The Burns Supper: A Comprehensive History

By Clark McGinn

When did Burns Suppers start?
Why is it celebrated all over the world?
Who can join in the fun?
Spanning the history of the phenomenon, from the year of its creation in 1801 to the present day, this book offers you everything you need to know about the Burns Supper, and the poet for whom it is held every year. From the origins of the custom to its modern day interpretations, from the rituals and traditions to the fun and fellowship, this first full-length study of the unique annual celebration of Scotland's national poet answers every question you can think of, along with every one you can't.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Luath Press
• Release date: Feb 19, 2019
• ISBN: 9781912387564

Clark McGinn

Clark McGinn was born and brought up in Ayr, being educated at Ayr Academy where he spoke at his first Burns Supper. He has performed at over 200 Immortal Memory speeches in 32 cities in 17 countries, travelling nearly a dozen times round the globe in the process. He was President of the Burns Club of London during the Burns 250th Celebrations in 2009, when he gave the Eulogy at the National Service of Thanksgiving for Burns at Westminster Abbey. In 2014, he was awarded a PhD by the University of Glasgow for his research into the history of the Burns Supper and has had several peer-reviewed articles published on various aspects of Burns. He has published several books on the Burns Supper, including The Ultimate Burns Supper Book, The Burns Supper: A Comprehensive History and The Burns Supper: A Concise History. Clark lives with his wife, Ann, in Harrow-on-the-Hill and Fowey. Their three daughters live outside London and New York.

Book preview

CLARK McGINN was born and brought up in Ayr, being educated at Ayr Academy where he spoke at his first Burns Supper. He then studied at Glasgow University where he graduated MA (Hons) in Philosophy. After a near 30-year career in corporate and investment banking in London and New York, he left the city to capitalise on his experience in financing helicopters, globally holding senior executive positions in the then largest helicopter operating company and the largest independent specialist helicopter leasing company.

He has performed over 200 Immortal Memory speeches in 32 cities in 17 countries, travelling nearly a dozen times around the globe in the process and was President of the Burns Club of London during the Burns 250th Celebrations in 2009, when he gave the Eulogy at the National Service of Thanksgiving for Burns at Westminster Abbey. In 2014, he was awarded a PhD by the University of Glasgow for his research into the history of the Burns Supper.

Clark lives with his wife, Ann, in Harrow-on-the-Hill and Fowey. Their three adult daughters live outside London and New York.

First published 2019

ISBN: 978-1-912387-56-4

The author’s right to be identified as author of this book under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 has been asserted.

The paper used in this book is recyclable. It is made from low chlorine pulps produced in a low energy, low emission manner from renewable forests.

Printed and bound by Ashford Colour Press, Gosport

Typeset in 11 point Sabon by Lapiz

© Clark McGinn 2019

To Murray

First and Foremost

Contents

Acknowledgements

Abbreviations

List of Tables

Introduction

Part One: The Creation and Growth of the Burns Supper

CHAPTER ONE: Convivial Club Life in Burns’s Time

CHAPTER TWO: The Creation of the First Burns Supper

Alloway, July 1801

How Hamilton Paul Bonded the Elements of the Burns Supper Together

The Thomson Club: Antecedent or Anachronism?

CHAPTER THREE: The Charismatic Period

CHAPTER FOUR: The Traditional Period

International Scope

The United States of America

Canada

India

Australia

New Zealand

Hong Kong and the Far East

Africa

Back to the United Kingdom

CHAPTER FIVE: The Bureaucratic Period

The Federation

The All-too Mortal Memory of Hugh MacDiarmid

The Commemoration of Robert Burns and its Connection with the Past

The Orthodox or Institutionalised Burns Supper

CHAPTER SIX: The Burns Supper at War

CHAPTER SEVEN: Innovations and the Global Period

Communism

Broadcasting

The Advent of the Global Period

Part Two: The Elements of the Burns Supper

CHAPTER EIGHT: The Immortal Memory

Toasting Immortality and Immorality

The Immortal Memory at the Burns Supper

The Immortal Memory in Prose

The Form of the Toast

‘Join Me in a Toast’

CHAPTER NINE: The Haggis

The Haggis for Scotland

The Haggis and Verse

The Haggis on the Menu

The Haggis in Ritual

Addressing the Haggis

CHAPTER TEN: Ale, Sangs An’ Clatter

Drink

Entertainment

The Songs

The Poems

CHAPTER ELEVEN: Beginning And Ending The Evening

Opening the Proceedings: Saying Grace

Closing the Proceedings: Singing Auld Lang Syne

CHAPTER TWELVE: Female Participation in Burns Suppers

Women Attending the Burns Supper

The Toast to the Lass(i)es

Conclusion

Appendices

Appendix A: Additional Account of the First Burns Supper from The Air Edition

Appendix B: Report of the First Meeting of the Paisley Burns Club, 29 January 1805

