The Horsieman

by Ducan Williamson

  THE HORSIEMAN

  With over ten books to his name, Duncan Williamson was one of the last true, traveller horsemen and the best-known of Scotland’s storytellers. This autobiography tells, for the first time, his original story; how the Scottish traveller survived hawking his wares, dealing with local farmers and tradesmen, becoming a family man, creating the world of an unparalleled tradition-bearer. Duncan Williamson died in November 2007.

  Linda Williamson, born and brought up in the woodlands of America’s Midwest, was educated at the universities of Wisconsin and Edinburgh, and received a PhD in ethnomusicology in 1985. She married Duncan Williamson in 1977 and they have two children. A devotee of Indian philosophy and literary editor of several collections of Scottish stories, she now lives with her son in Edinburgh.

  This eBook edition published in 2012 by

  Birlinn Limited

  West Newington House

  Newington Road

  Edinburgh

  EH9 1QS

  www.birlinn.co.uk

  Copyright © Duncan Williamson 1994

  Preface copyright © Linda Williamson 2008

  First published in 1994 by Canongate Press Ltd

  This edition first published in 2008 by Birlinn Ltd

  Illustrations by Neil MacGregor

  Map of Duncan Williamson’s route by John Fardell

  The moral right of Alistair Moffat to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form without the express written permission of the publisher.

  ISBN: 978-1-84158-692-2

  eBook ISBN: 978-0-85790-527-7

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  CONTENTS

  MAPS

  PREFACE

  1 JOCK AND BETSY AND THE KIDS

  2 THE SOLDERING BOLT

  3 MY MOTHER’S PENSION

  4 SANDY WAS AN ORIGINAL TRAVELLER

  5 GIE ME A HAUD O YIR HAND!

  6 THE HOOLET’S NEUK

  7 WHAT THE FAIRIES ARE PLAYING

  8 A TRAVELLER HERITAGE

  9 BEGGARS, THIEVES AND STRANGERS

  10 SILVER AND THE SHAN GURIE

  11 BY GOD, LADDIE, YOU’RE GAME!

  12 DO YOU BELIEVE IN EVIL?

  13 THE SECRET OF TRAVELLER TRADE

  14 A GREAT HORSIEMAN

  GLOSSARY

  PREFACE

  The Horsieman is the story of Duncan Williamson’s life on the road as one of Scotland’s travelling people from 1928 to 1958. Composed in late 1980 and early 1981 with the help of a grant from the Scottish Arts Council, the narrative was recorded over thirty hours on to twelve reel-to-reel tapes. These tapes, an oral history testament, were transcribed and edited by myself, Duncan’s second wife. Our working title was Horse Dealing and Traveller Trade, an exposition of how traveller families in Scotland survived by their wits and traditional skills. The language is racy and laconic, colourful and spirited as Duncan was still very much part of the travelling fraternity in 1980 – working as a general dealer in close touch with many hundreds of traveller friends and relations.

  The opening chapter, a brief account of Duncan’s early family life, recorded at the request of his publisher, Stephanie Wolfe-Murray, in 1993, differs linguistically from the balance of the book. The narration held more English, less Gaelic and traveller cant; a transformation to which I contributed, that story told below. To help the reader with comprehension, a full glossary of Scots, traveller cant and Gaelic words finishes the book. Supplementing the text of The Horsieman are maps of travel routes, camping places, villages and farms where the tapestry of Duncan’s life was woven. In the plate section, sketches taken from Duncan’s notebook of poems and song show his drawings of traveller tents and the tools of traveller trades, skills now nearly lost and forgotten; we give hearty thanks to Neil MacGregor for helping with these. An oral historian in his own right, Neil has been a constant support throughout the work.

  According to Duncan, there could be no real story without a song; and every chapter of The Horsieman closes with a poem, traditional song or ballad which Duncan wrote or sang. Wrapped up in these songs is a deeper story, of the writer who is responsible for all of the storyteller’s words in print: a newcomer to Scotland in 1974, I followed in small footsteps behind the indomitable Hamish Henderson as a collector of songs and ballads for doctoral work in ethnomusicology.

