George Darling
by Charlie Todd
B&F Sept / Oct 2014
A tidy terraced cottage in a ‘miners row’ in the quaint Mid Lothian village of Rosewell, near Bonnyrigg, has been home for the past 30 years to George Darling. But how did an Englishman from a totally non musical family, born on the land but trained as a coal mining engineer, become one of the best known and respected drummers in the Scottish dance band scene? To find out the answers I met up with George at his home one February afternoon.
George was born on 24th May, 1931 in Newcastle before being taken to the family home at Low Buston Farm near Alnwick. Along with brother Jim, five years his senior, he attended Walkworth School till the age of 14 by which time they had moved to neighbouring farm, High Buston. Neither dad, Ralph, nor mum Millie, were musical although Millie had been a good dancer in he young days but I’ll let George take up the story : “During 1940 the military took over the Estate opposite the farm and eventually the Gordon Highlanders arrived. After a few days I heard the pipes playing so off I went to see and hear what was going on, complete with round specs and wellies. After a while I wandered about the camp almost unhindered. Sometimes the soldiers would hide me in a truck or a bren-gun carrier and give me a wee hurl – great fun for a young laddie.
“Anyway, by this time I knew where the drums were kept so I would sneak in and rattle a drum with an old pair of sticks I got off a woman on the farm who’s son played, but tragically, had been killed at Dunkirk. Occasionally a soldier would chase me telling me in the strange Aberdeen dialect (to me anyway) not to come back. This went on for a while until one day a soldier arrived at my house asking for me. He said they were tired of chasing me so they would teach me if that was okay! So real drumming lessons began. An Aberdonian drummer took me once a week when his duties allowed. However the day came when they were posted away. By good fortune though it was the Argyll’s who followed, also complete with pipe band, and to my surprise a soldier arrived at the house. He said they had been told about me and would continue to teach me. Inevitably the day came when they were posted too, so I said my sad farewells and went off to school. When I came home my mother told me to look in the outhouse. That morning one of the bandsmen had come to the house and left me an old drum. So with this and a hard backed book (there were no practice pads in those days) I made my folks life a misery.
“Moving on, when I was fifteen, in 1946, I joined a Boys Club and there I met two lads my own age, Bryce Anderson and John Thompson, who played accordions so after a while we started a band. By this time we had been joined by another young accordionist, Peter Andrucci, but his bellows leaked so much we were catching colds, so we persuaded him to play the piano (when playable anyway). Under the name ‘The Minstrel Boys’ we started playing at local dances.
In those days Friday night dances finished at 2 a.m. but sometimes they would ask the band to play on for another hour and the dancers would have a collection round the hall for the band. Sometimes that collection came to more than the original band fee! Incidentally the going rate in those days was £1 on Friday nights and 15 bob on Saturdays.
A highlight was always if a Scottish dance band came down to play in Alnwick (Shand, Fitchet and MacLeod were the favourites). In those days dances didn’t stop for an interval. The band members either took their break on a rota or locals were asked to play and we were often asked to do this, which was great because it got us in and tickets were like gold dust. I got a lot of encouragement from Angus Fitchet and his drummer. Fitchet and MacLeod always let me play two or three dances with their bands. I also had a lot of help from ‘Pibroch’ Mackenzie, Bobby MacLeod’s fiddler who was also a very talented pipe band drummer.
“After two or three years we applied to audition with the BBC for a ‘Barn Dance’ music programme that went out all over England. By this time we had been joined by Willie Millar, a fiddler, and we engaged a session bass player from Newcastle. We passed at the second attempt but the BBC changed the name of our band to ‘The Cheviot Ranters’. Since the music was broadcast nationwide they liked the band’s name to give an indication of where they came from. There were only a few other bands doing this so we did about one a month from the fictional ‘Windyhope Farm’ (in Scotland you had ‘Down at the Mains’ - same idea). Jack Armstrong’s Barnstormers were another of the regular bands and there was a chap Adamson from Carlisle. In 1955 we also did a one-off TV programme from Alnmouth Boys Club which amazingly enough went out on prime time TV – 8 p.m. on a Saturday evening. The critics hammered it in the newspapers though – they called it hill-billy music. Incidentally there were complaints from the BBC up north if we played too many Scottish tunes. So we had to use lots of hornpipes and Irish tunes and Felix Burns compositions.
