Chapter 06 (1945 – 1945) - (Pages 56 - 65) - Fiddler’s Joy
By the early years of the war Shand was a name which came fairly readily into the minds of the general public when accordion playing was considered.
But if his playing was not yet universally acclaimed, it was already legendary to those and such as those…..To other box-players of course ; to fiddlers, piano players and other instrumentalists with a passion for Scots traditional airs, and to the connoisseurs among the then somewhat modest national folk-music public.
As well as in the mining communities, in the bothies and farm kitchens his name was a byword. The Beltona records were handled reverently, played to rapt attention, loaned reluctantly. And before his broadcasts precautions were taken to see that wireless sets would not fail through exhaustion of dry battery or discharge of wet accumulator. Unfortunates whose sets were out of commission or who did not possess one made arrangements with friends for ‘a listen’, and as the critical hour approached there would be a great hurrying over fields, bicycling along lanes, lured by the promise of the reedy magic.
Jim Ritchie was playing the fiddle while still a wee laddie on the farms his dad worked on in Glenshee.
Any good?
Well, by the age of ten he had come second in the Strathspeys and Reels for under 16s at Perth Musical Festival. The following year – 1938 – he was first in that class.
He played at his first dance in Glenshee Hall at thirteen - a trio, another fiddler, Will Cameron and Jean Fairweather at the piano.
His pal, Donald Ferrier, whose father Geordie ran the Glenisla Hotel, played the box, and by the age of thirteen the two ladies often entertained the guests and got to be in great demand for concerts raising funds for the Red Cross.
They learned the tunes off Geordie’s collection of Jimmy Shand’s records, earnest students for hours at a stretch, whose tuition came lilting and cascading out of a metal horn like a giant bluebell flower.
“And Lord help us if we didna get the tunes richt – auld Geordie wid gie us hell. His ain particular favourites were Battle o’ the Somme, Crags o’ Lundie, Midlothian Pipe Band, Bonnie Dundee………..I wis daein a full days work on the farm by then – seven in the mornin’ tae half-past five at nicht wi’ the orra beast” (spare horse).
“It wisna lang before I wis gie’n a pair o’ horse, an big day as that was, there wis shortly tae be a bigger…………..
“Ye’re jokin’!” I said when Donald, full o’ excitement, gave me the news ; but it wis right enough – Jimmy Shand had been booked by his dad tae come an’ play at Glenisla School!
“Neither o’s slept for a week beforehand………”.
And when the embarrassed looking Shand finally stepped out almost apologetically before the audience……
“I felt the hair on the back o’ ma neck risin’ an’ bristlin’, an that’s the Goad’s truth!”
It would have been easy for the entranced laddie to believe that as the magic notes drifted from the little building into the heather scented air, the stags were drawn lower down the hillsides to listen along with the silenced whaups and other wildlife of the glen – not forgetting the horses, the ‘orra beast’ and the pair, their pricked ears turned to the concert…..and the roosting hens blinking beady eyes.
Surely the day soon would come when Shand would be touring with a full-time band – and Jimmy Ritchie vowed that sooner or later he would play in that band!
When he first heard them broadcast he was a halflin’ (a teenage farm-worker between sixteen and seventeen) working along with his parents on Wester Bleaton Farm ; and he was ploughing in front of the house ; and Shand came on a 5pm and he was supposed to work until 5.30……….
But, tae hell wi’ it!
“Jimmy” from his mother at the window. as arranged.
The reins were secured ; he vaulted the fence ; and stuck his head in the window to be greeted by a matchless rendering of Auchmountain’s Bonnie Glen. Ah, to be a member of that most select of groups!
Eventually Jimmy Ritchie was to play fiddle in the band, but not for ten years of so, during which time he was with the Hawthorn Band for four years and more than five with Bobby MacLeod – with whom he also made records, and who named a composition after him, the strathspey Jim Ritchie’s Lilt (Jim himself has composed many tunes, six of which have been recorded).
He acknowledges three great masters of Scottish music ; Neil Gow, Scott Skinner and Jimmy Shand “and I learned mair during those four years I wis wi’ Jimmy than I had ever done fae onybody else”.
Although well on the way to becoming a national celebrity, the war years held considerable frustration for the morose melodeon player.
With his love of speed it had been a big blow when he had failed to get into aircrew, and this continued to irk.
