The Burns Supper Companion E-Book

Nancy Marshall

• Herausgeber: Birlinn
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 170

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

In 1801, some five years after Robert Burns' death, nine of his friends sat down to dinner in what is now known as Burns Cottage in Alloway to celebrate his extraordinary life and to give thanks for his friendship. Over the years the informal theme from that evening has developed into the ritual known as Burns Night. This best-selling book is the essential guide for anyone intending to hold or attend a Burns Night of any size. In addition to setting out the order of events for the evening, the Burns Supper Companion also offers fascinating insights into the traditions surrounding Burns Night. Nancy Marshall has spent a large part of her life living and working in Edinburgh. She read English Literature and Medieval History at Edinburgh University, going on to write widely about Scottish song and the poems and songs of Robert Burns.

Leseprobe

Nancy Marshall has spent a large part of her life living and working in Edinburgh. She read English Literature and Medieval History at university there. She has written on Scottish song and the poems and songs of Burns, her main interest being the history and myths surrounding them. After her family and friends her passions are gardening, watercolour and the history and landscape of Galloway – not necessarily in that order.

For John,who is with me

This edition first published in 2022 by

Birlinn Limited

West Newington House

10 Newington Road

Edinburgh

EH9 1QS

www.birlinn.co.uk

Text copyright © Nancy Marshall 1992, 2007, 2022

Illustrations copyright © the Estate of John Marshall 2001

The moral right of Nancy Marshall to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form without the express written permission of the publisher.

ISBN: 978 1 78027 631 1

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

CONTENTS

Preface

The Life of Robert Burns

The History of the Burns Supper

The Basic Elements of a Burns Supper

How to Organise a Burns Supper

The Dinner

The Immortal Memory Speech

The Other Speeches

Poems and Songs

The Evening Ends

Final Details

Quotations

Bibliography

Index

PREFACE

In 1801, some five years after Robert Burns’s death, nine of his friends sat down to dinner in what is now known as Burns Cottage. By then an inn, it was here in the ‘auld clay biggin’, where he’d been born, that the first Burns Supper took place. They gathered to celebrate his extraordinary life and to give thanks for his friendship. Little did they know that this fellowship of remembrance would resonate through the centuries and span out all over the world. ‘Auld Lang Syne’ indeed. A simple evening, during which friends reminisced about his work, sang a few songs, roared with laughter as they remembered the fiery barbs from his skelpin’ tongue, made speeches and drank toasts to his memory: it’s little wonder it caught the popular imagination. And yes, they did eat haggis.

Over the years the informal theme from that evening has developed into the mystical ritual known as Burns Night. The traditional format is laid out in the following pages according to The Burns Federation and some of the oldest Burns clubs in existence. There are sample speeches, a biography, poems and songs, quotations and even a recipe for haggis.

Whichever form your Burns Supper takes, whether a formal celebration with piper and invited speakers or low-key and simple with a fiddle and songs around the dining-room table, it’s an evening for sentimentality, a part of Scottish nature often frowned upon today. Burns would have loved it.

The heart ay’s the part ay

That makes us right or wrang

(Epistle to Davie)

Nancy MarshallEdinburgh, 2007

THE LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS(1759–96)

BURNS – THE MAN AND THE POET

Robert Burns was born on 25 January 1759 in the Ayrshire village of Alloway. Most of the following 37 years, until his death in 1796, were spent working on the land, from farm labourer on his father’s farms to farmer himself. Only during the last five years of his life, while acting as an exciseman in Dumfries, did he manage to free himself from the burden of toiling in the fields and even then, as he laid down the yoke of the soil for the last time, it was merely to travel the 200 miles a week on horseback needed to perform his excise duties. Life was never easy for Robert Burns. But whatever came his way, good or bad, pleasure or pain, he hungrily took it up like the artist he was, and celebrated the experience. His dogged determination in everything is reflected in the power of his work. Whether describing the instantaneous pleasure, the sad memory or the fleeting joy, he seems to capture and illuminate these feelings.

Burns’s acute perception of life and everything and everyone around him originated in the early years he spent labouring on his father’s farms. The fires of injustice were kindled in him as year after year of toil brought the family no relief from their daily hardship and the threat of the factor, and eviction for non-payment of rent always loomed in the background. The pain of these days, both physical and mental, was etched for ever into his mind. It was the source of his quicksilver mood changes, his depressions and melancholia. But more importantly it was the cradle of his creativity.