“I was with this band for roughly twelve years, then I decided to try something different, so I did the Working Men’s Club scene for a few years. Then a friend came to see me one day and said a Scottish Band was playing locally on the Friday evening and they were looking for a drummer – would I be interested? I said yes and he told me that the band was Andrew Rankine’s. At the end of the evening Andrew told me he was moving to the North-East, Whitley Bay to be exact, and could he contact me? That was 1964 and so began ten years playing with Andrew’s band locally and all over the UK. We did a tour of the South of England with Alasdair Gillies for which the band was augmented by Jim Johnstone, Charlie Cowie and pianist Bobby Brown. The highlight of that tour was performing in the Albert Hall when one of the acts was a ventriloquist called Ken Swan with his dummy, McGee. Unfortunately some of the audience sat behind the platform so they could see Ken working the dummy.
I did the final weeks of a White Heather Club tour with Andrew and Bobby Brown on the piano. Also in that group were Joe Gordon and Sally Logan, Billy Crocket, singer Colin Stuart and dancers Isobel James and Sandra Adams. It was a circuit of one-night-stands around towns and villages travelling in Andrew’s Volvo and staying in boarding houses. It was hard work. I moved to Whitley Bay and we were joined by an excellent guitarist/vocalist Chris Taylor and worked as a trio – Cordovox, guitar and drum kit. Chris kept right up to date with new songs as they hit the charts. Andrew had all the big hotels in Newcastle tied up but by the mid ‘70’s he decided to go solo with the Cordovox on the ‘Bier Keller’ circuit and move to Leicester. Newcastle, Leicester and Southport were the main venues but there was one in Blackpool I played in for a season. Originally an authentic German accordionist/singer had been brought over and he was a hard act to follow. He could play and sing for hours without a break but that was really hard on your voice. Accordionist Andrew Stoddart from Penicuik and guitarist/vocalist Chris Taylor, mentioned earlier using lots of electronics were also on the circuit, playing a venue for a month then moving on. Incidentally it was listening to Chris that got me started singing,
“Andrew and myself did a summer season based in Inverness. The venues were the Cummins Hotel in Inverness, Ullapool, Kingussie, and Fort William. The group consisted of vocalist Grant Fraser, comedian Johnny Bogan and the Maggie Firth dancers. We did that six nights a week then Andrew and I played in the Nairn Social Club on Sunday evening. The following summer I did the same tour with Bert Shorthouse and Rab Carruthers. After that I went back to Whitley Bay to play with a modern accordionist called Peter Scatterly, a very good player. Peter and I recorded an LP of ballroom dance music which was voted top record of the month by a ballroom dance magazine. After that I did a three week tour with Bert Shorthouse called ‘Search for a Song’ promoted by the Aberdeen Press and Journal. Grampian TV viewers were asked to compose a song and these were performed around different venues in the North East, the West Coast and the Orkneys. The songs were performed by singers Colin Stuart, Maggie Queen and the Marlettes. Some of these songs were so long they had to be shortened or we would have been there yet!
“In the early 70’s I started playing with the Iain MacPhail Band who had taken over many of Andrew Rankine’s Scottish dance gigs in the south. Iain asked me to join the band as he was going to start a summer season in the King James Hotel in Edinburgh in 1974 and I came up to Scotland and stayed with fiddler Alan Johnston’s family that year and for the following two summers before I eventually got this house in Rosewell. In all I did 11 seasons at the King James with Iain then 3 with Alec McPhee’s Band in the Balmoral and the Carlton Highland Hotels. There were a variety of accordionists in Alec’s Band over that time, David Wilson, Carol Farquhar, Iain Skinner and the ‘2 Gordons’ – Hoggan and Wardlaw. In 2002 I restarted gigging with Iain MacPhail but in the intervening years, in fact right through the ‘90’s, I played with Willie Simpson and Gordon Pattullo and a couple of years with Bill Black”.
