News

A GUID NEW YEAR TAE ANE AND AW

COMPLETE CALEDONIAN IMBIBER BBC RADIO 7 DECEMBER 12

KINGS + ARTICHOKES FESTIVE REPEATS Dec 25/Jan 4

THE KILMARNOCK EDITION Billy Kay recites the poetry of Robert Burns online.

HONORARY DOCTORATE University of the West of Scotland.

THE MYSTIC TIE Double CD on Robert Burns & the History of Scottish Freemasonry



Wishing all of you a very merry Christmas and a Guid New Year when it comes

Aw the best tae you an yours in aw the airts o the Scottish Warld

Billy



FORTHCOMING RADIO SCOTLAND BROADCASTS

Forthcoming Odyssey Productions Broadcasts on Radio Scotland. Remember that all programmes are available on the Radio Scotland website for a full week after broadcast….go to www.bbc.co.uk/radioscotland/


Radio Scotland Christmas Morning at 6.30

Artichokes, Chalk an Hoat Cuisine.

Billy Kay takes a wry look at the changes in diet experienced by Scots of his generation who grew up in the 1950’s and travelled abroad in the 1960’s where they experienced exotic food like artichokes and camembert for the first time. Billy explores the theme in the company of artists Dawson Murray, David Annand, Douglas Davies, Liz Murray and writer Brian McCabe. Clootie Dumpling….when will we see its like again?

An Odyssey Production for Radio Scotland.



Radio Scotland Monday January 4, 2010 at 6.03


Kings of the Road

Billy Kay tracks down the men who put heart and soul into the building of the M8 motorway….lorry and digger drivers from the Lothians who moved the mountainous Deans Bing and levelled it under the new road, foremen and tunnelmen down from the Hydro schemes of the Highlands and gangs doing the kerbing and draining from Donegal. In its day the M8 was cutting edge and contemporary, but many of its builders were part of an older tradition where hard work and strong drink went hand in hand.

An Odyssey Production for Radio Scotland


BBC RADIO 7

BBC Radio 7 - on DAB, on-line and on Digital TV, Channel 708


THE COMPLETE CALEDONIAN IMBIBER

Starts on Saturday December 12 at 09.30, repeated that evening at 1930, The series runs for 4 weeks. I have fond memories of this series as it won me the Wines of France Award 1996 – the prize being an elegant decanter made by the Cristallerie de Saint Louis and a holiday in the Alsace vineyard for my wife and I….good times! Cheers!

The Complete Caledonian Imbiber.

Billy Kay celebrates the Scots drouth for ale, whisky and the
great wines of Europe.

1. Knee Deep in Claret

Music by Rod Paterson and John Martin.

An Odyssey Production for Radio Scotland.


1. Knee Deep in Claret – the Scots and the red wine of Bordeaux

2. Let Them Drink Port. – the Scots on the Douro

3. Bend Weel tae the Madeira – the Scots in the Madeira and Sherry trade

4. The Craitur an Reamin Swats – the native tipples of ale and whisky


All the above programmes are available for one week after broadcast on the BBC iPlayer

http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbc7/programmes/a-z/player

The Head of Radio 7, Mary Kalemkerian gave the following introduction to the last group of programmes as part of her weekly newsletter:

“We are also introducing some excellent features, new to Radio 7, and produced by an inspirational Scottish writer and broadcaster, Billy Kay, whose programmes, mostly in the oral tradition, have been broadcast worldwide.


Here are some lines from my book The Scottish World on the historic background to the Port, and Sherry programmes.


Let Them Drink Port
‘I’m sitting on the veranda of the Graham Quinta dos Malvedos, perched high on one of the few straight furlongs of the River Douro, just beneath are orange and lemon trees in fruit, and an olive grove festooned with the glorious purple of Morning Glory….opposite, reflected in the river are the mountains girt with the green horizontal stripes of perfectly tended vines…it’s rugged, peaceful and stunningly beautiful It was here the Scots came to make one of the world’s great wines, Port.’