Normally abstemious he began to indulge, on occasion. It is not a period he particularly cares to dwell on……..”Jist let’s say that I maybe took a drap mair than usual at times but pulled up afore I went aff the rails.”
The Band’s first broadcast……..
This was to have been another solo spot, but Jim manager to persuade producer Howard M. Lockhart to try his ‘wee combination’.
“You understand, Jimmy, you’re asking me to risk my reputation?”
“I’m staking my reputation an’a’.”
Well, the band went on – and Jimmy and Howard went on.
The war ended in a long series of Welcome Home concerts.
Released from the Fire Service before VE day Jimmy took a job driving a lorry……He thought he had been through it all as far as extreme casualness of employment went in the ‘twenties and ‘thirties ; now, in a time of chronic manpower shortage, the job lasted one week! He actually was in charge of the transport depot of the firm, and part of his duties was to take orders over the phone.
And the phone never stopped ringing……..According to the boss, though, most of the callers were seeking the maestro rather than the motors. Since they were all incoming calls surely there could be no accusation of abuse of the phone for private purposes?
Yet, such an accusation was made, which drew a terse reply which could not easily have been set to music – but which would have drawn a nod of approval from any of Jim’s old mining or navvying buddies.
The succeeding spell with Tay Motor Lorries lasted longer, and was much happier.
Meantime, it seemed that every committee of every football, tennis, rugby, shinty, curling, water-polo, Darby-and-Joan, golf, bowls, cycling, angling club in Scotland was determined to secure Shand’s Band for their Grand Annual ; and don’t leave out the Guilds, the Associations, the Fraternal Societies, the Sons of this, the Daughters of yon.
Surely modesty could not shrug off such snowballing success?
Jimmy did more than shrug it off – he walked away from it! Or rather drove away from it in a 1934 Austin 10 he bought from shore porter Andrew Robertson. With enough petrol coupons to get him to Thurso, he was off.
It has been suggested that the prospects of having to stand up there before larger and larger crowds alarmed him to the extent of frightening him off ; also, he considered that there was no future in Scots Country Dance Music!
“Nae doot aboot still bein’ shy – an’ the bigger the croods the mair embarrassed I would get. As for there no’ bein’ a real future for my kind o’ music ; well, maybe now that the war was o’er, wi’ mair choice o’ entertainment the Scottish Country Dancing boom would just fade awa’.”
“You were off to the Orkneys. Why there?”
“Well, I’d been there afore the war. Played a few concerts arranged by James W. Sinclair, a Kirkwall photographer. Fair fell in love wi’ the place. As a matter o’ fact I ca’ed my hoose in Sutherland Street Malvern efter his.”
“What did the wife say?”
“Oh, we’d talked it ower, of course. The idea was that I’d gae up there and get started selling musical instruments, and maybe a wee bit playing at nichts, then I’d bring up her and the bairns. Oh, I looked forrit tae it ; and Anne was agreeable.”
The sea journey was rough and took almost twice as long as usual. The ground rocked for days afterwards.
Wind, rain, snow for about three months while he worked in Sinclair’s shop by day and roved abroad by night to play at dances and concerts, on occasion embarking in tiny boats against what seemed to him mountainous white horses to get to engagements.
Still, this was the worst part ; this was winter. Wait until the good weather.
About the middle of January he set off on what originally was to have been a visit to Dundee……For days beforehand it snowed, and snowed. The day of the flight out the little plane, seen from the rattling shelter of a Nissan hut, appeared to be on the point of breaking free of the straining ropes to be borne off by the tearing gale.
He was still going back to Dundee if and when the plane could make it, but not on a visit ; to take up residence again. Certainly it was winter, but such winters he could not expose wife and bairns to.
God, it was alarming on that bleak airfield! Yes, they said, the plane was likely to be going all right ; had gone in much worse ; may be a wee bit late, that was all ; och, nothing really to worry about……
There was a young mother with a wee bairn waiting for the plane, and her composure did a great deal to quieten Jimmy’s misgivings. On the frighteningly bumpy flight which ensued the lassie was sick, and he nursed the bairn.
Still, he was damn glad when they touched down at Aberdeen, from which a comfortable hour-and-half in the train would see him home. The girl was going on to London – “a stout-herted bit o’ a lassie.”
Wee Owney the drummer’s face lit up when Dave Ireland, the left-handed fiddler, told him “Jim’s back in Dundee.”