George is no stranger to overseas gigs either. For 26 years he has accompanied the Neil Barron SDB on their visits to the Far East (always Singapore and occasionally taking in the Philippines, Kuala Lumpur, Jakarta, Hong Kong and Vietnam) and since 2002 he has accompanied Iain MacPhail on his annual South American trip (always Brazil and occasionally taking in Argentina, Uruguay or Chile). Iain did that one solo in 2013 but Brian Griffin got the trip to Kenya so George added the Nairobi St Andrew’s Ball to his CV. He also does trips with Iain’s band and the ‘New Scotland Country Dancers’ from Edinburgh University to ‘Folklore Festivals’ throughout Europe.
Like most top musicians in between all of the above George did ‘one-offs’ with many well-known bands over the years. Thinking back over those years he came up with the following – Neil Barron, Bill Black, Burns Brothers, John Carmichael, Bobby Crowe, James Coutts, Mhairi Coutts, Graham Edwardson, Eric Goodfellow, Jim Johnstone, Lex Keith, Jimmy Lindsay, Bobby MacLeod, Gordon Pattullo, The Pentlands Ceilidh Band, Alan Ross, Willie Simpson, Callum Wilson, The Cullivoe and Da Fustra.
When George left school in 1935 he worked for ‘Dingwall’ in Alnwick, a subsidiary of ‘Hardy’s’ the famous fishing rod and reel people but his part of the business did something slightly different - engine overhauls. At 17 he joined the N.C.B. at ‘Whittle’ Colliery and spent the next five years as an engineering apprentice before transferring as a fully qualified engineer to nearly Shilbottle Colliery. In all he spent 11 years underground. In 1980 George rejoined the N.C.B. this time at their Newtongrange Area Workshop, again as an engineer, where he worked till its closure in 1985. Outwith those dates, other than the odd job here and there, he has been a full-time musician.
At 83, George remains a cheerful, enthusiastic individual who likes nothing better than a tune and a good blether. He’s a regular attender at nearby Peebles Accordion Club, but can pop up anywhere, for example I met him at Ian Holmes final guest spot at Islesteps Club in January of this year. He still plays regularly with Iain MacPhail travelling all over the country playing for general and Scottish Country dancing. Would he change anything if he could live life all over again – “probably not” he answered and what is it that keeps him going “Mixing with young people through music. They don’t think about age, so I don’t either”. And finally what is his philosophy – “Always look ahead and treat people the way you like to be treated yourself”. Well said George.
George was born on 24th May, 1931 in Newcastle before being taken to the family home at Low Buston Farm near Alnwick. Along with brother Jim, five years his senior, he attended Walkworth School till the age of 14 by which time they had moved to neighbouring farm, High Buston. Neither dad, Ralph, nor mum Millie, were musical although Millie had been a good dancer in he young days but I’ll let George take up the story : “During 1940 the military took over the Estate opposite the farm and eventually the Gordon Highlanders arrived. After a few days I heard the pipes playing so off I went to see and hear what was going on, complete with round specs and wellies. After a while I wandered about the camp almost unhindered. Sometimes the soldiers would hide me in a truck or a bren-gun carrier and give me a wee hurl – great fun for a young laddie.
“Anyway, by this time I knew where the drums were kept so I would sneak in and rattle a drum with an old pair of sticks I got off a woman on the farm who’s son played, but tragically, had been killed at Dunkirk. Occasionally a soldier would chase me telling me in the strange Aberdeen dialect (to me anyway) not to come back. This went on for a while until one day a soldier arrived at my house asking for me. He said they were tired of chasing me so they would teach me if that was okay! So real drumming lessons began. An Aberdonian drummer took me once a week when his duties allowed. However the day came when they were posted away. By good fortune though it was the Argyll’s who followed, also complete with pipe band, and to my surprise a soldier arrived at the house. He said they had been told about me and would continue to teach me. Inevitably the day came when they were posted too, so I said my sad farewells and went off to school. When I came home my mother told me to look in the outhouse. That morning one of the bandsmen had come to the house and left me an old drum. So with this and a hard backed book (there were no practice pads in those days) I made my folks life a misery.
“Moving on, when I was fifteen, in 1946, I joined a Boys Club and there I met two lads my own age, Bryce Anderson and John Thompson, who played accordions so after a while we started a band. By this time we had been joined by another young accordionist, Peter Andrucci, but his bellows leaked so much we were catching colds, so we persuaded him to play the piano (when playable anyway). Under the name ‘The Minstrel Boys’ we started playing at local dances.
