Mary Brooksbank is one of the most significant figures in the pantheon of the Dundee radical tradition. She was born on a raw winters day in December 1897, in Shiprow in Aberdeen, one of the worst slum areas in the city. Her mother was ‘a fisher lassie…. when she wasn’t being a domestic servant’ and her father’s family came from the parish of St Vigeans, in the Arbroath area, which during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was a hand loom weaving centre. Here, the auto-didactic artisan tradition drew on the much longer-lived north-east Scottish ballad tradition. Song and story-telling were therefore a central part of Mary’s inherited culture. She was blind for the first four years of her life and received very little education. At the age of eight, her family, which included four brothers, moved to Dundee to seek work. At 11 she started work, illegally, as a shifter before being discovered and sacked, but she returned to the mills shortly afterwards. As she grew older Mary began to listen, note down and to collect the work songs she heard in the mills, such as The Dundee Lassie and The Strike Song, before taking up the pen herself, particularly following her retirement when she produced many powerful and moving poems in the oary tongue. It would be migrants like Mary Brooksbank, shaped by the ballad traditions of rural Angus and the fishing communities of the north-east coast, as well as others from the Scottish Highlands and Ireland, who would develop and forge the oary culture that emerged out of the low mills and tenements of Juteopolis. It is important to remember that Mary was not just a talented songstress, and the originator of our wonderful Oary culture of song, she was also a determined socialist revolutionary, who was arrested on the first Armistice Day celebrations in 1918 for protesting at the shoddy treatment of returning veterans, and, at the age of 73, she visited Hanoi in 1970 in order to tend the wounded and to rebuild a city being bombed round the clock by B52 bombers. Her reluctance to bow the knee led her to long periods on the dole and on local blacklists, which meant she had to eke out a living picking berries, and working in canning factories and at the sack sewing. In the early 1930s, Mary was expelled from the Communist Party for denouncing Stalin, but she spent the rest of her life as an independent socialist. In effect, she became a one woman roving class war machine, who opposed all forms of oppression be it from employers, the state, labour reformism and Stalinism alike. We, in the Dundee left, should remember the tradition we are a part of, and be grateful for the giants, such as Mary, whose shoulders we stand on. We should also remember our duty to honour that tradition, not through hagiogrophy or hero worship, but through keeping her tradition of struggle alive, until we can complete the job of building the kind of socialist society she fought for. My favourite poem by Mary is Nae Regrets Im growin auld, and still it seems/ Lifes no jist empty o its dreams/ In waukrift nichts there comes tae me/ Memories o whit used tae be. A gey roch road, fell snell weather/ A fecht tae mak it a wee bit smoother/ Gin we show our eident grit/ Well mak it even better yet. Langs the road and steys the brae/ Well no lament, weve haeen oor day/ Tho it wisna a it shoulda been/ A gey thrawn speil, sma rest atween. I, growin auld, I feel gey prood/ In youth I taen the rauchle road/ Gin Id my time a ower again/ Id spent it jist as I hae dune.
Posted on: Mon, 13 Oct 2014 10:00:38 +0000