“Hoo’s he been getting’ on? Hoo lang is he stayin’? We’ll hae tae pey him a visit-“
“I would if I were you, Owney, he’s back for good – an’ he’s wonderin’ if ye’ll gae full-time….”
Involved in a business venture, Dave left the band, his place taken by Angus Fitchet.
Angus, one of a family of eleven, like George McKelvey was brought up in a two-roomed house in Dundee.
By the age of five he was spending a lot of time in a hall opposite in King’s Road where local cinema musicians foregathered off duty for orchestral practice.
He helped distribute the music, was encouraged in his fiddle playing.
By the age of ten he was playing at dances, travelling back and forth on the back of Jim Barrie’s push-bike with a couple of fiddles, his father often cycling alongside with his fiddle.
In the ‘twenties, at the age of fourteen, he was playing in cinemas, bowing and fingering to suit the mood of the action of the huge distorted shadow-giants looming above.
Young Angus’ fiddle learned to weep at the heart-breaking set-backs suffered by Mary Pickford, Mary Carr and the Gish sisters ; to leap joyously into the fray with Dougie Fairbanks, Joe Bonomo and Dick Talmadge in their athletic confrontations with their foes ; to nerve-wrackingly underline the frenzied out-of-control gallop of the horses dragging the swaying stage-coach with Pearl White struggling with the villain on the roof, or as the train thundered towards where Gloria Swanson was bound to the rails ; to wail eerily and tremble with delicious dread at the horrifying roles of Lon Chaney and the diabolical machinations of Fu Manchu ; to skip along in gay accompaniment to the lunacies of Keaton, Chaplin and Arbuckle.
He got to know Jimmy Shand fairly early in his career, meeting him at the little musical festivals popular in the ‘twenties and ‘thirties in the villages and small towns of Angus and Perthshire.
“Jimmy could be called a breakthrough in box-playin’. He was a revelation ; naebody before had ever managed to get as much as he somehow could out of a melodeon”.
Occasionally they played together in those early days. One notable occasion was in 1934 in Dundee’s Forresters’ Hall when they appeared on the same bill as Sir Harry Lauder, then Scotland’s greatest star. This was the annual Charity concert for ex-ploughmen. (Lauder had a great friend in the town, Charles Young, a chemist with whom he often stayed, and who probably persuaded him to give his services).
Angus, who took over from Dave Ireland in Jimmy’s first full-time band in 1946, still remembers the first engagement which followed at Kirriemuir. (He stayed with Jimmy until 1949 when he left to launch out on his own, returning in 1960).
A prolific composer, Angus has had many tunes published and recorded, among them Ashludie Rant, Coldside Jig, J.B. Milne Reel, J.B. being a musician pal from youth who finished up with a chain of cinemas.
After the band went full time, Johnny Knight continued to play piano with them for a while, but did not care to give up the printing trade, eventually having to drop out as more and more time off work became necessary.
Johnny had actually wanted to be a fiddler like his granddad and uncles, but was ‘sent to the piano.’ Brother Jim, four years younger, did get to take up the fiddle. While still at school the kilted brothers played at parties, concerts, dances.
Jim Knight the fiddler was actually to play in a Shand Band long before Johnny did! At the age of fifteen his playing at an Evening Class Passout Concert in Stobswell School attracted the attention of a Mrs Shand……….who was no relation of Jimmy, but who invited the laddie to play at her cinema in Shepherd’s Loan.
Johnny started playing with Jimmy in Maitland Street Hall for the East Craigie Scottish Country Dance Club when pianist Peggy Edwards left.
“The first broadcast from Glasgow on New Year’s Day 1945 in Scottish Half Hour…….That’s what made the band ; after that we knew we had a good band. I remember it well. There was an extra three minutes to play, and we gave them Scottish Reform……’The finest playing of Scottish Country Dance Music I’ve heard for a long while’ said the producer ; “You’ll be hearing more from us!” And within a month we were broadcasting from Aberdeen, then Edinburgh……”
Johnny it was who suggested to the producer they have dancers in the studio ; and the suggestion was adopted with great success.
Accordionist George McKelvey had been working in Baxter’s jute mill for thirteen years. It wasn’t a bad job he had, as jobs in jute-mills went in those days.
He worked in the calendar department, at the lapping ; the starched and finished jute cloth being pressed through hot rollers, then lapped – a final folding process. The next stage was the dispatch department.
