Hamish Henderson

Born in Perthshire as James (Hamish) Scott Henderson in 1919, Hamish Henderson studied Modern Languages at Downing College, Cambridge. An important poet and pioneering folklorist, Henderson was central to the folk revival catalysed by the Edinburgh People’s Festivals in the early 1950s. Henderson travelled Scotland collecting traditional songs and tales: his mother, who spoke English, French, and Gaelic, imparted on the young Hamish a love of the Gaelic language, and he wrote and translated poetry from Gaelic, French, German, Latin and Greek. He also wrote songs, some bawdy, others political. While Henderson was in Italy after the war, he was ‘asked to leave’ while working on a translation of the letters of Antonio Gramsci, the founder of the Italian Communist Party. Henderson held several honorary degrees and after his retirement became an honorary fellow at the School of Scottish Studies. He died in Edinburgh on the 8th of March 2002.

Henderson’s Collected Poems and Songs were published in 2000 but songs such as ‘The Freedom Come-All-Ye’ and ‘The John Maclean March’, are classics examples of Henderson’s own compositions. His experience of war gave rise to two volumes of poetry, Ballads of World War II (1947), which included ‘The Ballad of the D-Day Dodgers’ and ‘The Highland Division’s Farewell to Sicily’, and the poem sequence Elegies for the Dead in Cyrenaica (1948). Later works include Alias MacAlias (1992) and The Armstrong Nose (1996).