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Tom Hubbard <\/strong>writes about Fife’s folk culture, past and present<\/em><\/p>\n There are books which, discovered when you are young, remain a moral and artistic compass for you throughout your lifetime. In 1973 I bought a copy of The Penguin Book of Socialist Verse<\/em>, edited by Alan Bold, and was intrigued by the presence there of a Scottish poet and dramatist called Joe Corrie. Alan\u2019s selection was small \u2013 four pages in all \u2013 but powerful. He included the longish poem \u2018Women are waiting tonight\u2019, on the aftermath of an \u2018accident\u2019 at the pit with multiple \u2018fatalities\u2019 (my inverted commas round these words are doubtless advisable):<\/p>\n They will wait and watch till the dawn, <\/em> The poem goes on to condemn the hypocrisy ad crocodile tears of the establishment members who turn up at the funeral, of those such as the MP \u2018who voted that the military be used \/ When last these miners came on strike \/ To earn a living wage\u2019, the pit owner who \u2018vowed many a time \/ That he would make the miner eat grass\u2019, and also the right-wing press which had thundered against the strikers but who now squeeze every last drop of phoney pathos on to their pages. In due course, they will return to their usual function of \u2018storing up their venom and their hatred, \/ For the next big miners\u2019 strike.\u2019<\/p>\n Alan Bold\u2019s biographical notes take up less than two lines: one suspects that at the time of the anthology\u2019s publication (1970), the editor had little to go on, as Corrie\u2019s life and work had receded into obscurity. However, in 1977, I learned that Joe Corrie had been active as miner and writer in my native Fife. Both my grandfathers had been down the pit. So I consulted the local collection in Kirkcaldy public library and copied by hand a good number of the poems appearing in the rare pamphlets published during Corrie\u2019s lifetime.<\/p>\n Fast forward seven years and Thatcher was at her height, determined to hammer once and for all those uppity enough to challenge her ideology. The miners went on strike and her response was ruthless and, it turned out, terminal \u2013 not for her, but for her adversaries. It was time for Joe Corrie to come into his own, and suddenly the revival got under way. The 7:84 Theatre Company toured Scotland with Corrie\u2019s now best-known play In Time O\u2019 Strife<\/em>, directed by David Hayman, and Linda Mackenney brought out her book-length selection Joe Corrie: Plays, Poems and Theatre Writings <\/em>(7:84 Publications, 1985). In Time O\u2019 Strife <\/em>is set in a Fife mining community during the General Strike of 1926: it was electrifying to hear working-class Fife speech within the plush setting of Edinburgh\u2019s Royal Lyceum, in a kind of Brechtian dialectic of the familiar and the strange.<\/p>\n Around the same time, my friend William Hershaw and I served on the editorial board of a Fife-based magazine called Scrievins <\/em>(Scots for \u2018writing\u2019). We got the go-ahead to devote a special issue to Corrie. I drew a portrait, in pencil, of our author and that provided our image for the cover. The first article in the Corrie feature was by Alison Hutchison, who supplied a useful summary of Corrie\u2019s origins: \u2018Joe Corrie was neither a Fifer nor from a mining family. When the Corrie family moved to Cardenden in 1896 from Slamannan, near Falkirk, Joe was two years old. His father had been a grocer and his mother, before her marriage, had been a farm servant in Wigtonshire. [\u2026] [T]his was a fairly common pattern in Cardenden at the beginning of the twentieth century. People came flooding into the area to work in the newly sunk Bowhill pit. Some of these came from exhausted pits elsewhere in central Scotland, but many of them had little or no experience of mining, they were just looking for work.