Obituary: Janey Buchan, one of the first MEPs, she was a passionate socialist who helped run the People’s Festival

JANEY Buchan was one of the first members of the new European Parliament in 1979, serving as a Labour MEP in Brussels on behalf of her native Glasgow for 15 years, until 1994. But she was far more than a parliamentarian; indeed, she was in many ways the opposite of those MEPS who see the European Parliament as something of a golden egg-laying goose in terms of their careers and lifestyles.

The daughter of a tram driver whose wife was forced to work as a maid during the recession of the 1930s, Buchan became a campaigner for social justice not just in Scotland but around the world. She was also a stalwart of the arts and of civil and labour rights in Scotland, not to mention the rights of the previously-underground gay community.

After the war, she helped run the People’s Festival in Edinburgh, which in turn begat what we now know as the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. She was a particular lover of folk music and political song – from Scots to anti-apartheid or Woody Guthrie.

Having married, in 1946, Norman Buchan, a teacher who would become Labour MP first for West Renfrewshire and later for Paisley South, she herself became a councillor on Strathclyde Regional Council before being elected in 1979 in the first elections to the European Parliament.

Jane O’Neil Kent was born in Glasgow in 1926, four days before the famous general strike in support of miners, which would later re-emerge in her consciousness as she strove for social justice.

Her father Joseph had been lucky to get a job driving Glasgow trams after the shipyards fell silent. Her mother Chrissie Sinclair had come down from Thurso aged only 12 to seek work. She got it, as a downstairs maid for a tobacco magnate in Glasgow’s Pollokshields.

Young Janey recalled feeling lucky that their “room and kitchen” flat in Meadow Road, Partick, was the only one in their tenement with an adjacent toilet. But her parents had to sleep in the kitchen while she, her sister Alexanderina and her grannie shared the other room.

When young brother Enoch showed up, his bedroom for a while was the front room cupboard.

Her mum and dad had married in St Mary’s Episcopal Cathedral on Glasgow’s Great Western Road but soon got swept up in the mood of revolutionary fervour that swept early-1920s Clydeside and both joined the Communist Party. Janey passed her 11-plus but had to leave school at 14 to make 14 shillings a week as a trainee shorthand typist to help support her family.

It was in the Young Communist League at the start of the war that she met Norman, a first-year student at Glasgow University, who would soon be called up as a tank driver. He would serve in North Africa before returning after the war to finish his education and fight the communist cause in the famously heated debates in Glasgow University’s Student’s Union.

In 1949, Janey was part of a small group that organised The People’s Festival, with classical and folk music concerts, poetry readings and performances directed by Joan Littlewood, the first fringe events alongside the newly-created Edinburgh Festival.

As good communists, Norman and Janey provided beds for speakers and artists from around the globe, often to the discomfort of their young son Alasdair. In 1956, however, after the Soviets invaded Hungary, the couple left the Communist Party, joined Labour and remained there for the rest of their lives.

Both lovers of folk song, the couple first set up The Ballads Club at Rutherglen Academy, which would later become the Glasgow Folk Club.

Their son Alasdair recalled that overnight sleepers then included such famous names as Ewan MacColl, Martin Carthy, Jeannie Robertson, Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie’s famous sidekick and harmoniser Cisco Houston.

The American visitors, notably Bill Leader of Topic Records, would leave behind little-known American folk recordings, many of which influenced Scots musicians from Billy Connolly to Archie and Ray Fisher.

In 1956, when few of us had heard of Nelson Mandela, Janey organised a concert to support him and other ANC activists who had been arrested for defying apartheid in South Africa.

Musicians that night included The Reivers, the Clyde Valley Stompers jazz band and the Joe Gordon Folk Four. Also playing was Enoch Kent, Janey’s brother, who would go on to run the famous Singers Club in London, along with Ewan MacColl and his wife Peggy Seeger, where up-and-coming artists including Paul Simon and Bob Dylan gave some of their earliest performances.

In the early 1960s, Pete Seeger asked Janey to organise a concert for him in Glasgow. After the concert became an unusual (for a folk concert) sell-out at the St Andrew’s Halls in Glasgow’s Charing Cross, Seeger asked her if she could do the same for an up-and-coming folk singer – Dylan, who was asking for cash up front to the tune of £75 in Scottish banknotes.

Never having heard of Dylan, Janey declined, saying she wasn’t sure how many seats she could sell. She was, after all, a music-loving volunteer, not an entrepreneur. Despite Dylan’s subsequent fame, she never regretted the decision. She never really liked his music and was upset to hear that he didn’t pay Irishman Dominic Behan royalties for the song Behan called The Patriot Game but which Dylan Americanised as With God On Our Side.

In her later life, Buchan continued to donate and raise funds for South African causes. She quietly paid for several years to ensure the upkeep of the family of one imprisoned ANC activist.

In the arts she was trustee of the Smith Museum in Stirling, curated by her dear friend Elspeth King. She donated her paintings, books and other documents to Glasgow University, Glasgow Caledonian, the Glasgow School of Art and many others.

And yet she turned down honorary degrees from several universities, not wanting anyone to think she had “bought” them with her donations.

She once said that her political philosophy could be best expressed not by 20 volumes of Marx but by two Burns-like lines from Scottish mill worker Mary Brooksbank, herself a 14-year-old school-leaver by necessity, in the song now best known as the Jute Mill Song: “Oh, dear me, the warld’s ill-divided, Them that the work the hardest are aye wi’ least provided.”

Janey Buchan died in a nursing home in Brighton. Her husband Norman died in 1990. She is survived by their son Alasdair, her brother Enoch, four grandchildren and a great grandson.

PHIL DAVISON