Thomas Hood the Poet in Dundee

Thomas Hood is not a well remembered figure now, which is a shame because he is one of the more bearable minor English poets of the 19th century.  Hood wrote, in relation to the city of his birth, London: 'Next to being a citizen of the world,it must be the best thing to be born a citizen of the world's greatest city.'  Despite this, he was from Perthshire stock, in the Carse of Gowrie, and spent part of his short life (1799-1845) in Dundee.  Most of the material in this piece is gleaned from Alexander Elliot's Hood in Scotland (Dundee, 1885).

   Thomas's uncle Robert Hood became a tutor to the children of Admiral Duncan, later the victor at the Battle of Camperdown and the poet stayed at the house of one of his aunts, Jean Keay, on his first visit to Scotland.  The poet's father, another Thomas, was apprentice to a bookseller in Dundee before departing to live in London, where he became a publisher.  The poet's father died when he was young and he himself was in his early teens when he was sent back in Scotland for the sake of his health, sailing north on a ship of the Dundee, Perth & London line.

   Thomas Hood later took lodgings with a Mrs Butterworth in the Overgate.  One of his favourite haunts was the harbour at the River Tay and he got to know the boatmen as he frequently crossed to Newport where his aunt also had a home.  During his time in Dundee there was a tragedy with the ferry sinking, as reported by the Dundee Advertiser, 2nd June 1815:

On Sunday forenoon one of the pinnaces plying between Dundee and Newport, in Fife, suddenly sank about half a mile from the latter port, and out of twenty-three or twenty-four persons supposed to have been on board only seven were saved. From some of the people who escaped and others, we have with great pains collected the following details of this very sad disaster :— About a quarter past ten o'clock the pinnace sailed from the Craig Pier, but as the tide was ebbing, and the sand-bank, which now forms an opposing barrier to the passage, was uncovered, it was necessary to make the circuit of its eastern extremity, and for that purpose, the wind blowing strong from the south-east, the boatmen set her along shore till she was opposite the east harbour. Here those cumbrous and unmanageable sails, called lugsails, were hoisted. The main lugsail was first reefed, but after some altercation among the seafaring people on board, the reefs were let out and the whole canvas unfurled. A yawl belonging to Ferry-Port-on-Craig, with one man on board, was fastened by a tow-rope to the stern of the pinnace to be towed across the river. In this manner, and under a heavy press of sail, the pinnace weathered the bank, when, having shipped some water, a fresh altercation ensued about taking in the mainsail. In a few minutes afterwards the person at the helm rose either to clear the yawl's tow-rope from the outrigger of the pinnace's mizzen, or to assist in taking down the mainsail it is uncertain which—and having accidentally put the pinnace too broad from the wind, she instantly filled with water and went down by the stern. At this moment the man in the yawl, with admirable presence of mind, cut the tow-rope which attached her to the pinnace, and not only preserved his own life, but afforded the means of saving the seven persons from the pinnace.

   The captain of the vessel was John Spalding, known as Ballad Jock or Cossack Jock.  Thomas Hood made the incident the subject of one of his early prose pieces.  During the summer of 1815, Hood spent some time living with his father's other relatives in Errol in the Carse of Gowrie.  Back in Dundee in December he scribbled a long doggerel poem satirising the city to his relatives in London, beginning:

The town is ill-built, and is dirty beside,
For with water it's scantily, badly supplied
By wells, where the servants, in filling their pails.
Stand for hours, spreading scandal, and falsehood, and
tales.
And abounds so in smells that a stranger supposes
The people are very deficient in noses.
Their buildings, as though they 'd been scanty of ground,
Are crammed into corners that cannot be found.
Or as though so ill-built and contrived they had been,
That the town was ashamed they should ever be seen.

   The full-scale comical tour of the city which Hood anticipated writing - the Dundee Guide - was never accomplished and he left Scotland soon afterwards. 

Hood's first residence in Dundee, the Overgate.

