Faces in the Firelight: The Big Soul of the Place
A reflection on the history of the Biggar Bonfire, written by Brian Lambie, Founder of Biggar Museum, in 1999.
What thoughts does the bonfire conjure up? Warmth – excitement – reminiscences – Biggar.
My first recollection, sitting on somebody’s shoulders, is not of the fire in front of the Corn Exchange, but of its rival across on the Burn Braes, for then the West Row was a separate community, normally out of bounds for youngsters like me from across the burn. The date? Probably 1934.
The boys from the West Row fought keenly with the Biggar ones for combustibles, but Biggar had the advantage always of a ton of coal, which kept the fire going for about a week. Willie Pairman, the highly respectable agent of the National Bank who lived till his 90s, sported a broken nose, a legacy from the Biggar/West Row bonfire fights of his youth.
When Rowhead Terrace was built, the ‘authorities’ decreed that the Westrow fire be put down in the hollow, away from the fine new houses. So it was, until the day before when their sworn enemies, the boys from Biggar, turned out in strength to lay a few doors across the burn and help them drag the bonfire uphill to the old site.
The Westrow fire didn’t survive the Second World War. By 1946, the majority of families had been rehoused in Northcrofts or Knocklea and the Cross Knowe fire became the only one. Throughout the war, Aggie Brown, who ran the Central Tearooms with her sister Liz, and who stayed at 132 High Street, had gone out onto the cobbles at midnight and struck a match to see the New Year in. Don’t believe any other story.
After the First World War, two captured German guns were installed outside the Municipal Hall, and every year the Town Council was at the expense of dragging them out of the burn at the Cadger’s Brig, where the Hogmanay revellers had dumped them. Eventually they were put down to guard the entrance to the public park, and went for scrap during the second conflict. Garden gates were other easy game, usually switched around from one house to another at the opposite end of the town or deposited down the Gillespie stokehole or some other inconvenient site. Fireworks were lit in profusion.
The VE and VJ victory celebration bonfires were held in the Burn Braes. One was lit by Molotov cocktails, and I remember going down with a crowd after the celebration dance to see the embers glowing with the phosphorous which had been in the bombs. Our shoes shone all the way home and somebody had a fluorescent hand.
The first bonfire on the High Street after the war was huge! Years of ancient contents of attics were deposited on it – carpets, lino, wallpaper which had survived the salvage drives, grannies’ photo albums (sadly) and loads of tar and paraffin, which was rationed but, well, this was Biggar. A few days afterwards, my family had a visit from a long-lost uncle who had gathered whins himself as a boy in the 1900s. He asked what I had done and, as the answer was ‘Nothing’, I got a good lecture about my responsibilities as a native of the town.
Thereafter, I never missed going out collecting at night and cycling around the countryside at the weekends, looking for signs of a hedge or trees being cut down, which I’d ask the workers to lay aside. When Cornhill woods were cleared in 1947 we got all the rough stuff from there; Edmonston followed the next year, I think. We loaded roots and branches on whosever lorry we could borrow, usually a builder’s as these had high capes. Once loaded, we scrambled onto the top for the journey home. Occasionally somebody fell down through the greenery and had to be dug out from the bottom of the heap.
The leading lights in my day were Bob Boa and Bobby Moore. They kept things going when it would have been easy to say ‘It’s had its day’, and Biggar would have been the poorer for it.
The early history of fire festivals is safely obscured in ‘the mists of antiquity’. Time was when most villages had their own, up and down the country. The bonfires mark the winter solstice, when the sun is at its lowest, and possibly the fire was an attempt to warm up the sun and encourage it to return. When this actually seemed to work, bonfires became an annual ritual, bound up in the cycle of death and life, and in time, grafted onto the Christian story of death and resurrection. This has become the theme of the old guiser plays (seguisers in Biggar) where good triumphs over evil and the dead are restored to life by Dr Brown, ‘the finest doctor in the town’. Biggar’s own hero is Sir William Wallace, taking over from St George or the Great King of Macedonia of other plays.
Nowadays there are only a few fire festivals, and Biggar Bonfire is probably the one which has kept truest to its origins: likewise the Seguisers. I remember laddies like Wilson Arroll, Archie Barbour and Sandy Robertson performing by the light of the kitchen fire at Craigknowe, my home in the 1930s, jackets and bunnets reversed. They gathered money for coals for the fire and everybody let them perform. Some years, I believe they trailed out to farms and faraway places like Skirling. After the war, we wouldn’t have dared burn a ton of coal on the street, even if we could have found it. The custom all but died out, although the funniest performance l ever saw was in my house when Bobby Moore came to first-foot. He acted all the parts himself, fighting, dying, returning to life and dancing in a ring of one. From him and others I wrote down the text, comparing it with others which had survived in the district in places like Quothquan. I transposed some of the ‘action’ for better effect and persuaded a few like-minded souls to perform on the back of a lorry at the bonfire. One year we had Jimmy McMahon (senior) in the company and his version went back to the 1880s. Later we performed on the wall-head in front of the Corn Exchange, but there was always a difficulty in getting the crowd to shut up for long enough. A few changes happened quite naturally, as in all good traditions, as when the tune of the hit song ‘My Ding-a-ling’ fell into place instead of the Victorian polka tune used before. Last year’s children substituted rap. Plus ça change.
