by Colin Harper
Many songs in Bert’s early repertoire, some of which have remained there ever since, can be traced directly to Partridge – among them Snooks Eaglin’s ‘Come Back Baby’, Furry Lewis’s ‘Dry Land Blues’, ‘Betty And Dupree’, ‘Weeping Willow’, the quasi-traditional ‘She Moved Through The Fair’ and the curious case of ‘Hey Joe’.31 As for Len’s haughty demeanor, it was, he now admits, a defence mechanism. It was not the only way he stood apart from his colleagues: ‘I remember Roy saying to me one night, sitting across the road in a coffee bar, “It’s funny, Len, you’re one of us and yet you’re not one of us.” I didn’t know what he meant at the time. But I was living two lives: the life of a conventional sort of person who got up every morning and went to work, and then spent all night in subterranean bloody places playing guitar. Roy wasn’t working at all – he just survived by free-loading, basically! He had it down to a fine art.’
Some time during the latter half of 1960, Archie Fisher and Jill Doyle/Guest left Edinburgh for Glasgow. With Len unwilling to take on the responsibility, and a folk club swarming with eager pupils, Bert became aware that he was ‘probably the most proficient player left – so I filled the gap. It was five bob an hour! The pupils used to attend the club regularly and I’d have a curriculum worked out. I reckon I’m a pretty good teacher actually. I could break it all down and go through the whole thing from A to Z.’32 The money was good: Hamish Imlach recalls the fee for his own first paying gig, with Josh MacRae and Archie Fisher at a jazz club in Glasgow, as five bob each: twenty-five pence. Around the same time that Bert was finding his niche in Edinburgh, Hamish was teaching guitar every Saturday at Andrew Moyes’s Glasgow Folksong Club: ‘For thirty bob [£1.50] I’d teach guitar during the day and be resident singer at night. That would pay for a meal, my fares from Motherwell and enough to get drunk on.’
Hamish was already on the verge of becoming a professional folk singer. Never happier than when he was holding court, he was a natural entertainer. Short-lived enterprises as a travelling salesman and time-keeper on a building site would serve only as a source of farcical stories for his repertoire. Archie, another veteran of unsatisfactory employment – in his case turkey farming, milk marketing and the Merchant Navy – had been subsisting, as Hamish once put it, ‘on porridge and curried rustled sheep’ since the Howff had opened its doors. But the mushrooming interest in folk music, in both Edinburgh and Glasgow and very soon all over the country, was rapidly enhancing the prospects of people actually earning a living at it.
‘Some citizens of Edinburgh are still amazed at the success of the Howff,’ wrote Eric Winter in the Melody Maker, February 1961, giving the club its first national exposure. ‘They are contrasting Roy’s full houses with empty seats at the Lyceum and other theatres.’ Surveying various aspects of the Scottish scene for the same publication in April 1961, Winter noted that up to two hundred people were regularly attending the Glasgow Folksong Club’s fortnightly Sunday sessions. The evenings were being headlined by the Wayfarers: Archie Fisher, his sister Ray and fiddler Bobby Campbell. ‘They have good style and voices,’ wrote Winter, ‘but they are wrestling with an urbanised and sophisticated audience – which is uphill work. Ray also sings with her younger sisters Cindy and Joyce. Jill Guest sings quietly but sweetly in her native English, brave lass. But the best voice in the Glasgow club is that of Doreen Laiolo, half Italian, lovely to look at and delightful to hear.’ No doubt. Winter had opened his piece in praise of Dolina MacLennan, and it would not be the last time Dolina’s name graced the paper: ‘I had my tonsils out in 1962,’ she says. ‘Archie Fisher suggested I pickle them and send them to Eric Winter because Eric wrote about everything I did. He had a great fancy for me!’
