Book review: At Hame Wi’ Freedom, Edited by Eberhard Bort

HAMISH Henderson, poet, folklorist and genial patriarch of the Scottish folk ­revival, and Pink Floyd, iconoclasts of English psychedelia, might seem to ­offer little in common.

Yet in At Hame Wi’ Freedom, the third of a trilogy of essay collections celebrating Henderson’s work, Pino Mereu’s poem sequence Anzio Pipe Band is dedicated not only to Henderson’s memory, but to that of Eric Waters, father of Pink Floyd founder member Roger Waters. Waters Snr, like Mereu’s father, died during the Battle of Anzio in 1944.

At Anzio, Henderson formed a morale-boosting pipe band which entered Rome with the triumphant Allied forces. Mereu’s poem in Italian, influenced by Henderson’s Elegies For The Dead In Cyrenaica as well as by Pink Floyd’s Final Cut, is accompanied by a Scots translation from Tom Hubbard.

Such unlikely connections come as no surprise in a book, edited by Eberhard Bort, ­containing some wonderfully circuitous discourses. None more so than Owen Dudley Edwards’s lecture, ostensibly titled Sectarian Songs, which before getting to grips with The Ould Orange Flute, ­recounts how Henderson ­persuaded the future PM ­Gordon Brown of the importance of Antonio Gramsci, the Italian revolutionary writer.

Ten years on from Henderson’s death, these essays reflect the sometimes bewildering variousness of the man, remembered with affection by poet Hayden Murphy, while accordionist Jim Bainbridge recalls a never-to-be forgotten visit to an early Blairgowrie festival. Alison McMorland’s essay on the Fetterangus Stewarts taps into Henderson’s championing of the Travellers as tradition-bearers, while George Gunn and Fred Freeman deal with his fluidity of language and the place of ­poets in general.

Maurice Fleming, born in the same road in Blairgowrie as Henderson, gives an insightful picture of the Perthshire which shaped the man and where, on the slopes of Ben Gulabin, overlooking his Glenshee birthplace, his ashes were scattered. «