  The tattie howkers are rained off today and they say I will find Duncan Williamson here in this potato field near Crieff. Inside a tent on his knees singing ballads to his traveller friends I meet him, a widower aged forty-seven. He always said it was the Broonie, the spirit of a generation and Duncan means ‘brown head’ in Gaelic, because a year and a half later I marry him, in 1977. Living the life of the Scottish Travelling People, we are tented in a gelly – in summer months on Loch Fyne in Argyll, in winter months returning to Fife, up the Ceres Road from Cupar to Tarvit Farm. By 1980 our second child Tommy is in his second year, Betsy is aged three, and from August to September my mother has been to visit us at Duncholgan near Lochgilphead, staying in our extended gelly, made a third longer at the back to accommodate Granny from America. With heavy rainfall and high winds, Argyll is harsh in the winter and Duncan has few prospects for hawking, dealing in scrap metals. His buyer, Davie Band in Perth, is just over the hill and down the road from Glen Tarkie in north-east Fife. So, how wonderful to receive the letter from Mr and Mrs Bell on Kincraigie Farm above Strathmiglo who say ‘yes!’ Duncan should come again to help with farm work in exchange for the cottage beside the bothy at the back of the steadings. Great! Our first solid roof and floor, and farewell to life on the road, a decision we make for the sake of our weans, Betsy and Tommy, after all.

  The Scottish Arts Council have awarded us a bursary (September 1980) to write Duncan’s life story. His traditional folk tales are finding their way into the archives of the School of Scottish Studies through fieldwork recordings by various university students and doctoral candidates like myself; one literary agent and author armed with a handful of my transcriptions is trying to get an Edinburgh publisher interested in Duncan’s mine of stories. Fife, close to Perth and the capital, is a good place to put down roots. We begin work on the autobiography the first week resident in Kincraigie.

  Duncan knew in his heart his traveller life was over. His American wife, a thirty-one-year-old academic, had weathered nearly five years as a nomad but the hardships and uncertainties were taking a toll on her health, and with two kids growing like weeds he needed to provide a secure home. Davie Bell, laird of Kincraigie, had been host to his first family of seven since the 1940s. And here in Fife Duncan had become a tradesman, a real horsieman in the fifties. But normal settled life was never going to happen; we would not take charge of our lives, for the world was already keenly aware of the master storyteller, whose recordings had been whirling through the Edinburgh offices of the School of Scottish Studies, stretching into the bowels of the storytelling revival. What began as occasional recording sessions for students from America, Japan, Germany and all the isles of Britain, Canada and beyond soon became a weekly feature of Kincraigie life. Grampian Television, Central ITV and BBC Two camera crews found their way to the rocky hill at the back of the farm where lived the extraordinary tradition bearer who could tell stories for days on end showering guests with his renowned Celtic hospitality. Duncan’s life story was shelved for ten years while the Broonie, the hedgehurst, the unicorn, fairies, silkies and woodland elves sprang from his breath into the minds and imaginatio
ns of pilgrim storytellers ‘from the Alaskan North to the Antipodean South’, writes David Campbell, ‘all making tracks to Kincraigie Farm.’ Publicly recognised as Scotland’s living national monument, news spread like wildfire over a short space of ten years and such accolades as ‘the greatest living English-speaking storyteller’ were commonplace.

  From this period comes my favourite horse story of Duncan’s.

  I heard this many many years ago when I was just a kid back home in Argyll. It is a very old story. Now once upon a time there was this knight. And he had this horse, oh, what a beautiful horse! It was snow white. And the knight thought the world of it, took it with him to all the battles and every place he went all over the country. And everybody admired this horse. Then one day when he was older, the knight took his horse home and put it in the field next to his house.

  Now down in the village there was a bell. And whenever anyone wanted to spread news, because there were no newspapers in these days, if anybody wanted to tell something, they went out in the street and pulled the bell. The bell went; ding dong ding dong ding dong. And all the people gathered round about. A man told what was going to happen, if there was anything going on in the village, if anybody was hurt or anything important! But years passed and things changed, and the bell was never used. It was forgotten about, just like the poor old horse. But the old horse was still in the field only getting very, very little to eat. The knight was now very old and he had completely forgotten about his horse. Then one day the gate leading to the field was left open. The old horse got out.

