The Canoe Boys

by Alastair Dunnett

  Whatever its place in Scotland’s culture, though, The Canoe Boys is nothing if not a tribute to a remarkable friendship: a friendship which would endure for 64 years after the events described in these pages.

  Alastair and Seumas had both grown up in the tenements of working-class Glasgow, (though as Seumas liked to recall, Alastair was in ‘a posh wally close with a white-tiled entrance’). But it was in the scouts that they met, at Auchengillan on the edge of the Campsie Fells. Here, at what was broadly a rural base for underprivileged city kids, both young men exerted their first cultural influence, working to replace the curious American Indian associations of the organisation with a sense of Scottish history and pride (‘If people can look back with pride,’ Alastair would write later, ‘they can look forward with hope.’).

  With kilt funds and fireside ceilidhs, the scouting movement was developing a distinctive Scottish variant, and when Chief Scout Baden-Powell outlawed the wearing of the Balmoral bonnet in 1932 it wounded the whole organisation north of the border. It also united the two young men in a mischievous campaign of resistance that took in satirical songs and other protests designed to win over the national press.

  When both men were coincidentally transferred to Edinburgh – Alastair by his employers at the Commercial Bank and Seumas by the Daily Express, for whom he sold advertising – they joined the band of young writers, including Chris Grieve (aka Hugh MacDiarmid) and Tom Douglas MacDonald (Fionn MacColla) in orbit around the literary and nationalist paper The Freeman. But the association was to be short-lived. Impatient with the circle’s ‘outstanding’ but endless debate, the pair broke away to develop their own ideas about Scotland’s potential in the Claymore.

  The existence of that paper in the depths of the Great Depression was a heroic feat in itself, wresting innovation week after week from an unforgiving status quo. Yet by the time the Claymore foundered and its editors took to the water, they were still young enough to spend fireside hours ‘talking back and forth about ourselves’ and to nurture a dream of building a Highland base of their own. The great bulk of their adult lives lay uncertainly ahead.

  Alastair was the first to get a job after the canoe trip, sending a pound a week of his wages from the Glasgow Weekly Herald to Seumas in London, where they had spent a fruitless winter trying to sell Marshall canoes. In the decades that followed Seumas would work long stints starting and running newspapers in England, but also return at crucial times to Alastair’s side, first as features editor of the Daily Record and later general manager at The Scotsman. During this latter employment the two friends would climb Arthur’s Seat together every morning (perhaps marvelling at their transformed circumstances) before heading for their handsome desks overlooking North Bridge.

  When they were both in their late eighties I would sometimes catch up with them at their weekly meeting in a modest hostelry near my father’s house, sitting with their briefcases open beside them and a whisky in front, working with some hilarity on the latest ‘ploy’. The mood was always forward-looking.

  Alastair died in 1998, having to his satisfaction witnessed Donald Dewar pronounce, ‘There shall be a Scottish Parliament’. Seumas survived him by four years, publishing well into his nineties, and a familiar figure on the streets of Edinburgh in his kilt, peching along to some meeting or other, eyes twinkling behind his pebble glasses.

  Of the two, my father perhaps travelled further in public fame, but he never left behind the spirit or the bond of the two young men who had set out into the wide seas together. Near the end of his life, he tried to write about what the lifelong friendship and support of Seumas had meant to him, and found it hard: ‘anything in this vein is quite inadequate, and yet there is perhaps a cairn of gratitude embedded in the words.’

  Seumas and AMD with the Claymore at the National Library of Scotland, 1994

  He need not have worried. He had said it all, some years earlier, in a poem written for Seumas’s 80th birthday:

  We had nae rainbows on oor way

  Wi’ promises tae tell —

  Frae tide tae tide, and bay tae bay,

  The anely promises that stay

  Are those we made oorsel.

  And some we lost, and some we wan,

  And some seem like tae bide.

  Be blithe tae mind the race we ran,

  We mauna end whit we began,

  And baith at eventide.

  York Place tae Ardnamurchan lichts,

  And on the Minch alane;

  In hungry rooms and tented nichts —

  Ye’d aye a spirit for the fechts

  That we had made oor ain.

  We’ve laps ahead ere Charon’s bark,

  Nae dowie thochts daur fret.

  Scotia has sons still eident, stark —

  Belike we’ll view the feenished wark

  Frae yont the Gowden Yett.

  For a’ the beacon words ye said

  Howe’er the nicht was sair —

  For courses held and causes led —

  Frae ane wha jyned ye hert and head

  Gu taing dhuit, evermair.

  dowie: gloomy, eident: busy, yett: gate. The Gaelic phrase in the last line says thank you.

  NINIAN DUNNETT

  CHAPTER 1

  FAILURE

  Only who stand and wait

  The conquered are.

  There is more than one gate

  And none ajar.

  The road is still straight

  But it goes far.

  The Claymore ceased publication in the second week of July, at the urgent request of our printer. He was by far our largest and most patient creditor, and in the end it took us six years to pay him off. Putting the last number to press, we went to bed in our bare, single-roomed office in York Place, Edinburgh, and slept almost uninterruptedly for two days. During this time there came through the letter-box four progressively swelling cascades of dunning letters, appeals from bereft readers, and the August sales orders which we could not now fulfil. The postman, who for many weeks had been no messenger of joy, would have been scantily interested to learn that behind the door which he assaulted twice daily with foreboding handfuls of mail, there lay asleep and exhausted two stickit press lords.

  Seumas Adam* and I had founded the Claymore because there had to be a Claymore and no one else had thought of starting it. It was a tuppenny weekly adventure paper for Scottish boys, and none of the robust excitements it gave its readers ever matched the weekly adventure of its continued being. There was nothing of frivolity, however, in its creation. Seumas and I were only two of many, then and since, who have hoped to play some part in the re-forming of a scattered Scottishness. It was clear that, being very young and without influence, our best chance of influencing anything at all lay in a long-term directing of our effort at the boys who would be men in ten years.

  We had always found it easy to stimulate in Scottish boys an interest in Scotland. This was rarely even an incidental aim of schools or youth organisations, and we had the field to ourselves. Our ‘prentice hand had already laboured in this urgent domestic cause, with gratifying results. Working within the Boy Scout movement in the West of Scotland, we had wiped out from its self-conscious mythology most of the Red Indian cult, substituting for it authentic and healthy elements from the outdoor traditions of the country where the youngsters had their roots. Boys became clansmen, because that was in fact what they were. They saved up to buy a kilt of their clan tartan. They found out what was happening to their clan territories to-day. They went camping on clan ground and grew to a warm kinship with the land and the folk on it. Not one of them was the worse for it, nor longed to be a cowboy or a Blackfoot. We saw them grow up strongly, and their minds with them, and knew it was time to put this operation into practice on a large scale.

  17 York Place: AMD at desk, Seumas leaning over.

  No range of Scottish periodicals existed. There was consequently little market for the Scots writer who cared to depart from the stock view
of his country and its people. The only possible sustaining force of any people is the virtue of patriotism, with as many separate gradations of appeal as there are citizens. In Scotland in the 1930s this was a gravely spent force. For adults there existed a narrow choice of opportunities for national fervour – crude enough, but something to be going on with until the country could be shocked out of its second childhood and drawn to a mature focus. There was Para Handy; the Glasgow comedians; international football occasions at Hampden and Murrayfield. Extracts from this list could bring to mind the zest, if not altogether the dignity, of the place to which they belonged; where most of them would live, work, and see out the end of their days.

  But for the children there was not even this short group of enthusiasms, while their literature painted a greatly different scene. The boys’ weekly papers already in existence had a wide range of stimulus. They led their readers adventuring into all parts of the globe – except one. The somewhat repetitive pattern of their tales dealt with young explorers up the Amazon or down the Congo; South Sea planters’ sons; English boy football stars; pet gorillas which played cricket; jabbering and excited foreigners ready to be cowed by clean-cut types; Zulu chiefs who would eagerly exchange herds of cattle for alarm clocks. Only one part of the world did not pulse with these thrills. The weekly wave of adventure never reached the Scottish shore: not even on the home front, which was held to be adequately covered by stories of English public school life. In this grand pattern of events no British schoolboy could hope to be a hero unless he had been a fag and a Fourth Former in his day, with plenty of high-class japes. The ‘bad yins’ of these tales, apart from an occasional genteel cad, were coarse errand lads, usually discovered twisting the arms of small boys, although these villainies were mere by-products of the major crime of working for a living.

  It is generally agreed, although in another context, that the mind holds to impressions regularly received in youth. I believe that the power of early influence over the youthful mind can be greatly exaggerated. However, we came to the conclusion at the time that these literary enticements were likely to overbalance all but the most sturdy, and that Scots boys were bound to grow up with a tendency to regard themselves as potential emigrants or déclassé provincials.

  I find that I am mentioning these trends in the past tense, as if all the evils that poisoned a nation’s hope and future have since been overcome. They have not, but the air is a little clearer. At the time of the Claymore’s founding we were not the only ones with a mission of print. Many propagandists were writing, and even precariously publishing. There was plenty to complain of in Scotland’s situation, although the cause has since become more fashionable. Anger stirred ink into a flow of white-hot inspiration, and some of the pamphleteering of these days was as mordantly brilliant as any patriotic situation has ever called forth. But there was no laughter – no wit. Conceived in such a grim passion, the issue was bound to be humourless. We believed that this technique was wrong for anybody, but it was certainly wrong for us.

  We gave to our readers a picture of Scotland as a Land of Adventure. It was a staggering novelty, but they stood up to it bravely, and in growing numbers. Here was a robust, modern, and above all cheery setting for the whole gamut. The story themes were inexhaustible. If one wanted football stars – where were there any better? In a country which had invented so many sports, the sports theme was a natural fit. Schools? Rookwood and Greyfriars were sissy retreats from the authentic vigour of Tayside, our fictional Alma Mater. And so through the list. It is tempting at this remove to smile at the amateurism which may have been visible. The fact is that the stuff was good. Much of it was later produced in book form by publishers who knew their business. The Claymore was sent, at their request, to various libraries and exhibitions throughout the world and put on show as the selected example of the British tuppenny for youths. This prestige had ruefully little cash value. We could have been doing with the tuppences.

  For a number of reasons (one of them paramount), most of the work was unpaid, written by our two selves, or by a small group of our Glasgow friends who gave all their spare time to the effort. ‘I’d live on brose for a year to put this over,’ said one of them. Two of the most eminent artists in the boys’ periodical market drew illustrations for us anonymously. It was their first opportunity to do intelligent work in the juvenile fiction field.

  Their own firm insisted on a trashy quality of drawing, while we, with standards unrelated to finance, insisted that even their best was hardly good enough for Claymore readers.

  All through the first winter and the spring we held our own. We had settled to a sales level which, in a normal publishing concern, would have been a healthy foundation on which to build circulation. But our publishing activities were far from normal. Seumas and I had given up our jobs to devote our full time to the affair, and full time it truly turned out to be. My job, incidentally, had been the safest in the world – on the staff of the Commercial Bank of Scotland’s head office. Seumas had been East of Scotland advertisement manager of a national newspaper. We had not attempted to borrow money, but had launched away on our own savings. This made a laughably small total which we were later convinced our publisher had probably misheard in our conversations as the figure he might expect from us each week, instead of the total capital resources of the new power in the world of publishing.

  We had also to eat and sleep, if infrequently. To accomplish this within the narrow margin of profit which was to be expected initially, we moved into an inexpensive but undeniably literary lodging in Forrest Road, near the University of Edinburgh, sharing the room, with meals, at a straining limit of a pound apiece per week. This outlay soon proved to be extravagant, and one night we stole away from these comforts to the spot amenities of our office room, where we lived until the end of the chapter, unsuspected by our landlord. We slept on camp beds, cooked on a gas ring such food as it was expedient to come by, and eventually cut down our living costs to an all-in figure of ten shillings a week for the two of us.

  Bread, oatmeal brose and lentil soup were the cheap main items of our food, and although I shall later be describing with gusto the part played by brose in our canoe trip, it tends to be a colourless regular diet for indoor workers. Not that we noticed this much at the time, for the day’s jobs were spiced with variety.

  At least once in most weeks we found it possible to resort to an unseemly small eating-house near Canonmills, where soup cost a penny per well-thumbed plate, and an entire lunch was procurable for eightpence.

  From time to time, however, hunger made us bold, and once it sent us plainly begging. We walked into the most expensive café in Princes Street with the sum of one-and-threepence between us. In the pre-Claymore days we had often dined in this gay scene, with its palms, gilt, discreet orchestra, and high-priced food. Our main interest in the place was in its young and efficient manageress, a daughter of Skye with the mien of a princess. We had been accustomed to install ourselves in a corner, send up to the orchestra requests for unusual musical items, and carry on a conversation with the manageress in our pidgin-Gaelic. But these were the former times. Now we arrived cadaverously, went straight to her, and said: ‘Eisd, Sandy!’ (for that was really her name) ‘We’re hungry – and we’ve only got one-and-three.’ Sandy gave orders without a tremor; food came in profusion, and at the end the bill was a shilling, so that on leaving we were able to tip the waitress.

  It soon appeared that these economies were not enough. We were by now working 18 hours out of the 24, what with writing, editing, and the absorbing but exacting incidentals of circulation, and publicity matters, office correspondence, competitions and the despatch of prizes, the delivery of parcels, the avuncular receiving of enthusiastic readers calling in person, and the multitude of other tasks which one has since seen rather less intensively spread about a staff of some hundreds, and experts at that.

  To augment our subsistence income we turned to the writing of articles for more settled
publications, finding the sleeping hours of one or two nights per week the most suitable, because the only, time for these extra outpourings. I wrote a serial novel for a national weekly newspaper, and appeared smirking sleepily in a photograph bravely reproduced by our adult contemporary, whose money was welcome. No juvenile paper has ever experienced anything like the sudden effusion of display advertising which we carried in the Claymore. These were captured by Seumas in a dogged burst of space-selling genius. The advertisers got their money’s worth, for we picked them, and not they us, and by this time we had the most fervent readership of any youth newspaper of our size in the business.

  By the middle of the summer we were going down heavily. An annual phenomenon of which we were unaware – the reluctance of youths to read in the summer – punished our hard-won circulation. We had no resources on which to lean until the winter should bring round again the benison of eager readership. Staving off the crisis, we found time for personal canvassing on the tenement stairs of Edinburgh, trusting that in our door-to-door salesmanship we should not encounter any of the readers we had already met in the role of editor. Many busy mothers, pausing on their doorsteps in forenoon conversation with us, filled up the form which ensured for their sons, with our eager guarantee, elevating yet virile reading matter. We salute these matrons across the years. Our Glasgow allies took a part, on their own territory, in these sale-getting efforts. Two of them, pursued by policemen, carried out a number of middle-of-the-night fly-posting sorties, leaving Claymore bills stuck on prominent unpaid sites. A borrowed motor-bike played a large part in these raids, with the pillion passenger clasping a damp bundle of bills, already pasted, and ready to be clapped glutinously on the target.