Chapter 01 (1908-1926) - (Pages 07 - 17) - ‘Nicky Tams’
The car that met me at Cupar, Fife, was roomy, comfortable, fast.
The driver could not be faulted, having gained his expertise over nearly fifty years. He slotted a cassette into the stereo as we sped on to Auchtermuchty – ‘the home of Jimmy Shand’, as its guidebook proudly proclaims ; sped on to the music of the maestro himself.
Jimmy does not normally drive to his playing, nor listen to his tapes and records very much at any time. This occasion was for my benefit – and in fact it turned out to be the only time in all the interviews it occurred to him that I might like to hear him play.
On beyond the village of Auchtermuchty to a fine house set imposingly on a hill…….a swimming pool ; shed with a speedboat ; Mrs Shand’s car at the door ; a breathtaking view.
We sat down in a spacious lounge.
“Well Jimmy, you were already a pretty good melodeon player by the time you left school”.
“No’ bad ; and of coorse I kept at it – efter my shift doon the mine……….a tune or twa every day……..”
East Wemyss, where Jimmy was born on 28th January, 1908 in the Old Store Buildings, was one of a string of mining towns. The Shands originally came from Lochgelly. Jimmy’s father, Erskine, worked on various farms and played a single-keyed melodeon in the bothies before becoming a pit-head contractor – that is, he was in charge of all surface workers such as the operators of the cages and the tumblers that tipped the coal out of hutches (little wagons) onto tables ; and in charge of the women who picked out the stones.
Jimmy was the sixth of nine children, the others being George (Dod) the eldest, Dave, Erskine, Jock, Henry, Mary (died at two), Kate and Nancy. The house was a tenement flat, with outside toilet, consisting of combined kitchen and living room, with sink and cold tap adjoining the coal-bunker at the window ; two ben-the-rooms, one large enough to contain two beds. There were beds in all the rooms, the youngest often sharing the parental bed in the kitchen ; two and three to a bed was usual.
Most mining families owned at least one ‘box’, as they called the melodeon.
Jimmy cannot recall, as later his aunts were to, playing much before the age of eight. Certainly by then “a shot o’ dad’s box” had become as regular a thing with him as with big brother Dod, whose skilled manipulation of the keys and spoon bass and air-valve he was determined to equal.
And like all his pals he was seldom without a ‘tanner moothie’ – a sixpenny Hohner mouth-organ bought with saved coppers from Miss Patrick’s paper shop at the Back Dykes.
Mouth-organ technique with its ‘sook an’ blaw’ translated readily into the melodeon’s press and draw. As well as father and elder brother there were plenty of players to listen to and learn from.
Bill Millar, Aund McAndrew and many other miners would relax over a tune on the box outside Tammy Hutcheson’s pub, by which everyone knew the Forthbank Inn at the “fit o’ the Brewery Brae”. Here, barefoot from Easter until September, Jimmy and school pal Charlie Baillie would listen on a fine night ; or maybe they themselves would air their ‘prentice renderings ofBonnie Lass o’ Bon Accord, Dark Lochnagar, Muckin’ o’ Geordie’s Byre, The 25th Farewell to Meerut, “doon at the dyke” on the shore, or in the park.
Sometimes he would go to Newton Farm, there to play with another school pal, Tam Gourdie, at an old washing-house beside the cottages – in one of which lived a superb exponent of the ten-key box, Tam Nicolson, a man unstinting in his encouragement of the laddies.
At home, too, there was inspiration to be derived from the phonograph, the family’s most prized possession. With what reverent care young Jimmy would withdraw the black cylinders – “shiny enough tae shed yer hair in” – from their felt lined boxes to release, via Edison’s inspiration, marches such as Punchinello, The Corinthian played by the Besses o’ the Barns and the Black Dykes Mills Band. Father would travel miles to a brass band concert, whatever the weather, hurrying home on Saturdays to slough off working clothes, get washed and changed and off to some exposition of oompah-oompah.
There were infrequent occasions when Jim and elder brother Erskine had the house to themselves. Then it was a great delight to put on their own phonograph recital.
The instrument would be carefully lifted down from the top of the chest of drawers ; order of playing the cylinders would be agreed upon ; the older Erskine would assume the responsibility for keeping the motor fully wound so there would be no detracting running-down wavering to mar the programme. Until one day when they were left alone……………
Alas, on this occasion he too meticulously applied himself to maintaining a taut spring ; a hair-raising discord abruptly stopped the music – and nearly the boys’ hearts. The blued-steel tension of the motive power had snapped into two expanded quiveringly accusing coils. Was iot ever to be repaired?
“Na” Jimmy mournfully recalls ; “that was it buggert for guid”.
The phonograph was superseded by the gramophone ; but the gaudily-horned turntable accepting the new flat discs did not immediately come to the Shand home.
Periodically, a blind man led by his daughter would visit the school with the new sound reproducer, and for a penny pupils could hear a selection of records which included such favourites of the day as K-K-K-Katie and Abie My Boy (What Are You Waiting For Now?)
The folk who lived downstairs acquired a gramophone and Jimmy spent many an hour outside the window of Jock Allan, himself a good player as was his son Jim – not a peeping tom but a listening laddie – taking in the reedy virtuosity of the mining brothers from Hamilton, Peter and Daniel Wyper, the individualistic interpretations of traditional tunes by Palmy Dick ; and Jimmy Brown, Jack Williams, Peter Leatham. “Nae idea then that I would ever make records” – although at 13 he was playing at dances with Johnny Hope during the Miners Strike of 1921. Regal, Zonophone, Winner, HMV, Columbia – these were the red, the green, the pink and the dark blue labels of the thick 78rpms of that time.