One night in 1946 when he finished work Jimmy was waiting at the mill-gate for him…..On the Friday he folded the last batch of cloth and went on to dispatch himself.
If he had been privileged to spend most of his evenings with his family during the war, peace was to be very different. Part-time playing was limited – a day’s work made demands, and engagements could not be accepted very far away from home. Full-time meant no limit.
Wife Flo saw little of him, and young Billy and Audrey even less.
Obviously, Jimmy must have had seen a long vista of jobs ahead before asking the band to take the plunge.
Far ahead?
Well, how many folk get a diary, fill in the first few days then forget about it? George wasn’t one of these – he was able to fill the whole book up right away – “Jimmy used to give us the jobs for a year ahead at a time.”
Wives and bairns saw little of their dads, yet, this was not because the band relaxed in hotels before and after the more distant engagements. They would finish down south in the early hours of the morning and immediately pile into Jimmy’s Morris and head back through the night to Dundee – like as not to be off to the north after a few hours sleep. Seven nights a week playing was soon nothing unusual.
Excerpts from George’s diary – South Shields one night, Glasgow the next ; and how much sleep can you get playing Brampton Friday night and Aberdeen Saturday night? Surprisingly, perhaps, the majority of their engagements soon were seen to be in England ; which meant a lot of travel ; example, Inverness one night, the following night the Albert Hall in London.
But in snow storms, lashing rain ; in the middle of the nights of a calm high-riding full moon ; at dawn ; in pitch-dark, at all hours, in all weathers the bandsmen put their latch-keys in the locks and rejoined their families, fresh from new triumphs – wait ; make that exhausted from new conquests. They had eschewed the possibilities of a comfortable night’s rent in a hotel to snatch and hour or two at home ; but it was like playing a part in Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake much of the time ; disturbing nocturnal visitations.
“I had to be father and mother as well,” said George’s wife, Flo. “My kids grew up thinking I was too much of a disciplinarian ; I was definitely against spoiling them.”
Flo was also most frequently the hostess to the band in the early years. They did most of their ‘practising’ as she calls it, in the Corporation tenement flat in which they then lived in Hepburn Street.
This behind-the-scenes ‘practising’ endowed the group with what was to become an eerie rapport. Eventually a stage was reached when if Jimmy made a mistake the whole band made it with him.
The time came when Sandy Tulloch stopped off a professional medical tour he was on to say hello to Jimmy and the band in Glasgow just an hour before they were to broadcast……
“What are you playing?” he asked George.
“Don’t know yet.”
Sandy found this hard to believe. Surely it had all been rehearsed and rehearsed until a satisfactory standard had been reached?
True, separate tunes were constantly practiced ; programmes were not.
Jimmy would casually mention – maybe just before they were due to go on – “We’ll start wi’ this, follow wi’ that – an’ then we’ll see…..”
It worked.
And then they would rope Owney’s drums onto the roof of the car and pile in and head home.
“The Country Dance world was really booming at that time,” says Dr. Tulloch (who renewed his visits to Sutherland Street on demob in 1946 to find “the same living-room crowded with box-players, fiddlers, and would be composers ; the same welcome and generosity.”)
“Good new tunes were in great demand. Later on I thought that the quest for new or ‘rediscovered’ dances got a little out of hand – hard work to commit hundreds of dances to memory. Most of the bands played from memory ; seldom had anyone a sheet of music in front of them.”
The eye specialist box-player used to help Jimmy get his compositions down on paper. One Tune, Sister Elder’s Reel, he wrote out as Jimmy hummed it from a hospital bed ; and, “when he did write down his own music, he had a distinctive style, and I have some treasured scraps of manuscript from those days – waltzes, reels, strathspeys and jigs.”
Back to George McKelvey –
“All this broken sleep ; he must have been bad-tempered much of the time,” I suggested to his wife.
“No, never ; well, never through lack of sleep. I’ve seen him come home at breakfast-time and go to bed for an hour ; and when I wakened him he just got up and got ready and away again without the least grumbling.”
George told me “Wasn’t only Jimmy had the reputation of never smiling in those days, but the whole band. Often we were playing like we were hypnotized, maybe having had only one night’s sleep in three.”
Perhaps it was as well at times their programmes didn’t run to long sequences of dreamy waltzes but were generously laced with rousing marches!
