was there a scottish war literature? articulate the experience of north-east Scotland in its distinct Doric dialect voice.
Whilepoetry such as this undoubtedly assisted in a self-conscious revival of regional
literary confidence, and contributed several moving poems on the war’s effects on
the Home Front, such as Violet Jacob’s ‘The Field by the Lirk o’ the Hill’ and
Charles Murray’s ‘When will the War be by?’, it is difficult to argue that it really
extended very far the expressive range of British popular poetry. While it might
occasionally capture the linguistic vitality of a rich oral culture, the tonal range of
wartime Scots dialect poetry rarely stretched beyond pawky humour, simple rural
piousness, and sentimental monologue—though it did, characteristically, add the
odd exhortation to recruitment based on local regional pride.^38 George Abel, a
United Free Church minister from Aberdeenshire and occasional contributor of
‘Fireside Cracks’ to thePeople’s Journal, was perhaps not the best of these dialect
writers, but his wartime collectionWylins fae my Wallet (1915) exhibits many
of that genre’s characteristic impulses and attitudes: from its retelling of biblical
stories in Doric settings, through the mawkish sentiment of ‘The Fairmer’s Fairweel
to His Commandeered Nag’, to the ironic comedy of ‘The Tiff, An’ Efter’. In
this poem, a termagant wife is paid back for her nagging when her husband
returns to her from the war a deaf mute. It concludes with a rather characteristic
moral:
He’ll never hear my ill-hung tongue
File we’re abeen the sod,
But he sall ken it’s better hung
Fin we gyang hame to God.
Oh, sirs, tak’ tent afore it’s late,
An’ min’ yer teens an’ tongues,
Ye’ll think upo’ the whack we’ve gat,
An’ hae nae tiffs an’ bungs.^39Abel is not above a little tub thumping, too. A recruiting poem like ‘Mair Men!’
adopts a stance that is typical in much dialect poetry of the war in attempting to
employ its assumed closeness to the folk to talk them into enlisting in the wider
cause:
Sons o’ Scotlan’! Hardy Northmen!
Meno’breed,an’meno’brawn!(^38) See e.g. Jacob’s ‘Jock, to the First Army’ and ‘The Kirk Beside the Sands’, inMore Songs of Angus,
and Others(London: Country Life and George Newnes, 1918), 15 and 26, and Murray’s ‘Ye’re Better
Men’, ‘Wha Bares a Blade for Scotland?’, and ‘A Sough o’ War’—the latter welcoming the opportunity
of war to prove its refrain that ‘Auld Scotland counts for something still’ (Charles Murray,A Sough O’
War(London: Constable, 1917), 9, 15, 13–14). For a more positive assessment of this revival of Doric
poetry, see Colin Milton, ‘A Sough O’ War: The Great War in the Poetry of North-East Scotland’,
in David Hewitt (ed.),Northern Visions: Essays on the Literary Identity of Northern Scotland in the
Twentieth Century(East Linton: Tuckwell, 1995), 1–38.
(^39) George Abel, ‘The Tiff, An’ Efter’, inWylins Fae My Wallet(Paisley: Alexander Gardner,
1916), 103.