Mary Symon (1863-1938)

As the Great War fell in an age just before the advent of mass communications in radio and cinema, it was a conflict that would witness a great increase in published poetry. The majority of this was published in newspapers, by both accomplished poets and in the hand of enthusiastic novices. This phenomenon of war poetry was widespread throughout Europe. In the pages of daily newspapers, as well as in published collections, France and Germany would similarly see an extraordinary increase in published verse.

Wilfred Owen, Rupert Brook, Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves are remembered among the better known poets. In Scotland, E A MacKintosh, Charles Hamilton Sorley and the bardachd of Gaelic poets, such as Donald MacDonald of Baile Sear in North Uist, would add to the significant canon of verse from the First World War.

Dundee’s Joseph Lee, who fought at Aubers Ridge, Neuve Chapelle and in the heavily sustained losses at the Battle of Loos, wrote poetry mostly in English, but also in Scots, which he sent to the ‘People’s Journal’ and ‘Dundee Advertiser’. Lee continued to send poetry to the Dundee papers after being captured as a prisoner-of-war at Cambrai and held captive at Karlsruhe. As seen in ‘Sword and Pen, Poems of 1915 from Dundee and Tayside’, edited by Hilda D Spear and Bruce Pandrich (Aberdeen University Press, 1989) these two journals were prominent in publishing verse from the front while generally celebrating themes of Scottish patriotism and sacrifice.

A similar thread is upheld by Mary Symon when she praises the military cause in ‘For our Empire’. In ‘After Neuve Chapelle’ she extols the efforts of the Gordon Highlanders and the soldiers of the wider British Empire in the bloody battle of March 1915. At the same time she condemns what she sees as the malingerers, or ‘laggards’ who have yet to join up for military action.

‘God! Will they ever wauken, the loons that sit at hame?
While din-faced Sikhs an’ Ghurkas fecht tae keep oor shores fae shame.
Oor kin fae a’ the Seven Seas are tummelin’ to the fray,
But there’s laggards yet on lown hillsides ‘neath skies that span the Spey.’

The Military Act of 1916 would introduced conscription first of all to single and thereafter to married men: Charles Murray, author of popular Scots collection ‘Hamewith’ first published in 1900, served with the South African Defence Force. In Murray’s ‘Dockens Afore His Peers’, some insight is shown into how the war is dividing communities on the home front in Aberdeenshire. The proprietor of Dockenhill goes before the conscription board to justify the exemption of his son from war, all to continue the operations on his farm:

‘Fy na, he isna twenty yet –ay, weel, he’s maybe near’t;
Owre young to lippen wi’ a gun, the crater would be fear’t.
He’s hardly throu’ his squeelin’ yet, an’ noo we hae a plan
To lat him simmer i’ the toon, an learn to mizzer lan’.
Fat? Gar him list! Oor laddie list? ‘Twould kill his mither, that,
To think o’ Johnnie in a trench awa’ in fat-ye ca’t;’

As was common with many writers who documented the First World War, patriotism would give way to a more sombre mood as the horrors of scientific warfare and its toll on communities began to be realised. J B Salmond remained a staunch critic of the war – and society’s treatment of its soldiers – for many years. In ‘Any Private to Any Private, July 1917’, he writes from the front:

‘Ay, gie’s ma rum. I’m needin’t sair, by God!
We’ve juist been bringin’ Wullie doun the line –
Wullie, that used tae be smairt an’ snod.
Hell, what a mess! Saft-nosed ane. Damn the swine!
They micht kill clean. I kent his auld folk fine.
Ay, he wis mairrit. Man, she’s spared a sicht.
Here, Dave, gie’s ower that blanket. Ay, that’s mine.
I kenna, hoo I canna lauch the nicht.’

Salmond goes on in resigned rage as to how a daily newspaper has commented that war widows are ‘becoming a great burden to the State’:

‘An’ Heaven kens, they’ll lave her awfu’ ticht.
‘A burden to the State.’ Her Wullie’s shot.
I kenna, hoo I canna lauch the nicht.’

It is in Charles Murray’s 1920 collection ‘In the country places’ in possibly his finest poem, ‘Gin I Was God’, that the full realisation of man’s inhumanity to man finds expression:

‘ To some clood-edge I’d daunder furth an’, feth,
Look ower an’ watch hoo things were gyaun aneth.
Syne, gin I saw hoo men I’d made mysel’
Had startit in tae pooshan, sheet an’ fell,
To reive an rape an fairly mak’ a hell’

Mary Symon’s poetry would find its most powerful voice in relation to the impact of the conflict. In ‘The Soldier’s Cairn’ a memorial cairn is being built on a hill high over a town. As the cairn is built the memories of lads lost at the front are resurrected in a powerful and moving elegy. In ‘The Glen’s Muster-Roll; The Dominie Loquitur’, the teacher hangs the muster-roll of his his former pupils on the classroom wall. The poem shifts between memories of the pupils and their fateful destinies at war on land and sea. In the closing phase of the poem his scholars return as ghosts to ask the schoolmaster the meaning of it all, to which he can give no answer.

‘Scotland’s War’ comments: ‘… it is “The Glen’s Muster Roll; The Dominie Loquitur”, published in February 1916, which stands as perhaps the finest vernacular elegy to come out of the Great War. No other poem evokes so effectively the sense of loss to a community of a whole generation.’

In 2008 the British Library acquired an extraordinary sound archive from the Berliner Lautarchiv British & Commonwealth Recordings which holds a remarkable range of recorded voices collected between 1915 and 1938. Among these are recordings of British prisoners-of-war held between 1915 and 1918 with many recorded voices from various parts of Scotland. Some have comments against the contributor’s name such as: ‘Considers Scots as his mother tongue and English as an additional language. Can read and write in both English and Scottish.’

Some samples of Scots readings from the Berliner Lautarchiv are given in ither external links below.