The person to whom I allude is Robert Burns, an Ayrshire ploughman, whose poems were some time ago published in a country town in the West of Scotland, with no other ambition, it would seem, than to circulate among the inhabitants of the country where he was born, and to obtain a little fame from those who have heard of his talents. I hope I shall not be thought to assume too much if I endeavour to place him in a higher point of view, to call for a verdict of his country on the merit of his works, and to claim for him those honours which their excellence appears to deserve..
(Henry Mackenzie in The Lounger, 9 December 1786)
The first step on the journey toward this wider, international recognition of Robert Burns was taken in the very place where he himself had been born – Alloway – when, in the summer of 1801, a company of nine gentlemen met at the King’s Arms Inn in that little village a few miles outside Ayr, on the invitation of the Reverend Hamilton Paul. They had convened to remember the young man some of them had known very well as it had only been five years since he had been laid in his grave. This intimate, informal gathering is now accepted as being the first of what was to become known as the ‘Burns Supper’. The Burns Chronicle and Club Directory of January 1983 gives the following account:
In the summer of 1801… friends of Burns proposed to dine at the cottage in which he was born, and to offer a tribute to the memory of departed genius. The party was small but select and formed a most interesting group from the circumstances of nearly one half of the company having their names associated with some of the most gratifying particulars in the poet’s history… Two gentlemen of distinguished philanthropy and taste waited on the author of the following Odes, and requested him to produce a short poem on the occasion. The author never saw Burns, but was an early and enthusiastic admirer of his writings. The party was such as Burns himself would have joined in with satisfaction.
The author mentioned, the Rev Paul, had the typical reaction of the clergyman to Burns, in that he expressed himself an admirer of the works rather than the man. Yet his admiration was genuine and showed itself in his continued concern for the poet’s name and fame after his death. Paul was to produce a readable life of Burns in 1819. A lifelong bachelor, Mr Paul is said to have been ‘a member of every literary circle, connected with every club, chaplain to every society, a speaker at every meeting, the poet of every curious occurrence, and the welcome guest at every table.’ Now, here he was at the very first Burns Supper, a very ‘curious occurrence’ in 1801, rising as the Laureate of this first impromptu Alloway Burns club and already to hand with his rhymes about it. When he rose to deliver that particular Ode to that particular group it is certain that the reverend gentleman had no idea what he was starting. Regrettably, we have no idea what he said because no record was kept, or if it was, it has been long lost, but he was to repeat the service annually for the next decade, and on his ninth, and last occasion, he recited the following Farewell to the Allowa’ Club. It is added here because it might give us something of the flavour of his earlier verse to the poet. This kind of well-meant rhyming was to become a tradition at Burns Suppers and set a trend that would last down through the years.
Nine times the annual lyre I’ve strung
Nine times the Poet’s praises sung;
Thus have the Muses all, by turns,
Paid homage to the shade of Burns.
While you, the patrons of the Nine
Delighted, charm’d, enraptur’d, fir’d
By love of poesy and wine
Politely listen’d and admir’d:
But should my day be overcast
And this effusion prove my last,
In words that oft have met your ear,
This last request permit me here:
When yearly, ye assemble a’
One round, I ask it with a tear,
To him, the Bard, that’s far awa’.
Thus, the good man imprinted himself in the very first pages of the Robert Burns story as far as it has been told by Burns Suppers. Mr Paul had organised the original event on behalf of the ‘two gentlemen of philanthropy and taste’, John Ballantyne, the Provost of Ayr, and the lawyer, Robert Aiken, (listed as ‘Aitken’). Both men had been good friends to Burns. Burns acknowledged this in dedicating The Twa Brigs o Ayr to Ballantyne and The Cotter’s Saturday Night to Aiken. ‘Orator Bob’ had been a most zealous enthusiast for the Kilmarnock edition. Burns himself attested that Aiken sold the book single-handedly throughout Ayrshire by reciting the poems in it at every opportunity. This was word-of-mouth plus.
The others attending on that auspicious evening were William Crawford of Doonside, whose father had engaged Burns’s father as a gardener at Alloway; Patrick Douglas of Garallan, who was to have helped Burns obtain a post in Jamaica in 1786; Primrose Kennedy of Drumellan; Hew Fergusson, Barrackmaster at Ayr: David Scott, like Ballantyne, a banker at Ayr and Thomas Jackson, then Rector of the Air [sic] Academy and later Professor of Natural Philosophy at St Andrews. They all deserve to be remembered, for the Burns Movement, as such, may be said to have begun with their initial action. The Burns Chronicle account goes on:
These nine sat down to a comfortable dinner, of which sheep’s head and haggis formed an interesting part. The Address to the Haggis was read and every toast was drank [sic] by three times three, i.e., by nine…
This reference to the toast is only one of the links to Freemasonry in the Burns connection. It cannot be overstressed how important to Burns this connection was. The present Lord Elgin, to whom the present writer is much indebted for historic Burns material, is himself a Past Grand Master Mason of Scotland. During the Symposium on ‘Aspects of Burns’ at the 1976 Burns Festival in Ayr, he had this comment to make on why Burns was drawn to become a Freemason at Tarbolton in 1781.
It is no secret that for a society of men to prosper successfully in so small a country as Scotland and inhibited by the fullest freedom of travel other than by horse or foot, this meant all men living in a particular area. This growth of the thoughtful, or speculative, lodges of Freemasons was one of the most important elements in the building up of the character of Scotland. Membership meant the observance of discipline and the acceptance of responsibility, but the rewards were many. A wider understanding in all walks of life, and a greater encouragement to be articulate and at ease among his fellow men, were among the opportunities which opened to Burns.