This first full-time year was to set a pattern of the way of life for the rest of the band’s career – except that they were often to play longer, oftener ; travel further and further, sleep even less.
But if his playing was not yet universally acclaimed, it was already legendary to those and such as those…..To other box-players of course ; to fiddlers, piano players and other instrumentalists with a passion for Scots traditional airs, and to the connoisseurs among the then somewhat modest national folk-music public.
As well as in the mining communities, in the bothies and farm kitchens his name was a byword. The Beltona records were handled reverently, played to rapt attention, loaned reluctantly. And before his broadcasts precautions were taken to see that wireless sets would not fail through exhaustion of dry battery or discharge of wet accumulator. Unfortunates whose sets were out of commission or who did not possess one made arrangements with friends for ‘a listen’, and as the critical hour approached there would be a great hurrying over fields, bicycling along lanes, lured by the promise of the reedy magic.
Jim Ritchie was playing the fiddle while still a wee laddie on the farms his dad worked on in Glenshee.
Any good?
Well, by the age of ten he had come second in the Strathspeys and Reels for under 16s at Perth Musical Festival. The following year – 1938 – he was first in that class.
He played at his first dance in Glenshee Hall at thirteen - a trio, another fiddler, Will Cameron and Jean Fairweather at the piano.
His pal, Donald Ferrier, whose father Geordie ran the Glenisla Hotel, played the box, and by the age of thirteen the two ladies often entertained the guests and got to be in great demand for concerts raising funds for the Red Cross.
They learned the tunes off Geordie’s collection of Jimmy Shand’s records, earnest students for hours at a stretch, whose tuition came lilting and cascading out of a metal horn like a giant bluebell flower.
“And Lord help us if we didna get the tunes richt – auld Geordie wid gie us hell. His ain particular favourites were Battle o’ the Somme, Crags o’ Lundie, Midlothian Pipe Band, Bonnie Dundee………..I wis daein a full days work on the farm by then – seven in the mornin’ tae half-past five at nicht wi’ the orra beast” (spare horse).
“It wisna lang before I wis gie’n a pair o’ horse, an big day as that was, there wis shortly tae be a bigger…………..
“Ye’re jokin’!” I said when Donald, full o’ excitement, gave me the news ; but it wis right enough – Jimmy Shand had been booked by his dad tae come an’ play at Glenisla School!
“Neither o’s slept for a week beforehand………”.
And when the embarrassed looking Shand finally stepped out almost apologetically before the audience……
“I felt the hair on the back o’ ma neck risin’ an’ bristlin’, an that’s the Goad’s truth!”
It would have been easy for the entranced laddie to believe that as the magic notes drifted from the little building into the heather scented air, the stags were drawn lower down the hillsides to listen along with the silenced whaups and other wildlife of the glen – not forgetting the horses, the ‘orra beast’ and the pair, their pricked ears turned to the concert…..and the roosting hens blinking beady eyes.
Surely the day soon would come when Shand would be touring with a full-time band – and Jimmy Ritchie vowed that sooner or later he would play in that band!
When he first heard them broadcast he was a halflin’ (a teenage farm-worker between sixteen and seventeen) working along with his parents on Wester Bleaton Farm ; and he was ploughing in front of the house ; and Shand came on a 5pm and he was supposed to work until 5.30……….
But, tae hell wi’ it!
“Jimmy” from his mother at the window. as arranged.
The reins were secured ; he vaulted the fence ; and stuck his head in the window to be greeted by a matchless rendering of Auchmountain’s Bonnie Glen. Ah, to be a member of that most select of groups!
Eventually Jimmy Ritchie was to play fiddle in the band, but not for ten years of so, during which time he was with the Hawthorn Band for four years and more than five with Bobby MacLeod – with whom he also made records, and who named a composition after him, the strathspey Jim Ritchie’s Lilt (Jim himself has composed many tunes, six of which have been recorded).
He acknowledges three great masters of Scottish music ; Neil Gow, Scott Skinner and Jimmy Shand “and I learned mair during those four years I wis wi’ Jimmy than I had ever done fae onybody else”.
Although well on the way to becoming a national celebrity, the war years held considerable frustration for the morose melodeon player.
With his love of speed it had been a big blow when he had failed to get into aircrew, and this continued to irk.
Normally abstemious he began to indulge, on occasion. It is not a period he particularly cares to dwell on……..”Jist let’s say that I maybe took a drap mair than usual at times but pulled up afore I went aff the rails.”
