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Edited
by Frank R. Shaw, FSA Scot, Dawsonville, GA, USA
Email:
jurascot@earthlink.net
When Susan and I were in London several years ago, we were honored to be
guests at a luncheon hosted by The Burns Club of London at the city’s
prestigious Caledonian Club. No one has ever experienced more warmth and
hospitality from Burns Club members anywhere. Then Club President Walter
Watson had set the wheels in motion for the event, and it was there I met a
most interesting man by the name of Clark McGinn. We have stayed in touch
ever since, and Clark’s outstanding, comprehensive, and well-documented
articles on Burns have appeared in the pages of Robert Burns Lives!
many times.
At
that same luncheon I was also privileged to meet Jim Henderson who now
serves as Honorary Secretary of the Club. Thanks to emails and trips to
London, the three of us, along with our wives, have built a lasting
friendship. Jim recently sent me a history of the first one hundred years of
the Burns Club of London and mentioned that Clark might be updating it for
the club’s 150th
anniversary. Naturally I contacted Clark and asked him for an article
regarding his efforts, and you will enjoy below the result of that request.
Jim and Clark have both served as President of The Burns Club of London
which was founded in 1868. Thanks to these two men, I am a proud Associate
Member, and I extend my gratitude to Jim for sharing its historical
information and to Clark for contributing an extremely interesting article
on the club. A lot of histories such as this are usually “dead on arrival”
but this is indeed an exception, and I’m certain you will enjoy both
articles. Today’s Part I is actually an introduction to next week’s Part II,
the history of the club printed in 1968. Now you will meet one of the finest
Burnsians of all time – Colin Rae Brown.
(FRS: 7.26.11)
The History of The Burns Club of London:
1868 to 1968
Part I
By Clark McGinn
Past President, The Burns Club of London
In
introducing this interesting history of the Burns Club of London,
rediscovered by my good friend, Jim Henderson who is both Honorary Secretary
of the Club and, through his tireless efforts over years, also our
well-deserved Honorary President, I have to admit that there are older Burns
Clubs, there are certainly bigger Burns Clubs, there are clubs who cherish
direct links with the Poet and there are clubs with priceless historical
documents and artefacts, but amongst them all, it is the Burns Club of
London which is accorded the honour of standing at No. 1 on the Roll of the
Burns Federation.
For me, beside the happy companionship of my fellow BCoL members, many of
whom have become more than co-members to my wife Ann and me over the years,
the special heart of the Club is due to the extraordinary man who founded us
in 1868 - an expat Scot in London called Colin Rae Brown. He made us ‘Number
One’.
Few people recognise his name nowadays, and even those Burns scholars who
know of him probably underestimate his importance. There is hardly a part of
the history of the popularising of Robert Burns where Colin’s democratic
philosophy of ‘Burns for All’ – cannot not be found.
Like Burns, Colin was a committed Freemason and carried a philosophy of
brotherhood through all his endeavours. He was President of the venerable
Greenock Burns Club when the 1844 ‘Demonstration’ at Alloway was being
arranged to welcome the younger sons of Burns on furlough from India to meet
their elder brother and relatives at The Cottage. Here, the organising
committee envisioned a grand entertainment led by the Tory aristocracy for
the benefit of ordinary folk – Colin saw it differently and although a young
man, he was heavily involved in publicising the event such that tens of
thousands of day trippers came by stream boat and railroad on pilgrimage to
Alloway, overbalancing the planned ‘top-down’ formality turning the day into
a wider and more inclusive popular event.
An
auctioneer to trade, his skills and enthusiasm for the common man and woman
launched his career in popular journalism, and after the removal of the
iniquitous Stamp Duty on newspapers he founded the first mass circulation
daily paper in Scotland, the Bulletin. It was in January 1858 when he was
giving a Burns Supper to his staff that he realised that the following year
would be the Poet’s Centenary. He was walking across the old Brig o’Doon
itself when the thought struck him – to encourage Scots and Burns fans and
lovers of Poetry and Freedom the world o’er to hold as many Burns Suppers as
possible to cheer The Immortal Memory on the centennial natal day. Many,
many people helped, including the Burns Club of New York City and over 814
Burns Suppers, soirees, balls and concerts were held from Bombay to
Baltimore, from Mauchline to Malta and from Edinburgh to Dunedin. There were
great glittering events in London’s Crystal Palace and Glasgow’s City Hall
and of course, in Ayr and Alloway, but the unique thing was the spread of
activity – the people took Burns into their homes and parties, rather than
having to make a pilgrimage as in 1844. Burns was diffused through the world
in the medium of the Burns Supper, and Colin’s ideas were at the root of it.
He
moved to London to develop his publishing interests on Fleet Street, and for
twelve years from 1868 held a Burns Supper in his own (rather capacious)
home for the new Burns Club of London and swiftly became a prominent figure
in the capital’s Caledonian cultural scene: he strong-armed the millionaire
John Gordon Crawford to buy and donate a copy of Steell’s Central Park
statue of Burns for London’s Embankment in 1884, and he was influential in
settling the maximum donation of one shilling for the Burns bust unveiled in
Poets’ Corner the following year (so allowing 20,000 men and women to share
the honour of depositing our National Poet’s effigy in the National Church).
And it was here in London that he came up with the idea of the Burns
Federation, in conversation with a delegation from the Kilmarnock Club, and
in so doing personally leading the foundation of that great worldwide family
which still prospers today. As a token of that inspiration, he was allowed
to place the Burns Club of London as No 1 on the roll of federated clubs and
was annually elected its Vice President until he died. (The fact that
Kilmarnock declared itself Number 0 is another story!). Once the federation
was established, his publisher’s eye saw the need for a journal to collect
and disseminate knowledge and critiscm of Burns, so naturally he was behind
the creation of the Burns Chronicle.
Towards the end of his life, his love of Highland Mary – which first
quickened in his Greenock years when he was active in setting up her first
monument in the West Kirkyard – was the guiding star of his declining years
and his final energies were expended in fundraising for a monument to her in
her birthplace, Dunoon which he saw unveiled the year before he died in
London, aged 75 in 1897.
He
was laid to rest in Greenock’s earth, happily a few graves away from his
heroine, Mary Campbell.
One man – with a great heart – whose favourite Burns Poem was Honest
Poverty, and whose catchword, in politics, freemasonry, journalism, or Burns
celebration was:
That man to man, the world o’er
Shall brothers be for a’ that.
(This article is dedicated to the memory of Mark Ray who with his wife
Fiona, watched their three children (Adam, Eleanor and Madeline) lay the
wreath on behalf of the Burns Club of London and Burnsians the world over in
Westminster Abbey at the national celebration of the 250th
Anniversary of the Poet’s Birth on Sunday 25th
January 2009). |