In those days Friday night dances finished at 2 a.m. but sometimes they would ask the band to play on for another hour and the dancers would have a collection round the hall for the band. Sometimes that collection came to more than the original band fee! Incidentally the going rate in those days was £1 on Friday nights and 15 bob on Saturdays.
A highlight was always if a Scottish dance band came down to play in Alnwick (Shand, Fitchet and MacLeod were the favourites). In those days dances didn’t stop for an interval. The band members either took their break on a rota or locals were asked to play and we were often asked to do this, which was great because it got us in and tickets were like gold dust. I got a lot of encouragement from Angus Fitchet and his drummer. Fitchet and MacLeod always let me play two or three dances with their bands. I also had a lot of help from ‘Pibroch’ Mackenzie, Bobby MacLeod’s fiddler who was also a very talented pipe band drummer.
“After two or three years we applied to audition with the BBC for a ‘Barn Dance’ music programme that went out all over England. By this time we had been joined by Willie Millar, a fiddler, and we engaged a session bass player from Newcastle. We passed at the second attempt but the BBC changed the name of our band to ‘The Cheviot Ranters’. Since the music was broadcast nationwide they liked the band’s name to give an indication of where they came from. There were only a few other bands doing this so we did about one a month from the fictional ‘Windyhope Farm’ (in Scotland you had ‘Down at the Mains’ - same idea). Jack Armstrong’s Barnstormers were another of the regular bands and there was a chap Adamson from Carlisle. In 1955 we also did a one-off TV programme from Alnmouth Boys Club which amazingly enough went out on prime time TV – 8 p.m. on a Saturday evening. The critics hammered it in the newspapers though – they called it hill-billy music. Incidentally there were complaints from the BBC up north if we played too many Scottish tunes. So we had to use lots of hornpipes and Irish tunes and Felix Burns compositions.
“I was with this band for roughly twelve years, then I decided to try something different, so I did the Working Men’s Club scene for a few years. Then a friend came to see me one day and said a Scottish Band was playing locally on the Friday evening and they were looking for a drummer – would I be interested? I said yes and he told me that the band was Andrew Rankine’s. At the end of the evening Andrew told me he was moving to the North-East, Whitley Bay to be exact, and could he contact me? That was 1964 and so began ten years playing with Andrew’s band locally and all over the UK. We did a tour of the South of England with Alasdair Gillies for which the band was augmented by Jim Johnstone, Charlie Cowie and pianist Bobby Brown. The highlight of that tour was performing in the Albert Hall when one of the acts was a ventriloquist called Ken Swan with his dummy, McGee. Unfortunately some of the audience sat behind the platform so they could see Ken working the dummy.
I did the final weeks of a White Heather Club tour with Andrew and Bobby Brown on the piano. Also in that group were Joe Gordon and Sally Logan, Billy Crocket, singer Colin Stuart and dancers Isobel James and Sandra Adams. It was a circuit of one-night-stands around towns and villages travelling in Andrew’s Volvo and staying in boarding houses. It was hard work. I moved to Whitley Bay and we were joined by an excellent guitarist/vocalist Chris Taylor and worked as a trio – Cordovox, guitar and drum kit. Chris kept right up to date with new songs as they hit the charts. Andrew had all the big hotels in Newcastle tied up but by the mid ‘70’s he decided to go solo with the Cordovox on the ‘Bier Keller’ circuit and move to Leicester. Newcastle, Leicester and Southport were the main venues but there was one in Blackpool I played in for a season. Originally an authentic German accordionist/singer had been brought over and he was a hard act to follow. He could play and sing for hours without a break but that was really hard on your voice. Accordionist Andrew Stoddart from Penicuik and guitarist/vocalist Chris Taylor, mentioned earlier using lots of electronics were also on the circuit, playing a venue for a month then moving on. Incidentally it was listening to Chris that got me started singing,
“Andrew and myself did a summer season based in Inverness. The venues were the Cummins Hotel in Inverness, Ullapool, Kingussie, and Fort William. The group consisted of vocalist Grant Fraser, comedian Johnny Bogan and the Maggie Firth dancers. We did that six nights a week then Andrew and I played in the Nairn Social Club on Sunday evening. The following summer I did the same tour with Bert Shorthouse and Rab Carruthers. After that I went back to Whitley Bay to play with a modern accordionist called Peter Scatterly, a very good player. Peter and I recorded an LP of ballroom dance music which was voted top record of the month by a ballroom dance magazine. After that I did a three week tour with Bert Shorthouse called ‘Search for a Song’ promoted by the Aberdeen Press and Journal. Grampian TV viewers were asked to compose a song and these were performed around different venues in the North East, the West Coast and the Orkneys. The songs were performed by singers Colin Stuart, Maggie Queen and the Marlettes. Some of these songs were so long they had to be shortened or we would have been there yet!