The Wayfarers, in the company of left-wing playwright Arnold Wesker and Norman Buchan – who was, in addition to his various other roles, Scottish agent for the Workers’ Music Association – had just completed a two-week tour of Scottish trades unions. There had always been a link between the new Scottish folk singers and the left – though it was a link that would have no influence on Bert. For others, motivational individuals like Buchan formalised the relationship. Nuclear Polaris submarines stationed at American Navy bases on Holy Loch, twenty miles from Glasgow, were a convenient focus for marches, demonstrations and ‘ban the bomb’ protest songs during the early sixties;33 the brief theft and return of the Stone of Destiny – ancient symbol of Scottish kingship – from London to Scotland in 1953 had similarly ushered in a wave of nationalist polemic through the arts. There had even been a campaign of blowing up post boxes with ERII, a visible mark of English rule, on them. Morris Blythman, a staunch Republican, was writing and collecting songs related to all these causes and publishing them in songbooks. As Hamish Imlach noted diplomatically in his autobiography: ‘There are various accounts of who was posting the bombs.’
‘We all sang political songs,’ says Dolina. ‘We all sang the anti-Polaris songs and anti-royalty songs.’ Except Bert. But then Bert was not singing anything much at all in public at the time. To some of the younger singers, revolution was just another topic of pub conversation. ‘Archie Fisher and I were the first two folkies in Glasgow who weren’t graduates from the Young Communists’ Choir,’ says Hamish. ‘That’s not a joke, that’s a statement of fact!’ He also recalled one occasion where he, Archie and Josh sang for the Young Communists and the Young Conservatives on the same night. Who knows, it may even be true. Around this time Hamish, Josh and Bobby Campbell – on the back of Josh’s 1959/60 chart successes, and at the suggestion of Glasgow retailer Cliff Stanton – recorded a series of Irish rebel songs for Decca. Appearing as three singles credited to the Emmetones, a group that only existed for a day at a London studio, the records failed to provide any of the group’s members with long-term recording opportunities. They were nonetheless among the earliest to feature any of the young Scots.
Others were only just realising that not everything they could sing had to be American or political. ‘There was very little folk music on TV in those days and even getting folk records was like gold,’ says Maggie. ‘A lot of our earliest songs came from records. Then we realised that the stuff we’d learned from our mum and dad was folk music so we sang that as well.’ Dolina MacLennan, coming from Lewis, had an additional stock of American songs gleaned from seamen – country and western rather than blues – that were unknown this side of the Atlantic. Even Roy Guest’s repertoire had a certain freshness about it: ‘He’d sing things like “Everybody Loves Saturday Night” and sing it in various languages,’ recalls Maggie. ‘“Michael Row The Boat Ashore”, “Cumbaya” – that’s exactly the sort of stuff he was doing. Mind you, it was new to us, we’d never heard anything like it before. He was quite charismatic. Not a great singer, but charismatic – and he got us involved.’
Eric Winter, writing in that April 1961 MM piece, agreed: ‘Last Friday and Saturday I sang at the Howff,’ he reported, ‘whose Friday sessions, presided over by Roy Guest, are largely trad nights with a sprinkling of topical material. The Saturday sessions, run by Len Partridge, a good twelve-string player, tend to be a little more American. Guest has nursed that audience carefully. It has never allowed itself to expect folk song to be an entertainment from the platform to the floor. Sitting where I could see them all, I saw five or six people joining in all the verses of long ballads such as “The Cruel Mother” and “Binnorie”. In London you can’t always find a soloist who can sing them all.’
As Dolina notes: ‘Roy was the charmer of all charmers. He could embellish like nothing on earth and you would believe him.’ Len Partridge is more forthright: ‘He was a con man but in a nice way. As long as you knew he was like that you were fine. As an entertainer he had more class than any of us did. He had whatever it is that sells things to audiences. He made an audience join in whether it wanted to or not. I did a thing with him once at the Kelvin Hall and it was a bloody jazz event – the last thing in the world they wanted was us. How in the name of God he ever go
t on the bill I don’t know, but that was Roy. I remember thinking as Roy went on, “This is going to be a nightmare,” but when he came off he just handed me the audience on a plate. That’s what he was like. The man has to be given his due: he was a tremendous entertainer.’
‘Roy was like a floor singer,’ says Maggie. ‘He’d start the night off then you’d have maybe Ray & Archie, Bobby Campbell getting up and joining them as a group or maybe getting up on his own, Hamish Imlach, Josh MacRae … Loads of people came through for the weekend and we’d have them staying in our house for the weekend, sleeping on floors.’