Robert Burns was a complex character, a loyal friend, a dangerous enemy with a fast, biting tongue, a caring and loving father, a hardworking farmer, a great debater who needed social stimulus as much as he craved the quiet and solitude of his own fireside; he was neither a fool as to how others saw him, nor was he the uneducated ‘ploughman poet’ he allowed himself to be mistaken for.

Burns drank, but probably no more to excess than was the norm for the day. He had a way with the ladies, but as he describes in ‘Address to the Unco Guid, or the Rigidly Righteous’, the only reason some resist temptation is that temptation is never put in their way. The power of his work has stood the test of time, the sentiments in it as valid today as they have ever been. He combined intellect with imagination and instinct, and never lost his sense of justice, which gave him the freedom to expound his beliefs and loudly proclaim life’s pleasures and passions.

In a country being overrun by English ways and customs and English government, the average Scotsman in Burns’s time felt his way of life slipping away. Writing in the everyday language still used by the mass of the population, Burns avowed that their culture was still alive and in so doing elevated their existence and their pride in that existence. The gap he filled was a mixture of hope for the future and a nostalgia for the past, rather like the sentiments expressed in ‘Auld Lang Syne’.

FAMILY HISTORY

Robert Burns’s father, William Burnes, settled in Ayrshire in 1750 but hailed originally from Kincardineshire, in the northeast of Scotland. His family had been tenant farmers on the estate of Earl Marischal, a staunch Stuart supporter. In later life, the romantic in Burns liked to believe that his ancestors’ fall on hard times was due to their loyalty to the Jacobite cause, rather than such mundane reasons as his grandfather’s over-ambitious farming ventures or a succession of bad harvests. Whatever the reasons, the Burnes’s household was broken up in 1748 due to bankruptcy, and the sons, William and Robert, went elsewhere in search of work. The poet’s father, William, walked to Edinburgh and found work as a gardener, being employed for a time in helping to lay out ‘the Meadows’. In 1750 he moved to Ayrshire on the west coast of Scotland, where he continued as a gardener: first for the Laird of Fairlee, then with the Crawfords of Doonside and finally at Doonholm for Dr Fergusson. During this time, this determined, hardworking man put aside enough money to lease seven and a half acres of land in Alloway, where he planned to build a house and set up as a market gardener. He continued working at Doonholm, while he began his market garden, and in 1757, just seven years after his arrival in Ayrshire, during the summer and autumn, he built, with his own hands, the ‘auld clay biggin’ known all over the world today as Burns Cottage. It was intended as a home for his bride Agnes Brown, the daughter of an Ayrshire tenant farmer, whom he married on 15 December 1757. By then William Burnes was 36 years of age and his new wife 25. He was a slim, wiry figure of medium height and she was a small, vivacious redhead. They both possessed strong tempers, both had the ethos of hard work stamped through them and, probably because of their ‘late’ marriage, they both brought maturity and stability to a relationship which survived happily until William’s death in 1784. Robert, the first of their seven children, was born on 25 January 1759.

ALLOWAY

In Alloway the family’s life passed pleasantly. While William Burnes continued to work as a gardener and run his small market garden, his wife looked after the dairy, and along with her cousin, Betty Davidson, entertained the children with old Scottish songs and tall tales, which unbeknown to them, were to stimulate Burns’s imagination and influence his work all his days. In 1765, at the age of six, and with his younger brother Gilbert, Robert entered the village school of Alloway for his first formal education. Unfortunately after little more than a month, the schoolmaster left for Ayr and the school closed. An ever-resourceful William Burnes quickly got together with the heads of four other families and found a new master for the school, arranging that they split the cost of his salary between them and take it in turns to board him.