The Band’s first broadcast……..
This was to have been another solo spot, but Jim manager to persuade producer Howard M. Lockhart to try his ‘wee combination’.
“You understand, Jimmy, you’re asking me to risk my reputation?”
“I’m staking my reputation an’a’.”
Well, the band went on – and Jimmy and Howard went on.
The war ended in a long series of Welcome Home concerts.
Released from the Fire Service before VE day Jimmy took a job driving a lorry……He thought he had been through it all as far as extreme casualness of employment went in the ‘twenties and ‘thirties ; now, in a time of chronic manpower shortage, the job lasted one week! He actually was in charge of the transport depot of the firm, and part of his duties was to take orders over the phone.
And the phone never stopped ringing……..According to the boss, though, most of the callers were seeking the maestro rather than the motors. Since they were all incoming calls surely there could be no accusation of abuse of the phone for private purposes?
Yet, such an accusation was made, which drew a terse reply which could not easily have been set to music – but which would have drawn a nod of approval from any of Jim’s old mining or navvying buddies.
The succeeding spell with Tay Motor Lorries lasted longer, and was much happier.
Meantime, it seemed that every committee of every football, tennis, rugby, shinty, curling, water-polo, Darby-and-Joan, golf, bowls, cycling, angling club in Scotland was determined to secure Shand’s Band for their Grand Annual ; and don’t leave out the Guilds, the Associations, the Fraternal Societies, the Sons of this, the Daughters of yon.
Surely modesty could not shrug off such snowballing success?
Jimmy did more than shrug it off – he walked away from it! Or rather drove away from it in a 1934 Austin 10 he bought from shore porter Andrew Robertson. With enough petrol coupons to get him to Thurso, he was off.
It has been suggested that the prospects of having to stand up there before larger and larger crowds alarmed him to the extent of frightening him off ; also, he considered that there was no future in Scots Country Dance Music!
“Nae doot aboot still bein’ shy – an’ the bigger the croods the mair embarrassed I would get. As for there no’ bein’ a real future for my kind o’ music ; well, maybe now that the war was o’er, wi’ mair choice o’ entertainment the Scottish Country Dancing boom would just fade awa’.”
“You were off to the Orkneys. Why there?”
“Well, I’d been there afore the war. Played a few concerts arranged by James W. Sinclair, a Kirkwall photographer. Fair fell in love wi’ the place. As a matter o’ fact I ca’ed my hoose in Sutherland Street Malvern efter his.”
“What did the wife say?”
“Oh, we’d talked it ower, of course. The idea was that I’d gae up there and get started selling musical instruments, and maybe a wee bit playing at nichts, then I’d bring up her and the bairns. Oh, I looked forrit tae it ; and Anne was agreeable.”
The sea journey was rough and took almost twice as long as usual. The ground rocked for days afterwards.
Wind, rain, snow for about three months while he worked in Sinclair’s shop by day and roved abroad by night to play at dances and concerts, on occasion embarking in tiny boats against what seemed to him mountainous white horses to get to engagements.
Still, this was the worst part ; this was winter. Wait until the good weather.
About the middle of January he set off on what originally was to have been a visit to Dundee……For days beforehand it snowed, and snowed. The day of the flight out the little plane, seen from the rattling shelter of a Nissan hut, appeared to be on the point of breaking free of the straining ropes to be borne off by the tearing gale.
He was still going back to Dundee if and when the plane could make it, but not on a visit ; to take up residence again. Certainly it was winter, but such winters he could not expose wife and bairns to.
God, it was alarming on that bleak airfield! Yes, they said, the plane was likely to be going all right ; had gone in much worse ; may be a wee bit late, that was all ; och, nothing really to worry about……
There was a young mother with a wee bairn waiting for the plane, and her composure did a great deal to quieten Jimmy’s misgivings. On the frighteningly bumpy flight which ensued the lassie was sick, and he nursed the bairn.
Still, he was damn glad when they touched down at Aberdeen, from which a comfortable hour-and-half in the train would see him home. The girl was going on to London – “a stout-herted bit o’ a lassie.”
Wee Owney the drummer’s face lit up when Dave Ireland, the left-handed fiddler, told him “Jim’s back in Dundee.”