One can see why he would have jumped at such opportunities and why the social possibilities would also be seized with enthusiasm. The Masons repaid his fervour by underwriting the original Kilmarnock edition in 1786 and subsidising the Edinburgh edition in the following year. When they proclaimed him ‘Brother Burns – Caledonia’s Bard’ before all the Grand Lodges of Scotland gathered in Edinburgh at that time, it was a matter of national as much as Masonic importance. If Burns had not been a Mason he would not have been a published poet. It is as simple as that.
The same applies to the rites and traditions of the Burns Supper. The original nine were likely to be all Masons, hence the toasts drunk ‘three-by-three’. The tradition of delivering the Toast to the Lassies with the proposer standing on a chair with one foot on the table also has its roots in Masonic practice. One notes that Burns’s Address to the Haggis featured at this first gathering but it would be unfair to blame the Masons for its inclusion in the menu. Interest in the haggis still obtains to this day, and it an amazing that such a prosaic dish should excite such curiosity and levity, especially among non-Scots, for whom ‘haggis’ has become a virtual synonym for Scottishness.
Yet the dish itself, made from the maw of a sheep and minced in a bag with its lungs, hearts and liver, is actually Scandinavian in origin, although in France it was known from the late Middle Ages as le pain benite de l’Ecosse. It is not necessarilly confined to the sheep’s intestines either, it can be made from chicken, or pig and there is even a camel haggis. The Greeks, too, had a word for it and the Romans ate something they called cum intestinis omnibus. The stuffed bladder was for centuries the comic jester’s prop which may account for the fact that the haggis is rarely taken seriously – except at modern Burns Suppers where the address to it is recited portentously and gravely as if it were Holy Writ, which to the Haggis Addresser
it often is.
For Burns himself, it was little more than a jocular improvisation, a piece of fun with a satirical mock-heroic seriousness which, unfortunately, over the years has become etched in stone. He might even have seen its first appearance in a cookery book, when Mrs McIver printed her version in 1787. It achieved further culinary fame when Meg Dodds published her recipe in The Cook and Housewife’s Manual in 1826. Meg’s Cleikum Club haggis won first prize at the famous Haggis Club Competition held at Mrs Ferguson’s in the High St. Incidentally, the second prize went to ‘Christopher North’ who was actually John Wilson, Professor of Moral Philosophy at Edinburgh University, who is featured in the pages of this book as one of the first great Burns orators. It is perhaps unfortunate that the Burns Supper, and therefore Burns himself, should be so linked with haggis, but it would appear that the association has been there from the beginning. The Burns Chronicle account of the 1801 dinner concluded:
Before breaking up, the company unanimously resolved that the Anniversary of Burns should be regularly celebrated in praise of the Bard of Coila and that the meeting should take place on 29th January, the supposed birthday of the poet…
The nine got it wrong because Dr Currie, the first official biographer got it it wrong, yet Burns had written of his own birth in Rantin Rovin Robin:
Our monarch’s hindmost year but ane
Was five-and-twenty days begun
Twas then a blast o’ Janwar wind
Blew hansel in on Robin.
Perhaps the good doctor confused the christening with the birthday, but for whatever reason the Alloway nine met on the 29th in 1802 and again in 1803 and persisted in meeting on the nearest Saturday to this date until 1805. In point of fact, it wasn’t until 1818 that the correct date was confirmed when R. A. Smith, a music-teacher and a founder-member of the Paisley Burns Club, took the trouble to look up the Ayr Parish Records and see for himself that the 25th January was the real birth-date. Why had no one done that in the first place?
For some reason, the Alloway Nine, now increased to twenty, switched to a summer date. Sadly, the club did not flourish in the sun, and slowly wilted not to be revived until 1908. However, its ground-breaking, pioneering example was not lost on other Ayrshire men, especially those then resident in the port of Greenock just to the north. In that same year of 1801 gentlemen of the Greenock Ayrshire Society met over a meal at the Tontine Hotel to commemorate their fellow-countyman on 21 July, his death date, and in the following year, they did likewise on his birthdate.
Those present at that first meeting included such names from the Robert Burns story as Captain Richard Brown, whom he had met in Irvine, and fellow-Exciseman, James Findlay, who had married Jean Markland, one of the Mauchline Belles (‘Miss Markland is fine…’). Burns, in fact, had introduced them. Adam Patrick, the son of Burns’s herd-boy at Mossgiel, also took part. Members of Mary (or Margaret) Campbell’s family, like Archibald Campbell, then an old man ‘well stricken in years,’ were also involved in proceedings, deciding that their kinswoman gained more in fame than shame from her brief affair with Burns. It was their involvement with the Greenock Burns Club that led to her grave‘s becoming a place of pilgrimage at the Old West Churchyard. In 1842, the Club erected a monument to her on the site
The Greenock club met at the early years in the Henry Bell Tavern, which was managed by a Mrs Cottar. Their meetings soon became known as ‘Cottar’s Saturday Night’. One of their first Presidents around this time was the redoubtable Colin Rae-Brown, who will feature in these pages as one of the founding fathers of the Burns Movement. He is only one of the great names associated with this club. Greenock has gone on to win high prestige in the matter of her roll-call of honorary presidents which includes such as Lord Tennyson, Oliver Wendall Holmes, Sir Henry Irving and Hamish McCunn, the composer, himself a Greenock man. Thus was begun what came to be called the Mother of all Burns clubs and, happily, she was to have many children in the years to come, including a Daughter from Paisley who felt she had just grounds to be a Sister.
