![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/01\/c6382ecc548febcf9702b41806693739.jpg\")
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Jim Aitken<\/strong> presents an appreciation of the language, politics and class anger of Tom Leonard, and Peter Clive<\/strong> has contributed a poem about him, placed at the end of Jim’s essay.<\/em><\/p>\n Today we think of literature as providing inexhaustible forms and of language as being incredibly versatile and varied \u2013 as multi-layered and as multi-faceted as any other art form. To try and impose any literary prescription today to the novel, to poetry or to drama would not be to incur wrath but nothing more than a passing sense of incredulity and then dismissal. That is how far we have travelled. Yet this was not always the case. Literary prescription had been real and had to be faced down. The revolt came from below, from voices previously considered unworthy at best and as uncouth at their worst.<\/p>\n These new voices though were not actually new \u2013 they just hadn\u2019t been widely heard before. They were voices that had always existed but had been marginalised and considered amusing, like in Stanley Baxter\u2019s \u2018Parliamo Glasgow.\u2019<\/p>\n It was the inventiveness with form that blew off the dust that had settled on what Tom Leonard called \u2018the canon\u2019 of English and Scottish literature. This was the literature deemed worthy by a ruling class that liked to read stories and poems and watch plays that seemed to elevate the status they felt they had. This attitude has not gone away if we consider how works like \u2018Downton Abbey\u2019 by Julian Fellowes have managed to resurrect that sense of the classes who knew their place and knew why those with wealth were better than they were. It was not just wealth that divided people though, it was also about the possession of the dominant register, the correct pronunciation, the better diction and therefore the much better accent of mind.<\/p>\n What Tom Leonard sought to do was to extend the range of literature that was available by adding ignored voices and new forms for those voices to be heard. His voice and his accent of mind was rooted in the Glasgow where he was born in 1944. He was also born into the immigrant Irish community that had settled in Glasgow and throughout the Central Belt of Scotland in large numbers after the Famine of the 1840s.<\/p>\n Usually this aspect of Tom\u2019s life is passed over. It is noted but not addressed in any depth, despite the fact that a fifth of Scotland\u2019s population is descended from Irish immigrants. It is in fact Scotland\u2019s largest minority group and the one that has produced the comedians Billy Connolly and Frankie Boyle, the writers Arthur Conan Doyle, William McIlvanney and Andrew O\u2019Hagan, the actor Sean Connery, musicians and singers like Gerry Rafferty, Claire Grogan, Maggie Reilly and Eddi Reader, the artist John Byrne and so many more besides.<\/p>\n This immigrant community has also provided countless doctors, lawyers and teachers as well as MSPs and MPs and the country\u2019s leading historian, Tom Devine, who also doubles up as the nation\u2019s foremost public intellectual. However, although there are these undoubted successes there remain a disproportionate number of people from this community who are in jail and who are homeless or living in poverty. This is rarely said.<\/p>\n Tom\u2019s father had come from Dublin to Glasgow in 1916, the year in which James Connolly (from Edinburgh) played the leading role in the Easter Rising in Dublin\u2019s GPO. Being from an Irish Catholic background in a Scotland that had rejected Catholicism nearly 400 years earlier was not an easy place in which to practise that faith. Scotland had adopted a muscular form of Presbyterianism that was fiercely anti-Catholic. It was also under the impression that the Irish Catholics landing in Scotland were somehow racially inferior to themselves, the native Scottish Protestants. Ridiculous as this may seem, given that the Scots came from Ireland in the 6th century and Scotland was a mongrel nation descended from Romans, Vikings and Normans along with Celts like the Picts, Scots and Brythonic Welsh, this view was supported by the Church of Scotland at the time. In a report to their General Assembly in 1923 \u2013 for which they have since apologised \u2013 they claimed that the Irish were both \u2018alien\u2019 and a \u2018menace.