Work And No Work Songs

Most songs about aspects of work are descriptive or anecdotal, but some address and comment on conditions and issues in ways that involve or touch on protest or social comment. When the oldest settled activities of farming and weaving change from being self-employment to employment and at times exploitation of others, song lyrics report and reflect. As industry develops the mills and mines songs develop, strikes and industrial action are supported by song, and unemployment and poverty are condemned in verse.
Elsewhere in this website you will find assertions that all songs are in some sense political. Some singers go less far, but feel that songs to do with the ‘the common man’s’ working conditions are all political in essence. This chapter takes a narrower view, that political songs of work and no work are those that do not just describe or complain about work and workers, but that protest about working conditions, criticise employers, or urge change.

FARMING

They’ll tip you on the shoulder, an speir gin ye’re to fee
They’ll tell ye a fine story that’s every word a lee
They’ll tell ye a fine story, an get ye to perform,
But lads, when ye are under them, ye’ll stand the raging storm

He promised me the ae best pair I ever set my e’en upon
When I gaed hame to Barnyards there was naething there but skin and bone

The fairmer o yon muckle toon he is baith hard and sair, and the cauldest day that ever blaws, his servants get their share

Like many o my calling, I soon began to find that Benton’s study ever was his servants for to grind
Cuttin being over, and leading weel begun the Banton thocht he would get me awa frae him to run

But Martinmas it has won on, my fee’s into my pouch, And sae merrily merrily I will sing, ‘I’m oot o’ the tyrant’s clutch’

Ah’ll maybe see old Adam there, a suppin at his brose, ah’ll gie him a len o ma handkerchief tae dicht his snottery nose
Verses from various Bothy Ballads about farm working

Many of the bothy ballads that tell of life on 19th Century farms in the North-East complain about work conditions or the character of the farmer, but the planned solution is not in joint action but in the release at term time to seek work on another farm. Or if a new place of employment proved unsatisfactory, the worker could ‘run away’ and seek work at a Rascal Fair held a few weeks after the term time. Are these protesting ballads political? Singers like Jimmy Hutcheson and Geordie Murison say yes.
“Bothy ballads had quite a political slant to them, because they were quite anti, they were protesting in their own way about the conditions on the farms at the time. The hard conditions then.” Jimmy Hutcheson
Ah consciously learned aa these bothy ballads, which ye ken on reflection is just full a political statement - and of course aa the songs, they aa look intae this cry oot for help, or there was some statement bein made aboot the conditions an 'at.” Geordie Murison
Ian A Olson disagrees. “The idea that the bothy ballads are a significant form of socio-economic protest … is a fairly modern one, unsupported by contemporary evidence.” Olsen says the idea is “arrived at by a combination of simple assertion and a highly selective quotation of verses”, as shown above.
However, since modern singers consider the relevant bothy ballads to be political, and introduce and sing them as such, then if they were not political in their original setting, they become political when sung in some modern settings – as with the songs of warfare referred to in Chapter 4.
In the Lowlands two broadsheet ballads were also general in their criticism and praise.

Our farmers now they are aa growing braw, and getting quite fat on the Corn Law
Among them a tradesman can scarce make his bread, am told it is so by the Laird o Loanhead

You bonny lasses brisk and gay, that comes to Falkirk on the feeing day
I hope you'll join with me this day to sing the praise of ploughmen
The very Queen that wears the crown, and brethren of the sacred gown
And dukes and lords of high renown, all live by the gallant ploughmen
We have in Scotland Lords and Thanes, with powdered heads and glancing canes
That think themselves nae sheep shank banes, yet they all live by the ploughman

‘Twa Recruitin Sergeants’ is a Scots bothy version of a song about a recruiting party seeking to entice a farm worker off to war. It is discussed by Rab Noakes later in this book. Later bothy ballads were made to be sung in the emerging music halls, and moved towards broad humour rather than complaint.

WEAVERS AND WEAVING

The hand-loom weavers and the early spinners worked at home and were self-employed. They were at times exploited by the middlemen who bought their finished work, and in Paisley by the ‘corks’ who sold the weavers machine-made thread then bought back the completed cloth, and their livelihood was at times threatened by foreign imports, but songs about these issues are few. Instead we get a broadside that sings ‘In Praise of the Gallant Weavers’, and another that praises the weavers who behaved riotously at a wedding in Elgin.