Ah, the Death of Nelson, the Miller of Hirn, the High Level Hornpipe!
And of course there was the Scottish, Irish, Welsh and American Medleys of Debroy Somers and the Savoy Orpheans ; and the miner from Blackburn, West Lothian, Willie Hannah’s Elcelsior’s illuminating of the Scots repertoire. “A maister at playin’ waltzes, barn dances and two-steps : I learned a lot o’ new tunes aff Hannah”.
The heir to all this, before he came into his own, left school at 14 in April 1922.
Schooldays he liked, in the tall building across the street from the Empire set imposingly above ‘the Den’ – a burn with grassy banks and a few trees and bushes – although teachers were swift to punish severely. It was not unusual for the raised profanity of a mother to drown lessons in neighbouring classrooms ; one irate matron actually presenting herself with a can of paraffin vowing to incinerate the teacher if he did not cease his unjust persecution of her offspring!
Once, in fact, Jimmy’s dad felt the need to object, when the surreptitious reading of a Dixon Hawke resulted in a belting so savage as to cause the laddie to faint. The weals remained for a week.
A classmate of powerful build, who had often fallen foul of a certain teacher, thought to proclaim his independence when he left school by turning up next day to bellow at his old enemy in the playground “Hah – ye’ll no’ throw yer weight aboot noo!” At which the teacher leapt over the dyke after him!
Jimmy left school wishing he could learn the trade of joinery for which he had shown – and still has – a considerable aptitude, but an apprenticeship to any trade was, particularly in a small town, a hardly-a-hope-in-hell chance in those days. But if career opportunities were not thick upon the ground, at least employment was fairly readily available underground………….
Before young Orpheus enters the underworld, however’ linger a while in the sun and the caller salt air…….
Sand and water at the very door ; rocks among which to seek the parten (a large crab) ; and the boats…..It was the ambition of most miners to own or have access to a boat of some kind. And maybe if the laddie hung about the harbour long enough he might be invited on a trip to fish for haddocks and codlings. “An often as no’ tae be seasick!” Jim recalls. He spent enough time at the waterfront to still remember names like Helen, Bella-Agnes, which were yawls ; Fairy and Remembrance, square-stern boats ;Mermaid, a skiff. Regattas were great days, to be attended all along the coast, Kinghorn to Kirkcaldy, Dysart, West Wemyss to Buckhaven, with such boats competing as Isabella, Jim, Rover, Amateur, Barncraig, Fleetwing.
Some ladies were lucky enough to have a model boat of their own to sail. Jimmy, who didn’t, used to watch for a man who came down regularly with a fine home-made 3-foot yacht which he was allowed to carry on the way back to where the man turned off to his own house. Until one evening, when the model had been performing superbly well, they came to the street corner where they parted………
“She fair sailed braw the nicht, Davie, the best she’s ever done”.
“Aye, lauddie, it’s no’ a bad wee boat, that it’s no’’.
Eyes shining with pride, and longing, Jimmy carefully handed over the yacht – to have it thrust back in his arms as David Wallace turned away with “Na – you keep it, noo, lauddie”. Shamrock IV (after Lipton’s) was his!
There was free swimming in the Dookin’ Dub, a large pool cut out of the rock which the tides filled and changed the water. And there were the boisterous days when the water swamped not only the swimming pool but sought to flood the town, often enough partially succeeding. It was nothing unusual for the family of Jimmy’s cousins (the Kerrs – Auntie Phem was Mrs Shand’s only sister) to awaken of a morning to a foot or more of salt water lapping through their house on the shore.
But to adventurous laddies (like Doug Warrender, Jim Turnbull, Davy Grant, Jimmy Ferguson and Tam and Erskine Kerr) the rage of the leaping waves was a challenge which they exultantly accepted, gambling their fleetness and timing against a breath-catching deluge to get them from the shelter of Miss Fernie’s corner shop across an exposed stretch of the front to the bottom of Brewery Brae.
All laddies wanted to be engine-drivers then, and as fresh in Jimmy’s memory now as the feel of warm sand, rough rock and sliding sea water on bare feet is the joy of “a hurl on the pug”, as the little Wellsgreen Colliery steam engine was called. They were guests of driver Sandy Hastie on trips taking boards of sandwiches and paste biscuits (these last a meal in themselves) from Wemyss Castle Station to the colliery for workers filling off bing.
Didn’t he ever in those days want to go down a pit?
He had got the chance of a trip down in a cage about the age of nine – which prospect had frightened him! Brother John, four years younger, enthusiastically took the opportunity!
Now it was different ; now he was a big boy setting out to earn his living…..
With as much pride as a mother better financially placed would have outfitted her offspring with leather satchel and blazer, cap badge and tie for academy, Mrs Shand accoutred young Jim with blue flannel ‘sark’, boots ticketed completely from toe to heel-tip, and proudest of all, new moleskins complete with the indispensable knee strings…….
These last have achieved more widespread recognition as ‘nicky-tams’ ; and need be no more than a hitching-up bit of string which tied below the knee lifts a space of trouser above to allow for kneeling and bending. Really, nothing could be more sensible, practical.
At 4.30 on a spring morning in 1923 when Jimmy with piece-box and flask of water, (“A jeely piece and sup o’ cauld water doon below – nae steak wi’ trimmin’s since has ever equaled it”), rang iron-shod over the mile-and-a-half from his home to Lochhead Pit the birds were welcoming the daylight with song. He whistled and hummed in time with his spark-striking boots a welcome to the gloom of the underworld the cage presently unceremoniously dumped him into.