\u2019<\/p>\n The 1920s and 30s \u2013 the era immediately preceding Tom Leonard\u2019s birth \u2013 was a time in Glasgow of razor gangs like the Billy Boys of Bridgeton, led by their racist and fascist General Strike strike-breaker Billy Fullerton, the most notorious. The novel \u2018No Mean City\u2019 (1935) by MacArthur and Long recalls the brutality of these times. Sadly, to this day fans of Rangers still sing about the Billy Boys \u2018up to our knees in Fenian blood\u2019 showing that, although Scotland is largely a secular society today, there remain undercurrents of deep-seated bigotry.<\/p>\n In 1920, co-incidentally the same year in which the CPGB had formed with a large number of recruits from both side of the religious divide, with Arthur McManus being the first Chairman of the party, a Greenock man and former seminarian, the Scottish Protestant League was formed in Glasgow. In Edinburgh, 40 miles along the M8, the Protestant Action Society was formed in 1933. Both these groups stood at council elections and had members elected. The members of these groups along with the Orange Order were the real \u2018menace\u2019 to the impecunious Irish immigrants.<\/p>\n The interwar years show a deeply intolerant Scottish society that also had a strong trade union and Labour movement. It was a nation at pains to redefine itself after the First World War and the mass emigration of so many of its people. From 1920-9 some 363,000 Scots left for Canada and the US. In 1923 John MacLean formed the Scottish Workers Republican Party, Scotland\u2019s first pro-independence and pro-republican party. The National Party of Scotland was formed in 1928, and later merged with the Scottish Party (1932), a group of disaffected Tories and Unionists who sought for Scotland to seek dominion status in the empire, in 1934.<\/p>\n This was the political culture Tom\u2019s parents lived through before his birth. Their community had found themselves in what the writer Patrick McGill called \u2018the black country with the cold heart.\u2019 It was this immigrant community who would provide the muscle of the industrial revolution. Tom Leonard\u2019s father was a train driver and his mother had worked at the Nobel dynamite factory in Ardeer. He was born into a country still at war overseas, and still at war with itself at home.<\/p>\n Long before Bill Clinton and Tony Blair believed that they had thought up the concept of \u2019triangulation,\u2019 the Scottish Catholic Church had been practising this ever since the Scottish Education Act of 1918 had granted the Catholic Church control of its own state-funded schools. This form of triangulation was based on the home, the church and the school. This was seen as the solution to the hostile environment they found themselves in.<\/p>\n The Catholic Church was now largely made up of Irish immigrants and their descendants, though there was a Scottish-Italian community and a Polish and Lithuanian community. There were also pockets of Scottish Catholics from areas of the Highlands and Islands the Reformation had failed to reach. Many of these people came south to find work in Glasgow and to this day Glasgow remains the highest Gaelic-speaking area outside of Ireland.<\/p>\n Tom would recall his father saying his prayers in the kitchen before he set off to start his shift. This devotional piety his father had inherited from the influence left by Ireland\u2019s first Cardinal, Cardinal Cullen, who had died in 1878, the same year that saw the Scottish Catholic hierarchy restored. Cullen viewed the Scottish Church as an Irish outpost and sent over Irish priests to administer there. And it was not until the Second Vatican Council of 1965 that the Mass changed from Latin into vernacular tongues, and the priest face his congregation. All this is important to stress because it sets the scene of what it was like to be born into an Irish-Catholic family in 1944. This was their dominant culture and it co-existed alongside a Scottish Protestantism that saw itself as superior to the backward beliefs of the Irish immigrants.<\/p>\n The key literary figure of the years before \u2013 and for several decades after \u2013 Leonard\u2019s birth, was Hugh MacDiarmid. He was the champion of the Scottish literary renaissance and he hoped to do for Scotland what Yeats had done for Ireland. Yeats, an Anglo-Irishman, helped to ignite a national consciousness in Ireland by writing about long-neglected Irish themes from its mythological canon of the past. He also founded the Abbey Theatre in Dublin in 1899 and this would enable a whole new generation of writers to stage plays on Irish themes and issues. This literary revival fed into a political consciousness that led directly to the Easter Rising, and eventual Irish independence. MacDiarmid hoped that his literary revival would sever the terms of the Union of 1707.