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Song History
D Day Dodgers
A simple brief
thought on Scottish
Independance.

Were the outdated
union not of some very
high value to England and
the English, why would
they fight so to try to
keep it?

There are only so many
slices to a pie, for one to
have more, another must
have less.

Lastly - to those Scottish
"Loyalists" - to whom are
you loyal?
Scots royalty died in the
1700's so it can be no
Scots crown - And
certainly not it appears to
those who came before,
that bled for Scotland
and her freedom !  
In the words
of Burns, as he
wrote from the heart.

Scots, wha hae wi' Wallace bled,
Scots, wham Bruce has aften led,
Welcome to your gory bed,
Or to victorie.

Now's the day, and now's the hour;
See the front o' battle lour;
See approach proud Edward's power,
Chains and slaverie.

Wha would be a traitor-knave?
Wha can fill a coward's grave?
Wha sae base as be a Slave?
Let him turn and flie:

Wha for Scotland's king and law,
Freedom's sword will strongly draw,
Free-man stand, or free-man fa',
Let him follow me.

By Oppression's woes and pains!
By your Sons in servile chains!
We will drain our dearest veins,
But they shall be free!

Lay the proud Usurpers low!
Tyrants fall in every foe!
Liberty's in every blow!
Let us Do - or Die!!!

Choose your destiny.
An apocryphal story that Lady Astor accused
the British Forces in Italy of being “D-Day Dodgers
was widely circulated. This song was a non-apocryphal
response!

Most sources indicate the Author as "unknown" - some
research has located they were penned, at least the
original verses (whichever they are) by Major Hamish
Henderson of the 51st Highland Division in response to an
ill considered, 1944 comment by Lady Astor, in the House
of Commons, accusing Soldiers in Italy of “dodging D-
Day”.

His Obituary - From the Independent

Hamish Henderson

Tuesday, 12 March 2002

Hamish Scott Henderson, poet, singer and folklorist: born
Blairgowrie, Perthshire 11 November 1919;
Lecturer/Research Fellow, School of Scottish Studies,
Edinburgh University 1952-88; married 1959 Kätzel
Schmidt (two daughters); died Edinburgh 8 March 2002.

Hamish Scott Henderson, poet, singer and folklorist: born
Blairgowrie, Perthshire 11 November 1919;
Lecturer/Research Fellow, School of Scottish Studies,
Edinburgh University 1952-88; married 1959 Kätzel
Schmidt (two daughters); died Edinburgh 8 March 2002.

On the day, in 1990, when Nelson Mandela's forthcoming
release was announced, a round-robin of phone calls
produced an impromptu demonstration of joy by scores of
people in Festival Square, Edinburgh. I think everyone
knew what would happen when Hamish Henderson stood
up on a convenient plinth – he would lead us in his anthem
"Rivonia" written way back in the Sixties to a tune from
the Spanish Civil War:

They have sentenced the men of Rivonia
Rumbala, rumbala, rumba la . . .
He is buried alive on an island
Free Mandela Free Mandela

Equally, after John Major's re-election in 1992 had
condemned Scotland to five more years of "democratic
deficit", with the clear will of the people that the country
should have its own parliament thwarted yet again, why
was Henderson on the crowded platform at the big
"Scotland United" rally in George Square, Glasgow? To
sing his "Freedom Come-All-Ye" of course.

This great song dates from the heyday of the Campaign
for Nuclear Disarmament around 1960 – when it was
snapped up by Pete Seeger, who performed it in Carnegie
Hall, New York, even before Henderson had told him what
the words meant. But it has a peculiar place, which future
historians will do well to acknowledge, in the story of the
long haul from the abortive Referendum of 1979 to the
actual Scottish Parliament of 1999. Henderson sang it
himself wherever he went – not just on political occasions,
but at cultural events, where folk musicians gathered or
poets recited. It imagines a clear day's dawning over a
Scotland freed from complicity in imperialist bullying,
never more engaged in bloody war, ready to tackle its
own rapacious bourgeoisie ("our rottans") and to welcome
incomers from anywhere:

In your hoose a' the bairns o' Adam
Can find breid, barley-bree and painted room.
It became the thinking person's Scottish National Anthem.

As such, it had limitations. Though accomplished singers,
notably Dick Gaughan, delighted in performing it well,
those able to remember the rich Scots phrases were not
always up to the rather complex tune. That naïve ditty
"Flower of Scotland" won out on the football terraces. But
anyone pondering the role of "cultural renaissance" in
Scotland's gravitation back to nationhood should imagine
a big, rather sheepish man shambling in with a crumpled
little tweed hat on his head to focus again and again, at
gathering after gathering, the aspiration of every person
present. He didn't have a fine voice, but it did deliver his
message.

