Because of the great importance of Hamish Henderson’s work in the field of folksong, it was perhaps easy to overlook his own poetry, and his Collected Poems and Songs did not reach publication till 2000. Nevertheless, several of his songs, such as ‘The Freedom Come-All-Ye’ and ‘The John Maclean March’, are already classics, possibly sometimes sung as folksongs by people who do not realise they are Henderson’s own compositions.
His war experiences gave rise to two very different volumes of poetry. Ballads of World War II (1947) contained both soldiers’ songs collected on war service and some of his own work, including ‘The Ballad of the D-Day Dodgers’ and ‘The Highland Division’s Farewell to Sicily’. The soldiers’ songs are given in a full unexpurgated version and the book was privately published to avoid trouble with the censor.
In contrast, the poem sequence Elegies for the Dead in Cyrenaica (1948) is outstanding in its serious, clear and compassionate view of war. Throughout, Henderson sees the German soldiers as his brothers, men like himself and his companions, caught up in a conflict they neither understand nor want. A letter of congratulation at this time told him ‘You are that rare man, a poet.’ Yet the writer added, ‘You must not forget that your songs and ballads are not trivialities – they are quite as important as the Elegies.’
This judgment was proved true over the next forty years, as Henderson’s songs commented on causes and injustices in Scotland and much farther afield. ‘The Ballad of the Men of Knoydart’ continued to have relevance until the very end of the twentieth century in the debate on ‘Who owns Scotland?’ His anti-apartheid anthem ‘Rivonia’, written in 1964, with its refrain ‘Free Mandela!’, was sung at demonstrations and, it is said, heard by Mandela himself while imprisoned on Robben Island.
Greatest of all in this genre is ‘The Freedom Come-All-Ye’ (‘Roch the wind in the clear day’s dawin’’), speaking for social justice, inclusion and understanding throughout the world. It has often been suggested as a new Scottish national anthem, but Henderson was among those who demurred on the grounds that internationalism, not nationalism, is its theme.
In ‘The Flyting o’ Life and Daith’, following an old Scottish literary tradition, life contends ‘The warld is mine … I am the day, and the sunshine’, while death points out that famine, cruelty and injustice still hold sway. Predictably for readers of Henderson’s work, life has the last word.
Two volumes published in the 1990s show Henderson to be an equally articulate and incisive writer in prose. Alias MacAlias (1992) collects essays on folksongs, folktales and people of the folk revival, together with other writing on literature and politics. The Armstrong Nose (1996) is a selection of letters, including two famous ‘flytings’ of 1959-60 and 1964 with Hugh MacDiarmid about poetry and folksong, topics on which the two poets held widely differing views. Henderson’s voice in these letters and essays is as distinctive as in his poetry.
