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Robert Ford (1846-1904)
A 2006 literary magazine article about Glaswegians: Robert
Ford and John Ord.
Robert Ford was the senior of the two and by far the more
prolific author. The basic details of his life can be found in Henry
Dryerre’s Blairgowrie, Stormont and Strathmore Worthies (1903). He was born
on 18th July 1846 at Wolfhill, a tiny village in the parish of Cargill in
Perthshire. His father was a pit sawyer who owned some land and served as a
precentor in the local Free Church of Cargill. Robert was an able but
unexceptional child who eventually commenced a career as a clerk, originally
in Dundee and subsequently where he worked for J & W Campbell & Co for most
of his adult life. He raised a large family, mostly on his own after the
premature death of his wife. In his spare time, however, he penned a
sequence of extremely popular books. These include collections of poetry,
humorous stories and children’s songs, as well as edited collections of
William Miller, Robert Burns, Sandy Rodger and Robert Fergusson . e.g. The
Poetical Works of Robert Fergusson - Robert Fergusson , Robert Ford(1905).
He was an uninspired poet in his own right, although his work was very much
in the fashion of the times - similar to countless pieces that appeared in Whistlebinkie and other collections. This verse, from The Auld Beech Tree,
published in his first collection, Hame-Spun Lays and Lyrics, is typical:
Despite his own fairly modest gifts as a writer, however,
Ford was an excellent editor and collector, and his works, published
latterly by Alexander Gardner of Paisley, were best-sellers both at home and
abroad. Dryerre notes that his collection of anecdotes in the fashion of
Dean Ramsay, Thistledown, inspired an expatriate Scot in Klerksop, South
Africa, to name his estate after it. Ford was also particularly interested
in children’s lore, and his Ballads of Bairnhood (1894) - dedicated ‘To my
own five motherless children, for whose entertainment, in joy and in sorrow,
most of the pieces have been read or sung’ - and his Children’s Rhymes,
Games, Songs and Stories (1903) were especially popular.
There are interesting snippets of folksong and folklore in
several of Ford’s collections. For example, Children’s Rhymes, Games, Songs
and Stories contains an unusual example of an early mystery play, The
Goloshans (supposedly ‘The Galatians’) common in the west of Scotland, and
Thistledown has an intriguing version of an international folktale type
known in the north of Scotland, ‘The Professor of Signs’.
However, Ford’s main contribution to folksong scholarship
comes not in two fairly standard works - Song Histories (1900) and Auld
Scots Ballants (1889) but in his Vagabond Songs and Ballads of Scotland
(first published in 1899) a collection of around 150 Scottish folksongs with
annotations and fully transcribed tunes. Vagabond Songs is, in fact, a
meticulously edited and more genuinely traditional collection than any of
the other various derivative and repetitive volumes of the same type.
However, its limitations should also be made clear. Unlike
Greig or Duncan, Ford was an armchair collector. As he notes in his
introduction to the second edition: ‘For a good long time I have practised
the conceit of noting down these vagabond songs and ballads when and
wherever I was favoured with the opportunity of hearing them. Some I secured
through correspondence. Some from obscure publications. On the invitation of
the proprietors of the People’s Journal, a selection of them recently
appeared in the columns of that widely circulating periodical, with the
result that I obtained fresh and interesting particulars about some, and
additional verses to others.’
In fact, Ford was also regular contributor to the press at
the turn of the century. The newspapers of the day encouraged a high
standard of cultural and literary debate and many of the major writers of
the Scottish renaissance contributed.
JH
See our Poetry page for him
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