Last updated 21:42, Wednesday, 12 November 2008

YESTERDAY was the 50th anniversary of the death in a Glasgow hospital of a former Langholm Academy teacher and organist at North UF church.

Francis George Scott went on to become a well-known composer who believed that a distinctively Scottish idiom could be created, even in purely orchestral music, through a knowledge and appreciation of the speech rhythms and inflections of Scottish poetry. But because of these ideals, his compositions were often controversial.

Scott was born in Hawick and after being educated there and at Edinburgh University, he went on to teach English and eventually taught in Langholm Academy. Later he graduated B.music at Durham University, then lectured in music at Jordanhill Training College for teachers.

He set to music more than 120 Scots songs, drawing on the work of Scottish poets from the 16th century onwards, including, in his five published collections, 26 Burns’ poems, one of Sir Walter Scott’s and 10 of Hugh MacDiarmid’s, including the latter’s Watergaw.

One of his pupils at Langholm was Christopher Murray Grieve who, writing later in life as Hugh MacDiarmid, said of Scott: “He had an immense musical and general background and, if he had followed the customary practice of brainy Scots and devoted himself to anything but Scotland, he would undoubtedly have won recognition decades before he died.

“Happily, he took the opposite course and has paid for it in being unable to get his work across. His work should have taken the Scottish public by storm.”

Reading these words of MacDiarmid, I realise now why Francis Scott’s work never got the recognition it deserved.

It was written at a time when all things Scottish were deemed to be parochial and inferior to those of our southern neighbour.

Francis Scott, Hugh MacDiarmid and the Borders painter William Johnstone had an uphill struggle to gain the reputation they deserved because in their works they stayed loyal to their roots. These three Borderers spearheaded the Scottish Renaissance in the arts.

Writing to MacDiarmid about his last (fifth) book of song settings, Francis Scott said: “I have, I think, managed to sing a song at least.” He had not only sung but printed musical settings of 60 Scottish poems.

Commenting on his great work, A Renaissance Overture, MacDiarmid wrote: “There is no comparison between Scott and any other composer Scotland has ever produced; he stands on a plane of his own.”

When MacDiarmid was in the throes of writing what is probably the poem for which he’s best known, A Drunk Man looks at the Thistle, he had got to the point where, he admits, he was unable to “see the forest for the trees”.

He handed his whole manuscript over to Scott who, he says, “was not long in seizing on the essentials and urging the ruthless discarding of the unessentials. I had no hesitation in taking his advice and in this way the significant shape was educed from the welter of stuff and the rest pruned away”.

So MacDiarmid’s former teacher at Langholm Academy had a hand in the final draft of this epic poem.

On reading MacDiarmid’s autobiography, Lucky Poet, I came across his views on being a pupil at Langholm Academy.

He writes: “It was a great school in those days – I remember a teacher going to a table-drawer for his tawse only to find the whole black length of leather neatly diced” and “I remember a friend of mine throwing a frameless slate at the head of one of the teachers and how, almost simultaneously, it split one of the panels of the door as Black Jock, the headmaster, entered the room – if he’d been a fraction of a second earlier he’d have been shred in two.”

And I thought discipline in schools had got worse.

MacDiarmid doesn’t elaborate on the punishment meted out for these misdemeanours.