<\/p>\n MacDiarmid had renounced any religious belief and embraced instead both nationalism and communism. In this he was following in the traditions of James Connolly and John MacLean who had found their nationalism complemented by their socialism. MacDiarmid believed that Scotland had become a laughing-stock nation with cultural icons like Harry Lauder and the Sunday Post, along with the Kailyard School of writing and a general cringe within the people as a whole. While England may have been happy with this, MacDiarmid believed that it was the influence of union with England that had created this.<\/p>\n In contrast to George Malcolm Fraser, one of Scotland\u2019s leading journalists and writers at the time, saying that the Irish presence would destroy Scotland from within and lead her back to Rome, MacDiarmid welcomed Irish immigration into Scotland. For him the Irish presence in Scotland was welcome precisely because it was Catholic. Culture had flourished in pre-Reformation Scotland and would do so again.<\/p>\n In the poem \u2018A Vision of Scotland\u2019 in his 1967 collection \u2018A Lap of Honour\u2019 MacDiarmid is perfectly at ease with what has emerged in Scotland and what will further emerge:<\/p>\n Even in the streets of Glasgow or Dundee,<\/em> These conflicting narratives are the ones young Tom encountered. Added to this, Scotland was also part of a Britannia that was still ruling the waves. He would have realised rather quickly what being Catholic with an Irish background was like. It was a hostile environment for his kind. However, he would have found a celebration of his cultural background attending Parkhead to watch Celtic, who were formed in 1888 after playing a charity match with Hibernian, Scotland\u2019s first Irish club, to raise funds for the poor of the East End.<\/p>\n At about the age of 12 or 13, Tom was sexually attacked by a 30 year old man on his way to Calderpark zoo. This event is pivotal because it not only traumatised the young boy, it estranged him from the church into which he had been born. This has all been written about by Leonard himself in \u2018A Taboo Too Far\u2019, written for the magazine \u2018Conscience\u2019 in 2005 and published again in his \u2018Definite Articles\u2019 in 2013.<\/p>\n The incident must have happened around 1956-7 and Leonard recalled how he asked his perpetrator \u2013 who claimed also to have been Catholic \u2013 that he should promise to go to confession that night, go to communion the following day, and never attack anyone ever again. He would do the same himself. Tom\u2019s innocent faith had shown responsibility towards his abuser but when he went to confession the priest had asked him, \u2018Did you let him?\u2019 Leonard recalls replying with a confused \u2018yes.\u2019 When asked by his parish priest if he had told the police about this, Leonard had said he had not. Tom was given \u2018a bigger penance than I had ever received in my life before.\u2019<\/p>\n In \u2018A Taboo Too Far\u2019 Tom had explored the Church\u2019s veneration of sexual purity throughout its history as emblematic of its failure to address such cases of abuse. It is also an interesting fact that Cardinal Cullen himself had taken part in the theological debates that eventually produced the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception in 1854.<\/p>\n Tom never told his parents what had happened to him and they both died not knowing. The authority of the church in his life was blown asunder and any authority of any kind would now be viewed with deep suspicion. In a matter of a few years after this event Tom had left the Church for good, failed by an authority he had held dear but that had failed him utterly. His world had been turned upside down, and in the poem \u2018Remembrance Day\u2019, first published in \u2018Being a Human Being\u2019 in 2006, Tom recalls what happened to him almost \u2018fifty years ago\u2019:<\/p>\n I know what it is<\/em> I know what it is<\/em> while the unknown enemy<\/em> how I hate<\/em> fucking violence.<\/em><\/p>\n While individuals can and do overcome terrible experiences, those experiences always remain part of their life\u2019s story. It was the solace of listening to classical music on Radio 3 that gave him a space for reflection, and this too was outside the narrative of most working-class lives. Around \u2018about 16\u2019 a friend showed him an \u2018external exam for entrance to somewhere or other.