The still-surviving Minute Book (lodged in a Paisley bank vault) shows that the Paisley Burns Club was inaugurated at the Star Inn, Paisley, on 29 January 1805. The idea was put forward by Paisley’s own poet and Burns admirer, Robert Tannahill, and, following his efforts as the Club’s first Secretary, a company of more than 70 sat down to dinner. On this occasion, the first President, William McLaren, proposed a toast – ‘To the Memory of Our Immortal Bard, Robert Burns’. In 1806, the same toast must have been delivered by the next President, William Gemmill, for in February 1807, Tannahill wrote to James Clark, Bandmaster of the Argyle Militia, then stationed in Edinburgh:
I hope the meeting succeeded your wishes. Ours went on gloriously. Eighty-four sat at supper; after which, Mr Blaikie addressed us in a neat speech calculated for the occasion, concluding with a toast – To the Memory of Robert Burns.
This ‘calculated’ speech by Andrew Blaikie has become what is now known as The Immortal Memory and what was, from this time on, to become the pivot of all Burns functions. What is less known, however, is that a Paisley weaver, William McLaren, has good claim to the first deliverer of an Immortal Memory and that the Paisley Club by the same token has substantiated grounds to be considered as the first official Burns Club. I am indebted to Paisley’s present Secretary, James Skinner, for this information and for pointing me towards the considerable detective work done by the late Clark Hunter, himself a respected Burns author, in uncovering the complicated facts surrounding the question of the first-ever Burns Club and the long-standing rivalry between Paisley and Greenock on this delicate matter.
This is not the place to rake over those old ashes. Sparks still fly in this debate, but my own view is the facts are clear – Greenock came first historically and Paisley came first officially. There is anecdotal evidence to support the former as being active between 1801 and 1805 and there is concrete proof that the latter was instituted in 1805. Tradition nods towards Greenock and it is a tradition that still holds despite the fact that Paisley have been protesting strongly since 1892. According to Clark Hunter the Club would appear to have a good case, but it would seem even more that it is a long-standing and unending feud between Mother and Daughter. But then that sort of thing happens in families.
It is difficult to believe that men of the calibre of Rae-Brown would consent to a deliberate fraud or even the extenuation of an error by default. In the end it comes down to book-keeping and, unfortunately, Greenock didn’t keep theirs and, memory being the frail thing it is, things were mis-remembered or mis-applied and one thing led to another as the years went by. The fact remains that two sterling Burns Clubs emerged around the same time, both having the distinction of having been formed out of a genuine, disinterested and impersonal regard for their subject-patron and inspiration. Perhaps they should celebrate all that they have in common rather than maintain a squabble about what keeps them apart. Kilmarnock Burns Club, instituted in 1808, had something of the same problem with regard to seniority over London and this was solved by naming Kilmarnock as Number 0 and London as Number 1. These niceties seem to matter in the Burns world.
In 1810 the Argyle Militia returned to Ayr Barracks and the Glasgow Courier reported:
A number of non-commissioned officers and privates of the Argyle Militia went out from Ayr to visit the cottage (at Alloway) attended by the band of the Regiment, who played a number of appropriate airs.
These were the first notes of what was to become a world-wide anthem to Burns.The chorus was taken up all over Scotland, but not every note was approving. There were a few dissonant chords heard in the land. Burns, when living, had presented a proud, stubborn face to the world, even at his lowest, and this attitude was wholly consistent with his character and personality.
Our poet was rather below the usual standard, but was neatly formed and active in his habits. He had a ruddy complexion, the index of his uniformly temperate habits and good health – a piercing eye and an animated countenance; a somewhat irritable temper, the characteristic of the poetical temperament…
That was written by Alexander Ross, a schoolmaster at Lochlee, who had at least known and seen Burns in real life, which was more than could be said about those who were now to follow in having their say about this most complicated man. Ross was as entitled to his opinion as any and no doubt that was how Burns alive looked to him. Burns dead, however, seemed to take on a thousand faces, each more resembling the describer more than the described, but with his death, the Burns Industry, as it has come to be called, was born.
The funeral in 1796, on a typical Scottish summer’s day, a wet Monday in July, had passed almost in silence as a huge street crowd of many thousands peered beyond the bayonets of the soldiers facing them to watch the cortege go by as if it carried the remains of a gnarled general who had lived too long rather than what was left of a poet who had not lived long enough. It was almost laughable in its incongruity. There had never been a funeral like it in Scotland nor was there ever to be again. Not even Sir Walter Scott was so honoured in death. A good friend of Burns, William Grierson, who had travelled down from Glasgow to attend, noted in his diary that night – ‘in respect to the memory of such a genius as Mr Burns his funeral was uncommonly splendid…’
In addition to the Dumfries Volunteers, two regular army units were detailed to attend – The Angus-shire Fencibles and the Cinque Ports Cavalry – the latter under the command of Robert Banks Jenkinson, later to become Lord Liverpool and a future Prime Minister of Great Britain. They assembled at the Court House and escorted the cortege to St Michael’s Kirkyard. Gilbert was the only family member present among the party of dignitaries who walked slowly behind the muffled drums of the Cinque Ports Cavalry band. At the same time, every bell in every church in Dumfries tolled. Their tolling and the beating of the army drums were the only sounds to be heard.
But once the body was in the ground and the martial parade had marched away with its bands and bayonets, it was as if other weapons came out. Rather than Mr Handel’s Dead March from Saul one feels the band ought to have played ‘Fats’ Waller’s I’ll be glad when you’re dead, you rascal, you. Never mind, his person was now beyond all harm, but his reputation, still wet with his last exertions on the songs for George Thomson, was hanging up like a shirt waiting drying in the wind. It was hardly pegged before it was cut to shreds by another kind of army, each armed with their own particular grudge-knife. Figuratively speaking, they took possession of the empty hearse, determined to get to Parnassus on his broad back rather than on their own feet. Most would never make the foothills of Fame even if they crawled on their hands and knees, but that didn’t stop the barrage of printed words that opened up then and has been rumbling away on paper ever since.