To call Hamish Henderson an icon would be to miss the
point. He was very personally loved by thousands. He
would talk to anyone in Sandy Bell's bar, a convenient
extension either of his home, not far away across the
Meadows, or his office, close by in the School of Scottish
Studies at Edinburgh University. A typical Hamish moment
would be this – I drop into Bell's fairly late one afternoon,
and find him seated with two Bulgarians. They have
sought him out at the school. He has brought them here.
They sing at him in Bulgarian. He sings back in Scots.
Much drink has been taken, but after they go, he is ready
for a few more whiskies . . .

He was open to everyone, easily preyed on by toadies,
sharing his erudition without stint with anyone who
wanted to set him going, with the oldest cranky pedant or
the youngest fiddler. Bell's for decades was his seminar
room, long cohabited with the dog whom he named Sandy
in its honour – he was never quite the same, as they say,
after the old beast who had lounged patiently beside him
during so many long sessions of talk and music at last
preceded him into the darkness.

But Henderson was much more than the much-loved
doyen of Scotland's distinctive music and bard of the
movements for peace and against apartheid. He had been
a soldier and an active Communist. He had written what
now seems more clearly than ever a major long poem. He
had been the first to translate into English one of Europe's
major cultural theorists. He, more than anyone else, had
given Edinburgh a School of Scottish Studies with an
international reputation. And, paradoxical as it may seem
to those who assume that nationalism leads inevitably to
ethnic cleansing, no one in Scotland had deeper
knowledge than this profoundly patriotic man of the
literature and music of European countries. I think he was
quite serious when he said that Italian should be the world
language.

He was coy about his earliest years. We are sure that he
was born in 1919 in Blairgowrie, Perthshire, and that the
enigmatic, Highland-Lowland, middle county of Scotland
was central to his own affections all his life. We know that
his mother was a good singer, and that his grandmother
could recall the days when Gaelic had been spoken in the
Perthshire glens.

It is not quite clear why his mother, who died during his
adolescence, had left Scotland when he was small to work
as a cook-housekeeper in Somerset, nor why he himself
wended from Blairgowrie High School to Dulwich College,
an English public school whose recent illustrious alumni
included those two great writers P.G. Wodehouse and
Raymond Chandler. But, as he proceeded from Dulwich to
Downing College, Cambridge, his cosmopolitanism was
being forged.

In Germany in 1937 he witnessed with shock the Nazi cult
of Hitler. As he stood in the huge crowd in Berlin's
Tiergarten on the Führer's birthday, Hitler, preceded by
military hardware, passed by just yards away, standing in
an open car. "The women around me all went wild, and
one of them (who had been heiling like hell) suddenly
fainted." When he abandoned Cambridge for the Army
after war broke out he was already saturated in the poetry
of Goethe and Hölderlin.

But he stated that the only books of verse he carried with
him throughout the campaign in the North African Desert
were Hugh MacDiarmid's seminal long poem in Scots, A
Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle, and a pamphlet called 17
Poems for Sixpence obscurely published in Edinburgh in
1940. Its young authors were Robert Garioch, who wrote in
Lothian Scots, and Sorley MacLean, who was
revolutionising verse in Gaelic. Both were for a time in the
desert like himself.

As Intelligence Officer in the 51st Highland Division,
Henderson was at a unique point of convergence. He was
fluent in the language of the captured Afrika Korps men
whom he interrogated, and deeply sympathetic with their
Italian allies, as fellow human beings. He was also a Jock
among Jocks, who were fighting with all the ferocity of a
passionate military tradition against Fascism and Nazism,
which Henderson, with utter conviction, wished to defeat.
The 51st was exactly the place for a future folklorist. Its
officers flaunted proud Highland genealogies while its
squaddies sang traditional lyrics in Scots and Gaelic, and
its pipers represented a summation of an instrumental
tradition peculiar to Scotland.

Henderson described in detail how the first of his great
"standard" songs came about. In 1943, under Etna, after
Rommel's men had been fought through Sicily, he heard
massed pipers of the Gordons and Black Watch playing
"Farewell to the Creeks", a tune composed during the
First World War by Pipe Major James Robertson of Banff:

And while I listened to it, words began to form in my head,
particularly one recurrent line, "Puir bluidy swaddies are
weary." That night "The Highland Division's Farewell to
Sicily" had its first airing in a Gordon Officers' Mess, and I
was soon scribbling the words out in pencil for all ranks:

Then fareweel, ye dives o' Sicily
(Fare ye weel, ye shieling an' ha')
We'll a' mind shebeens and bothies
Whaur kind signorine were cheerie . . .