These are the opening words of my radio feature, Let Them Drink Port programme two in a four part series entitled The Complete Caledonian Imbiber on the Scots involvement in the great wyneyairds of the world. Port of course has the reputation of being quintessentially an Englishman’s drink. To the outsider, it conjures images of carnivorous West Country squires warming their blood with rich ruby blackstrap at the end of a day’s hunting, or of Oxford Dons sipping exquisite vintages over memories of their college’s great cricket team, while beyond the close lies in a breathless hush! Yet, like so many English institutions of a commercial nature, from the Bank of England down, it was the infusion of Scottish blood which did so much to transform what had been an ignoble fizzy beverage from the wilds of Portugal into one of the great wines of the world. The finest examples of the port blender’s art still bear the names of the pioneering Scots shippers; Sandeman, Robertson, Cockburn, Dow and Graham. This simply affirms that although all of these men belonged to a nation whose history had produced an early aversion to Port, the Scot very rarely permitted his historical heart to interfere with his commercial head for good business, even if it meant dealing with the English as his principal customers!
Port got off to a very bad start in Scotland in the mid eighteenth century. Almost every section of society bore it a grudge, and many of the grudges overlapped. To the Jacobites it was the favorite of Whigs and Hanoverians; to the anti-Union faction it symbolized English domination at Parliament due to its preferential treatment against the Scots ancient tipple, claret; to the claret drinker it was inferior plonk at an inflated price. Gey few Scots then felt unsympathetic to the tragic hero of John Home’s famous rhyme:

Firm and erect the Caledonian stood
Old was his mutton and His claret good.
“Let them drink port”
The English statesman cried.
He drank the poison
and his spirit died.

That the resistance to port was political, rather than aesthetic, is revealed in the long predilection for the Iberian wines which existed throughout Scotland since at least the fifteenth century. Canary, Tent, Mountain, Madeira, Bastard, Alicante and Lisbon all enjoyed a vogue, while Malaga is even commemorated in an early version of ‘Auld Lang Syne’ By the end of the eighteenth century, however, resistance had weakened considerably and port was welcome on all but the most diehard of Jacobite tables. The wine itself had improved beyond recognition and its acceptance was further enhanced by the forging of a British identity through Scots and English fighting together for the first time against France. The Scots involvement in the Peninsular War is enshrined in folk songs like the ‘Forfar Sodger’ and ‘Twa Recruitin Sergeants’, but a less tangible legacy was the growing propensity for the fortified wines of Portugal. The Scots officers would reminisce over Buçaco and Torres Vedras while sipping fine ports shipped by a man they may well have met there, George Sandeman.
It was often the case that old Scots families sent eldest sons to law or the ministry, the favored professions since the Union with England. When it came the turn of the younger boys, the wine trade, while not as prestigious, offered an attractive alternative where one would at least be dealing with people of a similar social standing. Few men of
20 could have entered a new trade with the arrogant certainty of success possessed by little George Sandeman, the youngest of a family of six. Here he is writing to his sister in Perth, shortly after he had set up his wine vault in London in 1790:
I shall remain where I am, till I shall have made a moderate fortune to retire with, which I expect will be in the course of nine years; which to be sure is a long time, but some lucky stroke may possibly reduce it to five or six. It is but lately I have taken up this prospect of growing rich, but I find it has been of infinite service to me already. One may see the marks of thriving in every line of my face. I eat like a man for a wager. People stand out of my way as they see me bustling along the streets. I have a good word to say to everybody I meet, and as I am informed, I frequently laugh in my sleep.




Sherry
At Xeres, where the Sherry we drink is made, I met a great merchant - A Mr Gordon of Scotland - who was extremely polite, and favoured me with the inspection of his vaults and cellars, so that I quaffed at the fountain head.

George Gordon, Lord Byron 1809.

Jerez, Cadiz and Malaga had supplied the Scots with wine since medieval times, so it is not suprising that a number of families put down roots in Southern Spain and traded in the local wine with the homeland. There was never an extensive Scots community in
Jerez, as there was in Oporto, but a few kenspeckle figures left their mark. The
Sandemans branched there from Oporto, and became equally famous for their sherry as
their port. By the time the Sandemans arrived though, an Ayrshireman, Sir James Duff was already established in the trade, sending wines home to Oliphants of Ayr as early as 1767. He brought his nephew William Gordon into the firm and the name Duff Gordon is still to be found on some wonderful bottles, though the owners of the brand today,
Osborne, only use the historic Duff Gordon name in certain markets.
One of the wines shipped by James Duff to Ayrshire was Malaga, sometimes called
Mountain, and hailing from the hilly region inland from that coastal resort. It was
obviously extremely popular for it entered the folk tradition of the area. When Robert
Burns was devoting his time to Scots songs, he wrote a letter to Mrs Dunlop in 1788
which contained the following lines of one he had just collected. .
Should auld acquaintance be forgot
And never thought upon
Let’s hae a waught o’ Malaga
For auld lang syne.
For auld lang syne my dear
For auld lang syne
Let’s hae a waught o Malaga
For auld lang syne.