Fortunately, we are concerned in these particular pages with the spoken word as it relates to Burns but it is impossible to ignore the noise that rose up around his name after that numbing, enormous, and largely silent funeral. One of the first to cast a stone was the Reverend William Peebles, who saw an opportunity for revenge for the poet’s satirical barbs against the clergy when he pricked Peebles nicely in The Holy Fair:
For Peebles, frae the water-fit,
Ascends the holy rostrum.
See, up he’s got the word o God,
An meek and mim has viewed it…
By 1811, the meek had inherited a certain reservoir of spleen and it was directed towards Burns in something Peebles called Burns Renowned in which the good Doctor, showing nothing of Christian charity, and without the least intention of turning the other cheek, lambasted Burns and the Burnsians. The following is merely an excerpt:
And do you grudge the ploughman’s praise,
The Bard of Scotland’s far-famed lays;
The man of humour, wit and fun,
Rewards confer’d, and honours won;
Whom Caledonia’s Hunt of Squires,
Ev’n first nobility, admires,
By fairest ladies brought in view,
By clergymen and poets too…
Nor is this all: from age to age,
As for a monarch, hero, sage,
Let anniversaries repeat
His glories, celebrate a feat
Imbibe his spirit, sing his songs,
Extol his name, lament his wrongs,
His death deplore, excuse his fate,
And raise him far above the great.
What call you this? Is it Insania?
I’ll coin a word, ‘ts Burnsomania…’
Luckily, Burnsomania wasn’t contagious, although it has never been completely eradicated even to our own day, but traces of it can be found in most non-Scottish comments about Burns, that is when they are not being fatuously patronising. But their day had not yet come, though it must be noted that Oxford University was early in the field with a Burns Dinner in 1806, which was hosted by John Wilson of Magadalen College and featured ‘a poetical address’ by Mr McCormick of Balliol. It was only in Scotland that the gatherings could be considered, as the Edinburgh Evening Courant put it – ‘as the indication of a general national feeling’. The country was still getting used to having a literary hero.
The Dunfermine United Burns Club was the next to be formed. Mr J. Johnstone, the original secretary, writing from the New Inn on 25 January 1812, explains further:
Met according to agreement and having spent the day in a manner highly satisfactory to all present, resolved to perpetuate the institution by the name of The Haggis Club… Ordered, that office-bearers do meet on the evening of Auld Hansel Monday AD 1813 in McLellan’s Inn to arrange the business of the Club preparatory to the annual meeting on 25th of January.
And on 25 January 1814:
This day the Haggis Club met in terms of the regulations and dined together in commemoration of the birthday of Burns. Mr Stenhouse, younger, being President, and failing to appear, or to rend a sufficient excuse for his absence, was fined ten shillings sterling. Mr Bowes was also fined five shillings for having mislaid the Minute Book of the Club. Ordered that these fines be applied to the purchase of a portrait of Burns to be hung in the clubroom.
The importance of the Laureate at the Club was underlined by the following entry:
At this sederunt, the Haggis Club elected, and hereby do elect, Mr Andrew Mercer, commonly called Aldie, to be Laureate at the Club ad vitam aut culpam; and ordained, and hereby do ordain, that at every meeting of the Haggis Club, the aforesaid Laureate, as the sole emoluments of his office, shall be entitled to a Canister of Black Toffees; quantam sufficit; of Scotch Fare and Scotch Drink ad libitum…’
Aldie duly obliged. The following example, from his Lamentation of 1814, is typical of the bardic effusions of the day.
Auld Scotia ay mourns now
The birth day of Burns now
Ay when it returns now
Since Burns is awa.
The auld town of Ayr now
Needna haud her Fair now
There’s nae lilting there now
Since Burns is awa.
There’s nae Hallowe’en now
There’s nae April Queen now
We’ve blear’d a’ our e’en now
Since Burns is awa.
There’s naething but gloom now
On the braes o’ bonny Doon now
The flowers never bloom now
Since Burns is awa.
Scotia’s harp is unstrung now
Her praise never sung now
She’s lost her very tongue now
Since Burns is awa.
That was surely worth a cannister of black toffees.
If the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 marked the end of Napoleon, it also indicated the temporary eclipse of that known Burns admirer, William Pitt the Younger. It would appear that sometime after the death of Burns, Pitt was at Lord Liverpool’s table and was heard to remark that ‘since the time of Shakespeare poetry has never come so sweetly from the hand of Nature as in his rhyme.’ The admiration was not mutual. At a dinner in Dumfries, a toast to Pitt was proposed. Burns refused to drink it and instead, countered with ‘I will give you a better man – George Washington.’ Since the American War of Independence was of recent memory and Washington was president of a revolutionary country, this was not only foolhardy, but dangerous. Instead, Burns’s local and national fame protected his indiscretion and he was merely shouted down. But incidents like this, and there were many, probably cost him a Civil List pension.
One hundred years later, he was even more famous, and in little need of a pension. Those shouted down now were those who dared to impugn his memory in any degree. The dinners now had their air of canonical, rather than masonic rites as speaker after speaker tried to make a miserable saint out of a happy sinner. However, some voices rang true and none more so than when a grand assembly met in Edinburgh to celebrate Burns’s birth in the presence of his brother Gilbert and with another old play-mate and travelling companion, Robert Ainslie, in the chair. ‘At a late hour’, no less than James Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd, gave the toast from the Burns Bowl of whisky punch and no doubt favoured the company with a song. Echoes of this must have been picked in the following year, for the Edinburgh Evening Courant of 27 January 1816 reported:
The meeting was held on Thursday last at MacEwan’s Tavern, in the Royal Exchange, where an extremely good dinner, and plenty of good wine, was given to the guests for a guinea a head. The company exceeded one hundred in number, and comprised a respectable proportion of rank and fashion, and a high display of literary talent…’
Walter Scott was one of the stewards, and John Wilson (‘Christopher North’) attended as did George Thomson, the publisher of Burns’s songs. Also there was Lieutenant-Colonel Wilson – ‘late from the field of Waterloo’. The company sat down at 6 o’clock and after ‘a fine canon’ and some songs, they got down to the main business of the evening which was the long lists of toasts in descending order, starting with the King, the Prince Regent and then Robert Burns.