  And he was that weak he could hardly stand. So he just barely managed to wander down the street, right by the knight’s house, down through the village till it came to the old church where the old bell was. And all of the old church was covered over with ivy. The old rope that was hanging from the bell, all the creeping vines had gathered round it and the rope was nearly covered – you could hardly see it but the bell could still ring! So the old horse searched about for something soft, because he had no teeth to eat. And the first thing he saw was the vines hanging to the bell. He started pulling them and the bell started to ring: ding dong ding dong, someone has done a wrong.

  And all the villagers listened. Some of the old folk in the village who remembered . . . when the bell used to ring when someone had done a wrong, or if somebody had done something good, all came out. Some on crutches, some with staves, old women, old ladies well up in their years, in their seventies and eighties, and they gathered all round the bell. And they stood and they looked.

  The old horse was pulling the ivy off the bell rope. It was going, ding dong ding dong, someone has done a wrong. And they saw the old horse. One old man stood up.

  ‘I remember that horse,’ he said. ‘That was a beautiful animal. It had no other way to come and tell us that its master had starved it nearly to death. Look at it! Its bones are sticking out; its ribs are sticking out of its side, and its hip joints. Look at its tail! It’s never been combed for years, neither has been its mane. Its master has done it wrong after all these years, and he will have to be punished.’

  So all the people of the village gathered and went up to the knight’s big house, knocked at his door and told him to come out. The old knight came out. He said, ‘What do you want?’

  They said, ‘We want you! You’ve done a wrong.’

  And the knight said, ‘I’ve never done a wrong in all my life. I’ve been a knight to the king all the days of my life.’

  The old man said, ‘You have done a wrong – you’ve neglected your old horse.’

  ‘My horse?’ says the knight.

  ‘Yes,’ said the people of the village. ‘Your old horse came down to the village and rang the bell himself, told us that you had done a wrong.’

  ‘Well,’ says the knight, ‘if that’s true, he’ll never be neglected again.’ So the knight took his old horse back up to his big house. He put him in a warm stable and looked after him, saw that the horse had plenty to eat and plenty to drink for the rest of his days. And that’s the last of my story.

  It was a special privilege to be able to look after Duncan in the last five months of his life. We spent the previous thirteen years apart, since 1994 when The Horsieman was first published, but I never forgot the knight and his steed, or the Broonie! His songs and stories remained an integral part of my own travels, my own story. In July 2007 he taught me the verses of ‘The Golden Vanity’ closing chapter five below. And asleep in the room at the end of Duncan’s house, I dreamed the Night of Peace, our Christmas tree alight with candles under canvas in the woods of Tarvit Farm. On Hallowe’en night after a sweet fireside ceilidh in song with his Ladybank neighbours, Duncan suffered a stroke, and eight days later in hospital my husband died. Now, a soulful legacy, storytellers mourn their loss. Colleague Hugh Lupton pays last respects to Duncan Williamson, a tribute to his artistry:

  Everything he heard, saw, touched, smelt, tasted and felt added flavour to the bubbling stew of stories he kept in his memory. He’d lived an extraordinary life to the full. He’d known how it was to be starving hungry, to be kept awake all night by seals with tooth-ache, to fit a cast-off horseshoe, to guddle for trout. He’d experienced loss and love and the pleasures of good company, he’d trodden the roads of Scotland over and over . . . all this fed into his stories, giving them substance, sympathy, humour, a grounding in real places and all the insights that come from a life of hard graft and sharp, humane observation. He might be telling a Jack tale, a silkie story, a joke, but in his imagination it always rested on a solid core of real lived experience that made the story true. Also, through his vast inner store of ballads and poems, through his knowledge of Gaelic and cant, he had a rich and rare vocabulary and a deep feel for the music of language. He was quite simply, the greatest bearer of stories and songs in the Scots and English language.

