Enthusiasms No 75 A collection of shorter pieces on subjects of interest, outrage or enthusiasm ...

The problem as far as the Scottish Travellers are concerned is sheer lack of evidence as to their origin, and to the sources of their songs and stories.  The School of Scottish Studies constantly complain, for example, that Gavin Greig and James Bruce Duncan did not collect from the Travellers.  On the other hand Duncan's family are certain that he, for one, certainly did.  Thus the lack of Traveller song in the G/D Collection may simply be that there wasn't a great song tradition amongst them before the Great War, and that what they demonstrated in the '50s was that they had preserved from the widespread songs - the 3,000 known songs that Greig and Duncan had found amongst the general population.

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In my Enthusiasm 74, Harlaw Battle and its Ballads, I mentioned that the ballad entitled The Battle of Harlaw (Child 163) which Stanley Robertson sang was a fake, probably a piece of propaganda created in the 18th century to improve the fortune of a North-East member of the Forbes family who had unfortunately supported the losing side in the 1745/6 Jacobite Rebellion.  In his letter of the 14th, Vic Smith wondered if any such reason could be offered for an apparently ahistorical verse that appears in the ballad The Bonny House of Airlie.

For many years I have looked at the ragged and unreliable interface between Scottish balladry and Scottish history with remarkably different results.  The Bonny Lass o' Fyvie, for example, starts life as an English chapbook story and a rather undistinguished song, but crosses the border to morph into a splendidly detailed 'historical' ballad now supposedly set in Aberdeenshire.1  But then I was able to show that one rare version of The Bonny Earl o' Moray ballad refutes the account in the history books that the fleeing Earl met his end on the sea shore, given away by his burning headdress, for this ballad version states that he was ambushed and murdered in his bed, hence the horror and disgust that this generated; historians now refer to this possibility.2  When it comes to the version that Stanley sang of The Battle of Harlaw, the evidence is that from beginning to end it is a pack of lies.  I am afraid that this is not, as Vic writes, 'a supposed inaccuracy'; it is a fakery that has long been suspected, for its versions show little of the variation over time that a truly old ballad displays.  The evidence for this I detail in a Review of Scottish Culture paper, and expand further in a chapter, 'Lord Forbes and his Ballad' in a book, Bludie Harlaw.  Realities, Myths, Ballads.3

That it was a post-Rebellion Forbes family propaganda effort would seem likely, given the circumstances of Alexander Forbes, 4th Lord Pitsligo, who was in hiding on his forfeited estates, having supported the Jacobites in the risings of both 1715 and 1745.  In his letter 'Harlaw and Airlie', Vic Smith wonders if there is some such explanation for an apparently anachronous verse in the ballad The Bonny House o' Airlie, i.e:

"For if my gude lord had been at hame,
As he's awa' wi' Chairlie,
There wouldnae come a Campbell frae Argyle
Dare trod upon the bonny green o' Airlie."

Mike Yates in his letter of the 11th does not see why I should object to Stanley singing a ballad which is a historically a fake; I must admit that I have not made my objections clear.  Before I do so, I should like to mention a disturbing aspect of the ballad that Stanley sang; in many versions it is racist, mocking the stupid, violent Highlanders which Forbes and his Lowlanders are depicted as routing completely and killing their leader.  This is done by portraying 'Johnnie Heilanmen' as spouting pigeon-Scots, a mockery of the speech of Highland savages:

Oh was ye near McDonnell's men?
Did ye their numbers see?
Come, tell me Johnnie Hielanman
What micht their numbers be?

Yes, I pe fae the Highlands cam
Yes me cam a' the wye
There pe ninety thousand Highlanders
As they cam frae the Skye.

Mike Yates writes:

So, where does this leave us in respect to Jeannie and Stanley?  Were they wrong to sing this ballad?  Of course not.  Did they believe that the ballad's story was factually incorrect?  Probably not.  If anything, I would say that Stanley was quite proud of his ability to tell what he believed was the history of the battlefield that we visited that day.  And why not?  He was, after all, a member of a group of people who had been marginalized in Scotland for far too long.  A group, I might add, that had remembered so much that had been lost by other Scots.  And I, for one, am more than happy to recall that day with Stanley and to remember his singing of his ballad.  Scholars might call it a 'fake', but in doing so they are using their brains, and not their hearts.

Mike recalls the moving moments where Stanley sang it out proudly beside the Monument raised in 1914 on the plateau of Harlaw to one of the most horrifically bloody battles in Scottish history; a battle which even hardened mediaeval historians had described as 'atrocious'.  Stanley was always proud to take people to the site of the battle, singly or in busloads, to sing his ballad and recount its history.  Traveller lore is firmly taken by them as true; I recall, for example, Lizzie Higgins taking me to the very spot that her father had shown her where Johnnie o' Braidisleys (Johnie Cock, Child 114) fell - although Child's versions alone have him perishing throughout England and Scotland.  Yet in recounting to visitors what was unfortunately a pack of lies on the Harlaw battlefield, I feel a line was inadvertently overstepped, even though Stanley was unaware of the falsehoods he was delivering.  Mike rightly praises the Travellers for preserving 'so much that had been lost by other Scots', but it is one thing to admire and treasure Traveller tradition; it is another to accept it wholly uncritically.

Stanley 'relished scholarly treatments of his ballads'.6  He died, however, three years before I was able to publish the sad facts about his version, for knowing his desire for truth, he would then have taken to singing the original thirty-one stanza ballad, also called The Battle of Harlaw, which was composed close to the time of the battle.  Moving, as well as largely historically accurate, it ends most appropriately:

Men will remember as they may
Quhen thus the Verite they knaw, [when: Truth: know]
And mony a ane may murn for ay,
The brim Battil of the Harlaw.  [violent, ferocious]

Ian Olson - 25.  11.  14

Notes:

1.  'The Bonny Lass o' Fyvie or Pretty Peggy of Derby?', Review of Scottish Culture, 22 (2010), 150-163.  [Offprint in the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library]

2.  'The Dreadful Death of the Bonny Earl of Moray.  Clues from the Carpenter Song Collection', in Folk Music Journal, 7, no 3 (1997), 281-310. 

3.  'The Battle of Harlaw, its Lowland Histories and their Balladry: Historical confirmation or confabulation?, Review of Scottish Culture, 24, (2012), 1- 33.  [Offprint in the VWML].
Bludie Harlaw.  Realities, Myths, Ballads (Edinburgh, John Donald, 2014).  [Copy in the VWML]

4.  Pat Shuldham-Shaw and Emily Lyle, The Greig-Duncan Folk Song Collection, Volume Two, (Aberdeen, 1983).  Note to Song 233, The Bonnie Hoose o' Airlie, pp.541-2.

5.  'William Stanley Robertson, The Scotsman, (26 Nov 2009).

6.  'Robertson, (William) Stanley (1940-2009)', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, (Oxford, January 2013) [http://oxforddnb.com/view/article/101133]

Correspondence: