This is the fourth article I have written concerning fairs and markets in the county and concentrates on Kirriemuir. Like most burghs, Kirriemuir had a number of periodic and regular fairs and markets. In the 1880s these were summarised by Francis Groome in his Ordnance Gazetteer of Scotland (volume 4):
A weekly corn and provision market is held on Friday; four cattle fairs have been extinct for several years; a horse fair is held on the second Friday of March; a cattle and horse fair on the Wednesday after Glamis May fair, on 24 July or the Wednesday after, on the Wednesday after 18 Oct., and on the Wednesday after Glamis November fair; and a hiring fair is held on the Term Day if a Friday, otherwise on the Friday after.
The town's regular Friday market was described by the native J. M. Barrie in Auld Licht Idylls (1888):
Every Friday there was the market, when a dozen ramshackle carts containing vegetables and cheap crockery filled the centre of the square, resting in line on their shafts. A score of farmers’ wives or daughters in old-world garments squatted against the town-house within walls of butter on cabbage-leaves, eggs and chickens. Towards evening the voice of the buckie-man shook the square, and rival fish-cadgers, terrible characters who ran races on horseback, screamed libels at each other over a fruiterer’s barrow.
The annual Muckle Fair also took place on a Friday but it was a larger and more riotous affair, and children and adults keenly anticpated it:
On the Muckle Friday, the fair for which children storing their pocket money would accumulate sevenpence-halfpenny in less than six months, the square was crammed with gingerbread stalls, bag-pipers, fiddlers, and monstrosities who were gifted with second sight. There was a bearded man, who had neither legs nor arms, and was drawn through the streets in a small cart by four dogs. By looking at you he could see all the clockwork inside, as could a boy who was led about by his mother at the end of a string.
Barrie wrote again of the anticipation of local bairns before the annual event in his novel Sentimental Tommy (1896): 'Every child in Thrums went to bed on the night before the Muckley hugging a pirly, or, as the vulgar say, a money-box...' Signs would be put up in the town to tell people to beware of pickpockets. Boys and girls would have trouble sleeping the night before the fair because of their excitement.
On the day of the
fair, people from the country would swarm into the district:
braw loons in blue bonnets with red bobs to them, tartan waistcoats, scarves of every color, woollen shirts as gay, and the strutting wearers in two minds - whether to take off the scarf to display the shirt, or hide the shirt and trust to the scarf. Came lassies, too, in wincey bodices they were like to burst through, and they were listening apprehensively as they ploughed onward for a tearing at the seams.
The gaudy
attractions were gaudy and glorious to people who led monotonous and
hard-working lives:
Four streets of them in the square! The best is the menagerie, because there is the loudest roaring there. Kick the caravans and you increase the roaring. Admission, however, prohibitive (threepence). More economical to stand outside the show of the 'Mountain Maid and the Shepherd's Bride' and watch the merriman saying funny things to tlie monkey. Take care you don't get in front of the steps, else you will be pressed up by those behind and have to pay before you have decided that you want to go in. When you fling pennies at the Mountain Maid and the Shepherd's Bride they stop play-acting and scramble for them. Go in at night when there are drunk ploughmen to fling pennies. The Fat Wife with the Golden Locks lets you put your fingers in her arms, but that is soon over.
In common with many
such gatherings, there was an extravagance of behaviour which turned less
innocent as the proceedings went on: 'With the darkness, too, crept into the
Muckley certain devils in the colour of the night who spoke thickly and
rolled braw lads in the mire, and egged on friends to fight and cast lewd
thoughts into the minds of the women.' [Sentimental Tommy, p. 214] And
the women, Barrie said, would often behave as badly as the men, and no wonder
as this was the one day of the year when they could be cut free of their
laborious restrictions and did not know how to moderate themselves.
A later writer on Barrie remembered the fair less fondly than the great man. Patrick Chalmers, in The Barrie Inspiration (1938), wrote of the fair, which had long vanished by that time:
My own recollection of Muckle Friday is one of sodden drinking, small rain and cruelty to animals. Hulking nothy hands in hobnailed boots , corduroy trousers and calfskin vests walked together in gangs... By noon most people, men and women, were tipsy... the Muckley had outlived its usefulness and had degenerated into an orgy pure and simple. No doubt it was picturesque to see the lines of snowy tents rising in the early morning beneath the shadow of the steeple. The columns of steam from the bright burnished tin or brass cauldrons, in which great savoury joints and whole kailyards of cabbages and potatoes were boiled... The blue smoke from the fires curled peacefully into the morning air, before the struggling mass of bewildered animalism had become maddened by thirst, or driven desperate by the blows of men and the barking of dogs.
