CPS

Them and Us: Reflections from Janey Buchan

Author: Janey Buchan
Date: August 2002

I wish I had a ha’ penny for every start I have made on this piece. It seemed so obvious and so clear. Fat chance. Scot and non-Scot; poor and wealthy; gay and straight; black and white…where to start?

When Anne Neilson, Adam McNaughtan and I started off on this commission we quickly knew that we could have organised a concert for each night of the year and not exhaust the material we knew of and also the material which daily comes before us. Each section intermingles with another.

If Them and Us is seen now as the world of period drama on TV then live theatre at its most popular was my launch-pad. It was pantomime time at Glasgow Citizens’ and it was still in the days when such events were VERY local. Irene Sunters was in the washing-the-floor scene and she sat back on her heels and to Sullivan’s I Dreamt I Dwelt in Marble Halls sang.

" I dreamt I dwelt in Newton Mearns
An’ the kitchen was rotten wi’ fridges".

The audience roared its response. Going home on the tram that night I said to my husband, "You know something? I don’t think that there were six folk in that audience with a fridge". It started us on a discussion about the language and the phrase which Scots use when they think that someone has more than enough: "Rotten with" being Andrew Carnegie with money. How an outsider or a language learner copes with that we neither knew nor cared. These two lines summed up the longing of everyone at that time – a lovely kitchen but what on earth we would do with all these fridges never entered into it.

Mary Brooksbank, a jute mill worker in Dundee who left school at the age of eight but who wrote some truly memorable songs which today reminds most of us where and what it is we came from:

" Oh dear me the world’s ill-divided
For them that work the hardest
Are aye wi’ least provided."

That says it all really. When my husband told her that Karl Marx could not have put it better in twenty volumes, Mary held to her Communist faith and told him off good and hard!

It is, of course, impossible to hold things inside any country. Scotland is no different from other countries in that respect. We sing in and we sing out. Eric Bogle’s And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda will always sing to me as a Scottish song though Eric has lived, worked and sung in Australia for many years. Members of the Red Review, whose songs we shall hear in the concerts, told me recently that they had watched a BBC 2 programme where the cricketer Shane Warren had said that he really knew nothing of Gallipoli until he heard that song. Discussing that made us think about what school education is and how could a boy in school in Australia NOT know Gallipoli?

Wartime Scotland taught us, from the refugees with us, The Peat Bog Soldiers which, when we heard it in the German in which it was written, gave another insight into defiance and uplift which song does better than any other form. The French revolutionary Ca Ira, which Burns heard an audience in the theatre in Dumfries join in with an English actress, was to many of us, the song which should have opened the Scottish Parliament to be followed by A Man’s A Man. Thus, re-establishing the Auld Alliance and taking us into an outward looking and truly international Parliament.

If Liberals, and especially Scottish Liberals, sang "God Gave the Land to the People" the recalcitrant would mutter "Well, he certainly gave it to some gey odd people then".

As Globalisation sweeps on we know – we have to know – what is happening on the other side of the world, and in recent months we know that a song has emerged about Enron which Americans have set to the pop song (I’m well out of my depth here) which has

" Da doo ron ron ron
Da doo ron ron"

as its base. We are working on it and hope to get it better known. Similarly, when Tom Paxton came to Scotland and sang the song around the latest USA Presidential election They’re Counting the Votes in Florida, in Florida, audiences in and out of Scotland picked up on it immediately. "Been there, done that" we wanted to sing.

If Them and Us appeared to be easy-peasy and was proven to be otherwise, then Scabrous Song was never going to be either straightforward or simple. In my edition of The Oxford English Dictionary the definition of scabrous is given as "Harsh, unmusical, unpolished" (1585) at which some of those whose work he shall be using chipped in " Well, that’s all of us then" – we’ll hope not. The nineteenth version in the same OED is "Risky, bordering upon the indelicate ". In the twenty-first century we’ll be somewhere around either or both of these.

With scabrous song Scotland is surely among the Top Ten. The Makars, Burns, MacDiarmid, are all there, and in the last fifty years there has been a resurgence of this genre.

Billy Graham’s arrival among us unleashed a flood of what now would be called in-yer-face song. Similarly when the Stone of Destiny disappeared from Westminster Abbey Scottish Provosts in all their pomposity got a right good walloping. How VERY Scottish!

It is not an easy mode to get into. There must be thousands of song-starts which were never completed because they would not "hing thegether", or the writer could not develop it. When the then Tory MP Edwina Currie opined "Good Christians won’t get Aids", another MP used the great hymn tune The Church’s One Foundation to write

" Oh Lord, do not condom us.
Touch neither man nor maid
With thy strong sheath around us
Good Christians wont’ get Aids."

Similarly, when the then Labour MP and Minister, Harriet Harman, had, like the Prime Minister, sent her children to schools other than the ones her constituents sent their’s to, an attempt was made to use the great Yip Harburg’s song for Groucho Marx in The Marx Brothers Go To The Circus - Lydia Oh Lydia, my Enclyclopidia.

" Harriet, oh Harriet
Our own Judas Iscariot
Oh Harriet, the school room lady…"

and nothing more came of it. A Scots actor wrote a brilliant piss-take on the SNP using the song Don’t Cry For Me Argentina but it was PLEASE VOTE FOR ME ARDENTINNY and now he can not remember a line of it. A Gilbert and Sullivan expert tells me that there is a man with some 5000 plus parodies of G and S. Scabrous will undoubtedly be there.

Another of the Dictionary definitions is, to my joy, a quotation from Dryden and surely someone, somewhere, sometime, will unearth unlikely examples and these will frequently mark great bravery. Those who call for openness rarely welcome it when it comes to their own front door.

As I write, I am reading that the British Council has had to close its Library in Paris and the shock and disgrace of that has produced fury from people all over France and here in the UK. We now have no excuse for not knowing that back door muggings like this are going on in all our names all over the world.

If we are heading in Lillian Hellman’s memorable phrase, "to Scoundrel Time", then the wielders of the scabrous will come singing to our aid and we should welcome them and join in and thereby help continue a truly great tradition.

In the empty language of today’s politics, the song is returning to reassure us that living by our principles still matters, and perhaps gives us hope that our loyalty will be returned by those elected through our commitment.

Come and hear what we know and let us hear from you too.Janey Buchan was born in Glasgow in 1926, Janey’s father was a tram driver, and her mother a domestic servant. Janey left school at 14 to a succession of posts as a tea girl, office girl, junior typist and shorthand typist. At the age of 19, she married Norman Buchan, a future Labour MP and Spokesman on the arts. Janey went on to be a Labour MEP from 1979-1994, serving on the EP’s Culture Committee as well as several funding bodies. She is still very involved in fundraising for the arts. Janey has one son, Alasdair, and four grandchildren.

Updated: 24 August, 2007 | Site editor | Legal