Appendix C: Biographies of the First Nine Burns Supper Guests – The Founding Members of the Allowa’ Club

Appendix D: Chronological Catalogue of Early Burns Suppers from 1801 to 1858

Appendix E: All Commemorative Celebrations Recorded in the Year 1859

Bibliography

Endnotes

Acknowledgements

THIS BOOK HAS been long in thought. In its anterior (or stand-up before an audience) life, it grew through many Burns Supper speeches from my first in 1976 to those a few months ago. To all those many friends, my thanks for allowing me to explore the poet’s work in your convivial company and for not shouting out ‘heard it before’ – even if you had. I am only sorry that some, including my father, George L McGinn, will not be here to read this. Similarly, life has less sparkle, before or after dinner, since the all-too-early death of my gifted friend Charles Kennedy.

In its posterior (or seated in front of the laptop) life, I am grateful for the insights and friendships of the team at the Centre for Robert Burns Studies at the University of Glasgow. My primary thanks go to Professors Gerry Carruthers and Kirsteen McCue who could not have been more helpful and supportive supervisors, helping one who knew something of the language of Burns but less about the grammar of academia. Thanks also go to my examiners Professors Nigel Leask and Chris Whatley. I have particular thanks to render to the staff of Ayr’s Carnegie Library, and to Linda Fairlie of East Ayrshire Museums who went out of her way to help me see the Hamilton Paul manuscripts. This is a neat segue to Dr William Zachs whose exceptional kindness in permitting me to work with his private collection allowed the first Immortal Memory to be discovered through his characteristic generosity. Throughout those two phases stand knowledgeable friends whose opinions and thoughtfulness reflect the greatest traditions of the Burns Club: Frank and Susan Shaw and Jim and Wendy Henderson, who are always consistently encouraging. It is a pleasure to be working with Gavin at Luath on another project.

Appropriately in the Burns context, I could have accomplished nothing without my ‘lassies’. Ann, forever inspirational and essential; and Claire, Eleanor and Emma – as wonderful, engaging and infuriating as only a trio of much-loved daughters could be (and my salutations to their lovely husbands, and my first grandchild, too). But they will forgive me, this time, if this work is dedicated especially to my dear friend and sparring partner, Murray Pittock, who, had there been gowans on Gilmorehill in the late ‘70s, would have been found pulling them with his sincere and lifelong friend, the author.

Abbreviations

a) Common Editions of Burns’s works: Poems Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect , (Kilmarnock: J Wilson, 1786), is cited as the Kilmarnock Edition .

Poems Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, (Edinburgh, Creech, 1787), using the ‘skinking’ version, is cited as the First Edinburgh Edition.

The Works of Robert Burns. With an Account of his Life, and a Criticism on His Writings, to which are Prefixed, Some Observations on the Character and Conditions of Scottish Peasantry; James Currie (ed), (4 vols), (London/Edinburgh: Cadell & Davies/Creech, 1800), is cited as the Currie Edition.

Poems Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, By Robert Burns, With the Life of the Author, Written by Himself, and Elegant Extracts from His Letters, To Which is Added an Appendix, containing a Number of Pieces Not in Any Former Edition of His Poems, (Baltimore: A. Miltenberger, 1812), is cited as the Baltimore 1812 Edition.

The Poems and Songs of Robert Burns, With a Life of the Author, Containing a Variety of Particulars, Drawn from Sources Inaccessible by Former Biographers. To Which is Subjoined an Appendix, Containing a Panegyrical Ode, and a Demonstration of Burns’ Superiority to Every Other Poet as a Writer of Song, Revd Hamilton Paul, (ed), (Air [sc. Ayr]: Wilson McCormick & Carnie, 1819), is cited as the Air Edition.

The Works of Robert Burns, The Ettrick Shepherd [James Hogg] & William Motherwell, (eds), (5 vols), (Glasgow: Archibald Fullerton, 1836), is cited as the Motherwell/Hogg Edition.

The Life and Works of Robert Burns, Robert Chambers (ed), revised by William Wallace, (4 vols), (Edinburgh: Chambers, 1896), is cited as the Chambers/Wallace Edition.