Weird, the sensation at first. No doubt about going down – and then about half-way you felt the cage was coming up again!
Of course it wasn’t ; and at the bottom another long walk “doon the dook” before the actual paid-for energy expenditure could begin, coupling-on. This was the linking together of hutches, the little wagons which freighted the coal from the face.
Jimmy wasn’t persuaded to wear the kilt till late in his professional career, which then scorched any rumours that he “shairly disna hae the leg for it”. The thrust needed for moving two and sometimes three hutches developed powerful leg muscles. Wages 3/6d per day.
Old Geordie Drylie, roadman and maintenance man down the pit, passed the word to Jimmy that his son Davie, who worked in Lochhead Mine, wanted a laddie. After three weeks down a pit he left to go down a mine.
There is a difference. You drop down a shaft in a lift called a cage to enter a pit ; the way into a mine is known as surface-dipping ; you walk or ride in down a slope.
At Lochhead they rode in hutches. There were three ‘races’ (a string of 12 hutches, 4 men in each) in operation. Best to be on the first or second race ; men didn’t like their ladies to be late.
Unforgettable, the blast of foul air guffing oot ahint the wooden trap, opened to let the hutches in. There never came a stage of no longer noticing this ; it was the same dank, unpleasant envelopment every morning.
The move from pit to mine meant an extra bob a day. This was at drawing and filling ; that is, shoveling out and loading into the hutches coal gained by the pick of Dave Drylie crouching at the face. The colliers, on this system, were paid by the company on tonnage ; in turn they themselves paid the laddies.
A capable laddie could earn more than the basic 4/6d a day if he could keep up with another collier. Jimmy soon was coping with the output of three men (Watt Pryde, Tam Foster, Willie Logie) earning 7/6d and more per day, when the lock-out came in 1926. This was a blow. He liked the work and the money was good……Och, well, the weather was fine, and everyone was of the opinion that they’d soon be back at work.
(For a year the Government had paid the coal-barons a subsidy. When they withdrew it the miners were asked to accept a cut in wages. They refused, were locked out, and the T.U.C. called for a General Strike. This lasted nine days, 4th to 13th May, but the miners held out till November on their own, finally being forced to return on the owners’ terms).
Besides, he now possessed an International 19 key, 4 Spoon Bass and Air Valve melodeon which would get more daylight ventilating. (Cost about £4 5/-) More time, too, to practice for and enter the Go-As-You-Please competitions popular in all the halls in all the towns and villages across the country and round the coast.
The first prize seldom exceeded ten bob, but they were obviously valuable in getting used to facing an audience.
Did Jimmy make his first public appearance at these Go-As-You-Please competitions?
“I’d been gaein’ in for them since late schooldays, certainly ; yet, before that I’d supported brither Dod at an occasional dance ; and we played at picnics since I was aboot eleven or twelve….
“Oh aye, real professional – we’d get maybe five bob for an efternin’s playin’. They were moistly held in the Firs, a wood favoured by Scouts camping an’ the like. The outings – they werena that far out, actually ; a mile-an-a –half by train fae Wemyss Castle Station tae West Wemyss ; anyway, we would be playin’ fur the lassies fae the Linen Factory an’ their lads moistly. The folk fair enjoyed theirsel’s – races, rounders, hackie-duck, dancing on the grass…..The one drawback was the midges – I used tae suffer for weeks efter ; they got a rare chance at ye when yer hands were busy playin’! But happy days, aye, happy days.
“Shy then? I’ve aye been shy, an’ shy yet. I would look tae one side, or at the grund – anyplace but at a’ they folk lookin’ at me!”
The miners stayed out. Savings were soon gone. More than once Jimmy came upon his mother weeping because she could not “pey her shop” ; settle the grocery bill with the Co-op.
The Co-op desdeves nothing but praise, for its patience, for its belief what when the women-folk had money in their purses again they would start paying off the back-log of credit that mounted, mounted, week after belt-tightening week.
The unemployed themselves organized soup-kitchens, financed mainly by the miner-musicians who became strolling players, Jimmy among them, in groups wandering as far afield as the bigger towns like Dundee to busk for coppers in the gutter. And he played at Strike Dances at Dunbeath Institute with Bob McCartney vamping on piano.
Then brother Erskine got a job, driving a horse and cart. Wages, little over £2 a week, the family’s only income.
Still, folk managed to scrape up some kind of a celebration at weddings – at which Jimmy was glad to be asked to play for a fee of – his supper.
Sometimes he would have Johnny McDill playing alongside him.
They got acquainted one afternoon when “oot for a choon” on Level Links, the beginning of a great friendship.
A gas attack during the ’14-’18 War had left Johnny more than half-blind. Trained as a poultry-keeper in Edinburgh, a grant enabled him to run a wee poultry farm at Woodside, near New Gilston. They were to continue their duets as the dance music in various Rural Institutes, etc., until the ‘thirties. Despite his handicap Johnny was an expert on the workings of the box and taught Jim all he knew about taking the instrument apart, repairing, tuning, re-assembling, for which he has been ever grateful. Inside information no doubt helped establish the celebrated Shand style which, with its minimal movement of the bellows, seems persuasive compared to some other players’ more flamboyant attacks………
In passing it might be noted that in more than forty professional years he has only once suffered a broken reed.
When people had work and money again they could perhaps make ten to twelve shillings for a night’s playing – and it was a night’s playing. Sometimes they would unlatch the instruments around 7 p.m. and be leaving with them at last silenced when the thrushes and blackbirds were tuning up for the day.