This passed into folk currency, sung in Scotland by
veterans who never knew who had written it. Less
sublimely, Henderson devised or collected for the Eighth
Army irreverent topical songs jeering at the top brass and
politicians back home (and also, such were the times,
praising Joseph Stalin).

The 51st went back to train on the flatlands of England,
most inappropriately, for their inglorious role in the bumpy
bocage country of Normandy after D-Day. Henderson
stayed on in Italy, liaising emotively with partisans.
Perhaps the best way of summarising his political
convictions was that he always remained at heart not a
Soviet-style but an Italian Communist. He served the
length of Italy, all the way to the South Tyrol.

Return to Cambridge after victory brought him into
intimate contact with remarkable left intellectuals. The
future historian E.P. Thompson and Piero Sraffa, an Italian
Communist don who was an especially close friend of
Ludwig Wittgenstein, were two in particular who
nourished his preoccupations. Other important new
contacts were with Scottish writers. Shooting about Britain
on a motorcycle, he established very cordial relations with
the great MacDiarmid, also a Communist. He himself had
begun to publish during the war sections of what became
Elegies for the Dead in Cyrenaica. He finished this long
sequence in 1947 as a guest of Naomi Mitchison at her
somewhat stately pile in Kintyre.

There is no other "war poetry" like the Elegies in English,
and from Europe I know of only one work to compare with
them – Odysseus Elytis' "Heroic and Elegiac Song for the
Lost Second Lieutenant of the Albanian Campaign". But,
whereas Elytis is sensuous and surrealistic, Henderson
brings to the desert the intellectualism of Rilke's Duino
Elegies.

Certainly, alert reviewers were immensely impressed
when John Lehmann published the Elegies in 1948,
though no praise meant so much to him as that offered in
a letter from Brigadier Lorne Maclean Campbell VC, who
had commanded the 7th Argylls – "I find your poems give
a voice to all the queer and, for me, quite inarticulate
feelings one had in the desert . . ." Henderson won the
prestigious Somerset Maugham Award. He had been
lecturing for the Workers' Education Association in
Scotland, then in Northern Ireland (where he had formed
an equal contempt for both Protestant and Catholic
sectarians). Now he used the award to take himself off to
Italy, with a mission to translate the "Prison Letters" of
Antonio Gramsci, the Communist leader incarcerated by
Mussolini.

Within a quarter-century Gramsci would become one of
the cardinal influences on debate world-wide over
Marxism and culture. But in 1951 very few people in
Britain had heard of him. Lehmann went out of business
before he could publish Henderson's manuscript, and
efforts by Henderson and others to find an alternative
publisher failed. The "Prison Letters" appeared at last only
in 1974, in two issues of New Edinburgh Review. Typically,
Henderson's reading of Gramsci disemphasised the
steelier side of his Marxism in favour of his deep feeling
for popular culture, especially that of his native Sardinia.
His Italian job finished, Henderson now made his
systematic foray into collecting Scottish songs.

The American collector Alan Lomax was working on a
huge project for Columbia records to tape music from all
over the world. One of Henderson's Red friends was
Jimmy Miller, who sang and wrote plays as "Ewan
MacColl". He put Henderson in touch with Lomax, who
conscripted his assistance for a tour of Scotland. The
resulting tapes, of which copies were deposited at
Edinburgh University, formed the initial basis of the
archive of the new School of Scottish Studies there. By
1952, Henderson had found the academic quarters in
which he camped for the rest of his working life. The
school employed him to go on further field trips. And thus
came about the meeting in 1953 of Henderson and Jeannie
Robertson.

Not all the people whom Henderson taped were up to
much as singers, interesting though their words might be.
Some were superb, such as Jimmy MacBeath and the
Stewart family of Blair. But Robertson was simply one of
the great female voices, supreme in her own line like
Bessie Smith and Callas, as those of us lucky enough to
hear her recognised at once. She could sing merry little
songs with pawky charm, but her unique distinction was
her way of rendering the big traditional ballads. She sang
them, one might say, remorselessly, with an instinctive
tragic austerity which went beyond "good taste" into
primeval Aeschylean modes of feeling.