   The poet did not come north again until 1843, accompanied by his son and daughter, again for the sake of his health.  he stayed for a while with his aunt Jean and her retired seafaring husband at Tayport, just across the Tay.  At his death, two years later, Thomas's sister wrote to her Scottish relatives:

My dear Aunt,—My poor brother is at last released from his sufferings. He departed this life about half past five o'clock on Saturday night. For the last three days he had been insensible. It was only by his groaning occasionally and heavy breathing that we could perceive life in him. I did not expect that he would have lived through Thursday night. When I saw him then he was unconscious, and had not spoken since Wednesday noon, except the words, 'Die, die!' Indeed, I may say, he has been for some time desiring his departure. It has been a lingering death, and his sufferings have been very great; but everything that could be suggested was done to endeavour to alleviate them. Poor Mrs Hood, I am afraid, will feel very much when all the excitement of the funeral is over, for she has been a devoted and attentive wife to him day and night, and had very little rest for some months past and as she said she had no time to write to me, I have been obliged to ride up every week to St. John's Wood, sometimes twice or three times, if I wished to know how he was, when he was in danger. He expressed himself as composed in mind, and prepared for death...With love to you and uncle, I am your affectionate niece,
       Eth. Hood.

Blood in the Kirk? Violence in the Early Reformation (and Before and Beyond)

  This article is a companion piece to the earlier piece Blood in the Fields and Burghs: Seventeenth Century Violence and examines whether the Reformation was a violent event in our area. There is a contention among some historians that the transfer of belief from Catholicism to Protestantism in Scotland was generally more peaceful than elsewhere is believed among modern academics.  There was no large-scale slaughter on either side of the ideological divide, it was true, but some familiar figures in Angus became associated with martyrdom, violence, either dispensing or receive undue punishment for the hue of their spiritual convictions.  Cardinal Beaton has put in several appearances in previous pieces and others like George Wishart and Walter Myln will be considered fully in the future.

   Modern post Christian scholars can look down from a lofty secular perspective and judge that religion and violence have always gone hand in hand, and this is partly true.  Examples can be readily plucked from the records, even though the lack of surviving detail robs us of the necessary context.  One of the earliest recorded events was also the most bloody, the massacre in the bishop's residence at Coupar Angus Abbey in 1186. But this was a fundamentally secular event which just happened to occur in a religious setting. (Details can be found in my post Monastic Settlement in Strathmore - Coupar and Kettins.)  One notable later event occurred in 1435 when John de Crannach, Bishop of Brechin, was violently assaulted by his own archdeacon, Gilbert Forrester.  The attack happened in the cathedral and Forrester was excommunicated by the cathedral chapter in February 1435.  The dispute may have been complicated by ecclesiastical jealousy or a false sense of entitlement for Forrester's uncle Walter had been the previous bishop.

A Godly place?  Crest of the burgh of Brechin, 19th century.

   Did the change from a Roman Catholic religious society to a Protestant one arrive with a tide of violence.  Any upheaval which resulted seems overwhelmingly concentrated on the destruction of property rather than violence against individuals.

   According to Mackenzie E.C. Walcott in Scoti-Monasticon, The Ancient Church in Scotland (1874), 'A nun of Dundee was killed during the violence which attended the demolition of the convent.'  What incident this refers to is not particularly clear.  The Convent of Franciscan Gray Sisters in the burgh stood upon ground between Bank Street and the  Methodist Close in the old Overgate.  Part of the convent survived a considerable time, being altered in the 17th century and only entirely demolished in 1870.  So the identity of the nun and the reasons behind her sad, unfortunate demise can only be guessed at.  I have not been able to discover the identity of this lady.

   In the same burgh there was deliberate violence against the property and contents of religious houses, sometimes politically as well as religiously motivated.  One of the aims was doubtless the sacrilegious humiliation and intimidation of those occupying such premises.  The town records of Dundee record this event:

For art and part in the oppression committed on the Friars, Preachers and Minorites of Dundee, by coming to their Places within the said burgh with convocation of the Queen's lieges in great number, armed in warlike manner: and there breaking up the doors and gates of the Places and breaking and destroying the ornaments, vestments, images and candlesticks carrying off the silvering of the altars, and stealing the bed clothes, cowls, etc., victuals, meal, malt, flesh, fish, coals, napery, pewter plates, tin stoups, etc., which were in keeping in the said Places: in company with Mr. Henry Durham and his accomplices—rebels of Our Lady the Queen, and at the horn—on the last day of August, 1543.

   Ironically, perhaps, the greatest material damage to Dundee's religious houses was not done by reformers but by the occupying English army of 1548, though they perhaps had accomplices in the town's Protestant zealots.  Before the English troops evacuated the town they set fire to the steeple and burned all the idols, also carrying off all the copper and brass inside.  The church plate was hidden away, but the finery of the building and its many small chapels was never fully restored.  Lindores Abbey funded a part restoration in 1552.

   The violent riots of Dundee in September 1543 spread at the same time to Arbroath.  The 16th century Diurnal of Occurrents notes that the abbey was saved by the defence of a local nobleman:

In this tyme thair was ane greit heresie in Dundie; thair thai distroyit the kirkis and wald have destroyit Abirbrothok kirk, war not the Lord Ogilbie.

But the physical decline and depredations at Arbroath Abbey was begun some decades before the Reformation when, in 1514, Ochterlonie of nearby Kelly castle set the monastery on fire following a presumably heated argument with the prior. Catholic writer Alexander Baillie, writing in A True Information (1628), certainly blamed Protestant mobs for ruining the abbey, though how much of this was hearsay or personal religiously tinted prejudice is unknown.  Although he was an exile of the continent, he seems to have known about the abbey in an earlier period (possibly the beginning of the second decade of the seventeenth century), when he  reminisced:

And first as to that of Abbirbroth, surely when before a certaine (number of) years I had first seene it and had stayed a while before the great dore thereof, gazing sadly upon the deplorable state of the defaced and staggering steeples, the battered wals, broken doune pillars and the floore al overgrowne with grass and defiled with filth and excrements of unreasonable beasts; and judging of such faire steads and mines that it hath oncebene a most royal braue and gorgious church, I could not but sigh and bewaile it. . .

   Brechin Cathedral was purged around 1559-60 and its choir was reduced to ruin. The Blackfriars' convent in Montrose was also sacked.

   In the early years of the Reformation there were sporadic incidents of local violence which involved the new regime, and it's interesting to speculate how much of this - if any - was rotted in the struggle of Protestant ministers to demonstrate authority as they took over, plus whether the lay population had any residual resentment against them.  In the year 1579 the Privy Council recorded trouble involving the minister of Fearn parish, Mr William Gray.  A man named Robert Lennox of Schanfurd is reported to have arrived:

in ane greit furie and reage, came to the said Maister Williame with ane drawin quhinzear in his hand, struik him thairwith, and had not faillit to have slayne him, gif God and the remaneut of the parichiners then present had not stayit the said Robert.

   The precise nature of the dispute is not recorded in full.  

   Another incident of violence was recorded in substantially more detail in February 1580 by James Balfour, minister of Rescobie:

Upoun the tent day of Januar last bipast, bealld the Sabbot day, he wes passand to the said kirk of Roscoby, to have usit his office and charge in ministratioun of the Word of God to the parochineris and utheris convenit at dew tyme of sermon, believand , in respect thairof, and for the reverence that aucht to have been borne to Goddis Word, to have ressavit na stop nor impediment, meikle les injuria or invasioun be way of deid of any persoun. Notwithstanding, far by his expectatioun and without ony offence or injurie offerit be him to ony personis, Patrik Buttir in Gormok and Thomas Eroch servand to Johnne Buttir of Gormok, bodin with jakis, steilbonatis, and pistollettis, prohibit to be worn be Actis of Parliament and Secreit Counsale, upoun sett purpois unbellet the said Mr James way, and with ane of the said is pilltolettis fellit him to the ground, and, heand liand thairon,  dischargit ane nther pistolet at. him; howbeit at Godis plesour he eschaipit the dangear thairof. Quhilk being persavit be thame, and that he was sumquhat recoverit of his formar hurt ressavit be the strek of the first pistolett, at last they pursewit him with drawn swirdis, hurt and wound it him in divers partis of his body, and specialie in his richt arme, to the effusione of his bluid in gret quantitie, and had not fallit to have slane him, war not the help of nychbours that stayit thame.

   The Rev Durie of Forfar was involved as the victim of violence not many years after being transferred from the parish of Logie.   In 1602 Thomas Bruce, a servant of John Scrymgeour of Kirkton, was hauled before the magistrates of Forfar and received the following punishment after being found guilty of assaulting the minister:

upoun Sunday Thomas should be presentit to the mercat croce of Forfar, with ane quhyte sark upoun him, and ane paper on his foirhead quhairon salbe writt,en the caus whairfoir he is thair presentit, and that. the said Thomas publictlie at the mercat croce upoun his kneis ask the said minister and the haill congregation forgivenes.

   After this public ritual he was to be bound in the stocks until a caution of £500 was delivered, then he was to be banished for an indefinite period.

The Pends, Arbroath Abbey

   The conspicuous Catholic foundations of Arbroath, Coupar and Rescobie may not have suffered the whole scale violence waged against them by Protestant mobs, as was seen elsewhere. (Resobie, despite the incident of violence involving the minister recounted above, certainly survived almost intact and was used for a short period as Forfar's parish kirk.) Part of the ruinous condition of religious buildings can be accounted for by later secular plunder of masonry for building purposes.  But the last word has probably not been written on this subject

   Surely the last word relating to the perception of violence associated with the Reformation must go to the tale associated with the Mearns reformer George Wishart who played such a large part in the religious conversion of Angus.  The 16th-17th century churchman and historian Spottiswoode relates the incident which happened in plague stricken, religiously divided Dundee in 1544:

It happened, whilst he stayed there, that a priest, called Sir John Weighton, having a purpose to kill him as he descended from the place where he used to preach, was apprehended with a weapon in his hand. A tumult was there upon raised, the sick without the gate rushed in, crying to have the murtherer delivered to them; but he taking the priest in his arms, besought them to be quiet, saying, 'he hath done no harm, only he hath shewed us what we have to fear in time coming,' and so saved the wicked man by his intercession. [The History of the Church of Scotland, volume I, John Spottiswoode, Edinburgh, 1847, p. 152.]

   Wishart's Christian example, of course, was not shared by everyone; not least the Catholic authorities who eventually brought him to his own death.

The Wishart Arch, Dundee

Further posts on aspects and main characters in the Reformation are forthcoming.

Did Dundee Turn Winston Churchill Tory Again?

It may seem unfair to start an article with a question that the author has no intention of fully answering, but that's exactly what I'm going to do. The question is:  Did the experience of being Liberal MP for Dundee turn Churchill into a Tory again?  Winston was the Liberal member of parliament for the burgh from 1908 to 1922 and did not enjoy a uniformly smooth time during his representation. After defeat in Dundee, Churchill returned to his former political home with the Tories. As he said: 'Any fool can rat on a political party. It takes a genius to rerat.' Churchill's disenchantment with Liberal policy, domestic and foreign, was the major part in his political about face, but the unceremonious end to his Scottish representation played a part too.

 Most biographers - from Roy Jenkins to Boris Johnson - gloss over the great man's time in Dundee, but there is interesting object lessons to be learnt by having a look at this period. Was it an extended season of ignominy which paved the way for his Wilderness Years  and gave him the necessary life lessons which prepared him for his great leadership in World War II?

The 1908 election result in Dundee. Note the name of the famous explorer Shackleton as an unsuccessful candidate in the previous general election of 1906.

The Road and the Miles to Dundee

   Churchill was almost gifted Dundee's parliamentary seat after he lost his previous seat in North-west Manchester, where he lost to the Tories, partly because local Jewish voters disliked his stance on the Aliens Act.  This lack of savvy about local matters was to be repeated north of the border, though the storm was a slow brewing one.  What attracted him to Dundee was that it was staunchly Liberal and a seat which many would have thought was guaranteed to be held for an entire political career. He was Minister of the Board of Trade and a rising star in his mid 30's when he came north. The Liberal incumbent in the seat was Edmund Robertson, who was elevated to the House of Lords as Lord Lochee. In the event he received 7,079 votes, 44% of the vote, while the opposing Tory and Labour candidates mustered 8,384 votes between them.  He was MP for Dundee for over 14 years.  A Labour candidate, Alexander Wilkie (first elected for Dundee in 1906), won the other half of Dundee.  (His first re-election in 1910 ran counter to a a wave of reaction against the Liberal party nationally.)

   The downside, of course, was that it was over 400 miles from London; no good if you were a cabinet member, and Churchill was president of the Board of Trade and then first lord of the Admiralty.  His physical absence from Dundee might have been alleviated by some gestures towards the sensibilities and concerns of Dundonians, but these were apparently few and far between. When he did turn up in Dundee it was noted with distaste that he was conspicuously lavish with his spending on himself; not an endearing trait in a place gripped by widespread poverty.  One piece of research states that he spent the modern equivalent of £1000 in one three day visit, of which a sizeable amount was on alcohol.  Some of his remarks on Dundee were jocular, but they were also dark, such as the following contained in a letter to his wife:

This city will kill me. Halfway through my kipper this morning an enormous maggot crawled out and flashed his teeth at me. Such are the penalties which great men pay in the service of their country.

But one of the first elements which caused him trouble was a national one:  the fight for women's votes.

Trouble With The Suffragettes

   Though far from alone in his opposition to the emancipation of women, Churchill hardly helped himself with his outspoken comments on the subject.  He once notoriously stated there was no need for women to have the vote because they were 'well represented by their fathers, brother and husbands'. The tide for suffrage was against him and he was targeted by militant women from an early date.  While he was campaigning for the Dundee seat he was prevented from delivering a speech, as this newspaper report states:

   Four years later, in 1912, he had a better general reception at Dundee:

  But in the previous month there was trouble for Churchill in his constituency:

   That same month a suffragette from Nairnshire with a genius for publicity managed to have herself posted to Mr Churchill, after a debate among postal staff about the legitimacy of accepting this human parcel.  As it happened, Churchill was absent when she was delivered and his outraged secretary refused to accept her.

   Dundee's population of course contained a far greater than average percentage of working women who toiled in the factories within the burgh and increasingly they were insulted by their representative's facile attitude towards their rights.

Antagonising the Dundee Irish, later Years in Dundee and Defeat

   Churchill's sending in troops to defeat a miner's strike in Wales in 1910 might have causes ripples of discontent among sympathetic people in Dundee, but the feeling was nothing compared to the outrage when, in March 1920 as Secretary of State for War, he sent the black and tan auxiliaries over to Ireland  to quell the incipient stirrings of the independence movement.  William Walker notes that Churchill, in 1908:

wooed the city's estimated 1,500 Irish voters with great seriousness and found time to address the Dundee branch of the United Irish League.  Received by the audience with  the 'utmost enthusiasm', Churchill explained that it would be wrong for the Liberal party to 'ban out' Home Rule.  Churchill went on to declare: 'My defeat at Manchester was, in a measure, a defeat for Ireland.  Let my victory in Dundee be, in a measure, a victory for Ireland.' ('Dundee's Disenchantment with Churchill,' The Scottish Historical Review, 49, 1970, pp. 85-108, f. p. 92.)

His actions in sending in the troops in 1920 was likely the straw which broke the back of Churchill's credibility in Dundee.  The Irish organisations in the town turned against the MP, as did the 'Dundee Catholic Herald'.  His end in the city was not long after this event.  It is strange that this fact had tainted his reputation for a large segment of his voters, for he supported Asquith's Home Rule Bill for Ireland in 1910 and had foreseen a progressive path for all parts of the UK, with this progressive comment, whose furtherance was blown away by World War I:

I will run the risk of prophecy and tell you that the day will most certainly come - many of you will live to see it - when a federal system will be established in these Islands which will give Wales and Scotland the control within proper limits of their own Welsh and Scottish affairs.