The weekend trip from Glasgow to Edinburgh was becoming commonplace: ‘Quite a few of us from Glasgow would pile out of the pubs before they closed at 9.30 p.m.,’ says Hamish, ‘make a mad dive to catch the 9.30 train to Edinburgh – the last one, which had a bar still open. If the train was dead on time we could loup off at Haymarket and catch the last one back to Glasgow. If we missed it and it was a Saturday we could go up and get to the Howff just as it was warming up. Then we’d trust to luck we could find somewhere to kip until it was time for the first train home.’ As often as not, the Glasgow crowd would sleep over at the Howff itself or at the Cruickshanks’ place: ‘It was an exciting time,’ says Maggie. ‘But it was all above board, there was no hanky-panky. My mum and dad were tolerant because they loved the music.’ Dolina had come to Edinburgh in 1958 and then taken a teaching job in Fife from 1959 to early ’62 – essentially the duration of the Howff. ‘I used to come over at weekends,’ she says. ‘I was unusual among that crowd in having a job so quite often fed everybody else!’ The flat she had used while living in Edinburgh, at 19 Bristo Place, belonged to a friend. On Dolina’s recommendation, the flat was now let to Roy and Jill.
The truth of Roy’s relationship with Jill Doyle is elusive. Steve Benbow, who worked with Roy in the Wanderers in 1959, recalls the pair courting during this period and believes there to have been a marriage. But there is no record of any such marriage taking place in England or Wales, and if it happened at all it was before they arrived in Scotland. All of which would be of trivial interest were it not for the curious ménage à trois that developed with Archie Fisher as the third party. ‘She was quite promiscuous, but likeable,’ says Maggie, referring to Jill. ‘I think she was the love of Archie’s life.’ Maggie recalls a party she gave towards the end of 1960 to celebrate, belatedly, her birthday in August and the passing of her finals in October. Everybody from the Howff was invited. ‘I’ve a funny feeling the sparks first started to fly between Archie and Jill then. I seem to remember them disappearing to one of the rooms … But there were no fights. Roy didn’t seem to have a problem with it, to my knowledge.’
Len Partridge often visited Archie Fisher’s family at Easterhouses in Glasgow, where he was always made welcome: ‘One visit, Roy and Jill had come along and when we left only Roy left with me,’ he says. ‘And I remember so clearly Roy saying, “Well, Lennie, it’s just as well I’m so tired, otherwise I might be upset”. That was one way of looking at it. There’d obviously been something brewing for a while.’
It would seem that Jill left Roy for Archie; the pair of them then moved to Glasgow for a short time, returning to live in Edinburgh again during 1961 and initially to the flat in Bristo Place. Their partnership lasted for two or three years. Certainly, they were still together during the 1962 Festival, several months after Roy had mysteriously disappeared from the scene. He would reappear a couple of years later, marrying New York model Susan Kohrs in London in July 1964. During July 1961, adding an unfathomable twist to the matter, Roy formed a short-lived trio with Archie and Bobby Campbell, causing quite a stir with a foray down to the Troubadour and Partisan clubs in London. Archie was also still involved with the Howff during 1961 and particularly throughout the Festival. In one photograph from that place and time, there is a bandage on his right hand – evidence of an episode that is widely recalled: ‘What I heard was that Archie walks in to his bedroom to find Jill with Roy,’ says Dolina. ‘He had to get out, and the window was closer than the door. And of course there was a soft-topped car supposedly full of pillows or something just below the window. Oh, life was terribly exciting then! You just never knew what was going to happen next.’ The story made the local papers, the farcical element compounded by the captioning of Archie’s name to a photo of one George Fleming, another Howff singer of the time. In fact it was a fellow called Giles Bristow, a friend of Bert’s, who had been the third party. Archie’s humiliation was made all the more public when George Fleming sued the paper and cashed in on his momentary celebrity.
Though Bert was still without a guitar of his own, another of his earliest songs dates from around this time: the rhythmically extraordinary ‘Train Song’, known originally by one of its lyrical motifs, ‘Basket Of Light’. ‘It was called that because when I was writing it,’ says Bert, ‘I was in a flat in Edinburgh after my first sexual experience with a lady. Shirley was her name. She was actually after Archie but she couldn’t get him because he was involved with Jill, so she grabbed me one day. And that’s how I remember sitting in this flat where the light shade had a basket hanging from it.’
Bert’s domestic arrangements at this time were somewhat casual. He occasionally crashed at a flat shared by Giles Bristow and Harry Steele. John Watt, who founded the Dunfermline Howff in imitation and flattery of the Edinburgh one in October 1961, recalls that ‘Archie, Bert and a whole gang’ lived for a while at a flat in Rankeillor Street, a student area near the University. He also recalls an anecdote from the period, wherein Bert inadvertently becomes a car park attendant (a CV entry not recalled by Bert), which is a typical example of the generally absurd ‘Bert story’ possessed by many of those who have known him briefly at almost any point over the years – one favourite being the hardy perennial of Bert as the only person in the British Isles this century to go down with scurvy (also untrue).
Eric Winter had become an occasional visitor to the Howff during 1961. Even aside from the delightful Dolina, he was impressed with what he saw: ‘Folk club? As a rule the term means folk club evening,’ he told readers of his MM column in July 1961. ‘Soon in Edinburgh it will mean more. Roy Guest, who runs the Howff, is to set up a round-the-week (possibly even round-the-clock) centre at 369 High Street. There will be facilities for playing records and tapes and a tape and disc lending library, informal and organised folk song evenings, chess and cards, and food and drink. Not least, there’ll be regular visits from Jimmie MacBeath, Dolina MacLennan, Jeannie Robertson and other ethnic singers. Since Guest’s partner is Jim Haynes, proprietor of The Paper Back shop where free coffee is always available, I imagine that song books and magazines will also be on sale. At £1 a year, membership sounds like a bargain.’
‘Already the race for the quick pound note is on in the folk song world,’ declared Ewan MacColl, with remarkable prescience, typical rage and only three weeks earlier in the same publication. He was setting out the stall of his come-back at the helm of a club, and he had naught but invective for the forces of mediocrity and profit: ‘The only notes that some people care about are the bank notes,’ he went on. ‘The folk song revival can get so far away from its traditional basis that in the end it is impossible to distinguish it from pop music and cabaret. It has happened in some US clubs. True bawdiness is reduced to mere suggestiveness. The songs, sapped of their vigour, become “quaint”. It’s happening here too in the Tonight programme and I was scared when I saw what is going on in some of the clubs. We need standards. “Quaint” songs, risqué songs, poor instrumentation and no-better-than-average voices, coupled with a lack of respect for the material: against these we will fight.’
MacColl would not have entered into the spirit of the Howff. He certainly never played there although his name was well known to the Scottish folk fraternity. ‘I didn’t like him,’ says Dolina. ‘I loved his Radio Ballads. But him and Peggy, I found their public performances full of shit compared to people who sang the
same songs naturally. They were “performing”. It went against the grain.’ Surviving live recordings from the period not only underline how exceptional a musician Peggy Seeger was but reveal a brighter and more likeable side to MacColl than his forays into print and the crushing earnestness of his commercially recorded work would have one believe. Great fun was to be had with a series of extracts from street songs and children’s songs for instance, linked with wry commentary, in a style somewhat akin to music-hall. But MacColl’s comedy was of a scripted rather than truly intuitive or improvisational nature and was still rooted in a belief that imbued worthiness to the oral tradition in all its forms, however vulgar. ‘Ewan MacColl’s polemical songs, on the contrary,’ concluded one reviewer of a typical MacColl performance, ‘have about them a self-righteous hectoring quality, unfortunately magnified by the attitude of magisterial condescension which he unwittingly brings to his stage presence.’34
In addition to his July announcement of Roy Guest’s plans for the Howff, Winter could also report on the success of Dolina & Robin’s recent tour of London folk clubs; on Roy, Archie and Bobby Campbell’s debut as a trio at Aberdeen Folk Club; and on the opening night of Ewan MacColl’s as yet unnamed new club ‘with a shower of congratulatory messages from other clubs including Glasgow, the Liverpool Spinners’ club and the Troubadour’. By the middle of 1961 the rise and spread of ‘the folk club’ as an instrument of the revival was gathering pace.