\u2019<\/p>\n Cardenden, located in central Fife, is now the collective name for a conglomeration of four former pit villages: from north to south (as also alphabetically), these are Auchterderran, Bowhill, the original Cardenden, and Dundonald. Though Joe Corrie would find himself in a vexed relationship with the conservative Scottish Community Drama Association, he had earlier enjoyed his collaboration with the Bowhill Players (later renamed the Fife Miner Players) who took In Time O\u2019 Strife <\/em>on tour to many Scottish locations, with mostly working-class audiences. Lack of financial backing led to the demise of the company in 1931. During the leanest of times, the Bowhill Players supported their community in practical as well as artistic ways, notably by running soup kitchens, those ancestors of today\u2019s foodbanks.<\/p>\n Joe Corrie achieved a good measure of success in Germany, where his work was performed at Leipzig at the beginning of the 1930s, shortly before the Nazi takeover. My earlier allusion to Brecht might seem in keeping with this, but Corrie\u2019s more naturalistic aesthetic has led rather to comparisons with Zola (of Germinal<\/em>) and Se\u00e1n O\u2019Casey, with regard, respectively, to the mining communities and to the staged domestic interiors.<\/p>\n The revivals over the past thirty-five years have served to compensate \u2013 amply \u2013 for the neglect of Corrie over the half-century or so from the early 1930s. William Hershaw and his fellow performers have created a new Bowhill Players who engage in many gigs across Fife and elsewhere in central-east Scotland. In a poignant gesture to the original bearers of the name, William\u2019s son David produced a CD which includes a re-issue of a 1929 Bowhill Players of Corrie\u2019s short comic play The Miners\u2019 Saturday Night<\/em>, with the voices of Joe himself and his sister Violet. This, together with other tracks performed by today\u2019s Bowhill Players, is obtainable from www.fraspublishing.co.uk<\/a> as an insert in the pamphlet Joe Corrie: a Legend and his Legacy <\/em>by the late Scottish playwright Donald Campbell.<\/p>\n A larger-scale production by our contemporary Bowhill Players is the CD The Joe Corrie Project: Cage Load of Men<\/em>, complete with a booklet containing the texts and explanatory notes. The top-notch performances by the Players include such Corrie classics as \u2018It\u2019s Fine tae Keep in wi the Gaffer\u2019, a song which (to put it mildly) maintains its relevance in our own time:<\/p>\n For mony a year I ha\u2019e worked doon alow,<\/em> You hear this track and you could be forgiven for thinking that the poem \/ song seems to have composed itself. It could be mistaken for a folk song \u2013 but in a sense that\u2019s what it has become: like Hamish Henderson\u2019s \u2018Freedom Come All Ye\u2019 it\u2019s one of these radical Scottish songs that invite audience participation.<\/p>\n In some of his writings Joe Corrie expressed an understandable aversion to institutional religion. As a young student in the early-mid 1970s I found myself looking to Russian literature for clues as to how to retain a humane Christ-based ethic that could blend with a socialist outlook. Initially I resorted to Tolstoy and that took me so far, but the stern simplifications of his old age \u2013 as I discovered much later \u2013 jarred with the subtle amplitude of his great novels, their ingenious structure or \u2018labyrinth of linkages\u2019. Dostoevsky was a very different writer but, again, his confused reactionary politics co-existed oddly with the psychological and philosophical depth of Crime and Punishment<\/em>. I would argue that Dostoevsky failed to understand politics, but that he grasped the psychology of politics.<\/p>\n
Till the wheels begin to revolve, <\/em>
And the men whom they loved so well, <\/em>
The strong, kind, loving men, <\/em>
Are brought up in canvas sheets,<\/em>
To be identified by a watch,<\/em>
Or a button,<\/em>
Or, perhaps, only a wish.<\/em>
And three days from now,<\/em>
They will all be buried together,<\/em>
In one big hole in the earth.<\/em><\/p>\n
But never in pits that are wet or are low,<\/em>
For I mak\u2019 it my business wherever I go,<\/em>
Aye tae keep in wi\u2019 the gaffer.<\/em>
Oh! it\u2019s fine tae keep in wi\u2019 the gaffer.<\/em> [+ five more verses]<\/p>\n