MOUNT OLIPHANT

John Murdoch, the young man who filled the post, regarded Robert and Gilbert as bright and hardworking. Gilbert of the two he thought had a ‘more lively imagination’ and was ‘more of the wit, than Robert’, and musically he found ‘Robert’s ear, in particular, was remarkably dull, and his voice untunable’. Murdoch continued to teach the boys for a time, although only sporadically, after the family moved to Mount Oliphant Farm early in 1766. By then William Burnes thought the cottage too small for his growing family and, to prevent his children becoming labourers and therefore ‘underlings’ in another household, he leased Mount Oliphant, a few miles from Alloway, at £40 per year, becoming a tenant farmer like his ancestors. And he was to fare no better. In these 70 acres of exhausted soil, which hardly covered the rocks beneath, the family toiled in backbreaking work and lived in extreme frugality for the next 12 years. During that time, Robert performed a man’s work, when he was still little more than a child, and in the process irreversibly damaged his heart. He described his time there as being ‘the cheerless gloom of a hermit, with the unceasing moil of a galley slave’. Gilbert believed that Robert’s later melancholia and the depressions which haunted him all his adult life stemmed from this time. Describing Robert’s physical condition he said, ‘At this time he was almost constantly afflicted in the evenings with a dull headache, which, at a subsequent period of his life, was exchanged for a palpitation of the heart, and a threatening of fainting and suffocation in the night time.’ Robert’s drastic measures to stop the palpitations included keeping a bucket of water at his bedside into which he plunged his head in the hope of relieving the spasm.

During these years William Burnes, when not teaching Robert and Gilbert himself, and instructing them on the Bible, periodically sent them to different schools to brush up on their work. It shows the remarkable strength and character of this kindly, but stern father that even while trying to eke out an existence for the family and contend with threatening letters from the factor over unpaid rent, he still found the time and inclination to foster the future for his children.

By the age of 18 Robert, a compulsive reader from his earliest days, had devoured the works of Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, Gray, Shenstone, Pope and Addison. Apart from the fiction of Henry Fielding and Tobias Smollett and the philosophy and history of David Hume and William Robertson, he knew intimately the works of his predecessors in Scottish literature, Allan Ramsay and Robert Fergusson, he read French and had a little Latin. The Bible, as he was to depict in ‘The Cotter’s Saturday Night’, was standard reading for any God-fearing Scottish family. It was hardly the background of an ‘unlettered ploughman’.

LOCHLIE

In 1777 Robert’s horizons widened immeasurably when his father decided to take the lease of Lochlie Farm, three miles from Mauchline and two and a half miles from Tarbolton. In farming terms, it was little better a bargain than Mount Oliphant, either financially (the rent was high at £1 for each of the 130 acres) or in soil condition. William Burnes had merely exchanged poor, exhausted soil for swampy, undrained land, but for the next four years his family enjoyed a more comfortable lifestyle and Robert found new friends and stimulating company in the nearby farms and villages. It was here that he set out to mark himself as different by tying his hair back unlike the other men of the parish, who traditionally wore their hair short.

In 1780 the Tarbolton Bachelors’ Club was founded and Robert became one of its leading lights, delighting in the debates and gaining confidence from the fierce interchange of passions and personalities. His hand can be detected in the rules, which were drawn up:

No haughty, self-conceited person, who looks upon himself as superior to the rest of the club, and especially no mean-spirited worldly mortal, whose only will is to heap up money, shall upon any pretence whatever be admitted.

By the following year Burns had become a Freemason in St David’s Lodge, Tarbolton, and it was due to this early masonic commitment that he found his later entry into Edinburgh made easier. The ladies had by then also begun to interest him: in his earlier youth the charms of Nellie Kilpatrick and Peggy Thomson had disturbed him, and now at 22 he developed an attachment to Alison Begbie, a farmer’s daughter. She turned down his offer of marriage and, depressed and dejected, Burns went off to Irvine to learn the art of flax-dressing. He did set up in business with a partner, but the venture failed. His great friend from the Irvine days was Richard Brown, a sailor and great ladies’ man, who, if the stories are to be believed, led Burns astray with his libidinous attitude to women. But more importantly, he was the first person to suggest that Robert become a poet.

On his return to Lochlie early in 1782, Burns found his father involved in litigation with the factor over arrears in rent. The weather had been bad and consequently the harvests poor, and this combined with a general downturn in the economy toppled many small Ayrshire farmers of that period. By the time the sheriff’s officers came to the farm to sell their cattle, tools and crops on 17 May 1783, William Burnes was ill with consumption and physically frail after all his years of hard labour. It seems that Burns developed an acute hatred of the landowning classes after years of watching his father being tormented by their factors making demands for money he could not find: this final sequestration of all their goods and chattels strengthened Robert’s belief that all men should share the same rights and privileges. William Burnes died at Lochlie on 17 February 1784 and was buried in Alloway Kirkyard, the scene of Tam o’ Shanter’s nightmare encounter with the witches.

MOSSGIEL

Burns’s spirit was maybe embittered by life’s inequalities, but his brain was as sharp as ever, and in the autumn of 1783, some five months before his father’s death, he and Gilbert arranged to rent Mossgiel Farm to provide, as Gilbert later described it, ‘an asylum for the family in case of the worst’. They also shrewdly claimed against their father’s bankrupt estate as employees, and with this money and whatever savings the family had, after William Burnes’s death, removed to Mossgiel, where Robert became head of the family. It was at this point that the ‘e’ was dropped from their surname. Mossgiel, a 118-acre property with an annual rent of £90, lay one mile from Mauchline and, with its heavy clay soil and high elevation, it was to prove no better a bargain than the previous farms, even though Robert was determined to make it a success. However, the combination of a new-found independence and responsibility as head of the family seemed to release in him an enormous creative force. True, he had begun his First Commonplace Book at Lochlie, in which he jotted down ideas, thoughts and impressions about life, while he continued to write both poetry and prose. Now, here at Mossgiel between the years of 1784 and 1786, he produced work of such exceptional calibre that had he never written another word, he would still have been recognised as a great poet.

The ecclesiastical satires ‘Holy Willie’s Prayer’, ‘Address to the Deil’ and ‘The Holy Fair’, come from this time, as do ‘The Twa Dogs’, ‘To a Mouse’, ‘The Jolly Beggars’, ‘The Cotter’s Saturday Night’ and ‘Address to the Unco Guid’.

But, apart from this prolific output and the strain of working the farm, Robert also found time for new and influential friends, such as his landlord, Gavin Hamilton, and the lawyer, Robert Aiken of Ayr. John Richmond, one of Gavin Hamilton’s clerks, and James Smith, a local draper, together with Burns made up a well-known trio in Mauchline, enjoying many evenings in the Whiteford Inn or Poosie Nansie’s. His reputation as a poet was well known locally, but his fame was spreading too amongst ‘the Belles of Mauchline’. In May 1785, his first illegitimate child, a daughter, was born to Elizabeth Paton, one of the servants on the farm, and by the end of the same year he had wooed and won Jean Armour; their first set of twins was born the following September.

Both these events brought down the wrath of the Kirk Session of Mauchline Parish Church on the poet’s head: he had to appear publicly in church to be condemned for the sin of fornication. This was common practice in Scotland at that time, but for Burns it was a bitter humiliation, especially in the case of Jean Armour. After his initial delight at her pregnancy and his written promise of marriage (then recognised as a legal and binding contract), he was shattered to find that Jean’s father, totally opposed to the match, had taken steps to have both of their names cut out of the document. Burns’s anger and bitterness were reserved for Jean; in his eyes, by handing over the paper to her father, she had betrayed him.

But James Armour, master mason and respected citizen of Mauchline, was not yet finished with the local rhyming rake. In the early summer of 1786, in the knowledge that Burns was in the process of publishing what is now known as the Kilmarnock edition of his poems, he determined to have a financial settlement for Jean and had a warrant issued against the poet for a substantial sum of money. But wily Burns had calculated his actions and had already signed his share of Mossgiel over to Gilbert, ostensibly for the support of Betty Paton’s child and included ‘the profits that may arise from the publication of my poems presently in the press’.

Burns continued to agonise over Jean and what he saw as her appalling treatment of him, but true to form, in the middle of this turmoil, he turned to Mary Campbell, better known today as ‘Highland Mary’. In May of that year he proceeded to offer her marriage, while thinking about emigrating to Jamaica to work as a bookkeeper. Whether he was planning to take Mary with him is a matter of conjecture, as is the reason for her death in October of that same year. It was said to have been caused by typhus although many rumours circulated that she had died in childbirth. There is no evidence of either. ‘AftonWater’ was written in her memory.

EDINBURGH

On 31 July 1786 the Kilmarnock edition of Burns’s work was published and in one month the total 612 copies were sold out; public response was deafening and his poems were read from cottage to castle. The literary world was stunned by the extraordinary talent of this supposed ‘unlettered ploughman’. On 3 September Jean Armour gave birth to twins, a boy and girl. Burns left Mossgiel on 27 November for what was to be the first of two winters spent in Edinburgh. It must be remembered that he did not arrive in Edinburgh either friendless, socially inept or intellectually inferior. John Richmond, his friend from Mauchline, now lived there, his masonic affiliations brought many useful contacts, the literati