A long day’s activity? Many a Saturday morning have I been wakened at five o’clock by the band playing itself through the village on the way to Glasgow, there, at seven, to lead its employing multitude to a boat for a journey down the Clyde. The band walked the five miles to Glasgow, and played most of the way. Practice in daylight maybe saved the cost of candle-light.
Some little time before I left Scotland there came to Thornliebank a designer for the Crum Mills, who had a very fine tenor voice. He was a little unlike some of our native singers, such as John Semple, whose bass was one of the most sonorous I have ever heard; who gave to his solo work a genius of interpretation I have never known excelled, but who couldn’t read a note, and relied entirely on his unfailing, memorial ear.
Our tenor was a technician, with a passion for the science of melody, and a determination to excel in the professional world—which he has since done in two continents. He is George Neil, conductor of the Toronto Scottish Chorus, one of the sweetest lyric tenors you could wish to hear, and a relentless worker in the cause of perpetuating Scottish songs.
Discussing, the other evening, the musical associations of the region we both knew so well, George and I agreed that the Pageant Chorus, which has opened a new chapter in the great story of the Canadian National Exhibition, is a measurable, modernized, Canadianized expansion of the Tannahill concerts on Gleniffer Braes, to which, with myriads more, Thornliebank used to flock on a summer Saturday afternoon, to hear anywhere up to a thousand voices, drawn from city and country choirs, commemorate a Scottish poet who thus received a tribute unequalled, I think, by anything that has annually been dedicated to his master Burns.
Tannahill was the son of a Paisley handloom weaver. He was put to the shuttle as a boy, but studied the poetry of Burns, Fergusson and Ramsay till he developed an intense ambition to emulate them. He fused his muse with the music of his loom, and tuned his metres with his shuttle. At thirty-three he took the advice of those who noted the local popularity of his poetry and published a volume of 175 songs and lyrics that enabled him to bank twenty pounds. But at thirty-six, when Constable refused to publish a corrected edition, his heart broke and he was found drowned.
One of his best pieces is “The Braes of Gleniffer”; and it was in a natural amphitheatre, on the braes of Gleniffer, visible from Thornliebank, that the yearly commemorative concert was held. The braes were five miles from home; but nothing was thought of walking the distance. The Tannahill concerts were known all over the south of Scotland; and for several decades it was a distinction to be a singer in them.
My father was a foreman in the Crum mills, and did his bit in religious and social service. He was a highly Calvinistic Presbyterian, of a sect which has no perpetuation in Canada. My mother, a Blair of Barrhead, was also of his kirk—the kirk of Original Seceders it was formally called, after a certain process of union had been consummated.
There was no church of the Original Seceders at Thornliebank, so we worshipped at Pollokshaws, the town that lay between Thornliebank and Glasgow, and is now incorporated with the great city. My father was the precentor for the Original Seceders, who would as soon think of having a box of whistles to lead the praise in God’s house as they would of praying to the accompaniment of fife and drum. Old associates of his son in Portage la Prairie might not have been astonished at the accountant of the Manitoba and North Western Railway venturing on the perilous seas of choir-leading at the Presbyterian church, had they seen Precentor Hanna at the Original Seceders in Pollokshaws, standing up when the psalm was called, striking his tuning fork, bending his ear to it, sounding the note in harmony, and then leading off with “Duke Street” or “Martyrdom”.
The Original Seceders are a survival and a combination of several schisms in the Presbyterian church in Scotland. The rigid qualities of the Covenanters caused some of them to resist all innovations, and to keep themselves separate from such as yielded to new-fangled fashions in worship and belief. The settlement of William and Mary, as sovereigns of Scotland as well as of the rest of the British Isles, imposed an oath on ministers which some refused to take, so that there was a secession of Burghers, as they were called. These, in their turn, had a split of their own, resulting in churches of Anti-Burghers. In opposition to the advancing tide of more liberal ideas and less severe practices, the Auld Lichts also set up a new identity among the folds of Christ’s Presbyterian flock.
To any of these divisions of the church militant may be ascribed the overworked story of the good soul who, lamenting the decay of faith, as indicated by the true kirk of the truly faithful having dwindled to the minister and herself, said: “And I’m no’ so sure of the meenister.”