Johnny often spoke of the possibilities of an electronic accordion ; maybe if backing had been forthcoming he might well have made something of the idea. As it was their manually produced Petronella, Strip the Willow, Rory O’More, Quadrilles, Lancers, Schottische, Circle Waltz must have been worth hearing.
Before considering the various jobs he had after the strike, Jim’s passion for wheels needs to be mentioned.
At school, mostly a gird was as near personal transport as he could get (you could not get on a gird of course, but it did give a feeling of being mechanized). Gird ; a metal hoop, propelled and guided by a cleek – a metal rod suitably hooked at one end to engage the gird, mainly low down at the rear. You had to trot with a gird ; below a certain speed it wobbled out of control. With practice it could be steered exceedingly accurately, through crowds, up and down braes, round the sharpest corners. You never hit the gird with the cleek – that was a degrading effete pastime a very young bairn might get up to with a wooden hoop and stick.
The metal-to-metal skirling song of cleek on gird, the quivering bounding over cobbles and cracks in the pavement as if the steel had a nervous energy of its own, these were joys to be intensified when pals got together on ambitious expeditions to the next village – or the one after that……And ah, the accompanying rhythmic thus and slap of bar or sandalled feet – indeed the tireless lope of the native scouts of the ladies papers!
Nothing could take the place of a gird, but a bike was better.
There were shots on pals’ bikes, or more likely shots on pals’ fathers’ or brothers’ bikes. And in the annoying way elder brothers have of always getting things you yearn for, Jim’s brother Dod acquired a most desirable mount. No brakeless, mudguardless boneshaker this to be screechingly, hair-raisingly stopped with the application of sole on tyre, but complete even to pump and bell. How inviting the purr of pedals when illicitly spun in the lobby…..the gleam of enamel and plating, the ruby twinkle of the rear reflector. There was an air about the handlebars as of a faithful steed’s ears laid back harkening for the word of a master’s command…..”Come awa’, Jim ; get awa’ tae the butchers now – and hurry, lauddie” from his mother in the kitchen.
He was not allowed to meddlewith the bike, but surely in the case of such an urgent message as this –
“A’ richt. Ma, I’m awa’ ; I’ll hurry”, but he didn’t add “on the bike”.
Paradoxically, the bike enabled him to take a much more roundabout route to the butcher without a charge of loitering, and he was blissfully gliding along home even more circuitously with the parcel of beef when an unseen stone or rut wrenched the handlebars out of his nonchalant one-hand control and he was into a fence with the ‘message’ littered over the stoury road.
A kindly body came out of her cottage to help him collect the bits and pieces which she washed and re-wrapped so no one could tell.
But though he managed to sneak the bike – fortunately undamaged – back into the house, his mother immediately put two and two together :
“What happened? That’s no’ the paper the butcher uses. Did ye fa’? Ye must hae……Ah, ye took the bike now, didn’t ye? Wait till Dod hears o’ this m’laud!” Melodeons could be common property but not bikes!
He did get a machine of his own later. Dad got a bargain – and a bike with back-pedalling brake for half-a-crown was a bargain even in those days. It was the first of many bikes which later served to get him to various casual employments all over the country.
Desirable as a bike was to a laddie, to a sixteen-year old a motor-bike was a must.
Jimmy’s first one came even cheaper than his first push-bike – a free gift from Jock Brand who courted sister Nancy. With pal Tam Gourdie he wheeled it home the four miles from Leven. Of course he remembers the make – a 1921 Diamond with belt-driven 2½ h.p. J.A.P. engine ; registration No SG 301.
This was followed by a spell of push-biking 16 miles each way Wemyss to Carnbee to navy, along with brother Dod, Tam Lyon, Jock and Peter Thomson.
Eventually he was able to buy a second-hand New Imperial, 1922, with 2¾ h.p. J.A.P. engine, registration No SP 7764, for £16 from Alec Allan.
Front brakes in those days were not very effective. Keenly aware of this the police were given to stopping motor-cyclists foe spot-checks.
Jimmy proudly wheeled the machine off to the nearest petrol pump, got on, drove off and was immediately stopped. Within less than an hour of taking possession he was booked for faulty brakes, for which he was later fined!
As with the innards of the melodeon, early on he realised it would be to his advantage to know something of the mechanics of motor-bikes. This was brought home to him when more experienced and apparently more knowledgeable pals blinded him with science over a machine he had just acquired. Highly technical expressions involving de-carbonisation, piston rings, were gravely bandied about between Sandy Laing, Wull Whyte, Eck Horsburgh. Jimmy could hardly wait to get his piston rings changed. A new set was purchased and the experts set to on Sunday morning.
The opportunity was taken to make the occasion the basis of a (somewhat dramatically) instructive lecture on the maintenance of the internal combustion engine.
The old piston rings were removed with a flourish, held up to illustrate their worn condition, then pulled apart to show their fragile nature and tossed aside. Now for the new rings – which, alas, were also broken in the replacing! Jimmy learned all right – “Aye – a lesson I’ve never forgot ; leave well alone!”
Johnny McDill used to travel on the pillion to their gigs, his restricted vision at times mercifully concealing from him hair-raising situations which the pilot always managed to resolve without serious consequences.
One dark night returning home they sped round a bend, then –
“Goad man, Jim, it’s a bloody rough road this”, shouted from the limpet-clinging Johnny.
!Aye, ‘tis that” as he strove to get the machine back onto the road from the bank it was careering along!
On another dark night a drunk blundered in front of them and was knocked down. As Jim bent over him he felt the man’s coat beginning to soak – with blood? Thank heavens, no – the aromatic fumes revealed it to be a broken half-bottle carry-out of rum.
After the strike he took what casual labouring he could get, above ground, although the tasks set him with a shovel at times seemed as if his employers were seeking to sink pit shafts.