The Letters of Robert Burns, J. DeLancey Ferguson (ed), G Ross Roy (Second Edition ed.), (2 vols), (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1985): individual letters are referenced by the number assigned, thus: Letters, L. [number], to [addressee], [date] and other references thus: Letters, vol.[number], p.[number].

The Poems and Songs of Robert Burns, James Kinsley (ed), (3 vols), (Oxford: Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1968): individual poems are referenced by the number assigned by Kinsley, thus: Poems K.[number] and other references thus: Poems, Kinsley, vol. [number], p.[number].

The Oxford Edition of the Works of Robert Burns is abbreviated, as a series, to Oxford WRB, with the individual volumes abbreviated thus:

•Nigel Leask (ed), Volume I: Commonplace Books, Tour Journals, and Miscellaneous Prose as Oxford WRB ( I );

•Murray Pittock (ed): Volume II : The Scots Musical Museum, Part One as Oxford WRB ( II ) with individual songs shown as [ SMM Volume no. – Roman numeral], and

•Murray Pittock (ed): Volume III : The Scots Musical Museum, Part Two a s Oxford WRB ( III ).

b) Hamilton Paul: Manuscripts

McKie Collection: cited as McKie MS, [curatorial letter].

Zachs Collection: cited as Zachs MS, [date].

c) Other Sources:

James Ballantine, Chronicle of the Hundredth Birthday of Robert Burns. Collected and Edited by James Ballantine (Edinburgh & London: A Fullerton & Co, 1859) is cited as Ballantine with individual references to p.[number] ([event name]).

Burns Chronicle is cited as Burns Chronicle ([year]), [page number] without distinction of ‘Series Number’ or ‘Volume Number’.

List of Tables

Table A: Newspaper Reports of Early Hamilton Paul Burns Suppers.

Table B: Number of Burns Suppers Held Each Year from 1801 to 1858.

Table C: Geographical Spread of Burns Suppers in 1859.

Table D: Geographical Spread of Burns Events reported for the 1859 Centenary.

Table E: Recorded Burns Suppers between 1801 and 1858 compared to 1859.

Table F: BBC Broadcasts of Burns Suppers and Other Burns Programmes, 1923–1935.

Table G: Poems in Memory of Burns as Contained in the 1843 Blackie Edition.

Table H: Form of the Principal Toast at Dalry Burns Club: 1826 to 2018.

Table I: Form of ‘the Immortal Memory’ Across Ballentine's Chronicle 1859.

Table J1: Form of Principal Toasts in 1859.

Table J2: Form of Response in 1859.

Table K: Statistical Analysis of Haggis in Ballantine’s Chronicle.

Table L: Toast List, Broughton 1832.

Table M: Toast List, Glasgow Literary & Artistic Club, January 1859.

Table N: Burns Songs Sung in 1859.

Table O1: Analysis of Types of Song Sung in 1859.

Table O2: Graph of Songs Sung During 1859.

Table P: Songs Sung at Dalry Burns Club Anniversary Dinners, 1870 to 2018.

Table Q: Burns Poems Recited in 1859.

Table R: Recitations at Alexandria Burns Club: 1885 to 2016.

Table S: Poems read at Alexandria Burns Club: 1981 to 2016.

Table T: Publication Dates of Burns’s Graces.

Table U: Manner of Singing Auld Lang Syne in 1859.

Table V: Female Participation in Ballantine's Chronicle, 1859.

Table W: Modes of Female Participation in Ballantine's Chronicle, 1859.

Table X: Statistical Analysis of Female Participation in Ballantine’s Chronicle.

Table Y: Ladies Burns Clubs Federated From 1920.

Introduction

THIS IS THE FIRST full-length study of the unique phenomenon known as the Burns Supper. This annual celebration of the life and works of the poet Robert Burns is held in Scotland and, increasingly, globally around the anniversary of the poet’s birthday in January in the form of a convivial dinner with particular, some may say peculiar, ritual traditions. There is no similar literary or national celebration dedicated to a poetical or heroic figure held with broadly recognisable ritual around a given annual date. St Patrick’s Day in an unstructured (and Guinness-commercialised) fashion comes close and while many figures are revered at their birthplaces or during their centennial celebrations, it is only Robert Burns who captures international interest each year on (or about) 25 January when Scots, including their families and descendants, the international Scottish diaspora, communists, inhabitants of former outposts of the British Empire and folk throughout the USA share in a dinner in memory of Scotland’s national poet, celebrating his charismatic life and his memorable poetry, and what each of those legacies mean to that particular audience. As one early biographer put it, Burns has achieved ‘every honour except canonisation’.¹

The history starts with that biographer, the minor Ayrshire poet, cleric and Freemason, the Reverend Hamilton Paul (1773–1854) who organised the first Burns Supper in Burns Cottage in Alloway on the fifth anniversary of Burns’s death. The number of Burns Suppers held has grown virtually every year since then, such that an estimated nine million people (equivalent to around one and a half times the population of Scotland) participated in Burns Suppers, or Burns Nights as they are sometimes called, in the 250th anniversary year of his birth in 2009. Like the global use of the English language, the celebration of Burns Night is of Scotland but is (happily) not insulated from global ownership.