The Memory of Burns’ in solemn silence was drank [sic] by the company standing; after which some beautiful verses, the composition of Mr [Alexander] Boswell, were recited. These were followed by the Glee, ‘Come, Shepherds, we’ll follow the Hearse’.
The next toast was ‘The Widow and Children of the Poet’ followed by ‘The Friends of Burns’. Those named included Dr Blacklock, Mrs Dunlop, the Earl of Glencairn and Dr Currie. Succeeding this was the toast ‘The Admirers of Burns’ which, by inference, included everyone there, and after another glee, the toasts continued via the poets of Scotland mentioning Thomson, Ramsay and Fergusson, then the poets of England from Chaucer to Byron, then Ye Mariners of England (written by a Scot, Thomas Campbell). Next came the Duke of Wellington coupled with The Heroes of Waterloo, when, no doubt, Colonel Wilson took a bow.
The lengthy toast list was officially closed with the name of Joanna Baillie, ‘a Scotswoman who yields the palm of poetical excellence to neither sex, and to no country’. This put Robert Burns firmly in his place. Not that it mattered. By 11 o’clock, the Chairman had departed, indisposed, and it was two o’clock the next morning before the last of the informal toasts was drunk and company dispersed, the object of their gathering, the Poet Burns, quite forgotten. Regrettably, this set a pattern for such events that has been assiduously copied ever since, even if their company did not boast a hero from the battle of Waterloo.
In the meantime, John Syme, Burns’s good friend in Dumfries was trying to raise some kind of memorial to Burns in that town where Jean Burns still lived with her three sons, but Dumfries was apathetic. An appeal was launched nationally and the sum of 1,200 pounds was raised on behalf of the widow Burns and her five surviving children. Dr Currie’s book on Burns brought in another 1,400 pounds so it could said that Jean and the bairns were provided for. It was not until 1823 that she was offered a Government pension of less than a pound a week, which she proudly turned down as being insulting to her late husband’s name. Her two sons in the East India Company made her an annuity instead.
Discussions went on through 1814 about a possible Burns monument in St Michael’s Kirkyard but it took till the following year to raise the necessary 2,000 pounds for it. Eventually his remains were moved to an imposing marble mausoleum in its south-east corner, but one feels it was as result of the efforts of the few rather than the will of the many as far as Dumfries was concerned. Burns was dead and, according to some in the town, both he and Dumfries were the better for it. Critic, William Hazlitt, who gave a public lecture On Burns and the Old English Ballads commented on this very point of public apathy by certain people in his Table Talk published in 1821:
When a man is dead, they put money in his coffin, erect monuments to his memory, and celebrate the memory of his birthday in set speeches. Would they take any notice of him if he were living? No! I was complaining of this to a Scotchman who had been attending a dinner and a subscription to raise a monument to Burns. He replied, he would sooner subscribe twenty pounds to his monument than have given it him while living; so that if the poet were to come to life again, he would treat him just as he was treated in fact. This was an honest Scotchman. What he said, the rest would do.
Sadly, this might be the case. The dead can be safely dealt with, but the living can be awkward and embarrassing.
No less so was the meagre donation of His Royal Highness King George 1V of 50 guineas towards the cost of the Burns Mausoleum, considering that His Majesty’s father gave 500 guineas to the messenger who brought him the news of his son’s birth. It is hard to think that this utterly useless Royal appendage was held to be ten times the value of our poet. It is questionable, however, that Burns, had he been alive, given his Republican sympathies, would have taken a penny from a Hanoverian booby, although there was nothing he would have liked more at the end than a wealthy patron or even that wished-for sinecure with the Excise. But it was all too late. Now public subscription from all sides saw his dead body given marble housing at a cost that would have kept the Dumfries poor for a year. Instead, the same poor folk, who had truly loved and admired the poet, were kept from his funeral by bayonets.
By this time, clubs were sprouting in every main city and almost all towns and even the smallest villages. In 1820, Dumfries finally capitulated to the trend and the Dumfries Burns Club, destined to be one of the finest in the movement, was founded at the Globe Inn, the poet’s own ‘local’. Around the same time, David Sillar, the ‘Dainty Davie’ of Burns’s youth, was involved in the setting-up of the Irvine Club and before long there were as many as a hundred Burns clubs in existence. The Burns Supper became part of the fabric of Scottish social life, both at home and abroad, and by the end of the 19th-century, as we shall see, it had expanded to such a degree as a symbol of Scottish identity, as to become a virtual Burns festival in itself.
It had not yet degenerated into the corporate, kilted Burns bonanza of modern times. Burns never wore a kilt in his life, nor did he know anyone who did, yet it seems to have become required dress at the Burns Supper today. I suppose it lends a Scottish distinctiveness to what, after all, is a Scottish occasion, but it is more a bow to sartorial fashion than a gesture towards the Lowlander at the centre of their festivities. He was a proud Scot but he was strictly a breeches man.
As I have said elsewhere, the Burns Supper of today, despite the top speakers, the best singers, the finest fiddlers, and the army of waitresses hired for the occasion, has only a nominal association with the Bard. In many cases it is nothing more than a sham ritual masquerading as a rite. This is Burns as entertainment. Which is why we have personalities as comperes and comedians for the Toast to the Lassies. If, as they all say, his ‘sweetest hours were spent among the lassies’ there is a singular lack of sweetness in most of the modern toasts which are nothing more than unsubtle innuendo and schoolboy smut. It also occurs to me that the simple message of Burns that ‘man to man the warld o’er should brothers be’ is rather contradicted by the presence of a top table. All Burns Suppers should be in the round.
All the spontaneous gaiety of the man, not to mention his manly dignity, is lost in a welter of onerous introductions, boring speeches, and what is even worse, hackneyed singing of the great songs and incomprehensible or lugubrious recitations. And all this under a Niagara of drink. This surely does scant honour to a man who loved the social occasion, but not one run riot in the lesser interests of a good night out with the boys. They prefer Rabbie with his breeches down, a glass in his hand and a girl in his arms. You can be sure that few of these fellows had given a thought to Burns since the previous year and won’t until the next. Fewer still had read him, but then Burns has always been more praised than read, but just enough of him is read to keep the flame alive.
Meantime, the ubiquitous Nasmyth reproduction has looked down on a kind of Burnsian bacchanalia. Normally sober and hard-working citizens seem to consider that a ticket for a Burns Supper is a passport for any kind of licence. Of course there are the serious students and the genuine Burns lovers who attend such nights and know and respect the works and the man, but they are in a large minority, if you see what I mean. Their voice is little heard above the noise of unsteady feet going and to and from the men’s room.
Yet all over the world, there are quiet gatherings where the essence of Burns is still evident, where people have taken the time to think about the man and be grateful for him, but the Burns industry has no place for such specialism. It needs the numbers, and the bigger the better in most cases, but these over-blown occasions with their
empty charades and offensive cabaret acts do Burns, and the real Burnsians, more harm than good. It must be admitted, however, that people do enjoy their annual blast of Janwar hot air, and Burns, despite them, does get the odd look in, but it’s generally very odd. I suppose, like the poor, the present format, with James Thomson’s outdated lyrics for The Star o Robbie Burns being lustily sung out, in the chorus at least, will always be with us, as long as there are secretaries who see that it’s done as it’s always been done, and that the piper gets his dram.
In 1823 work was begun on a Greek Temple on top of the Calton Hill in Edinburgh to commemorate Burns and a statue by Flaxman was inserted into it. The statue came free but the building cost over three thousand pounds. The committee organising it was headed by General Dunlop, the son of Mrs Dunlop of Dunlop. Generals, and statues and lords and ladies, mausoleums and cenotaphs, Princes of the realm and all the names of the day. Whatever can be said of it all, the Burns image had come a long way from that first simple supper for nine friends in 1801.
Jean Armour Burns died in 1834, a little-known wife who had dwindled into a celebrity widow, but she remained the same Jean Armour despite her spread of years. She was buried beside her husband, leaving three grown sons out of the nine births she had known with the poet. The toast was ‘Three-times-three’ to the name of Burns, but the Burns children the world was to know better were the offspring of his wit and imagination, born out of zeal for his country and love of its men and women – in other words, his poems and songs. His natural children, that is the three sons and two daughters out of wedlock, made their own lives, as we shall see, well away from celebrity spotlight of their father. The boys were educated, two of them at Christ’s Hospital in London, and the girls found marriages. Jean stayed on in the house, despite many invitations to return to Ayrshire and was content to remain single although still under 40 and still a fine-looking woman. I think, after a volatile life with Robert Burns, she was glad of the rest.
When she died, the house was bought by Dr Maxwell, and then, in 1851, purchased by her son, William, who, seven years later, signed a Disposition, giving it over to the Dumfries Education Society to maintain in return for a small annuity to the family. It was not until 1934 that the Burns House was taken over by the Dumfries and Galloway Infirmary as the trustees of the property, who in turn leased it to the Town Council. The house was completely renovated and restored to the state of Burns’s time. The finished work was formally opened to the public in a ceremony broadcast nationally by the BBC by Jean Armour Burns Brown, a grand-daughter of the second Robert Burns – on the wrong side of the blanket. This fact was not broadcast, yet somehow, it seemed fitting.
Ninety years earlier, the last of the family showed a much greater reluctance to go public with their private link to the poet, but his youngest sister and two of the three surviving sons were to feature as guests of honour at the next posthumous Burns milestone – the Ayr Festival of 1844. Punch in London commented at the time: ‘Scotland is tremendously earnest in all that relates to Burns; earnest alike in her gratitude and her penance.’ But then London is a long way from Ayr in every sense. Scots knew the importance of being earnest about Burns and on Tuesday 6 August they flocked to the south-west from all parts of the country for the event. Some reports say that as many as 80,000 men, women and children men assembled on the Braes o Doon that day. Whatever the actual number, it was certainly a crowd of football stadium proportions and it was just as enthusiastic. It was the first-ever Burns Festival, it was summer time and, as usual, it was raining.
Notwithstanding, in the specially-built pavilion before a specially-favoured 2,000 persons, the speeches went on throughout the day, and none was brief. Under the Presidency of the Earl of Eglinton and with Professor John Wilson as croupier, the vast audience endured hour after hour of damp oratory sustained only by fervour for their young poet and their Scottish sense of duty and proper respect for the dead. One wonders, given the size of the crowd and their informal spread over the area involved, how many of them actually heard what was being said, but there is no record of anybody’s leaving before darkness fell.
As mentioned, the principal guests were Burns’s two sons, the oldest Robert, and the youngest Major James Glencairn Burns. Also attending with the poet’s only surviving sister, Isabella (Mrs John Begg) was Jessie Lewars (Mrs John Thomson) who attended Burns in his last illness. The Earl of Glencairn’s was a lengthy introduction and he apologised for having gone on so long. Cries of ‘No! No! No!’ came from those assembled but through them could be heard the applause of agreement. The noble lord hurried to his conclusion by asking those present to join with him in ‘raising one overflowing bumper, and in joining to it, every expression of enthusiasm you can, to The Memory of Burns.’ At this there was ‘rapturous applause’ and Robert Burns Junior then rose to reply for the family:
My Lord, Ladies and Gentlemen. Of course it cannot be expected at such a meeting such as the present, that the sons of Burns should expatriate on the merits and genius of their deceased father. Around them are an immense number of admirers, who, by their presence here this day, bear a sufficient testimony to the opinion in which they hold his memory and the high esteem in which they hold his genius. In the language of the late Sir Christopher Wren, though very differently applied, the sons of Burns can say, that to obtain a living testimony to their father’s genius, they only have to look around them. I beg in the name of my aunt, brothers and myself to return our heartfelt and grateful thanks for the honour that this day been paid to my father’s memory.