We’re a’ met thegither here tae sit an’ tae crack, wi’ oor glesses in oor hands, an’ oor wark upon oor back
For there’s no a trade amang them a’ can either mend or mak gin it wasna for the wark o’ the weavers.
If it wasna for the weavers, what wad they do? They wadna hae claith made oot o’ oor woo’,
They wadna hae a coat neither black nor blue gin it wasna for the wark o’ the weavers
There’s smiths an’ there’s wrights an there’s mason chiels an a’. There’s doctors an’ there’s meenisters an’ them that live by law
An’ oor freens that bide oot ower the sea in Sooth America an’ they a’ need the wark o’ the weavers
The Wark O The Weavers, David Shaw

Oh all you Trades and Callings, to offend you I am loath, but if the Weavers be not fine from whence comes the fine Cloath?
Wat is’t that makes us gallant? Comes not from that Ingine, who works the Silks and Satins Strips, Stuffs and Cloath so fine
Proper New Ballad In Praise Of The Gallant Weavers, broadside

In Tom Leonard’s ‘Radical Renfrew’ he helpfully categorises the works of weaver poets he has selected. Though most of the pieces he classifies as ‘Employment’, ‘Unemployment’ and ‘Trade Unions and Co-operation’ are strongly political, each one was made as poetic verse, not as song. Glasgow weaver poet Sandy Rodger’s songs are challenging enough to explain why he was locked up in Glasgow in the Government panic of 1820 that followed the Radical War, and how his bellowing out his verses tormented his jailers. He wrote widely and richly on political topics, but not on weaving. Elsewhere I tell of the modern use and mining of Forfar weaver David Shaw’s early 19th Century song ‘The Wark o the Weavers'. The song begins "We're aa met thegither here, tae sit an tae crack". Shaw's humorous song is in praise of his fellow handloom weavers. Shaw also talks of other trades, including 'hireman chiels', and drops in an internationalism reference to “our friends in Sooth America”, who were at the time with Bolivar freeing themselves from the yoke of Spain. Shaw also points out how our own soldiers and sailors “couldna fecht for cauld” without cloth, and begins and ends with a celebration of the joys of social consumption of alcohol.
We do not find complaints in song either about the often horrific factory conditions in the cotton mills after the hand-loom was smashed by machinery, though songs from cotton spinners’ strikes resulting from complaints about work conditions and payment are given below.
Dundee jute mill worker and “leader of a left-wing militant group” Mary Brooksbank was also a fine song and poem maker of the first half of the 20th Century, and her songs of mill life survived to become popular in the Revival. Her best known song, ‘Oh Dear Me’, was a development of a verse that she first heard in 1912, “They used tae sing it in the street and up and down the Passes between the frames in the mills”.

Oh dear me, the mill’s gaen fast, the puir wee shifters canna get a rest
Shiftin bobbins coorse and fine. Wha the hell wad work for ten and nine?

In the Revival, noted singer Sheena Wellington made a new song lauding the work and determination of the ‘Wimmin o Dundee’.

COAL MINING

Coal mining is rich in songs. Up until 1799 the colliers, and the salters, were in effect slaves. Not only the workers, but their families, were thirled to their place. So in the love song ‘Collier Laddie’ the girl who prefers a collier lad over a noble suitor is choosing not just ‘the wee cot hoose’, but slavery for her children. Later, in a broadside ‘The Truck Masters’ of Gartsherrie and Summerlee in Lanarkshire are castigated for their system of truck shops, where colliers had no option but to buy goods on credit from the master at such a cost and rate of interest that they were in effect still tied by unpayable debt to the pit.

As for some of our masters they are great men, and one of them a ruler of our native land
I wonder what’s the reason he does not stop the infamous system of a truck shop
The reason is obvious and plain to be seen. The profits are great altho’ they are mean
They rob the poor man in every stage and they very soon make him a small enough wage

In another broadside, ‘The Pitman’s Union’, a miner steps up apologetically to a pretty maid a-milking.

Your pardon is granted, young collier, she replies. But do you belong to the brave union boys? He equivocates, but he is a pitman “as black as any sloe” as her father was, so she “put her arms around him like violets round the vine’.
As with the bothy ballads, old mining songs that have no political content are in Revival performance labelled as political. Pit disaster songs tell of loss, but not of blame. ‘The Blantyre Explosion’ is a lament for the dead. In ‘The Donibristle Moss Moran Disaster’ of 1901 some error was made, “someone put in a stopping”, but who?
Humour is deployed as a weapon in miner poet and dramatist Joe Corrie's song ‘It’s Fine to Keep in Wi the Gaffer’, in his play ‘Hogmanay’.

