- Hamish Henderson
Hamish Scott Henderson, (
11 November 1919 -March 8 2002 ;Scottish Gaelic : "Seamas MacEanraig" ("Seamas Mòr")) was a Scottish poet, songwriter, socialist, humanist, soldier, and intellectual.He has been called the most important Scots poet since Burns, catalyst for the
folk revival inScotland , discoverer ofJeannie Robertson , the man who accepted the surrender ofItaly on19 April 1945 , the author of the "Freedom Come-All-Ye ", the outspokenGermanophile and avowedAnti-Nazi , and one of the bairns of Adam, Seamas Mòr.Born illegitimately in
Glenshee ,Perthshire , Henderson eventually moved to England with his mother. He won a scholarship to the prestigiousDulwich School in London; however, his mother died shortly before he was due to take up his place and he was forced to live in an orphanage while studying there.He studied at the
University of Cambridge in the years leading up toWorld War II , spending spare time running messages for theQuakers inNazi Germany , and working to smuggleJew ish people out of the country up to the outbreak of war.Although he argued strongly for peace, even well into the early years of the war, he became convinced that a satisfactory peace could not be reached and so he threw himself into the war effort. Joining as an enlisted soldier in the
Pioneer Corps , he later applied for and received a commission in the intelligence corps as an interrogator (speaking six European languages and having an excellent knowledge of European culture, he was extremely effective in this role).He took part in the
Desert War inAfrica , which produced his Elegies For the Dead in Cyrenaica, encompassing every aspect of a soldier's experience of the sands ofNorth Africa , and even in the midst of the struggle againstNazism reaching out to find the common ground between German foot-soldiers and theJocks of theBritish 51st (Highland) Division . Henderson formally accepted the surrender ofItaly .Henderson's complexities make his work hard to study: for example,
Dick Gaughan 's commentary on the song-poem The 51st Highland Division's Farewell to Sicily, while insightful, does not take into account the traditional divide betweenpiper s and drummers in the Scots regiments, the essential key to one reading of the text.Henderson threw himself into the work of the
folk revival after the war, discovering and bringing to public attentionJeannie Robertson . He was instrumental in bringing about the People'sCeilidh s, celebrations of traditional Scottish culture that foreshadowed the modernEdinburgh Fringe Festival . Dividing his time between Europe and Scotland, he eventually settled inEdinburgh in 1959 with his German wife, Katzel.He collected widely in the Borders and the north-east of Scotland, creating links between the travellers, the
bothy singers ofAberdeenshire , the Border shepherds, and the young men and women who inEdinburgh .From 1955 to 1987 he was on the staff of the
University of Edinburgh 's School of Scottish Studies which he co-founded withCalum Maclean : there he contributed to the sound archives that are now available on-line.
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