But he was done with going down pits and mines.
The driver could not be faulted, having gained his expertise over nearly fifty years. He slotted a cassette into the stereo as we sped on to Auchtermuchty – ‘the home of Jimmy Shand’, as its guidebook proudly proclaims ; sped on to the music of the maestro himself.
Jimmy does not normally drive to his playing, nor listen to his tapes and records very much at any time. This occasion was for my benefit – and in fact it turned out to be the only time in all the interviews it occurred to him that I might like to hear him play.
On beyond the village of Auchtermuchty to a fine house set imposingly on a hill…….a swimming pool ; shed with a speedboat ; Mrs Shand’s car at the door ; a breathtaking view.
We sat down in a spacious lounge.
“Well Jimmy, you were already a pretty good melodeon player by the time you left school”.
“No’ bad ; and of coorse I kept at it – efter my shift doon the mine……….a tune or twa every day……..”
East Wemyss, where Jimmy was born on 28th January, 1908 in the Old Store Buildings, was one of a string of mining towns. The Shands originally came from Lochgelly. Jimmy’s father, Erskine, worked on various farms and played a single-keyed melodeon in the bothies before becoming a pit-head contractor – that is, he was in charge of all surface workers such as the operators of the cages and the tumblers that tipped the coal out of hutches (little wagons) onto tables ; and in charge of the women who picked out the stones.
Jimmy was the sixth of nine children, the others being George (Dod) the eldest, Dave, Erskine, Jock, Henry, Mary (died at two), Kate and Nancy. The house was a tenement flat, with outside toilet, consisting of combined kitchen and living room, with sink and cold tap adjoining the coal-bunker at the window ; two ben-the-rooms, one large enough to contain two beds. There were beds in all the rooms, the youngest often sharing the parental bed in the kitchen ; two and three to a bed was usual.
Most mining families owned at least one ‘box’, as they called the melodeon.
Jimmy cannot recall, as later his aunts were to, playing much before the age of eight. Certainly by then “a shot o’ dad’s box” had become as regular a thing with him as with big brother Dod, whose skilled manipulation of the keys and spoon bass and air-valve he was determined to equal.
And like all his pals he was seldom without a ‘tanner moothie’ – a sixpenny Hohner mouth-organ bought with saved coppers from Miss Patrick’s paper shop at the Back Dykes.
Mouth-organ technique with its ‘sook an’ blaw’ translated readily into the melodeon’s press and draw. As well as father and elder brother there were plenty of players to listen to and learn from.
Bill Millar, Aund McAndrew and many other miners would relax over a tune on the box outside Tammy Hutcheson’s pub, by which everyone knew the Forthbank Inn at the “fit o’ the Brewery Brae”. Here, barefoot from Easter until September, Jimmy and school pal Charlie Baillie would listen on a fine night ; or maybe they themselves would air their ‘prentice renderings ofBonnie Lass o’ Bon Accord, Dark Lochnagar, Muckin’ o’ Geordie’s Byre, The 25th Farewell to Meerut, “doon at the dyke” on the shore, or in the park.
Sometimes he would go to Newton Farm, there to play with another school pal, Tam Gourdie, at an old washing-house beside the cottages – in one of which lived a superb exponent of the ten-key box, Tam Nicolson, a man unstinting in his encouragement of the laddies.
At home, too, there was inspiration to be derived from the phonograph, the family’s most prized possession. With what reverent care young Jimmy would withdraw the black cylinders – “shiny enough tae shed yer hair in” – from their felt lined boxes to release, via Edison’s inspiration, marches such as Punchinello, The Corinthian played by the Besses o’ the Barns and the Black Dykes Mills Band. Father would travel miles to a brass band concert, whatever the weather, hurrying home on Saturdays to slough off working clothes, get washed and changed and off to some exposition of oompah-oompah.
There were infrequent occasions when Jim and elder brother Erskine had the house to themselves. Then it was a great delight to put on their own phonograph recital.
The instrument would be carefully lifted down from the top of the chest of drawers ; order of playing the cylinders would be agreed upon ; the older Erskine would assume the responsibility for keeping the motor fully wound so there would be no detracting running-down wavering to mar the programme. Until one day when they were left alone……………
Alas, on this occasion he too meticulously applied himself to maintaining a taut spring ; a hair-raising discord abruptly stopped the music – and nearly the boys’ hearts. The blued-steel tension of the motive power had snapped into two expanded quiveringly accusing coils. Was iot ever to be repaired?
“Na” Jimmy mournfully recalls ; “that was it buggert for guid”.
The phonograph was superseded by the gramophone ; but the gaudily-horned turntable accepting the new flat discs did not immediately come to the Shand home.
Periodically, a blind man led by his daughter would visit the school with the new sound reproducer, and for a penny pupils could hear a selection of records which included such favourites of the day as K-K-K-Katie and Abie My Boy (What Are You Waiting For Now?)
The folk who lived downstairs acquired a gramophone and Jimmy spent many an hour outside the window of Jock Allan, himself a good player as was his son Jim – not a peeping tom but a listening laddie – taking in the reedy virtuosity of the mining brothers from Hamilton, Peter and Daniel Wyper, the individualistic interpretations of traditional tunes by Palmy Dick ; and Jimmy Brown, Jack Williams, Peter Leatham. “Nae idea then that I would ever make records” – although at 13 he was playing at dances with Johnny Hope during the Miners Strike of 1921. Regal, Zonophone, Winner, HMV, Columbia – these were the red, the green, the pink and the dark blue labels of the thick 78rpms of that time.