For mony a year I hae wrocht doon alow, but never in bits that are wet or are low
For I mak it my business wherever I go aye tae keep in wi the gaffer
When the singer has a foreman who is a Mason, he ‘beards the goat in its den’, when he works under a musician he learns to play cornet, for a Salvationer he carries the lamp, but when his gaffer bets on the horses, the singer ends with ‘my shirt in the pawn’.

As the Revival was beginning, in 1959 at Auchengeich Colliery near Glasgow 47 miners were killed in an underground fire. Norman Buchan wrote ‘The Auchengeich Disaster’, to the tune of the song that had so pleased him in 1951, ‘Skippin Barfit Throu the Heather’, and was delighted when within a few years the new song appeared on a recording labelled ‘trad’, given the accolade of acceptance into tradition.
The author’s mother was from the mining village Plean near Stirling, and my maternal grandfather, Hugh Reynolds, told me first-hand about a 1921 disaster in one of Thorniecroft’s Plean pits. I researched more information in the local newspaper, learned whom an investigation had found to blame for the deaths, and took my information to the primary school where my mother and her siblings had studied, and had been attended by the dead miners. I worked with a Primary 6 class in Plean Primary school, and together we wrote a song, ‘My Collier Sweetheart’, using the first verse of one old song and the tune of another old ballad.

My mother said I could not have a collier, if I did it would break her heart
I didn’t care what my mother told me, I had a collier for my sweetheart
But one day up Cadger’s Loan, the siren screamed at Pit Four head
All of Plean ran to find out, “How many living, how many dead?”
Down in the dark of the Carbrook Dook the young shot-firer fired his shot
Dynamite blew up the section, twelve lads dead, seventy caught
Their holiday bags were lying waiting, the men were lying down below
The wee canaries they died too, salty tears in the sad Red Rows
The young shot-firer had no certificate, my young collier lost his life
Fate was cruel to my sweetheart and I will never be a wife

STRIKING AND UNION ACTION

Strike songs are preeminently used for direct action, and often are more chant or roughly worked couplet than song. Their use is to taunt or chastise bosses or strike-breakers, to assert solidarity and sometimes to explain themselves to passersby or the reporting media. Other than in media reports the lyrics seldom survive. A rare exception was discovered by Professor Christopher Whatley in court papers relating to an 1824 strike of Glasgow cotton spinners where violence had included a strike-breaker being shot. Strike-breakers were called Nobs, and the girl workers on strike gathered around the works gate where they “shouted and hurrad and sang what they called the ‘Nobs Song’”. Whatley gives us lyrics for only two of the five or six Nobs Songs the strikers are reported to have known. One begins We are the braw chiels that belongs to the wheel, That earns their bread by the spinning o’t, and continues in criticism of the mill owners,

I think they would tak both the quick & the dead, and howk up a Corpse for the Skinning o’t
Their houses are Shinny their children are braw, their tables are costly, their privies warst of a
But when they go on they will soon get a fa and wha will they be the beginning o’t

The other song refers to the shooting, saying “Wasn’t he a fool to come out and be shot?” Both songs are set to old Scots tunes. Roy Palmer reports that in 1837 there was another strike of Glasgow cotton spinners, and passes on the remark of historian Dorothy Thompson that the very influential Cotton Spinners case “really led straight into Chartism.” A blackleg was shot, union officials were arrested and sentenced to transportation for seven years, their crime was “being leaders of an association engaged in illegal activities (mainly picketing)”. Palmer prints a broadside ballad about them, ‘The Cotton Spinners’ Farewell’, which says that

Our trial they postponed for time after time, indictment on indictment, and crime upon crime
Which turned out all a humbug, for this was their claw to prevent combination in Caledonia

The accused were sent by ship from Glasgow’s Broomielaw to the hulks at Woolwich, and pardoned in 1840. In 1903 Robert Ford wrote that prior to the 1850s Crimean War the children of Glasgow sang in the streets, to the Jacobite tune ‘Wha Wouldna Fecht For Chairlie’, Wha saw the Cotton-spinners? Wha saw them gaun awa?. Wha saw the Cotton-spinners sailing frae the Broomielaw?
A 19th Century Dundee broadside song, ‘It’s No’ the Clean Tattie Ava’, has two verses about a railway strike, then moves on to criticise young laddies who marry before they’ve enough income, to praise the “wee chapper laddies” who work for only “three hanies a week”, and then cheers the success of the local football team, who won “the Coonty Cup” last year and should “scope it this year”.