The way Henderson told it, he met her this way. Foraging
round with his tape recorder, he kept hearing that the best
singer of all among the "travelling people" was now a
housewife in Aberdeen. He tracked her down. Busy with
her housework, she reacted to the appearance of this
genteel stranger as if he was an unwanted Kleeneezee
salesman. As she shooed him away, Henderson
desperately launched into song. Attentive, she said,
"That's no right. Come on in and I'll sing it tae ye properly."

Henderson thus created bridges from the insistently
authentic voice of a tradition reacting back deep into the
Middle Ages to the highly professional Ewan MacColl,
singing Scots songs superbly here, there and everywhere,
and to Norman Buchan and other enthusiasts who created
the Edinburgh People's Festival in 1951 as a
counterweight to the non-Scottish "high culture" which
dominated the official Edinburgh International Festival of
Music and Drama founded four years before.

The "Scottish Folk Revival" of the 1950s was of immense
significance in two overlapping ways. Its key promoters
were all on the left, and in many cases CP members. In
that decade, the Conservative and Unionist Party actually
captured an absolute majority of the Scottish vote in a
general election and the Labour Party abandoned its
traditional commitment to Home Rule. But the folk revival
was predicated on the idea of Scottish distinctiveness. Its
energy demonstrated itself as CND emerged as a mass
movement of the left, spawning brilliant new protest
songs, and those marching days in turn were the seedbed
of the arrival of the Scottish National Party as a serious
force in the late 1960s.

Secondly, the maddening controversies over the status
and nature of "Scots language" were occluded, though
not, alas, extinguished, by the arrival before a growing
public of infectious songs voiced in all the dialects
currently spoken. Against the academic "Lallans" of the
minor followers of MacDiarmid could be set, for instance,
Robertson's deep-brewed North-Eastern Doric and the
demotic Glaswegian of Matt McGinn, in verses which
many believed had literary quality. Increasingly, writers of
fiction and verse would feel free to use whatever sort of
Scots seemed appropriate, obeying no fabricated
"standard".

MacDiarmid himself was not pleased by this development.
His early admiration for Henderson's poetry and approval
in principle of the revival's aims gave way, by the 1960s,
to haughty disgust at what he perversely conceived to be
a pandering to nostalgia for vanished rural ways and to the
mental inanity of unlettered people. He denounced folk
song as "the ignorant droolings of swinish shepherds".

In May 1959, Henderson had married Kätzel Schmidt in
Coburg. By 1966 they had two beloved daughters,
Christine and Janet. As time went on, they lived apart,
though close at hand. A bisexual who kept folk-music
hours was not a candidate for conventional domesticity.

As Henderson began to tally honorary degrees, the most
distinguished moment of his public life was when he
actually refused an award. Margaret Thatcher's
government tried to appoint him OBE in the 1984 New
Year's Honours List. He turned it down and, at the
instigation of the 200-strong campaign of Scottish Writers
Against the Bomb, made public that fact, and his reason:
his "total disagreement with Mrs Thatcher's dangerous
defence policies".

The harvest of Hamish Henderson's writing is surprisingly
scanty. A collection of essays, many of these brilliant,
appeared as Alias McAlias in 1992. There are tantalising
displays of his extraordinary erudition in his "Selected
Letters", very well edited by Alec Finlay as The Armstrong
Nose (1996). But what became of the most promising
young British poet of the late 1940s?

The Elegies returned to print in 1977, and have been
frequently available since. They occupy 26 of 155 pages in
the Collected Poems and Songs which at last appeared, in
somewhat random order, in 2000. Almost everything else
has an "occasional" character – cheeky political songs,
translations from German and Italian, one-off assaults on
substantial topics in various styles. Everything is
interesting, and much is powerful. But they don't
constitute an oeuvre. That Henderson had somehow lost
interest in being what one might call a "career" poet was
confirmed on public occasions when he read work long
published not from printed pages but from a battered
notebook, as if it was semi-private or still "in progress".

One he would turn to, inspired by his annual journeys to
attend a Cornish folk festival in Padstow, seemed as he
read it to be his own epitaph. Beginning

Under the earth I go
On the oak-leaf I stand
I ride on the filly that never was foaled
and I carry the dead in my hand . . .

it contains his distinctive credo:


Will flow free again, and new voices
Be borne on the carrying stream.

Scotland has latterly been, in his own potent words from
the Elegies, a land of "no gods and precious few heroes".
What made Hamish Henderson a true hero for many of us
was the clarity of vision which showed him the crucial
importance of that "carrying stream" of language and
song. Like Burns and Scott, he thought the songs he
collected to be more important than anything he wrote
himself. Like them, he composed verse which ascended
to anonymity, part of a tradition of which every Scot is an
author.