“In the early 70’s I started playing with the Iain MacPhail Band who had taken over many of Andrew Rankine’s Scottish dance gigs in the south. Iain asked me to join the band as he was going to start a summer season in the King James Hotel in Edinburgh in 1974 and I came up to Scotland and stayed with fiddler Alan Johnston’s family that year and for the following two summers before I eventually got this house in Rosewell. In all I did 11 seasons at the King James with Iain then 3 with Alec McPhee’s Band in the Balmoral and the Carlton Highland Hotels. There were a variety of accordionists in Alec’s Band over that time, David Wilson, Carol Farquhar, Iain Skinner and the ‘2 Gordons’ – Hoggan and Wardlaw. In 2002 I restarted gigging with Iain MacPhail but in the intervening years, in fact right through the ‘90’s, I played with Willie Simpson and Gordon Pattullo and a couple of years with Bill Black”.
George is no stranger to overseas gigs either. For 26 years he has accompanied the Neil Barron SDB on their visits to the Far East (always Singapore and occasionally taking in the Philippines, Kuala Lumpur, Jakarta, Hong Kong and Vietnam) and since 2002 he has accompanied Iain MacPhail on his annual South American trip (always Brazil and occasionally taking in Argentina, Uruguay or Chile). Iain did that one solo in 2013 but Brian Griffin got the trip to Kenya so George added the Nairobi St Andrew’s Ball to his CV. He also does trips with Iain’s band and the ‘New Scotland Country Dancers’ from Edinburgh University to ‘Folklore Festivals’ throughout Europe.
Like most top musicians in between all of the above George did ‘one-offs’ with many well-known bands over the years. Thinking back over those years he came up with the following – Neil Barron, Bill Black, Burns Brothers, John Carmichael, Bobby Crowe, James Coutts, Mhairi Coutts, Graham Edwardson, Eric Goodfellow, Jim Johnstone, Lex Keith, Jimmy Lindsay, Bobby MacLeod, Gordon Pattullo, The Pentlands Ceilidh Band, Alan Ross, Willie Simpson, Callum Wilson, The Cullivoe and Da Fustra.
When George left school in 1935 he worked for ‘Dingwall’ in Alnwick, a subsidiary of ‘Hardy’s’ the famous fishing rod and reel people but his part of the business did something slightly different - engine overhauls. At 17 he joined the N.C.B. at ‘Whittle’ Colliery and spent the next five years as an engineering apprentice before transferring as a fully qualified engineer to nearly Shilbottle Colliery. In all he spent 11 years underground. In 1980 George rejoined the N.C.B. this time at their Newtongrange Area Workshop, again as an engineer, where he worked till its closure in 1985. Outwith those dates, other than the odd job here and there, he has been a full-time musician.
At 83, George remains a cheerful, enthusiastic individual who likes nothing better than a tune and a good blether. He’s a regular attender at nearby Peebles Accordion Club, but can pop up anywhere, for example I met him at Ian Holmes final guest spot at Islesteps Club in January of this year. He still plays regularly with Iain MacPhail travelling all over the country playing for general and Scottish Country dancing. Would he change anything if he could live life all over again – “probably not” he answered and what is it that keeps him going “Mixing with young people through music. They don’t think about age, so I don’t either”. And finally what is his philosophy – “Always look ahead and treat people the way you like to be treated yourself”. Well said George.