\u2019 On it was Stephen Spender\u2019s poem \u2018The Express\u2019 which began:<\/p>\n After the first powerful plain manifesto,<\/em> This was a poem about a steam engine leaving the station and Leonard became \u2018hooked on the music of it\u2019 to such an extent \u2018it was to be poetry that I wanted to write.\u2019 He recalls this in a prose piece from \u2018Definite Articles\u2019 writing about his father.<\/p>\n In 1967 Leonard attended Glasgow University to study for a degree in English and Scottish literature. He left after two years and this is where his poem \u2018The Dropout\u2019 must date from:<\/p>\n well jist take a lookit yirsell<\/em> yir clivir<\/em> He returned to complete his degree in the 1970s. The figure of Philip Hobsbaum, a lecturer there, seems highly significant. He came from a Polish-Jewish background in London and was an outsider like Leonard himself. Previously he had been at Queen\u2019s University in Belfast and presided over what came to be known as the Belfast Group of writers, which included the emerging talents of Seamus Heaney, John Bond, Michael Longley, Derek Mahon, Stewart Parker and Bernard MacLaverty.<\/p>\n In Glasgow Hobsbaum created a Glasgow Group that included Tom, Alasdair Gray, Liz Lochhead, Jeff Torrington, Aonghas MacNeacail and Jim Kelman. When you consider the diversity of literary material all these writers went on to produce you have to ask what it was that Hobsbaum said to them all. I can only imagine that it must have been something like \u2018Find your voice and find forms and styles that suit it.\u2019<\/p>\n This was an era when experimentation was very much in vogue and notions of \u2018high art\u2019 were being challenged in all the arts. Leonard had read \u2018The Golden Treasury of Scottish Poetry (1940)\u2019 edited by Hugh MacDiarmid, and found MacDiarmid\u2019s early lyrics a source of great interest. However, his use of Lallans or synthetic Scots was not the voice Leonard heard inside himself. His voice was the voice of Glasgow, the voice of the people he grew up with and lived with still. The voices he heard, with their distinctive vowel sounds and the patterns of words that seemed to fuse into one another, were not the voices of any art. Was what he heard badly spoken English? Surely not, was his inner reply.<\/p>\n In a class-ridden society like Britain you are defined by a whole host of things \u2013 the school you attended, where you live, your parental lineage, your occupation, the way you speak and the sound of your voice. There can be nothing more political than language, and it would be through the medium of language, his language, that he would challenge the very nature of the state itself. He was keenly aware of how this would collide with the literary authorities and establishments in both Scotland and England. His poems would take such authorities on.<\/p>\n David Pollock, in his Obituary of Tom on 27 December 2018 in \u2018The Herald\u2019, said that the poem \u2018The Six o\u2019clock News\u2019 was \u2018his most widely known and celebrated work\u2019 and most commentators seem to agree with this assessment. It is certainly important but there are many other poems that are equally celebrated, and it is his work as a whole that should be celebrated. Too many critics accept \u2018The Six o\u2019clock News\u2019 as a poem that is safe to talk about now because it seems to have come into its own, and praise this poem while ignoring the issues he raises in so many others.<\/p>\n In the poem Leonard imagines a BBC newsreader about to use his customary Received Pronunciation to deliver the news, but who breaks with the established norm to speak instead in Glasgow dialect:<\/p>\n thi reson<\/em>![\"Screen](\"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/01\/Screen-Shot-2018-01-14-at-091808.png\")
<\/p>\n![\"hugh\"](\"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/01\/hugh.jpg\")
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She throws her head-square off and a mass<\/em>
Of authentic flaxen hair is revealed,<\/em>
Fine-spun as newly-retted fibres<\/em>
On a sunlit Irish bleaching field.<\/em><\/p>\n
to be powerless<\/em><\/p>\n
to be made to lie low<\/em><\/p>\n
invades you\u2026..<\/em><\/p>\n
male<\/em><\/p>\n
the black statement of pistons,<\/em>
without more fuss, but gliding like a queen.<\/em><\/p>\n
naithur wurk nur wahnt<\/em>
aw aye<\/em><\/p>\n
dam clivir<\/em>
but yi huvny a clue whatyir dayn<\/em><\/p>\n
a talk wia<\/em>
BBC accent<\/em>
iz coz yi <\/em>
widny wahnt<\/em>
mi ti talk<\/em>
aboot thi<\/em>
trooth wia<\/em>
voice lik<\/em>
wanna yoo<\/em>
scruff, if<\/em>
a toktaboot<\/em>
thi trooth<\/em>
lik wanna yoo<\/em>
scruff yi<\/em>
widny thingk<\/em>
it wuz troo<\/em><\/p>\n