  Excellent recordings of Duncan Williamson’s soulful tenor, his ballads and songs, may be heard on the CDs produced by Mike Yates (Travellers Joy), John Howson (Put Another Log on the Fire) and Pete Shepherd (FifeSing). Available from Music in Scotland Ltd are two volumes of Traveller’s Tales, including ‘Closing Our Camping Grounds Down’ by Duncan, also known as ‘The Hawker’s Lament’.

  From the Celtic otherworld, the rest is left to our horsieman. May the reader find below something of the profundity and gentleness of the man, as Helen East remembers, ‘who did his utmost to make sure we have his stories.’

  Linda Williamson

  November 2007

  CHAPTER ONE

  JOCK AND BETSY AND THE KIDS

  Some travellers stuck more to one area. But Johnie Townsley, my mother’s father, travelled all over. He walked along with a handcart and went to Inverness, Elgin, right down into Ayrshire and down to Dumfries. He travelled all through Fife, Angus and Perthshire – no, not in the wintertime, just in the summertime. But you see, he was a piper and a horse was no good to him. He played his bagpipes in the summertime, by the shooting lodges, big houses, hotels and that. And then he came back home to Argyll and settled down for the winter. In the summertime he took off again with his family.

  My mother’s mother was old Bella MacDonald. She told me that her grandfather, Roderick MacDonald, used to travel with a pony through the paths to the farms, taking the shortcuts over the hills. Roderick carried his gear, a bundle tied to each side of the pony’s back with a couple of kids sitting on, and he led the pony all through Argyllshire and Perthshire. Taking carts through these roads was no good, because the wheels broke and the paths were too narrow.

  On my father’s side, my grandfather Willie Williamson, born 1851, never travelled at all once he had children, since long before the 1914 war. And I remember my father telling me that his grandfather on his mother’s side, John MacColl (whose father was from Ireland) travelled with horses with sackets on their backs. They were pack folk, like the way the cowboys went with pack mules.

  John MacColl was born in Kilberry in 1812. His father was a tinsmith
, but John liked to work as a coppersmith. He used to go with a one-wheeled barrow, like a wheelbarrow but it had no sides. My mother told me that he travelled the footpaths from place to place because the roads were very bad in these days. He took all the shortcuts across the hills and across the mountains carrying these big sheets of copper on his barrow. And my mother told me how he came to this farm away in the back highlands of Argyllshire.

  The farmer said to him, ‘John, that’s an awfae bundle you’ve got on that barra. Would ye no be better wi a bit pony tae pull that bit cart tae youse, instead o pushin that thing across the mountains and across footpaths?’

  ‘It might be all right,’ he says to the farmer, ‘but I couldna get gaun across my paths across the hills wi a pony.’ But he took the pony from the farmer anyway, bought it from him and he threw away the barrow, tied the bundles on the pony’s back. He walked with this wee piebald pony through the moors; let it carry his stuff.

  But travellers were very poor before they had ponies. They couldn’t do much for themselves, and they couldn’t carry very much. For the want of carrying more it made them poorer still. Their camping stuff was as light as what they could carry on their backs. It was okay if they had a big family, see what I mean, two-three boys or two-three lassies. Like our family when we went on the move in the summertime. Every one of us carried something of the equipment. But if we’d had a pony, if my father had had a pony, then we could have been a bit better off. Some carried the sticks for the tent, some carried the tent canvas, some carried the cooking utensils and some carried the bed clothes in our family. Everybody had their own thing.

  After travellers managed to see the sense of having a horse, getting a pony, buying a cart and harness, they went further afield. They could travel farther. Some Highland families left and travelled into other ‘countries’, Perthshire, Fife and Angus, the ‘low country’. But while it started the travellers and made some of them a wee bit better off, there were some who never bothered with horses at all. They still maintained it was too much bother, especially in Argyllshire among the Townsleys, my mother’s people. They bothered very little about horses because they were afraid of burkers, or body-snatchers. These travellers could lift their barras over a fence, lift their wee handcarts or perambulators over into a wood or take them up an old road where they couldn’t take a horse and cart – well away from the main roads at night-time. This was handy to them. They didn’t keep ponies, because they didn’t want to be close to the road when the coaches passed. Before the days of motor cars they believed all coaches were driven by burkers, who took your body and sellt it for research.