Ah, the Death of Nelson, the Miller of Hirn, the High Level Hornpipe!
And of course there was the Scottish, Irish, Welsh and American Medleys of Debroy Somers and the Savoy Orpheans ; and the miner from Blackburn, West Lothian, Willie Hannah’s Elcelsior’s illuminating of the Scots repertoire. “A maister at playin’ waltzes, barn dances and two-steps : I learned a lot o’ new tunes aff Hannah”.
The heir to all this, before he came into his own, left school at 14 in April 1922.
Schooldays he liked, in the tall building across the street from the Empire set imposingly above ‘the Den’ – a burn with grassy banks and a few trees and bushes – although teachers were swift to punish severely. It was not unusual for the raised profanity of a mother to drown lessons in neighbouring classrooms ; one irate matron actually presenting herself with a can of paraffin vowing to incinerate the teacher if he did not cease his unjust persecution of her offspring!
Once, in fact, Jimmy’s dad felt the need to object, when the surreptitious reading of a Dixon Hawke resulted in a belting so savage as to cause the laddie to faint. The weals remained for a week.
A classmate of powerful build, who had often fallen foul of a certain teacher, thought to proclaim his independence when he left school by turning up next day to bellow at his old enemy in the playground “Hah – ye’ll no’ throw yer weight aboot noo!” At which the teacher leapt over the dyke after him!
Jimmy left school wishing he could learn the trade of joinery for which he had shown – and still has – a considerable aptitude, but an apprenticeship to any trade was, particularly in a small town, a hardly-a-hope-in-hell chance in those days. But if career opportunities were not thick upon the ground, at least employment was fairly readily available underground………….
Before young Orpheus enters the underworld, however’ linger a while in the sun and the caller salt air…….
Sand and water at the very door ; rocks among which to seek the parten (a large crab) ; and the boats…..It was the ambition of most miners to own or have access to a boat of some kind. And maybe if the laddie hung about the harbour long enough he might be invited on a trip to fish for haddocks and codlings. “An often as no’ tae be seasick!” Jim recalls. He spent enough time at the waterfront to still remember names like Helen, Bella-Agnes, which were yawls ; Fairy and Remembrance, square-stern boats ;Mermaid, a skiff. Regattas were great days, to be attended all along the coast, Kinghorn to Kirkcaldy, Dysart, West Wemyss to Buckhaven, with such boats competing as Isabella, Jim, Rover, Amateur, Barncraig, Fleetwing.
Some ladies were lucky enough to have a model boat of their own to sail. Jimmy, who didn’t, used to watch for a man who came down regularly with a fine home-made 3-foot yacht which he was allowed to carry on the way back to where the man turned off to his own house. Until one evening, when the model had been performing superbly well, they came to the street corner where they parted………
“She fair sailed braw the nicht, Davie, the best she’s ever done”.
“Aye, lauddie, it’s no’ a bad wee boat, that it’s no’’.
Eyes shining with pride, and longing, Jimmy carefully handed over the yacht – to have it thrust back in his arms as David Wallace turned away with “Na – you keep it, noo, lauddie”. Shamrock IV (after Lipton’s) was his!
There was free swimming in the Dookin’ Dub, a large pool cut out of the rock which the tides filled and changed the water. And there were the boisterous days when the water swamped not only the swimming pool but sought to flood the town, often enough partially succeeding. It was nothing unusual for the family of Jimmy’s cousins (the Kerrs – Auntie Phem was Mrs Shand’s only sister) to awaken of a morning to a foot or more of salt water lapping through their house on the shore.
But to adventurous laddies (like Doug Warrender, Jim Turnbull, Davy Grant, Jimmy Ferguson and Tam and Erskine Kerr) the rage of the leaping waves was a challenge which they exultantly accepted, gambling their fleetness and timing against a breath-catching deluge to get them from the shelter of Miss Fernie’s corner shop across an exposed stretch of the front to the bottom of Brewery Brae.
All laddies wanted to be engine-drivers then, and as fresh in Jimmy’s memory now as the feel of warm sand, rough rock and sliding sea water on bare feet is the joy of “a hurl on the pug”, as the little Wellsgreen Colliery steam engine was called. They were guests of driver Sandy Hastie on trips taking boards of sandwiches and paste biscuits (these last a meal in themselves) from Wemyss Castle Station to the colliery for workers filling off bing.
Didn’t he ever in those days want to go down a pit?
He had got the chance of a trip down in a cage about the age of nine – which prospect had frightened him! Brother John, four years younger, enthusiastically took the opportunity!
Now it was different ; now he was a big boy setting out to earn his living…..
With as much pride as a mother better financially placed would have outfitted her offspring with leather satchel and blazer, cap badge and tie for academy, Mrs Shand accoutred young Jim with blue flannel ‘sark’, boots ticketed completely from toe to heel-tip, and proudest of all, new moleskins complete with the indispensable knee strings…….
These last have achieved more widespread recognition as ‘nicky-tams’ ; and need be no more than a hitching-up bit of string which tied below the knee lifts a space of trouser above to allow for kneeling and bending. Really, nothing could be more sensible, practical.
At 4.30 on a spring morning in 1923 when Jimmy with piece-box and flask of water, (“A jeely piece and sup o’ cauld water doon below – nae steak wi’ trimmin’s since has ever equaled it”), rang iron-shod over the mile-and-a-half from his home to Lochhead Pit the birds were welcoming the daylight with song. He whistled and hummed in time with his spark-striking boots a welcome to the gloom of the underworld the cage presently unceremoniously dumped him into.
Weird, the sensation at first. No doubt about going down – and then about half-way you felt the cage was coming up again!
