david goldie
Answers straightaway, ‘we are ready,
Weare with you, Motherland,
Though the strife be long and deadly,
Armageddon be at hand.’
Which from Erin, late divided,
Racked by discord, sore dismayed,
Thunders forth the glad assurance,
‘We are one; be not afraid!’^15More surprising, perhaps, was the literary response of Scotland’s most popular
weekly paper, the Dundee-basedPeople’s Journal. This had for a long time been a
radical liberal newspaper that had, especially in the 1870s and 1880s, promoted an
extensive use of dialect Scots.^16 By the 1890s it was claiming a weekly readership
of one million, making it not only Scotland’s best-selling paper, but one of
the United Kingdom’s most popular weeklies.^17 ThePeople’s Journalhad a long
tradition of reader participation and, unlike theScotsman, had been in the habit of
publishing verse regularly before the war. So when war came, thePeople’s Journal
naturally responded with frequent and wide-ranging popular verse responses.
Those published on Boxing Day 1914, under the heading ‘Poems from our People:
War Verses by Journal Readers’, offer a representative snapshot.^18 Among the five
poems, one is a parody of a Scottish poem written in cod German, one is a Scots
dialect poem, and three are types of standard-English imperial poetry.^19 The first,
‘The Kaiser’s Prayer’, is a parodic version of Robert Burns’s ‘Holy Willie’s Prayer’,
in which the Kaiser’s perceived hypocrisy and arrogance are entertainingly, and
tellingly, compared to the self-deceiving Calvinism derided in Burns’s original. The
three poems in English are typical, in language, metre, and tone, of Edwardian
popular verse. M. A. Cameron’s ‘The Defence of the Bridge’ (‘They guarded the
bridge, a noble few’) and H. C. McDonald’s ‘Follow Me’ (‘The Scots and English,
side by side|With Welsh and Irish stem the tide,|And French and Indians closely
vie|For roll of honour—do or die!’) are types of martial verse exhorting conquest
and heroism that could have been written of virtually any imperial campaign since
(^15) ‘A.B.’,‘BritishBugles’,The Scotsman, 15 Aug. 1914, 10.
(^16) For an excellent account of this, see William Donaldson,Popular Literature in Victorian Scotland:
Language, Fiction and the Press(Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1986).
(^17) How a Newspaper Is Printed: Being a Complete Description of the Offices and Equipments of the
Dundee Advertiser, People’s Journal, Evening Telegraph, and People’sFriend(Dundee: John Leng & Co,
n.d. [1891]), 18–19. This figure would mean that the paper would be read by more than one in four
of all Scottish adults.
(^18) The typicality of this type of verse can be seen byconsulting Hilda D. Spear and Bruce Pandrich
(eds.),Sword and Pen: Poems of 1915 from Dundee and Tayside(Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press,
1989). Of the 100 poems they have collected from Dundee newspapers in 1915, only nine use dialect
in any sustained way.
(^19) ‘Poems from Our People: War Verses by Journal Readers’,People’sJournal(Dundee Edition), 26
Dec. 1914, 3.