Professor Wilson’s was an even lengthier oration, but then everybody was out to make a day of it despite the rain. This is a short extract.
I fear I am trespassing on your time too much, but I would fain keep your attention for a very short time longer, while I say that there is a voice heard above and below and round about – the voice of mere admiration, as it has been expressed by men of taste and criticism. There is a voice which those who listen to it can hear – a voice which has pronounced its judgment on the character of Burns – a judgment which cannot on earth be carried to a higher tribunal, and which never will be reversed. It was heard of old, and struck terror into the hearts of tyrants, who quaked and quailed and fled for fear from this land before the unconquered Caledonian spear. It is a voice they were pleased to hear; it was like the sound of distant waterfalls, the murmurs of the summer woods, or the voice of the mighty sea which ever rolls even on. I mean the voice of the people of Scotland, of her peasantry and trades, of all who earn their bread by the sweat of their brow – the voice of the working men.
I shall not pretend to draw their character; this I may say of them now, and boldly, that they do not choose to be dictated to as to the choice of those who with them shall be a household word. They are men from whose hands easier would it be to wrench the weapon than ever to wrench their worship from their hearts. They are men who loved truth, sincerity, integrity, resolution, and independence – an open front and a bold eye that fears not to look on the face of clay. They do not demand in one and the same person inconsistent virtues; they are no lovers of perfection or of perfectibility; they know that there are fainter and darker shadows in the character of every man; and they seem, as we look back on their history, to have loved most those who have been subject most, within and without, to strong and severe temptations. Whether in triumph or in valour, they have shown at least, by the complexion of character of their souls, that they loved their country, and had no other passion so strong as the defence of the people.
Ay! They too, unless I am mistaken, loved those who had struggled with adversity; they loved those who have had their trials, their griefs, their sorrows; and, most of all, they loved those who were not ashamed of confessing that they were so, and who threw themselves on the common feelings and forgiveness here below, and trusted for forgiveness on other principles and feelings altogether to that source from which alone it can come. The love of the people of Scotland for those whom they have loved has not been exclusive: it has been comprehensive. They left the appearance of their different characters, and honoured them for every advance they made, provided they saw the strength of character, moral and intellectual. Such a people as this, possessing such feelings, could not but look upon Robert Burns, and while they admired him they also loved him with the truest affection, as well for the virtues as for the sorrows and the griefs of that great, but in some respects unfortunate, man.
This Wilson was the same man who, as ‘Christopher North’, had written of Burns in 1818, in an article pithily entitled ‘Some Observations on the Agricultural and that of the Pastoral District of Scotland, illustrated by a Comparative View of the genius of Burns and the Ettrick Shepherd’:
There is a pathetic moral in the imperfect character of Burns, both as a poet and a man; nor ought they who delight both in him and his works, and rightly hold the anniversary of his birth to be a day sacred in the calendar of genius – to forget, that it was often the consciousness of his own frailties that made him so true a painter of human passions.
Wilson had much to answer for in the ensuing century when the matter of Burns’s ‘frailties’ seems to obsess every speaker on every Burns occasion. At the Ayr Festival, however he had to speak as himself, and after several hours, he concluded,
Was he worthy of their love? Taking it for granted, and we are entitled to do so, then why did they love him? They loved him because he loved his own order, nor ever desired for a single hour to quit it. They loved him because he loved the very humblest condition of humanity so much, that by his connection he saw more truly and became more distinctly acquainted with what was truly good, and imbued with a spirit of love in the soul of a man. They loved him for that which he had sometimes been most absurdly questioned for – his independence. They loved him for bringing sunshine into dark places; not for representing the poor hard-working man as an object of pity, but for showing that there was something more than is dreamed of in the world’s philosophy among the tillers of the soil and the humblest children of the land.
This speech brought what was called the ‘Demonstration’ at last to a close, and, once again, Robert Burns rose to reply – briefly:
My Lord, Ladies and Gentlemen. You may be assured that the sons of Burns feel all that they ought to feel on an occasion so peculiarly gratifying to them, and on account of so nobly generous a welcome to the Banks of Doon. In whatever land they have wandered – wherever they have gone – they have invariably found a kind reception prepared for them by the genius and fame of their father; and under the providence of Almighty God, they owe to the admirers of his genius all that they have, and what competencies they now enjoy. We have no claim to attention individually, we are all aware that genius, and more particularly poetic genius, is not hereditary, and in this case the mantle of Elijah has not desended upon Elisha. The sons of Burns have grateful hearts, and will remember, so long as they live, the honour which has this day been conferred upon them by the noble and illustrious of our own land – and many generous and kind spirits from other lands – some from the far West, a country composed of the great and the free, and altogether a kindred people. We beg to return our heartfelt thanks to this numerous and highly respectable company for the honour which has been done us this day.