“Hoo’s he been getting’ on? Hoo lang is he stayin’? We’ll hae tae pey him a visit-“
“I would if I were you, Owney, he’s back for good – an’ he’s wonderin’ if ye’ll gae full-time….”
Involved in a business venture, Dave left the band, his place taken by Angus Fitchet.
Angus, one of a family of eleven, like George McKelvey was brought up in a two-roomed house in Dundee.
By the age of five he was spending a lot of time in a hall opposite in King’s Road where local cinema musicians foregathered off duty for orchestral practice.
He helped distribute the music, was encouraged in his fiddle playing.
By the age of ten he was playing at dances, travelling back and forth on the back of Jim Barrie’s push-bike with a couple of fiddles, his father often cycling alongside with his fiddle.
In the ‘twenties, at the age of fourteen, he was playing in cinemas, bowing and fingering to suit the mood of the action of the huge distorted shadow-giants looming above.
Young Angus’ fiddle learned to weep at the heart-breaking set-backs suffered by Mary Pickford, Mary Carr and the Gish sisters ; to leap joyously into the fray with Dougie Fairbanks, Joe Bonomo and Dick Talmadge in their athletic confrontations with their foes ; to nerve-wrackingly underline the frenzied out-of-control gallop of the horses dragging the swaying stage-coach with Pearl White struggling with the villain on the roof, or as the train thundered towards where Gloria Swanson was bound to the rails ; to wail eerily and tremble with delicious dread at the horrifying roles of Lon Chaney and the diabolical machinations of Fu Manchu ; to skip along in gay accompaniment to the lunacies of Keaton, Chaplin and Arbuckle.
He got to know Jimmy Shand fairly early in his career, meeting him at the little musical festivals popular in the ‘twenties and ‘thirties in the villages and small towns of Angus and Perthshire.
“Jimmy could be called a breakthrough in box-playin’. He was a revelation ; naebody before had ever managed to get as much as he somehow could out of a melodeon”.
Occasionally they played together in those early days. One notable occasion was in 1934 in Dundee’s Forresters’ Hall when they appeared on the same bill as Sir Harry Lauder, then Scotland’s greatest star. This was the annual Charity concert for ex-ploughmen. (Lauder had a great friend in the town, Charles Young, a chemist with whom he often stayed, and who probably persuaded him to give his services).
Angus, who took over from Dave Ireland in Jimmy’s first full-time band in 1946, still remembers the first engagement which followed at Kirriemuir. (He stayed with Jimmy until 1949 when he left to launch out on his own, returning in 1960).
A prolific composer, Angus has had many tunes published and recorded, among them Ashludie Rant, Coldside Jig, J.B. Milne Reel, J.B. being a musician pal from youth who finished up with a chain of cinemas.
After the band went full time, Johnny Knight continued to play piano with them for a while, but did not care to give up the printing trade, eventually having to drop out as more and more time off work became necessary.
Johnny had actually wanted to be a fiddler like his granddad and uncles, but was ‘sent to the piano.’ Brother Jim, four years younger, did get to take up the fiddle. While still at school the kilted brothers played at parties, concerts, dances.
Jim Knight the fiddler was actually to play in a Shand Band long before Johnny did! At the age of fifteen his playing at an Evening Class Passout Concert in Stobswell School attracted the attention of a Mrs Shand……….who was no relation of Jimmy, but who invited the laddie to play at her cinema in Shepherd’s Loan.
Johnny started playing with Jimmy in Maitland Street Hall for the East Craigie Scottish Country Dance Club when pianist Peggy Edwards left.
“The first broadcast from Glasgow on New Year’s Day 1945 in Scottish Half Hour…….That’s what made the band ; after that we knew we had a good band. I remember it well. There was an extra three minutes to play, and we gave them Scottish Reform……’The finest playing of Scottish Country Dance Music I’ve heard for a long while’ said the producer ; “You’ll be hearing more from us!” And within a month we were broadcasting from Aberdeen, then Edinburgh……”
Johnny it was who suggested to the producer they have dancers in the studio ; and the suggestion was adopted with great success.
Accordionist George McKelvey had been working in Baxter’s jute mill for thirteen years. It wasn’t a bad job he had, as jobs in jute-mills went in those days.
He worked in the calendar department, at the lapping ; the starched and finished jute cloth being pressed through hot rollers, then lapped – a final folding process. The next stage was the dispatch department.
One night in 1946 when he finished work Jimmy was waiting at the mill-gate for him…..On the Friday he folded the last batch of cloth and went on to dispatch himself.