Noo the great railway strike that did happen, I'm sure it upset ane an aa
An ye may think it's fun what the blacklegs have done, they're no the clean tattie ava
Noo, bad luck tae aa head men o’ railways, an may they sune get a doon fa
For to work day and night, it’s far far frae right, it’s no the clean tattie ava

Unusually, the composer of this song is shown. “Written composed and sung with success by William Gordon, Dundee.” This suggests he was a music hall artiste performing between 1880 and1900.
The Dundee mill lassies knew how to keep their emotional energy high on the picket line. A newspaper photograph from 100 years ago shows shawled Dundee jute strikers playing 'Jingo-ring' as they dance 'The Merry Matanzie'. That same spirit, and the combination of bouncy old tunes and simple determined lyrics, also typified the mass Holy Loch peace protests of the 1960s. Mary Brooksbank, poetess of the Dundee mills, in the early 20th Century created her own version of an older strike song, to a tune by George F Root that began life as an American Civil War marching song, 'Tramp, Tramp, Tramp'. It was applied to the US hymn 'Jesus loves the little children' but also used in many political campaigns to advocate that hearers 'Vote vote vote for [insert candidate's name here]'. We are out for higher wages, as we have a right to do. And we'll never be content till we get our ten per cent for we have a right tae live as well as you.
Nigel Gatherer (1985) comments, “It is easy to imagine Mary Brooksbank leading the singing of this song during a strike”, and suggests she must have based her rhyme on an older song, since a song about a Dock strike in London in the 1880s has the chorus: Strike boys, strike for better wages, strike boys, strike for better pay. Go on fighting at the docks, stick it out like fighting cocks, go on fighting 'til the bosses they give way.
Another strike song, from the 1926 Miners' Strike, tells of the arrest of the author’s grandfather and other Union officials for peaceful picketing in the village of Plean where he was Union Branch Secretary. He was sentenced to six months hard labour, and blacklisted from the mines. The tune is ‘The Wearing of the Green’.

Oh the model village Plean, oh the model village Plean
They’re going to build a prison wall round the model village Plean
You go into the court, and you stand before the Dean
And the Prosecuting Council says, “It’s Reynolds frae the Plean”

Fife Playwright Joe Corrie’s ‘In Time O’ Strife’ play of 1926 begins with a song borrowed from America, with the tune ‘John Brown’s Body’. We’ll hang every blackleg to the sour apple tree, as we go marching on.

Glasgow shipyard union official Josh Shaw wrote songs and sang them in meetings and on the picket line in the 1950s and 60s. His ‘The Lockout Song’ says The shipbuilding bosses are hon’rable men. They sign their agreements wi’ gold-plated pen
But for all that they’re worth sure, it’s only a farceYou might as well use them for lighting the gas
To the tune ‘Carolina’ he wrote, “Nothing could be finer than to form a picket lina in the morning.”

The 1971 Upper Clyde Shipbuilders sit-in was strongly supported by West of Scotland singers and songmakers at concerts and demos. Matt McGinn wrote two songs, so did Jim McLean, who then recorded and issued an album of UCS songs. In the Political Song Archive at Glasgow Caledonian University is a typed song lyric headed “Dedicated to the Lee Jeans Girls, to be sung to the tune of ‘Joe Hill’”. The 1981 Lee Jeans factory women workers occupied their factory to save their jobs. There are no clues on the song’s provenance. Here are verses one and five. In the latter the writer says there will be support from other trade unionists. I dreamt I saw a girl last night, astanding by my bed. She said ‘I want to keep the right to earn my daily bread’. You’ll have workers from the pit, the workers from the yards.They’re on the side of girls of grit, who will not take their cards.In 1985 Edinburgh school teacher Nancy Nicolson wrote one of the rare anti-agents-of-the-law songs, a sombre protest about the use of police horses to charge coal miners on strike, ‘Maggie’s Pit Ponies’.