So Burns great international anthem had its roots in the South of Spain as well as the Ayrshire folk tradition. Recently, I managed to procure two different bottles of Malaga for a group of friends interested in tasting wine, so I led us all in a chorus of ‘Let’s hae a waught o Malaga for auld lang syne’ in between sips of the sweet mountain nectar.
Other old family firms from the region with Scots connections included Findlater,
another branch of the Gordons and MacKenzie - though these names unfortunately are no
longer used by the multi-national conglomerates who now own so much of the drinks industry. My host when I visited the old MacKenzie vineyards and bodegas, was a marvelous old Spanish gentleman called Diego Fergusson, whose people came from Banffshire in the middle of the 19th century to join the firm. Upper Banffshire was also the home of the Gordons who had entertained Lord Byron. That part of Scotland had
retained a Roman Catholic enclave in places like Glenlivet and the Cabrach, so just as you had Scots Jacobites exiled in catholic countries like France and Spain, you also had a
tradition of Roman Catholics fleeing Scotland at times of persecution and settling in the more congenial surroundings of Andalucia. Significantly, when the Cadiz-based
merchant Arthur Gordon died in 1815, he bequested part of his estate to the Real Colegio de Escoceses, the Royal Scots College in Valladolid. Now, part of the University of Salamanca, the college was set up as a seminary for Scottish catholic priests first in Madrid in 1627 then in Valldolid where it remained from 1771 until 1988. I visited in the summer of 1982 and made recordings for a programme called The Scots College in Spain on the history of the establishment, before heading south to support the boys in blue against our World Cup opponents New Zealand, Brazil and the Soviet Union in Malaga and Seville



HONORARY DEGREE AWARD

I was delighted to hear from the University of the West of Scotland that my work in promoting Scottish culture has been recognised by the University. The University Court has agreed to award me the honorary degree of Doctor of the University of the West of Scotland at a graduation ceremony in Troon Concert Hall on July 1st at 14.30. As an Ayrshireman born and bred it gives me great pride to receive such recognition in my hame county – my love for my native culture stems from the people I came from in that part of the world – so it will be a great day for the Kay family and friends of the family in Ayrshire.

July 9. Receiving the award was a wonderful experience for me and my family – my thanks to all at the University for making it such a memorable day. It was also gratifying to feel the response of the Ayrshire audience when I gave my speech….”o aw the airts the wind can blaw, I dearly like the west”



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS SYMPOSIUM Washington DC February 25/26

I'm delighted to let you know that videos for the entire 'Robert Burns at 250' symposium have now been posted on the American Folklife Center's website. Links to have been interwoven into the program schedule with the wording 'View the webcast…' See: http://www.loc.gov/folklife/Symposia/Burns/program.html



THE MYSTIC TIE Double CD on Robert Burns & the History of Scottish Freemasonry produced and presented by Billy Kay is available now and can be purchased via the Grand Lodge of Scotland website: www.grandlodgescotland.com


Further Details:

For the 250th anniversary of the birth of the national bard, The Grand Lodge of Scotland has commissioned multi - award winning writer and broadcaster, Billy Kay to explore the role of Freemasonry in the life, the poetry and songs of Robert Burns. Within this double CD he also extends and re-fashions the original material he collected for his acclaimed BBC series The Mason Word and along with Freemasons and historians, celebrates the fascinating history of the Scottish Craft and the strong claim that Scotland is the spiritual home of a world wide brotherhood numbering in excess of 6 million people.


CD 1 The Mystic Tie Robert Burns and Freemasonry.

Track 1. Brethren o the mystic level

Track 2 Caledonia’s Bard.

Track 3. It’s comin yet for a’ that.

The History of Scottish Freemasonry

Track 4 The History of Scottish Freemasonry A. The Mother Lodge.

CD 2. The Mystic Tie The History of Scottish Freemasonry

Track 5. The History of Scottish Freemasonry B The Mason Word.

Track 6. The History of Scottish Freemasonry C The Maister’s Apron.

Track 7 . The History of Scottish Freemasonry. D From Washington to St Petersburg.

Track 8. . The History of Scottish Freemasonry. E “We met upon the level…”



THE KILMARNOCK EDITION East Ayrshire Libraries has commissioned Billy Kay to record his recitation of selected poems from the Kilmarnock Edition of the Bard’s poetry which appear on line with a virtual version of the book. It will also appear in the Burns Monument in the Kay Park, Kilmarnock. March 18: It is now available . Go to the link below, then click on Robert Burns, then click on Kilmarnock Edition.

www.burnsmonumentcentre.com.