Hamish Henderson: A Biography. Volume 1 - The Making Of The Poet (1919-1953)

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He was offered a CBE in 1983, but refused it on account of the pro-nuclear policies of the Thatcher government, which he campaigned against. He lived to see the opening of the Scottish Parliament in 1999, for which he had also campaigned, and died in Edinburgh on 8 March 2002, aged eighty-two. He was survived by his wife Kätzel (Felicitas Schmidt), whom he had married in 1959, and their two daughters. A funeral service in St Mary’s Cathedral in Edinburgh was attended by 1500 people, the coffin preceded by a piper, with the ‘Freedom Come All-Ye’ sung at his departure. An early two-stanza version of the song was published in a broadsheet "Writers against Aparthied" (sic) in the Spring of 1960; [1] as the first line refers to Harold Macmillan's Wind of Change speech, [2] given in February of that year, the composition can be dated quite precisely. Henderson was recorded singing the complete 3-stanza version of the song that year. [3] Henderson was very much a part of the ‘folk process’ he championed. For some, this position was problematic and riddled with contradictions, but these were contradictions that Henderson himself embraced. His affinity with the cultural politics of the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci is important here. A constant theme in Henderson’s writing, like Gramsci’s, is the role of the intellectual in society. Gramsci famously ‘hated indifference,’ believing that ‘living means taking sides.’ ‘Those who really live’ he wrote, ‘cannot help being a citizen and a partisan.’ In this spirit, Henderson refused to separate his life, scholarship, art and politics – writing, Hamish Henderson's work will help us to appreciate the value of our living tradition. To appreciate and value our Scottish culture and traditional arts would perhaps be the greatest memorial to Hamish Henderson that we could create. In celebrating our culture and in celebrating Scotland, we celebrate him; in celebrating him, we celebrate our culture. Corey Gibson (2015) The Voice of the People: Hamish Henderson and Scottish Cultural Politics, Edinburgh University Press, ISBN 978-0-74869-657-4

The ‘heelster-gowdie’ force of Henderson in upending the establishment through his challenge to such orthodoxies – in politics, education, culture and broadcasting – led to many hostile reactions and attempts to sideline him in his own time. He was a catalyst for the folk revival in Scotland. He was also an accomplished folk song collector and discovered such notable performers as Jeannie Robertson, Flora MacNeil and Calum Johnston.The structure is again cumulative, with the repetition and staged progression essential to the unfolding a song in performance. Humorous irony is kept in play until the last two verses deliver their devastating charge: matriculation photograph (Downing College Archive, DCPH/2/1/7; credit: Lafayette Photography Ltd) Sources

After the war, Henderson drew on his own wartime experiences, writing ‘Ballads of World War II’ and ‘Elegies for the Dead in Cyrenaica’, which won him the Somerset Award in 1949. He used the award to travel to Italy and translate the works of the Marxist Antonio Gramsci, whose works he had been introduced to by partisans in Italy during the war. After returning to Scotland be became assistant to the American folk song collector Alan Lomax, and spent a year travelling the North East for traditional songs, occasionally being offered his own compositions. a b c "About Hamish Henderson". The University of Edinburgh (in Inglis) . Retrieved 23 Januar 2022.I first became aware of the work and personality of Hamish Henderson in the early 1970s, when I was involved in a big birthday party in Glasgow for another left-wing thinker and protector of the folk song tradition in Scotland, Norman Buchan. Some of those who came to that party had been brought to public attention and to the awareness of folk singers and folk song lovers around the world through the work of Hamish Henderson. Many guests were there, including Billy Connolly as one of the Humblebums. He was not connected to Hamish Henderson at that time. It was a memorable occasion when those people came together. Hamish Henderson (1995), Zeus as Curly Snake: The Chthonian Image, in Ross, Raymond (ed.), Cencrastus No. 52, Summer 1995, pp.7 – 9, ISSN 0264-0856 In 1983 he wis votit Scot o the Year in 1983, bi Radio Scotland listeners; he refusit an OBE in protest aboot nuclear weapons. [5] I remember reading a letter from Hamish to The Scotsman, in which he railed against the Wilson Labour Government of 1966-70, because of its failure to challenge the power of international finance. God knows what he would make of globalisation. He also argued against what he described as the servile complicity of Britain in the Vietnam war. He reminded everyone who read The Scotsman that that war was the first war in which 90 per cent of the casualties were civilians. If only we had listened to him, because most of the wars since then have repeated that horror statistic. Geordie McIntyre (1973), Resurgimento!, an interview with Hamish Henderson, in Maisels, Chic K. (ed.), Folk Song and the Folk Tradition, Festival issue of the New Edinburgh Review, August 73, pp.12 & 13