The play has been filmed on several occasions and written up by the historians of such matters, who try to interpret such wonderful incantations as ‘The reel, the rout, the skitter, the scout, the ringworm round the scurvy’. I also had a go at reviving the old custom of roasting herring at the fire. Jean Paul of the fish shop got me a wee firkin of salt herring, sometimes two, though I only ever had to pay for the one. These certainly could give you a thirst. You were supposed to take one out to first-foot with.
Eventually I had better success with the Seguisers when I approached the Primary School and trained up Primary 7, taking a team round the town in my van. Some years I had help with training up the children from Nan Urquhart and Ann Matheson, and Ann took a highly successful team to the Wallace 700th anniversary conference at Stirling in 1997 when they bowled the audience over. Just as the 1970s saw the first woman lighting the bonfire, so, in the 1980s, we had the first girl play Sir William Wallace, David and Jean Aiken’s daughter Lorraine, who certainly whacked the laddies into submission. So traditions evolve.
In the old days, the fire was generally lit by the same individuals. Robert Affleck lit it for years in the 1890s and 1900s and always threw in his bunnet after it. He was called ‘the Claddy’, but the only interpretation of the name I have seen is in Willie Pairman’s Ballads o’ Biggar (1928) where a verse says that he always sang ‘The Braes o’ Claddy’ after lighting the fire.
Folk in the 1920s seem to have been more Victorian than the Victorians themselves, and occasionally when Hogmanay was on a Sunday the fire was lit on the Saturday night instead. With a ton of coal, it was not difficult to keep it going, so the revellers had the fun of having two nights’ celebrations. From the 1920s, a local worthy has been chosen to light the fire, and those who wore bunnets generally threw them in the fire.
About 1949, I made three or four torches and we had the rudiments of a parade up from the Clydesdale Hotel archway. More followed in later years; we started at the Cadger’s Brig, and by the time I gave up there was a forest of torches and a whole pipe band, instead of a lone piper. Now, thanks to the Cornets, the procession up the High Street is a memorable sight. Another memorable sight was the crowd of young soldiers sent to Biggar with Green Goddess fire engines when there was a general Fire Service strike. The locals plied them with so much celebratory drink that they had their most wonderful Hogmanay ever.
Apart from the two victory celebration fires there have been others. Coronations and Jubilees were celebrated with fires on Bizzyberry, but in 1951 we had one on the street for the Quincentenary, and again in 1976 for ‘Biggar 525’. But the best ‘extra’ fire was surely the one arranged for television in August 1982. The programme was about New Year customs and was partly filmed in Gladstone Court Museum. In the Edinburgh Road, Dot Aitken decorated her front room for Christmas, stuck up some cards and decorated a tree.
It was strange to have a bonfire appear in the town in August. An old Biggaronian was being driven home after spending a week in the Kello. ‘Michty me,’ she said, ‘have I been in the hospital that long?!’
You never know who you’ll meet round the fire. There’s always somebody that you haven’t seen in years, home for Hogmanay, and plenty of folk who you meet on the street all year through. Newcomers to the town join the tradition for their first time, and memories of past parties and people long gone swirl in the smoke.
Every year I see them and their cronies at the bonfire, there in the background, faces in the firelight. Bobby Moore and Bob Boa, Andrew Elliot, Will Todd, Jock Eliot, Jimmy Horne, Johnnie Coupland, Provost John George Brown, John D. Brown, draper, and his sisters Aggie and Liz and all their relatives, singing ‘A Guid New Year Tae Yin An A’ and ‘Auld Lang Syne’ after midnight. Davie Hope, the two Gib Elliots, Valda Grieve, always in from Brownsbank, sometimes accompanied by the Poet, and all the people who make up the big soul of the place. All there, reflections in the firelight, behind the folk from the big houses in their evening clothes and all the welcome strangers and visitors who come to see the locals enjoying themselves. And there are the shades of further back generations in the shadows beyond them. Look. Maybe our own will be there someday, caught up in the folk memory of the next millennium.
See you there!
Brian Lambie (1930-2014)
‘Brian Lambie shaking hands with James Graham, Hogmanay, 1953.’ Photo courtesy of Biggar Museum.
