MayDay celebrations start with a cracker

2014’s MayDay celebrations have started with two excellent events and a considerable increase in the interest levels.

1915 Rent strikes in Glasgow

Last Saturday, the new Friends of MayDay (GFoMD) organised ‘Walk through the War’ had its first outing and a small but interested band took a couple of hours to visit a number of Glasgow sites associated with events linked to different campaigns connected to the First World War.

Starting at the site of the notorious Duke Street Jail – used to imprison suffragettes, anti-war campaigners and strikers – the walk wound its way via George Square, the Clyde and Bath Street to the old St Andrew’s Hall building. The rain kept off and the history of those radicals still fighting while war raged was laid out through the city!

Good news for fans of these walks is that a joint application to Glasgow’s Doors Open Day organisers on behalf of GFoMD and the Scottish Labour History Society has been successful, and both the ‘walk through the War, and a variant on last year’s East End Walk (from Bridgeton to George Square) will feature in this year’s (September) programme.

From First War to Spanish War

Then on Thursday, a different war featured, as Calton Books launched their reprint of John and Willy Maley’s play From Calton to Catalonia based on their father’s experiences as an International Brigader in the Spanish Civil War. It’s available from Calton Books – their FB site is here. 

Willie Maley was present to introduce the book and expand on the fascinating character that his father must have been. Particularly good for an ex-colleague of mine – Dougie Hay – to get a mention! And proving that Glasgow is the biggest village in the world, the MayFest connection came full circle – the first outing of the play was part of that lamented festival!

Some great music, from Chris and Paul of The Wakes wound up a cracker of an evening!

March and rally to the Cabaret

A great start to this year’s mayday celebrations! On to the MayDay rallies on Saturday across Scotland, and in Glasgow on Sunday! And remember to get your tickets for the Great MayDay Cabaret at Oran Mor on Monday night. Tickets across the bar in OM, on line from their website,  or from the GFoMD stall at the O2 Academy Rally on Sunday.

Far, far from Ypres, and not yet close to a target

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If producing a show that deals with a cataclysmic event, such as a war. especially a war that consumed so many lives for so little purpose, it is useful to have an aim in view. What was the impact of it? Did people die in vain, or for a purpose? If there were disasters, why did they happen? Unfortunately the lack of such an aim or target in Friday's (17) First World War concert at Glasgow's Celtic Connections (Far, far from Ypres) in the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall ultimately meant that it lost its way.

The material itself was often excellent, and the artists - including Barbara Dickson, Dick Gaughan and rising folk star, Siobhan Miller - more than did it justice. But the confusion about what the show set out to do, ultimately meant that it failed.

Billed as the music, songs and poetry of World War One from a Scottish perspective, the show used contemporary songs - music hall and troops own - in a similar vein to (and using much the same material from) theatre workshop's 'Oh, What a lovely War!'. However lacking the clear political perspective of that show, meant that we were also subjected to trite jingoistic material with no sense of irony or sarcasm. And of course, troops' songs in a major conflict such as the First World War don’t tend to fit into a Scottish, or any national perspective.

Ian McCalman, who directed the musical show, also mixed in some later material such as Eric Bogle's The Band played 'Waltzing Matilda' which, while a superb song, is about ANZAC troops in Gallipoli. I’m not sure Bogle’s Scottish birth was sufficient link.

The device of using ‘Jimmy McDonald’, an ‘everyman’ figure, could also have worked, if he hadn’t been introduced and then forgotten about for most of the show! Even when he had to be dispatched, he went via the Spanish ‘flu outbreak of 1919, rather than in the war itself. Ian Anderson’s narration, while clear, reinforced the view that this was intended to be a journey. But not knowing whether we were tracking the impact on the squaddies, history, the battles, or Scotland meant that we didn't really know where we were going.

It was a disappointment, that after such a successful opening venture as McCalman’s Spanish Civil War songs last year, this one didn’t gel. It wouldn’t take much to get it right. Perhaps it should be regarded as a ‘work in progress’?

‘…gentle stirring sounds, Belied a deathly silence that lay all around.’

Spent an afternoon at Grantchester recently. An attractive village near Cambridge, probably best known either for the poet Rupert Brooke and especially for his poem The Old Vicarage, Grantchester. Or for the Pink Floyd track from Ummagumma - ‘Grantchester Meadows’, from which the title of this piece is taken.

Rupert Chawner Brooke, the
1910's answer to 'glitterati'.

Having walked there from Cambridge, we had a beer in one of the local pubs and then something to eat in the Orchard, where Brooke, and other of the ‘beautiful young litterati’ of the pre-first world war spent time. Indeed there is a small (and quite impressive) museum to Brooke there. It gave a view of an intelligent and privileged young man who in many ways seemed to have a particular gift for self delusion. He seemed to be constantly confused about who he should trust, love and support. He was apparently a socialist of a Fabian bent, but wrote five or six stirringly jingoistic military verses at the beginning of the first world war.

Indeed, these verses (along with The Old Vicarage, Grantchester) are probably the main reason for his fame. He was taken up by (among others) Winston Churchill who promoted the (by then dead) Brooke as the voice of The Soldier. 

In truth, it is unfair in the extreme to blame Brooke for this lionisation, and indeed given his lack of experience of the war, (he died in 1915 from  blood poisoning after Gallipoli, where we was not part of the landings. He is buried on the Greek island of Skyros) it may also be slightly unfair to blame him for the jingoism of his poetry. After all, both Wilfred Owen, and Siegfried Sassoon had to experience much of the ‘pity of war’ before they produced their greatest works, and Sassoon initially produced as militaristic verse as Brooke.

“To these I turn, in these I trust; 

Brother Lead and Sister Steel. 

To his blind power I make appeal; 

I guard her beauty clean from rust.” The Kiss

Charles Hamilton Sorley

However, there was another poet early in the first world war who not only saw the futility and horror before having to spend years in the trenches, but also possessed the objectivity to express that as a general truth. The objectivity of Owen’s Strange Meeting, rather than the direct attack of Sassoon’s Base Details if you like.

Charles Hamilton Sorley, like Brooke, died young (also in 1915) and had little or no time to experience the horrors of war, yet in the short time he did have he produced two remarkable poems. All the hills and vales along, and When you see millions of the mouthless dead, are significant for both their prescient recognition of the futility of war and the bitter sarcasm with which Sorley lampoons the pastoral glories of many of the pro-war poets.

How does this happen? That a less insightful poet receives far greater recognition than a better? Is it to do with privilege? Hardly, Sorley was the product of the same public school/oxbridge upbringing as Brooke (although Marlborough College/Oxford vs Brooke’s Rugby School/Cambridge). He was, as some might have guessed, Scottish - born in Aberdeen - but that wasn’t hugely significant in his upbringing. 

Rupert Brooke (a la the Archers)

It is surely down to the illusion perpetrated by the establishment in using Brooke’s poetry to shore up their false image of the glory of war. Even now, a statue of Brooke in the grounds of the Old Vicarage in Grantchester, shows him in battledress holding a book! Yet his experience of frontline warfare was limited to one day of limited action during the evacuation of Antwerp! 

Mind you, if the illusion of Brooke was false, it was largely perpetrated by other people. The family who now own the Old Vicarage, Grantchester are the Archers, Lord Jeffrey, and Lady Mary. Certainly Jeffrey is a literary figure who requires no outside assistance to create an illusion of qualification, or even truth!