The 51st Highland Division's Farewell to Sicily by Hamish Henderson". Scottish Poetry Library (in Inglis) . Retrieved 23 Januar 2022.The obituaries spoke of a feud with Hugh MacDiarmid and his biographer, Alan Bold. Hamish and Alan were banned from Milne's Bar for fighting. Passions had run high following a disagreement in the columns of The Scotsman about Hugh MacDiarmid's attitude to poetry. The feud is often remembered, but the cause has been forgotten. I believe that that cause is significant and worth revisiting, as it tells us much about Hamish's principles and the way that they permeated all his activities. Henderson believed that what applies to freedom also applies to poetry; the idea being that people are resourced, liberated and sustained by poetry. ‘Poetry’ here, however, goes beyond the literary form of self-expression; it speaks to a deeper understanding of creativity as ‘poeisis,’ the poetic act of constantly ‘making the world new’. For Henderson, it is a timeless and universal truth that both freedom and creative expression must be continually sought out and reaffirmed. Henderson’s metaphor of the ‘carrying stream’ of tradition is understood as a constant source available to and necessary for artists of all kinds to ‘remake and renew’, where each new generation has the potential to create new meaning in dialogue with what has come before. The artist’s role in society is a recurrent theme in Corey Gibson’s study, and the evolution of Henderson’s thinking and writing are presented as an ‘endless flyting’ (the title of Gibson’s award-winning PhD thesis on which the book is closely based), both in grappling with Gramsci’s observations on folk culture and, more immediately, with Hugh MacDiarmid, whose poetry he revered but whose elitism he rejected. For Henderson, the folk revival, and particularly the People’s Festival Ceilidhs, were ‘Gramsci in action’. As Corey Gibson puts it succinctly: Henderson ‘advocated Gramsci in practice and wrestled with Gramsci in theory.’ From 1955 to 1987 he was on the staff of the University of Edinburgh's School of Scottish Studies which he co-founded with Calum Maclean: there he contributed to the sound archives that are now available on-line. Henderson held several honorary degrees and after his retirement became an honorary fellow of the School of Scottish Studies. For many years he held court in Sandy Bell's Bar, the meeting place for local and visiting folk musicians. In April 1979, he was ' the prevailing spirit' at the first Edinburgh International Folk Festival conference ' The People's Past' both on ballads and in challenging traditional history telling. He also spoke at a Riddle's Court meeting which had hosted in the past, the Workers' Educational Association when he said that Calvinism was repressive in the Scottish psyche and that 'we had to divest ourselves of layers or preconception and misconception before we could come to grips with Scotland and its people.' [7]

There is aesthetics in this outlook, along with politics, anthropology and religion. But, whatever their origins, these ideas coalesce Henderson’s activities as writer, collector, translator, critic, performer, and even magus. They bring together songs, poems, and ballads, and explain why any attempt to uncouple the work from its contexts results in distortion and misunderstanding. Here is the explanation for the diversity of Hamish Henderson’s output – from satiric song to complex elegy – which has often left puzzled commentators trying to explain why Henderson ‘gave up writing poetry’. The answers sometimes suggested – waning powers or alcohol – mirror what was said about Robert Burns when he turned his energies to song-making and collecting. Timothy Neat (2012) Hamish Henderson: Poetry Becomes People (1952-2002), Birlinn Ltd, Edinburgh ISBN 978-0-85790-487-4 In 1990, Hamish Henderson was invited to speak at the Celtic film and television festival in Douarnenez, a body of which I used to be the director. The festival was due to be held in a brand new hotel, but the hotel was never built—a lesson for the Minister for Tourism, Culture and Sport. As a result, it was held in a very old hotel on the beach at Tréboul, which is the twin town with Douarnenez, just across the river. The hotel's last big booking had been during the second world war when the German officers stayed there. It had been decaying ever since. In 2005, Rounder Records released a recording of the 1951 Edinburgh People's Festival Ceilidh as part of The Alan Lomax Collection. Henderson had collaborated with the preparations for the release.Hamish fully agreed with Gramsci’s contention that folklore should be studied seriously. A passage from the Prison Notebooks could stand as a manifesto for Henderson and the School of Scottish Studies: In 1951 Henderson was appointed a lecturer and research fellow at Edinburgh University's School of Scottish Studies. His work there as a folk-song collector formed the foundation of the Scottish folk revival. And, over and over again, Henderson's writings displayed a keen and deep appreciation of internationalism, foreign literature, and people's culture. Throughout his life too, he corresponded privately connecting with many of the finest minds of the day, and also wrote through the columns of national newspapers. Towards the end of the 1950s, on 15 May 1959, Henderson married Renate Felicitas (Kätzel) Schmidt (b. 1937) in Coburg, Germany a b "Letters: Honouring the great Hamish Henderson". HeraldScotland (in Inglis). 31 August 2019 . Retrieved 23 Januar 2022. In another article, which was published in The Scotsman 10 years later, Hamish Henderson referred to the painful experiences of the Scottish Labour Party, when one third of the party was expelled for claiming to be revolutionary as well as socialist. He wrote: