By Paul Magrati
Joe Corrie, the miner playwright from West Fife, had many reasons to identify with the ploughman poet from South Ayrshire, Robert Burns. From youth to maturity, Corrie’s admiration for his eighteenth-century predecessor was a constant of his literary career. An illustrative example of this can be found in the memoirs of John MacArthur, who, long after Corrie’s death, could still remember vividly the playwright’s obsession for the ‘Bard’.[1] By 1923, MacArthur, a communist activist from Buckhaven, remembers that Corrie ‘was not too strong physicially’ and had been unable to continue his work at the pit, which forced him to become a pedlar and sell ‘needles and pins round the doors’ of Cardenden.[2] At first, MacArthur felt empathy for the impoverished writer and accepted, with fellow trade-unionists, to make Corrie an allowance of £3 a week and hire him as a regular contributor to The Miner, the newspaper of the National Miners’ Reform Union. Over the years, however, MacArthur’s goodwill would turn into bitter acrimony. Despite the union’s aid, which stabilised Corrie’s financial situation and afforded him the platform from which he emerged as a successful writer, he never, according to MacArthur, had a public word of gratitude for his benefactors.[3] Instead, MacArthur explains that Corrie ‘began to get the idea that he was a second Robert Burns and that he would benefit from living where Burns had’. In 1929, after the international success of his play, In Time o’ Strife, Corrie moved from Cardenden to Mauchline, in Ayrshire, and distanced himself from the militant miners of West-Fife without further acknowledgement. For this, MacArthur ‘could never forgive Corrie’.[4]
Although for different reasons, Corrie’s identification with Robert Burns irritated another, prominent Scottish communist, C.M. Grieve —alias Hugh MacDiarmid. In 1959, the latter dismissed Joe Corrie as ‘a writer of little or no consequence’: a working-class instance of the mawkish ‘kailyard’ school of Scottish writing, in other words, who enjoyed excessive reputation in the Labour movement, despite his failure to rally MacDiarmid’s modernist Renaissance, encapsulated by his slogan: ‘Not Burns —Dunbar!’.[5]
The resentment was mutual. Three months after MacDiarmid’s comment, Corrie wrote a letter to his friend, the folklorist Hamish Henderson:
a number of the lyrics of such poets as C.M. Grieve just don’t have the lyric quality. A lyric should half-sing itself, have a beginning, a middle, and an end, and the poet must have the dramatic instinct to keep his best thought for the last. That was where Burns scored everytime…[6]
Unimpressed by MacDiarmid’s claims of avant-gardism, Corrie belonged to that Scottish socialist tradition which saw Burns as the unbeatable ‘People’s Poet’, whose radical works should not be challenged or surpassed but rather celebrated as a mark of Scotland’s egalitarian roots.
Corrie’s fascination for Burns, as a symbol of equality, is evident in his first (unpublished) notebook of poetry, written in 1919 and dedicated to Andrew Doig — a well-read socialist who had become Corrie’s mentor down the mine. Amongst the young miner’s ‘first attempts at poetry’ was an ode to Burns — ‘Scotia’s Boast’:
When Januar’s winds blaw cauld and hard,
And folk are prone to grumph and swear,
Just think of Rab, Auld Scotia’s bard,
First welcomed by the frosty air.We hear a lot ‘bout Presidents,
And statesmen, great, or King and Queen,
Yet it takes wordy monuments,
To keep their memories evergreen.Such signs of greatness Time will fade,
And wintry gales and storms will rend;
But Rab, your monument was made
When in a book your muse was penned,So brither Scots, whaur’ere you be,
At hame or far across the sea,
Lift up your glass and drink the toast,
To Rabbie Burns, Auld Scotia’s Boast.[7]
Despite the poem’s apprentice and conventional tone, Corrie’s contrast between Burns’s humble fame and the vainglory of Presidents and monarchs reveals radical undertones in his reading of Burns.
This was made clearer, a few years later, when Corrie began to write for the Miner, a newspaper which was strongly influenced by the ideas of the Independent Labour Party (ILP).[8] Incidentally, several writers of this party had been instrumental in developing a socialist reading of Burns, during the preceding decade. The ILP journalist William Stewart, for instance, in his 1910 essay Robert Burns and the Common People, depicted Burns as a ‘rebel’ with a ‘social philosophy’ and a vision of brotherhood, encapsulated in Burns’s egalitarian anthem ‘A Man’s a Man’, which predated the ideal of internationalist cooperation.[9] Likewise, John Smith Clarke, a conscientious objector during the Great War, wrote a successful pamphlet entitled The Story of Robert Burns (1917), which railed against the hijacking of Burns as a militarist tool by the ‘ruling-class’ and portrayed Burns as a ‘class-conscious proletarian’ pacifist who would rather have gone to ‘Wormwood Scrubs’ than supporting an ‘imperialist’ and ‘jingoistic’ conflict.[10]
Corrie’s views on Burns were aligned with those of Stewart and Clarke. On 24 January 1924, the ex-pedlar published his first article as a paid contributor to The Miner. His piece was a socialist ‘Immortal Memory’ to ‘Scotland’s Bard’, entitled ‘Robert Burns —The Poet of the Peasantry’.[11] Conforming with the ILP’s interpretation of Burns, Corrie celebrated him as a ‘ploughman genius’ who ‘fought for the cause of liberty’. The ‘Bard’, as Corrie related, had suffered from poverty and hard labour throughout his life and ‘did not require a Karl Marx to show him the true value of the common toiler’. Indeed, ‘too well did Burns see the great inequality of the system of society under which he lived’. This, Corrie insisted, led the poet to rise against law and Kirk. ‘Burns was not only a rebel against Calvinism, he was a rebel against everything that was unjust and he spoke out freedom as no Scottish poet had done before’. Songs such as ‘A Man’s a Man’ or ‘Why Should We Idly Waste our Prime’ (a radical poem wrongly attributed to Burns) showed that ‘liberty’ and ‘emancipation’ were essential to Burns’s message:
‘Had he been living today Burns would have been on the side of the revolutionaries in Russia, and the Socialists of this and every other country […] Let us then revere his memory not by meeting at the banquet table and listening to marqueses, dukes, and other belted knights, but in working for the day
“When man to man the world o’er
Shall brithers be for a’ that”.[12]
This article, which was a fine piece of propaganda, revealed Corrie’s views on Burns as much as it emphasised his zeal for the editorial line of a journal which had just rescued him from poverty.
But Corrie’s situation would soon improve. Five years later, his works had reached popularity outside the small number of West-Fife socialists. By 1929, his successful play, In Time o’ Strife, had toured all over Britain and been translated in German and Russian, attracting the attention of Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald who prefaced Corrie’s new collection of poems, in 1930.[13] As mentioned by John MacArthur, in Militant Miner, Corrie’s identification with Burns was growing stronger. The miner dramaturge, it seemed, could emulate the ploughman poet of Ayrshire. In 1929, Corrie used the royalties from In Time o’ Strife to move from Fife to Mauchline, in Ayrshire, where Burns himself had lived from 1784 to 1786.
There are several reasons to explain Corrie’s decision to live in Ayrshire. Not least, amongst these, is the fact that he already knew the place, having worked in Mauchline mines during the Great War, from 1915 to 1918. Yet, it was also evident that Corrie intended to use Burns’s country for inspiration. In June 1929, the Kilmarnock Standard introduced the Fife playwright to his local readership: ‘Joe Corrie, the Fife miner poet and dramatist, has been residing for some time past in Mauchline, where it is understood, he is writing a Burns play’.[14] Likewise, an unsigned fragment of a letter sent to Corrie on 5 October 1930, recalls: ‘I shall always remember with pleasure turning round in Poosie Nancy’s [the famous inn in which Burns set his cantata ‘The Jolly Beggars’] to find you working there’.[15] Two years later, in 1932, Joe and Mary Corrie, together with their daughter, Morag (born on Burns Night that year), moved in Alloway, the birthplace of Burns, in the south of Ayr.[16]
Five extra years would pass before the publication of Corrie’s first one-act Burns play — The Rake o’ Mauchline (1938)— and five years, still, before the printing of his longer, four-act Robert Burns (1943).[17] Both plays focus on the turning point of Burns’s life, the year 1786, which saw Burns’s conflict with Jean Armour’s father and his affair with Mary Campbell, as well as the publication of the Kilmarnock edition of his Poems, chiefly in the Scottish dialect, and his sudden departure for Edinburgh.
Though marked by a clear left-wing stance on Burns, Corrie’s plays allow for more nuances and subtleness than shown his 1924 article for The Miner. The challenge of staging his hero’s life, it seemed, enabled Corrie to explore his own situation as a working-class poet and dramatist, from social marginality to literary creativity and spirituality.
Certainly, Corrie’s plays embraced a socialist depiction of Burns as a rebel and a radical outcast who challenged Kirk and morals in the company of beggars. The first scene of The Rake o’ Mauchline, for instance, presents Burns as a ‘bedraggled’ fugitive, escaping ‘the law hounds’ sent by James Armour, and seeking shelter in the house of his friend —Tam Samson.[18] At first, Tam’s wife refuses to host the outcast: ‘We a’ ken, she says, that kin’ o’ character you ha’e wi’ your poetry makin’ against dacent honest elders o’ the Kirk, and your sangs about lasses that arena fit for the ears o’ douce folk’.[19] However, Tam locks his wife in her room and welcomes Burns in the house. Soon, however, a constable comes looking for the poet, who is forced to hide in Mrs Samson’s room. Once out of danger, Burns receives a visit from Johnnie Wileson, his printer from Kilmarnock, who explains the true reason behind Burns’s prosecution: ‘Man, if he would only leave the kirk alane—that’s at the bottom o’ it a’, mind ye. Weemen dinna matter a damn, but the kirk!’[20] Here, the message seems clear: Corrie’s Burns is as a seditious and irreligious hero whose danger to social order lies in his radical opposition to law and Kirk.
But Corrie’s Burns is not godless. Towards the end of the play the poet recites the extracts from his long, meditative poem, ‘The Cotter’s Saturday Night’. As showed by historian Christopher Whatley, this pious account of Sabbath eve among Scottish farmers was a favourite of Scottish conservatives during the nineteenth-century, who used it as a way to celebrate a canny and orderly vision of Scotland.[21] However, of all extracts of ‘The Cotter’, Corrie chose the most ambiguous: that of Burns’s conclusion which conflates frugal piousness with patriotic radicalism:
O Scotia! my dear, my native soil!
For whom my warmest wish to Heaven is sent,
Long may thy hardy sons of rustic toil
Be blest with health, and peace, and sweet content!
And O! may Heaven their simple lives prevent
From luxury’s contagion, weak and vile!
Then howe’er crowns and coronets be rent,
A virtuous populace may rise the while,
And stand a wall of fire around their much-lov’d isle.[22]
Whilst acknowledging Burns’s sincere spirituality, Corrie insists on the more seditious layer of the poet’s faith —one reminiscent seventeenth century Ayrshire conventicles.
Corrie’s views on Burns’s radical creed were further expressed in his four-act play, Robert Burns. This play stages the poet’s opposition to the puritans of Mauchline Kirk and the likes of William Fisher, whom Burns later immortalised in ‘Holy Willie’s Prayer’. At the beginning of the play, Burns’s brother, Gilbert, summarises Robert’s approach to religion:
There’s more real Christianity in one o’ Rob’s wee fingers than there is in the whole o’ Mauchline church. […] There’s a breath o’ freedom blowin’ through the world today, and religion that doesna mean more freedom for poor folk isna religion, but as Rob has said in one o’ his poems [‘Epistle to a Young Friend’], ‘A hangman’s whip to keep the wretch in order’.[23]
A few moments later, Burns himself declares:
‘We’ll never have a clean and decent religion till we laugh the whole damned lot o’ hypocrites out o’ the church and put honest and decent men in their place who believe in the real gospel’.[24]
Against authoritarian elders, Corrie’s Burns celebrates the faith and honesty of common people.
What bears truth for the gospel of religion also applies to poetry. Under constant threat of arrest and anathema, Corrie’s Burns finds respite in Poosie-Nancy’s inn, where beggars and ‘gaberlunzies’ can drink, sin, and mingle freely. There, Burns’s poetic inspiration is triggered by the ever-growing creativity of folk music and phrases. During the play, Burns is sitting at a table, in Poosie Nancy’s, when a female beggar launches into a song with the catchy chorus: ‘My love is like a Red Red Rose’ —a ‘wonderful line’, declares the bard, who immediately takes a note of the refrain.[25] Here, Corrie depicts Burns as both a poet and a song collector, whose grounding in the people’s experience reflects Corrie’s own writing experience in West-Fife mining communities. Despite Corrie’s socialist background, his Burns plays shun the revolutionary epic and present the ‘Bard’ as a free-thinking and creative marginal. Already, in Corrie’s 1926 play, In Time o’ Strife, characters of trade-unionists and political activists were conspicuously excluded in order to focus on the grassroots experience of strike and privations. Similarly, in both The Rake o’ Mauchline and Robert Burns, Corrie seems more interested in Burns’s working-class milieu than in portraying him as a worn-out revolutionary archetype.
This, certainly, had a potential to irritate both the militant miner John MacArthur and the high-brow communist Hugh MacDiarmid. For them, Corrie’s work would have sounded either too sentimental or too populist, mired in the worship of folk doggerel and ‘heaven-taught’ genius, miles apart from their political and artistic claims of avant-gardism.
However, towards the later part of his life, Corrie would find valuable support from the Scottish folk revivalist, Hamish Henderson, who shared his admiration for the Bard’s radicalism and loyalty to folk and lore. Like Corrie, Henderson interpreted Burns’s work a basis for a modern, twentieth-century, people’s art, which would lay the ground for the revival of Scottish traditional music and community theatre, during the 1960s-70s.[26]
Today, Corrie’s contribution to modern Scottish drama is often forgotten and overlooked. Yet, alongside Henderson, the miner playwright from Cardenden should be remembered as a pioneer of folk poetry and theatre in the twentieth-century. From plough to pithead, his fascination with Burns, despite occasional traces of sentimentalism, had provided him with a model and a purpose to chart his own, working-class path into poetry and drama, independently from partisan, spiritual, or avant-gardist rules.
[1] John MacArthur, Militant miners: recollections of John McArthur, Buckhaven, and letters, 1924-26, of David Proudfoot, Methil, to G. Allen Hutt, Ian MacDougall (ed.), (Edinburgh, 1981).
[2] Ibid. p.65.
[3] Ibid. The Miner, 8 December 1923, included a poem by Corrie, ‘The Pedlar’, with a caption asking readers to help ‘our miner poet’ by buying his pins and needles.
[4] Ibid., p.66. A press cut relating the birth of Morag Corrie can be found in Joe Corrie’s archive, NLS, Acc.10839.
[5] Hugh MacDiarmid, Burns Today and Tomorrow, (Edinburgh, 1959), p.20.
[6] Letter from Joe Corrie to Hamish Henderson, 3 April 1959, quoted by Timothy Neat, Hamish Henderson: Poetry Becomes People (1952-2002), (Edinburgh, 2012), p.170-171.
[7] Joe Corrie, ‘First Attempts at Poetry’, notebook, 1919, NLS, Acc.10839.
[8] John MacArthur, Militant Miners, p.69.
[9] William Stewart, Burns and the Common People, (Glasgow, 1910), p.53.
[10] John S. Clarke, The Story of Robert Burns, (Glasgow, 1917), p.15. Concerning political uses of Burns during the First World War, see David Goldie, ‘Burns and the First World War’, in International Journal of Scottish Literature, 6, spring/summer 2010.
[11] Miner, 24 January 1924.
[12] Ibid. See Norrie Patton, ‘Why Should We Idly Waste Our Prime’, in Burns Chronicle, (2002, Kilmarnock). pp.47-48.
[13] Joe Corrie, The Road the Fidler Went, prefaced by Ramsay MacDonald, (Glasgow, 1930)
[14] Kilmarnock Standard, 15 June 1929, press cut, Joe Corrie’s papers, NLS, MSS.26560.
[15] Letter to Joe Corrie from 5 October 1930, NLS, MSS. 26551.
[16] The Corrie family stayed in Ayrshire until 1950, except for a year and a half spent in London, in 1939-1940.
[17] Joe Corrie, The Rake o’ Mauchline, (Glasgow, 1938); Robert Burns, (Glasgow, 1943). Corrie wrote two other unpublished Burns plays (probably written during the 1930s) which can be found in the National Library of Scotland: ‘A Man’s a Man; or Burns amang the Gentry’ (NLS, MSS.26493) and ‘There was a Lad’ (NLS, MS.26496 and NLS, MS.26508)
[18] Joe Corrie, The Rake o’ Mauchline, p.4.
[19] Ibid., p.7.
[20] Ibid., p.13.
[21] Christopher A. Whatley, Immortal Memory. Burns and the Scottish People, (Edinburgh, 2016), pp.25-51.
[22] Ibid., p.17.
[23] Joe Corrie, Robert Burns, pp.5-6.
[24] Ibid., p.17.
[25] Ibid., p.12.
[26] See Corey Gibson, The Voice of the People. Hamish Henderson and Scottish Cultural Politics, (Edinburgh, 2015).