   The progressive young Churchill of the prewar years was gone and he moved inexorably towards the right, which was to cost him dearly on a personal level.

   There were elements of farce and rich irony in the woeful campaign which unseated Winston Churchill in November 1922.  He was struck down by appendicitis, but battled on bravely at the hustings. He did not arrive in Dundee until three days before the vote.  When he was carried into  the first meeting in the Caird Hall it became known he had paid the men £1 to bear him in.  Some caustic wit offered the bearers £2 if they would let him fall down.  The audience were muted rather than hostile.  The second meeting in Drill Hall was noticeably more antagonistic towards him. Churchill stated:

I was struck by the looks of passionate hatred on the faces of some of the younger men and women. Indeed, but for my helpless condition, I am sure they would have attacked me.

   Churchill poorly misjudged his opponents and made unsavoury remarks which showed he was out of sync with the changing nature of British society.  (And, to be fair, the Liberal party was out of favour with its previous supporters in the whole of Scotland.)  He was also out of touch not only with common voters, but powerful local opinion makers, such as the Tory head of Dundee publishing group D. C. Thomson. One of his opponents, the Labour man E. D. Morel had been a conscientious objector, and a noted campaigner against Belgian atrocities in the Congo.  Churchill chose to berate him because of his French ancestry. (he was born in France of an English mother and a French father.) 'No foreigner should be in the British parliament,' he announced.  He also termed socialists 'reptiles'.  It was his distrust of the Liberals' alliance with Labour that led him to jumping back in bed with the Tories in 1925, three years after his Scottish defeat. His reward was a lengthy exile, the Wilderness Years, when he was trusted by neither Conservatives nor Liberals. Disillusion at defeat in Dundee, surely a shock, may have had some part in him switching political sides.  His previous majority in Dundee was 15,000, in 1918, so the fall from grace in 1922 was absolute and humiliating.  His share of the vote in 1922 was 33%; in 1918 it was exactly double this, 66%.

 
   In the end, Churchill finished in a dismal fourth place in the poles and he joked that defeat at Dundee left him without an office, without a seat, without a party and without an appendix'.  The victor in the hustings was local councillor Edwin Scrymgeour, who had stood against him at every election since 1908.  He could hardly have believed his luck, and in retrospect it seems almost like a mass protest vote which saw him elected. Scrymgeour was the only candidate ever to become a member of cabinet on a prohibitionist mandate. 'Vote as you pray' was his campaign war cry.  It is doubtful whether Dundee's underclass gave his philosophy of banning alcohol any credence whatever.  Yet 'Neddy' Scrymgeour, despite the eccentric outer credentials, was a legitimate man of the people (a socialist and one time member of the Independent Labour Party) and got re-elected in the seat several times.  It is noted that he was a firm supporter of Irish Home Rule.


The full result was as follows:

Edwin Scrymgeour, 32,578
E. D. Morel (Labour), 30,292
D. J. Macdonald (Liberal), 22,244
W. S. Churchill (Liberal and Free Trader), 20,466
R. R. Pilkington (Asquith Liberal), 6,681
William Gallacher (Communist), 5,906

 (Willie Gallacher, the Communist who had toured Bolshevik Russia and had an audience with Lenin).

Neddy Scrymgeour

After the Defeat: Dundee Forgives; Churchill Does Not Forget

   In 1942 Churchill told an audience in Edinburgh that he remembered his time representing Dundee with a degree of fondness.  Yet the feeling might have been weaker than he cared to admit, for when Dundee offered him the freedom of the city  - a vote which was passed by councillors by just one vote -in the following year he pointedly refused to accept it after ten days' consideration.  There is no statue to the great man in the burgh, just a plaque unveiled by his daughter in 2008, celebrating the centenary of his election win, which is affixed to the Queen's Hotel.

'History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.' –Winston Churchill