Angus Folklore: Forgotten Sons of Angus

This one is personal, in a funny sort of way. I know of Sir Alexander Gray (1882-1968)- as I suspect many Scots do - only through his most famous poem Scotland, a much anthologised poem which has rightly merited its place on the Canongate wall outside the Scottish parliament:

This is my country

The land that begat me,

These windy spaces

Are surely my own.

And those who here toil

In the sweat of their faces

Are flesh of my flesh

And bone of my bone.

Hard is the day's task -

Scotland, stern Mother ! -

Wherewith at all times

Thy sons have been faced:

Labour by day,

And scant rest in the gloaming.

With Want an attendant.

Not lightly outpaced.

It was not until I was well advanced into adulthood that I learned that its author was born in Marshall Street, Lochee, less than a quarter of a mile from my own childhood home. Alexander Gray was so accomplished in many fields that his great talents had allowed him to slip beneath the radar in the fifty odd years since his death. The son of an art teacher, John Young Gray and his wife Mary Young, Alexander was born in 1882 and attended Dundee High School before going to Edinburgh University. After studying abroad he became a civil servant (for seventeen years) and then an academic and economist. But a major part of his life was poetry, which included translations of Danish and German works into Scots. He produced his own work too and was included in the influential Northern Numbers.

I know next to nothing about Gray's background. But something tells me that his early interests were not to be found chiefly in the immediate, built up area of Lochee. His poem called 'The Owl' tells us:

When I was young, my heart inclined

To eggs and fishes, moths and stamps,

These were the lode-stones of my mind,

And to my feet succeeding lamps.

The Canongate Wall, Scottish parliament

It is possibly because he moved so far beyond the orbit of Dundee that he is not at all known in his home town. And yet he should be. Perhaps his diversity was his undoing. His earliest book was The Scottish Staple at Veere (1909), and his later non-fiction encompassed biography (Adam Smith, 1948) and economic history and political theory. He was given a knighthood in 1947 and spent much of his latter career at Edinburgh University, and it was in Edinburgh where he died in 1948. According to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography: 'Gray was very much a Scot and strongly rooted, with a profound understanding of his country.' It was a wonder that he managed to publish as much as he did in between the participation in government committees and the demands of academia.

His home county, and the glens in particular, stayed in the poet's mind. The first part of his poem 'The Glen Road' which appeared in Greta Mitchie's A Glen Anthology (1962)* runs:

As I gaed up by Cater Thun

God! the road was dreich and dreary;

And aye I banned the stour and sun;

Sirs! but I was wae and weary.

But I'm no the first that's been up there,

Pechin' hard and sweitin' sair...

Part of his summers during a boyhood in the very early part of the 20th century were spent in the Angus countryside as he recalled in an article about the mansion named The Burn (published in Higher Education Quarterly in May 1953):

Doubtless I did not know [The Burn] by that name; more probably it was merely the 'big hoose' - an object of apprehension rather than of admiration. For though we were not exactly near-neighbours, during the summer we lived within easy striking distance, by cycle or by that curious combination of a nondescript carriage and a nondescript horse which Victorian fathers at times hired to give their family an outing as a reward for good behaviour. On such occasions when our itinerary took us towards Glenesk, an inevitable stopping-place was the Gannochy Brig, where it was an act of piety to look up the river and down the river, and admire the tumbling, tawny waters of the North Esk.

The Burn, built by the Gordon family, later passed into the hands of the Dominion Students' Hall Trust, now Goodenough College. Students can retreat there and it is also for hire as a private venue.

Alexander Gray may be the only luminary from Lochee ever to earn a knighthood (other kenspeckle figures from Lochee such as myself or the notorious George Galloway are unlikely to emulate him in this honour). That aside, Gray kept his eye on the smaller details of life, as exemplified by this quote from his 'Epitaph on a Vagabond':

Careless I lived, accepting day by day

The lavish benison of sun and rain,

Watching the changing seasons pass away

And come again.

It is a great pity that Alexander Gray is so unsung in the current age. I close with the last two verses from his poem 'The Gowk in Lear,' which shows his masterly command of the Scots tongue:

Nane but a Gowk cud sing whan the warld was hell

And Christ dung doun bi the Deevil -

Nane but a Gowk ower glaikit tae fash for himsel

Cud lauch i the lour o evil.

Nane but a Gowk cud sing—whan wyce men's sangs

Were stown, and saunts were quaet -

The weird o the warld, sae wyvit o richts and wrangs

That nane but a Gowk cud spey it.