Here come the cavalry, here come the troops, here come Maggie’s Pit Ponies
Watch for the batons and watch for the boots and watch your back, Miner Johnnie

Nicolson’s bus to work passed the road-end where there were pickets for Bilston Glen [coalmine]. “It was just heartrending seeing these guys standing there. Then, at a teachers’ meeting in Edinburgh we were watching a piece of newsreel, of horses running into and through a picket line. My friend said, ‘Those bloody horses’. I said ‘The horses are just doing what they were trained to do.’ And I looked at the boys on their backs, doing what they were trained to do. I told my husband Denness, and he said, ‘Aye, some bloody pit ponies’. The song just grew itself.
“I sang it at a concert, an this fine lookin man in a suit came marchin towards me, I thought ‘I’ve done it, this is the day I’m gonnae get bopped in the face’. He says, ‘That song’, I says ‘What song?’ ‘The miners song, where’d ye get it?’ I put my chin up ready to be hit and said, ‘I wrote it’. He took me by the lapels to be even closer, and he says, ‘On the button, hen! On the button!’ He was Jackie Aitchison, one of the miners’ leaders.” Nancy Nicolson
Nancy sang her song at an 1985 ‘Writers For Miners’ fund-raising event organized by Jim Kelman in Glasgow’s Third Eye Centre. The list of performers is a roll call of politically committed artists. Poets reading their work included Liz Lochhead, Edwin Morgan, Freddie Anderson, Aonghas MacNeacail, Hamish Henderson and Tom Leonard. Peter Nardini sang his furious ‘Now That Hitler’s Back In Style’, Danny Kyle sang a protest blues called ‘If You’re Black Get Back’, other singers and musicians were Dave Anderson of Wildcat Theatre, Alan Tall, Jim Daily and the writer of this book, Gerda Stephenson. And Rab Noakes, who sang the World War One song ‘When This Bloody War Is Over’.
Small squibs made to be sung in trade union settings only accidentally get into print. There have surely been many such songs, undocumented, over the years. Nancy Nicolson sang the author “a very political song that you won’t have heard, because I just used to sing it among teachers in E.I.S. thingies [Educational Institute of Scotland union meetings] about the heidie [head teacher]. “There’s lots of splendid heidies now, but there’s still a few of this ilk.”

Ah’ll butter ma breid on baith sides, eat ma cake and have it. Ah’m the heidie, Ah’m the boss, Ah run the E.I.S.
Ye needna work, ye needna strike, buy a Rover no a bike. Transfer the staff ye dinnae like, join the Heidie Tong

UNEMPLOYMENT

Why have you no songs, Poets, For the men who march through the towns?
Demanding bread for their children, and rags for their naked bones.
Why have you no songs, Poets, for the right against the wrong?
For the slave against the tyrant, to make him proud and strong?
The gift you have, oh, Poets, is the greatest given to man,
But while the poor march songless, you spend your lives in vain.

Joe Corrie's poem of the 1930s ‘Hunger Marchers’ pointed out the need for song to support the marchers as they trudged along, and to explain who they were and why they marched. Though Corrie says they had no songs, when in 1933 a national march came to Edinburgh, and camped in Parliament Square, “from parts of the encampment came snatches of song.” Probably popular and national song, but equally probably small squibs of topical parody. The march was reported in ‘The March: the story of the historic Scottish hunger march’, written by Comrade Harry McShane and published in 1933 by The National Unemployed Workers Movement.
The police kept the surprised Edinburgh citizens from ‘loitering’ to talk with the marchers, and Princes Street Gardens were kept closed from them when on the second night they camped along Princes Street.But the marchers had won a tactical morale victory on the first day that sustained spirits, with a spontaneous act of song-led mass trespass on Royal ground that was reported only in the Communist Party’s ‘Daily Worker’, although the other aspects of the marchers’ activity in Edinburgh were reported in the Press.
The marchers’ road to a mass meeting at the Edinburgh Meadows lay down the Royal Mile, “leading to the historic Royal palace of Holyrood. Down go the swinging columns, down right to the gates of Holyrood. ‘Turn to the right’, says a police official. The March leaders turn a deaf ear. ‘Straight on!’ ‘Straight on!’ it is, right through the Palace grounds itself. The pompous official in charge at the Palace almost took an apoplectic fit! His eyes literally bulged out with mixed astonishment and horror.
“In go the columns, a mile of flaming, flaunting scarlet banners, headed by the Maryhill [Flute] Band playing Connolly’s ‘Rebel Song’ as if their lungs would burst. What a sight! The proletariat, the indomitable proletariat in their ragged clothes, have stepped into the most sacred precincts in all Scotland!” Co-leader of the 1916 Dublin Easter Rising, Edinburgh born James Connolly’s ‘Rebelsong’ was followed by “the thunderous battle cry of the world’s workers, ‘The Internationale’.” The age of the two songs played and sung makes the point that the march had no key song of its own to sing.
Wry selfmocking parodies like the following clever Dundee song of unemployment and ‘signing on’ at the Bureau, to the flighty tune of 'Bye Bye Blackbird', would have worked well when sung on a march or picket line, but its detailed lyric and lack of chorus make it a soloist's song, not one the marchers could have joined in with.

We’re the boys fae the tap o the hill, we never worked, we never will. We’re on the Bureau
Just like the lads fae Peddie Street, mention work – we tak tae oor feet. We’re on the Bureau
We went doon ae Thursday for oor money, the cash clerk said, “Noo lads, youse think you’re funny
You’re oot o here ye see, for noo ye’re on the UAB”. Bureau, bye bye

Many noble aspirational ballads or sarcastic squib songs were surely sung from platforms at demos, or annually on Mayday on Glasgow Green or at the Miners' Gala on the Edinburgh Meadows. Before the Folk Revival was there a lack of songs that all could join the chorus of on the marches and at demos to encapsulate whatever point they were making? If there were such songs other than ‘The Red Flag’ and ‘The Internationale’, I have not located them.

POVERTY AND HARD TIMES

And still must he labour mid hardship and care at delving, at ploughing, or spinning o’t
Wi belly aft pinched, and wi back nearly bare, for comfort, there’s now a sad thinning o’t
His substance is seized on for taxes or rent, the priest comes and tythes him, then preaches content
Wi sickness and sorrow his frame’s sairly bent, pale want on his face shows the grinning o’t
The Spinning O’t, tune The Rock And The Wee Pickle Tow, words Sandy Rodger

Speak no ae word about reform, nor petition Parliament
A wiser scheme I’ll now propose, I’m sure ye’ll gie consent
Send up a chiel or twa like me as sample o the flock
Whase hallow cheeks will be sure proof o a hinging toom meal pock
And sing, Oh waes me
Tell them ye’re wearied o the chain that hauds the state thegither
For Scotland wishes just to tak gude nicht wi ane anither
We canna thole, we canna bide, this hard unwieldy yoke
For wark and want but ill agree wi a hinging toom meal pock
And sing, Oh waes me
The Toom Meal Pock, John Robertson, from ‘Radical Renfrew’

The poorly paid 19th Century broadside ballad scribblers waxed very eloquent on the hardships and evils of poverty. ‘Remember the poor’ begins “Cold winter has come with its cold frosty breath, And the leaves fall fast from the tree”. ‘The pauper and the minister’ is satirically cheerier – “I'm living on the parish now, as happy as a king, From morn to night I've nought to do but whistle dance and sing.” In ‘Scotland's Stagnation’ is “The oldest person in the world, on land or on the water, Never saw such times before since Sampson killed his daughter”.
The Hungry Thirties produced a music hall comment on a pantomime villain, the ‘Means Test Man’ who assessed an unemployed worker’s right to claim financial benefit.

Ah’m no the factor or the gas man, Napoleon or Ronald Coleman
When you hear me rat tat tat upon your door, ‘Have you money in the bank or money in the store?’
You better look out or else ah’ll get ye, try and dodge me if you can
For ah’m neither Santa Claus or Doug-a-las Fairbanks, I am the Means Test Man

A newer song by actor Duncan Macrae based on the mawkish ‘My Ain Folk’, appears in the Second Rebels Ceilidh Song Book.

They’ll never be forgotten, the days that we lived through
When we hung aboot the Gorbals an we sterved on the Buroo
Wi the lassies playin peever, an the laddies sclimmin dykes
An the weemin gaun thir duster an the polis gaun their bikes
Ma Ain Close, tune My Ain Folk, words Duncan Macrae

And the smallest of squibs, hardly a sparkler, can be preserved in family memory. The author’s Auntie May often sang two lines from the popular song ‘Ain’t We Got Fun?’ with one word changed. There’s nothing surer, the rich get rich and the poor get - children