Of course it wasn’t ; and at the bottom another long walk “doon the dook” before the actual paid-for energy expenditure could begin, coupling-on. This was the linking together of hutches, the little wagons which freighted the coal from the face.
Jimmy wasn’t persuaded to wear the kilt till late in his professional career, which then scorched any rumours that he “shairly disna hae the leg for it”. The thrust needed for moving two and sometimes three hutches developed powerful leg muscles. Wages 3/6d per day.
Old Geordie Drylie, roadman and maintenance man down the pit, passed the word to Jimmy that his son Davie, who worked in Lochhead Mine, wanted a laddie. After three weeks down a pit he left to go down a mine.
There is a difference. You drop down a shaft in a lift called a cage to enter a pit ; the way into a mine is known as surface-dipping ; you walk or ride in down a slope.
At Lochhead they rode in hutches. There were three ‘races’ (a string of 12 hutches, 4 men in each) in operation. Best to be on the first or second race ; men didn’t like their ladies to be late.
Unforgettable, the blast of foul air guffing oot ahint the wooden trap, opened to let the hutches in. There never came a stage of no longer noticing this ; it was the same dank, unpleasant envelopment every morning.
The move from pit to mine meant an extra bob a day. This was at drawing and filling ; that is, shoveling out and loading into the hutches coal gained by the pick of Dave Drylie crouching at the face. The colliers, on this system, were paid by the company on tonnage ; in turn they themselves paid the laddies.
A capable laddie could earn more than the basic 4/6d a day if he could keep up with another collier. Jimmy soon was coping with the output of three men (Watt Pryde, Tam Foster, Willie Logie) earning 7/6d and more per day, when the lock-out came in 1926. This was a blow. He liked the work and the money was good……Och, well, the weather was fine, and everyone was of the opinion that they’d soon be back at work.
(For a year the Government had paid the coal-barons a subsidy. When they withdrew it the miners were asked to accept a cut in wages. They refused, were locked out, and the T.U.C. called for a General Strike. This lasted nine days, 4th to 13th May, but the miners held out till November on their own, finally being forced to return on the owners’ terms).
Besides, he now possessed an International 19 key, 4 Spoon Bass and Air Valve melodeon which would get more daylight ventilating. (Cost about £4 5/-) More time, too, to practice for and enter the Go-As-You-Please competitions popular in all the halls in all the towns and villages across the country and round the coast.
The first prize seldom exceeded ten bob, but they were obviously valuable in getting used to facing an audience.
Did Jimmy make his first public appearance at these Go-As-You-Please competitions?
“I’d been gaein’ in for them since late schooldays, certainly ; yet, before that I’d supported brither Dod at an occasional dance ; and we played at picnics since I was aboot eleven or twelve….
“Oh aye, real professional – we’d get maybe five bob for an efternin’s playin’. They were moistly held in the Firs, a wood favoured by Scouts camping an’ the like. The outings – they werena that far out, actually ; a mile-an-a –half by train fae Wemyss Castle Station tae West Wemyss ; anyway, we would be playin’ fur the lassies fae the Linen Factory an’ their lads moistly. The folk fair enjoyed theirsel’s – races, rounders, hackie-duck, dancing on the grass…..The one drawback was the midges – I used tae suffer for weeks efter ; they got a rare chance at ye when yer hands were busy playin’! But happy days, aye, happy days.
“Shy then? I’ve aye been shy, an’ shy yet. I would look tae one side, or at the grund – anyplace but at a’ they folk lookin’ at me!”
The miners stayed out. Savings were soon gone. More than once Jimmy came upon his mother weeping because she could not “pey her shop” ; settle the grocery bill with the Co-op.
The Co-op desdeves nothing but praise, for its patience, for its belief what when the women-folk had money in their purses again they would start paying off the back-log of credit that mounted, mounted, week after belt-tightening week.
The unemployed themselves organized soup-kitchens, financed mainly by the miner-musicians who became strolling players, Jimmy among them, in groups wandering as far afield as the bigger towns like Dundee to busk for coppers in the gutter. And he played at Strike Dances at Dunbeath Institute with Bob McCartney vamping on piano.
Then brother Erskine got a job, driving a horse and cart. Wages, little over £2 a week, the family’s only income.
Still, folk managed to scrape up some kind of a celebration at weddings – at which Jimmy was glad to be asked to play for a fee of – his supper.
Sometimes he would have Johnny McDill playing alongside him.
They got acquainted one afternoon when “oot for a choon” on Level Links, the beginning of a great friendship.
A gas attack during the ’14-’18 War had left Johnny more than half-blind. Trained as a poultry-keeper in Edinburgh, a grant enabled him to run a wee poultry farm at Woodside, near New Gilston. They were to continue their duets as the dance music in various Rural Institutes, etc., until the ‘thirties. Despite his handicap Johnny was an expert on the workings of the box and taught Jim all he knew about taking the instrument apart, repairing, tuning, re-assembling, for which he has been ever grateful. Inside information no doubt helped establish the celebrated Shand style which, with its minimal movement of the bellows, seems persuasive compared to some other players’ more flamboyant attacks………
In passing it might be noted that in more than forty professional years he has only once suffered a broken reed.
When people had work and money again they could perhaps make ten to twelve shillings for a night’s playing – and it was a night’s playing. Sometimes they would unlatch the instruments around 7 p.m. and be leaving with them at last silenced when the thrushes and blackbirds were tuning up for the day.
Johnny often spoke of the possibilities of an electronic accordion ; maybe if backing had been forthcoming he might well have made something of the idea. As it was their manually produced Petronella, Strip the Willow, Rory O’More, Quadrilles, Lancers, Schottische, Circle Waltz must have been worth hearing.
