’s sake’ from the original sixty verses of ‘mainly social characters in Bo'ness. Many of the verses describing local personalities of the past and present are omitted.” Willie Kellock
Charlie Auld had built the new Lea-Rig pub alongside his licensed grocer premises in Dean Road. The pub became the famed venue for more frequent smaller scale ceilidhs. Harry Constable remembers that “on a Monday and a Friday night we would meet in the Lea-Rig lounge. It wasn’t a concert ceilidh, it was almost like a debating society. We had people from the Labour Party, communists, left wing socialists, nationalists, it was remarkable. But not only left wingers. Discussions took place, and I believe a lot of people learned a lot. I think the Rebels Literary Society helped people to gain knowledge. It wasn’t just core politics, it was about passion, and patriotism, and people like Clydesider John Maclean and Irish rebel James Connolly. I went to a Gaelic class when I was quite young, and I met Willie Kellock and Charlie Auld there, and ended up joining the Literary Club. I was the first Treasurer they had had in a while.”
There was of course much singing too, and most of the Song Book songs have some political element. The three songs about the blowing up of EIIR pillarboxes by ‘Sky High Joe’ give few clues to his identity, other than he had ‘hair sae black’ and was a ‘big black-coated chiel’. Hamish Henderson’s biographer, Timothy Neat, is confident that Henderson was ‘Sky High Joe’, but the hair colour is wrong, and others I interviewed do not agree, feeling such violent action did not chime with his personality. I was told that black-haired piper Seamus MacNeill was suspected, and that “people always joked, ‘Don’t give Seamus any letters to post’.” Whoever lit the fuses, the campaign was effective, and pillar boxes in Scotland bore no royal initials until in 2008 a box transplanted from the South was spotted on an industrial estate in Linlithgow.
The title of another song, ‘Sky-High Pantomime’, suggests it too was about pillar boxes, but it tells of the four students accused of being part of the Scottish Republican Army, plotting to blow up St Andrew’s House, the base of the government’s Scottish Office. The song 'Grieves Galorum' celebrates the 1952 prison sentence given conscientious objector Michael Grieve, son of Hugh MacDiarmid. Grieve was not the only Scot to be incarcerated for refusing to ‘fight for an English queen’, songwriter Jim Maclean did likewise.
Hamish Henderson contributed to the Song Book two songs from WW2 days, the very famous 'D-Day Dodgers' and, anonymously, 'The Taxi Driver's Hat'. His 'John Maclean March' is included, and under the pseudonym Seamus Mor his 1948 ‘Ballad of the Men of Knoydart’, one of two songs of Highlanders reclaiming land. The furiously vituperative tone of Henderson’s attack on English landlord Lord Brocket shows why his own name is not attached to the lyric. The other, Blythman’s ‘Ballad of Balelone’ tells in more wryly humorous style of a 1952 ‘land raid’.
Norman Buchan's 'The Happy Blunderer' expressed worry about the defeated Germans being allowed to reform an army. Iain Nicolson's 'The Labour Provost' addressed a more local issue, the former Labour Party left wingers who shunted themselves right-wards when they got into political power as Glasgow councillors.

When I was young and fu o fire, tae smash the Tories was my firm desire
But noo I’m auld I hae mair sense, I just blame the lot on Providence
I am a man o’ high degree, Lord Provost o’ this great cittee
The workers want a world tae gain, but I’m content wi’ my badge and chain
The Labour Provost, tune The White Cockade, words Iain Nicolson

Four Gaelic songs are included without translation in the Song Book - Foghnan na h-Alba (The Badge of Scotland), ‘Mhic Iarla Nam Bratach Bana’ about the white banners of an earl’s son as his fine birlinn sails, the dance-accompanying port a beul ‘S Ann an Bhoidhich’, and ‘Tiugainn do Scalpaidh’ in which bard John Morrison praises his Hebridean island home of Scalpay.
Four songs came from the older political struggles of Ireland. In discussion with me Harry Constable emphasised the importance of Irish rebel songs in the Bo’ness movement, and the political example of James Connolly. “The Irish songs were important, but they did it by the gun, we do it by the ballot box. Dominic Behan’s song ‘The Patriot Game’, that tells how James Connolly was ‘shot in a chair, his wounds from the battle all bleeding and bare’. The cause of freedom can be fought for in different ways. Ireland has been a sad country, all the way down the line from Brian Boru.” Harry Constable
The ‘Rebels Ceilidh Song Book’, like the ceilidhs, was not a narrow party political product. Willie Kellock's introduction says “This book is Labour, it is Nationalist, it is Tory in the original sense of the word – it is a Rebel Song Book uniting the varieties of Scottish Rebels to the realisation that what’s wrong with the world is wrong here and now in Scotland.”
In April 1955 the Linlithgowshire Journal reported about this first Song Book that it not only had “become popular in Scotland, but it is beginning to be known overseas.” They explained that Russian poet Marshak, attending an International Burns Festival, was presented with a copy. “He was so impressed that he asked for copies to take back home with him for presentation to the Moscow University Library.” Marshak went on to translate several Rebels songs into Russian.
The first ‘Rebels Ceilidh Song Book’ was distributed throughout Scotland, and young singers seized hungrily on it to learn songs. Contexts in which to hear the songs were developing. As well as the Heckleburnie Club and Thistle Society, in 1954 Blythman adopted the London model of a Ballads and Blues Club developed by Ewan MacColl and A L Lloyd, and started such a club for the boys of the all-male Glasgow secondary school where he taught French, Allan Glen’s Academy. He brought traditional singers like Aberdonian diva Jeannie Robertson to the Club, and to the ceilidhs in his and his wife Marion’s home in Balgrayhill.
In an appreciation of Blythman published in ‘The Scotsman’, singer Jimmie Macgregor wrote, “Through these vastly enjoyable, and always crowded house parties, Morris, by a process of illustration, propaganda, encouragement, education and sometimes downright bullying won us all away from the commercial music of the time, and introduced us to the traditions of our own country.”

Now her sister Meg had a bonnie pair o legs, but she didnae want a German or a Greek
eter Townsend wis her choice, but he didnae suit the boys so they selt him up the creek
O, it’s here’s tae the Lion, tae the bonnie Rampant Lion, an a lang stretch ti its paw
Gie a Hampden roar, an we’re oot the door, Ta-Ta to Chairlie’s Maw
Coronation Coronach, tune The Sash, words Thurso Berwick

O, Scotland hesna got a King, and hesna got a Queen
Ye canna hae the saicint Liz whan the first yin’s never been
Nae Liz the Twa, nae Lillabet the Wan, nae Liz will ever dae
We’ll mak oor land republican in a Scottish breakaway
Her man’s cried the Duke o Edinbury, he’s wan o they kiltie Greeks.
"O dinna blaw ma kilts awa, cos Lizzie wears the breeks
Coronation Coronach, tune The Sash, words Thurso Berwick

THE BLYTHMAN HOUSE, BALGRAYHILL, GLASGOW
Josh Macrae, Andy Hunter, Jimmie McGregor, Morris Blythman, Nigel Denver, Duncan Macrae with his 'Wee Cock Sparra'. Stone and bunnet represent Johnnie McEvoy, composer of 'The Wee Magic Stane'.