The second Robert Burns was something of a lost figure in the Burns saga. Of great promise as a boy and with high intellect, much was expected of him, especially in mathematics, but after winning prizes at Glasgow University, he drifted into the Stamp Office at Somerset House in London, a dull post offered to him by the Prime Minister in 1832. He ‘retired’ within a year and lived out the rest of his life in Dumfries on a small pension given him because of ‘the great literary talents of his father’. He found it hard to be the famous son of a famous father and took solace in the bottle and by taking pupils in the classics and his beloved mathematics. He had married young and he and Anne Sherwood had a daughter, Eliza. As soon as she was old enough, Eliza went out to India to join her Uncle James where she married a doctor and died in 1878. Her father never married again but he had two children by Emma Bland, another son and another Robert, and a daughter, Jane Emma.
Interestingly, this Robert Burns married a Mary Campbell, and they had yet another Robert, who died in Edinburgh in 1895. Jane Emma married a Thomas Brown and they had the daughter, Jean, who opened the Burns House as a museum, and from time to time gave genteel readings of her great-great uncle’s more respectable poems, dressed in his costume, and looking uncannily like him. This performing ability was certainly not a trait inherited from her father. Essentially this Robert Burns was a loner. He died in 1857 having done nothing with the fine brain he was born with.
James Glencairn Burns was one of the two Burns sons who prospered and both did so as far from Scotland as they could. Both James and William Nicol Burns received commissions in the East India Company and both retired as colonels, William, the elder, to Cheltenham and James to become a Judge and Collecter at Cahar, in India. When he finally retired, he joined his brother in Cheltenham. By this time both men were widowers. William was childless but James had two daughters by two wives and these ladies laid the basis of the highly respectable, if rather dull, lineage that saw the Burns stock move up the social scale and into blank, professional obscurity. James’s first daughter, Sarah, had also married a doctor, and her son was the last direct male descendant of Robert Burns. He went to America and worked in a shipping office. It was a rather prosaic end to the line, but the fire had only flamed once and it had long burned itself out.
The Burns brothers skilfully avoided their father’s limelight. They were no less proud of their giant of a father’s reputation but had no wish to trade on it. They therefore limited their visits to Scotland as much as possible. However, after the huge success of the 1844 Festival at Ayr, the middle brother, William, was constrained to join James in a return in the following year, this time to follow their father’s footsteps through the Highlands. The Inverness Courier carried a full report of the brothers’ visit to that town.
They were both extremely shy men and the last thing they wanted was publicity, but there were many ardent literati in Inverness in those days, and they straightaway decided to pay all the honour in their power to the two pilgrims. A public banquet was speedily arranged, but that was not considered to be sufficient, and the Town Council were prevailed upon to confer the Freedom of the Burgh on the visitors. The two functions were combined, and on the 6th August an enthusiastic gathering assembled in the Caledonian Hotel, Provost Sutherland occupying the chair, and Colonel Mackintosh of Farr being croupier. Both the visitors were officers in the army, the elder then being Lieut. Colonel William Nicol Burns and the younger Major (subsequently Lieut. Colonel) James Glencairn Burns. Colonel Mackintosh of Farr had served with the latter in India, and during the dinner referred to their youthful acquaintanceship. As was usual in those days, the speches were many and eloquent, but the guests, as we have remarked, were shy men, and when the ceremony of conferring the Freedom of the Burgh was reached, only one of them could be prevailed upon to reply, the elder brother, Colonel Burns, returning thanks for both. But the company were determined to have a speech from Major Burns, especially as his brother, in the course of his remarks, had disclosed the interesting fact that the Major was proficient in Gaelic, the study of which he had commenced in his college days, and had continued ever since. But how could a speech be extracted from the reticent Major? Somebody hit on a brilliant idea. He remembered that Major Burns was the proud father of several daughters, and straightway their health was proposed, and pledged with the real Highland fervour. Whereupon there was no course open to the blushing guest but to rise and reply. So the company got their speech, and something else as well; for the Major, after returning his thanks, said he was no speaker, but that if they would permit him, he would sing one of his father’s songs to them instead, a proposition which, needless to say, was received with the greatest enthusiasm. So he sang ‘O’ a the airts the wind can blaw’ to the great delight of the company. Thus did the Major repay the courtesy of the toast by giving an Inverness gathering the privilege of hearing one of Burns’ own songs sung by one of Burns’ own sons.’
Strangely enough, it was Burns’ singing that Aunt Isabella remembered of him best. Bella was the baby of the Burns family, and perhaps she got the best of her big brother. As time went on the youngest child became the oldest survivor. She was constantly sought out by celebrities, information-seekers and scholars for direct information about Robert as she remembered him. Her comments as an old woman, and the mother of nine children, tended to vary according to her whim, but her callers had to bear in mind that here was a voice that had all the sounds of old Ayrshire in it, and one which Burns had heard intimately when both were young.
Mrs Begg considered her brother ‘no great efficient in music’. This despite the fact that he could read music and notate from singing. His own singing voice, she thought, was just like his fiddle playing – ‘rude and rough, but croonin’ tae a body’s sel’ does weel enough.’ Apparently, Burns used to play the fiddle in the fields in the summer when they sheltered from the rain, and in the winter:
He used to rise early and chop the gathering coal, then play for the amusement of thae that were in bed. It could not be borne forever and speedily came to an end.
It is amusing to think of the Burns siblings shouting down Scotland’s greatest songwriter before breakfast, but where better to learn his trade than at his own fireside?
Isabella Begg died in 1858 at Bridge House in Alloway, not far from the cottage from where William Burnes had started out just over a hundred years earlier. She was the final link with the original family and now that she was gone there were fewer left, outside the family, who could say that they knew the living Burns.
But the dead Burns continued to fascinate, as edition after edition of the complete works followed in succession all round the world. The centenary of his birth was approaching and that same world, or at least its Scottish segment, geared itself for what was to amount to one huge, year-long Burns Supper in what was to be called ‘The Universal Burns Centenary Celebrations of 1859’. It was a year that was to be marked memorably.
With melting heart and brimful eye
I’ll mind you still, tho far awa.
(The Farewell)