Before considering the various jobs he had after the strike, Jim’s passion for wheels needs to be mentioned.
At school, mostly a gird was as near personal transport as he could get (you could not get on a gird of course, but it did give a feeling of being mechanized). Gird ; a metal hoop, propelled and guided by a cleek – a metal rod suitably hooked at one end to engage the gird, mainly low down at the rear. You had to trot with a gird ; below a certain speed it wobbled out of control. With practice it could be steered exceedingly accurately, through crowds, up and down braes, round the sharpest corners. You never hit the gird with the cleek – that was a degrading effete pastime a very young bairn might get up to with a wooden hoop and stick.
The metal-to-metal skirling song of cleek on gird, the quivering bounding over cobbles and cracks in the pavement as if the steel had a nervous energy of its own, these were joys to be intensified when pals got together on ambitious expeditions to the next village – or the one after that……And ah, the accompanying rhythmic thus and slap of bar or sandalled feet – indeed the tireless lope of the native scouts of the ladies papers!
Nothing could take the place of a gird, but a bike was better.
There were shots on pals’ bikes, or more likely shots on pals’ fathers’ or brothers’ bikes. And in the annoying way elder brothers have of always getting things you yearn for, Jim’s brother Dod acquired a most desirable mount. No brakeless, mudguardless boneshaker this to be screechingly, hair-raisingly stopped with the application of sole on tyre, but complete even to pump and bell. How inviting the purr of pedals when illicitly spun in the lobby…..the gleam of enamel and plating, the ruby twinkle of the rear reflector. There was an air about the handlebars as of a faithful steed’s ears laid back harkening for the word of a master’s command…..”Come awa’, Jim ; get awa’ tae the butchers now – and hurry, lauddie” from his mother in the kitchen.
He was not allowed to meddlewith the bike, but surely in the case of such an urgent message as this –
“A’ richt. Ma, I’m awa’ ; I’ll hurry”, but he didn’t add “on the bike”.
Paradoxically, the bike enabled him to take a much more roundabout route to the butcher without a charge of loitering, and he was blissfully gliding along home even more circuitously with the parcel of beef when an unseen stone or rut wrenched the handlebars out of his nonchalant one-hand control and he was into a fence with the ‘message’ littered over the stoury road.
A kindly body came out of her cottage to help him collect the bits and pieces which she washed and re-wrapped so no one could tell.
But though he managed to sneak the bike – fortunately undamaged – back into the house, his mother immediately put two and two together :
“What happened? That’s no’ the paper the butcher uses. Did ye fa’? Ye must hae……Ah, ye took the bike now, didn’t ye? Wait till Dod hears o’ this m’laud!” Melodeons could be common property but not bikes!
He did get a machine of his own later. Dad got a bargain – and a bike with back-pedalling brake for half-a-crown was a bargain even in those days. It was the first of many bikes which later served to get him to various casual employments all over the country.
Desirable as a bike was to a laddie, to a sixteen-year old a motor-bike was a must.
Jimmy’s first one came even cheaper than his first push-bike – a free gift from Jock Brand who courted sister Nancy. With pal Tam Gourdie he wheeled it home the four miles from Leven. Of course he remembers the make – a 1921 Diamond with belt-driven 2½ h.p. J.A.P. engine ; registration No SG 301.
This was followed by a spell of push-biking 16 miles each way Wemyss to Carnbee to navy, along with brother Dod, Tam Lyon, Jock and Peter Thomson.
Eventually he was able to buy a second-hand New Imperial, 1922, with 2¾ h.p. J.A.P. engine, registration No SP 7764, for £16 from Alec Allan.
Front brakes in those days were not very effective. Keenly aware of this the police were given to stopping motor-cyclists foe spot-checks.
Jimmy proudly wheeled the machine off to the nearest petrol pump, got on, drove off and was immediately stopped. Within less than an hour of taking possession he was booked for faulty brakes, for which he was later fined!
As with the innards of the melodeon, early on he realised it would be to his advantage to know something of the mechanics of motor-bikes. This was brought home to him when more experienced and apparently more knowledgeable pals blinded him with science over a machine he had just acquired. Highly technical expressions involving de-carbonisation, piston rings, were gravely bandied about between Sandy Laing, Wull Whyte, Eck Horsburgh. Jimmy could hardly wait to get his piston rings changed. A new set was purchased and the experts set to on Sunday morning.
The opportunity was taken to make the occasion the basis of a (somewhat dramatically) instructive lecture on the maintenance of the internal combustion engine.
The old piston rings were removed with a flourish, held up to illustrate their worn condition, then pulled apart to show their fragile nature and tossed aside. Now for the new rings – which, alas, were also broken in the replacing! Jimmy learned all right – “Aye – a lesson I’ve never forgot ; leave well alone!”
Johnny McDill used to travel on the pillion to their gigs, his restricted vision at times mercifully concealing from him hair-raising situations which the pilot always managed to resolve without serious consequences.
One dark night returning home they sped round a bend, then –
“Goad man, Jim, it’s a bloody rough road this”, shouted from the limpet-clinging Johnny.
!Aye, ‘tis that” as he strove to get the machine back onto the road from the bank it was careering along!
On another dark night a drunk blundered in front of them and was knocked down. As Jim bent over him he felt the man’s coat beginning to soak – with blood? Thank heavens, no – the aromatic fumes revealed it to be a broken half-bottle carry-out of rum.
After the strike he took what casual labouring he could get, above ground, although the tasks set him with a shovel at times seemed as if his employers were seeking to sink pit shafts.
But he was done with going down pits and mines.