If he had been privileged to spend most of his evenings with his family during the war, peace was to be very different. Part-time playing was limited – a day’s work made demands, and engagements could not be accepted very far away from home. Full-time meant no limit.
Wife Flo saw little of him, and young Billy and Audrey even less.
Obviously, Jimmy must have had seen a long vista of jobs ahead before asking the band to take the plunge.
Far ahead?
Well, how many folk get a diary, fill in the first few days then forget about it? George wasn’t one of these – he was able to fill the whole book up right away – “Jimmy used to give us the jobs for a year ahead at a time.”
Wives and bairns saw little of their dads, yet, this was not because the band relaxed in hotels before and after the more distant engagements. They would finish down south in the early hours of the morning and immediately pile into Jimmy’s Morris and head back through the night to Dundee – like as not to be off to the north after a few hours sleep. Seven nights a week playing was soon nothing unusual.
Excerpts from George’s diary – South Shields one night, Glasgow the next ; and how much sleep can you get playing Brampton Friday night and Aberdeen Saturday night? Surprisingly, perhaps, the majority of their engagements soon were seen to be in England ; which meant a lot of travel ; example, Inverness one night, the following night the Albert Hall in London.
But in snow storms, lashing rain ; in the middle of the nights of a calm high-riding full moon ; at dawn ; in pitch-dark, at all hours, in all weathers the bandsmen put their latch-keys in the locks and rejoined their families, fresh from new triumphs – wait ; make that exhausted from new conquests. They had eschewed the possibilities of a comfortable night’s rent in a hotel to snatch and hour or two at home ; but it was like playing a part in Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake much of the time ; disturbing nocturnal visitations.
“I had to be father and mother as well,” said George’s wife, Flo. “My kids grew up thinking I was too much of a disciplinarian ; I was definitely against spoiling them.”
Flo was also most frequently the hostess to the band in the early years. They did most of their ‘practising’ as she calls it, in the Corporation tenement flat in which they then lived in Hepburn Street.
This behind-the-scenes ‘practising’ endowed the group with what was to become an eerie rapport. Eventually a stage was reached when if Jimmy made a mistake the whole band made it with him.
The time came when Sandy Tulloch stopped off a professional medical tour he was on to say hello to Jimmy and the band in Glasgow just an hour before they were to broadcast……
“What are you playing?” he asked George.
“Don’t know yet.”
Sandy found this hard to believe. Surely it had all been rehearsed and rehearsed until a satisfactory standard had been reached?
True, separate tunes were constantly practiced ; programmes were not.
Jimmy would casually mention – maybe just before they were due to go on – “We’ll start wi’ this, follow wi’ that – an’ then we’ll see…..”
It worked.
And then they would rope Owney’s drums onto the roof of the car and pile in and head home.
“The Country Dance world was really booming at that time,” says Dr. Tulloch (who renewed his visits to Sutherland Street on demob in 1946 to find “the same living-room crowded with box-players, fiddlers, and would be composers ; the same welcome and generosity.”)
“Good new tunes were in great demand. Later on I thought that the quest for new or ‘rediscovered’ dances got a little out of hand – hard work to commit hundreds of dances to memory. Most of the bands played from memory ; seldom had anyone a sheet of music in front of them.”
The eye specialist box-player used to help Jimmy get his compositions down on paper. One Tune, Sister Elder’s Reel, he wrote out as Jimmy hummed it from a hospital bed ; and, “when he did write down his own music, he had a distinctive style, and I have some treasured scraps of manuscript from those days – waltzes, reels, strathspeys and jigs.”
Back to George McKelvey –
“All this broken sleep ; he must have been bad-tempered much of the time,” I suggested to his wife.
“No, never ; well, never through lack of sleep. I’ve seen him come home at breakfast-time and go to bed for an hour ; and when I wakened him he just got up and got ready and away again without the least grumbling.”
George told me “Wasn’t only Jimmy had the reputation of never smiling in those days, but the whole band. Often we were playing like we were hypnotized, maybe having had only one night’s sleep in three.”
Perhaps it was as well at times their programmes didn’t run to long sequences of dreamy waltzes but were generously laced with rousing marches!
This first full-time year was to set a pattern of the way of life for the rest of the band’s career – except that they were often to play longer, oftener ; travel further and further, sleep even less.