This growth was spontaneous on the whole (although wider organisation was evident at centennial anniversary years and around specific statuary projects) and each event broadly followed and still follows the ritual created by Hamilton Paul. The essential, or at least core, elements have been relatively consistent features in the Burns Supper over its 200-odd year history: toasting the poet’s memory, addressing and eating a haggis and sharing in Burns’s poems and songs. To these at various times, other accidental elements have been added, but were the proposer of today’s Immortal Memory to be exchanged in time and place with Hamilton Paul in 1801, each would recognise the form and structure of the event they were enjoying. Over the years, the Burns Supper has been held at various levels of social formality, bringing together dukes and dustmen, from Scotland and across the globe, as hosts, guests and performers. Many Suppers have involved the consumption of heroic quantities of alcohol, but there have been many douce events, sometimes even on strict temperance lines, and, while no formal dinner in 1801 would have had women present (unless cooking or serving) within a few decades women had begun to attend Burns Night, as spectators, then at table, and ultimately as complete equals. The success of the format is three-fold. First, the Burns Supper remains a social and convivial party that should be a pleasure to attend. Fellowship and community are key themes in Burns’s works, so this is an apt vehicle for his celebration. Secondly, there is a greater degree of flexibility in how it can be arranged than is often recognised; and finally, the few mandatory elements are key to understanding Burns’s own imperative to be recognised as ‘Bard’ within a milieu which calls for participation. The original Burns Suppers recognised this and deliberately utilised Burns’s most performative verse to capture the spirit of his oeuvre. By incorporating that bardic quiddity, the Burns Supper after two centuries still shares that fundamental experience which is essential to its immediacy and integrity as a vehicle for the appreciation of Robert Burns. While other contemporary societies and annual literary dinners have fallen into desuetude, the Burns Supper has exhibited longevity and a growth in scale annually that is exceptional. These key elements will each be discussed in turn in the chapters below, showing that the event is, and has been from the beginning, more multi-faceted and open than critics have generally given it credit for.

Furthermore, the Burns Supper has developed in national and international scope with audiences entirely composed of Scots of birth, of heritage or of inclination mixing with people the world over. In fact, certain of the rituals we take for granted as Scottish inventions have received embellishment from abroad which have contributed to an organic development of the patters of performance within the ‘standard’ Burns Supper.

Academic research into the Burns Supper has been hindered by one practical issue and two category mistakes. The practical point is the sheer volume of ephemeral sources. The growth of the phenomenon was spontaneous without an underlying movement or a governing body: for every Burns Club which kept records, there would be other groups or societies who would hold an event, possibly with some press notice, but by-and-large leaving no footprints in the sand. This thesis has attempted to start a rigorous capture of newspaper and other anecdotal and biographical reports to round out the corpus of formal club minutes, with nearly 3,500 recorded Burns Suppers from 1801 to 1859.

The first category error arises out of those records. The last two or three years have seen some rewarding research around the great Burns Centenary of 1859, as documented by James Ballantine. His massive Chronicle of the Hundredth Birthday of Robert Burns reported on around 1000 different Burns celebrations. The depth (and availability) of this compendium has encouraged many commentators to see 1859 as the keystone of the Burns Supper bridge.² However, despite centennials being a very appealing study, the Burns Supper had almost 60 years of development prior to that year and it has to be seen and analysed as both annual and polycentric in its approach. The concept can only be truly engaged with by looking at the early events which established the recognised form, and then seeing how the global publicity of 1859 accelerated an already established and growing phenomenon.

The second, more negative and more long-standing, category mistake was the growing confusion arising out of the polemics of Hugh MacDiarmid (Christopher Murray Grieve, 1892–1978) which was carried through into the late 1970s and 1980s. This conflates the Burns Club movement with the Burns Supper itself. While, as will be discussed, the very nature of the Burns Supper is born out of the clubbable life popular in Burns’s time, the popularity of the Burns Supper was linked to a wider range of social and national groups than the one narrow target of Grieve’s diatribes. So, while it is accepted that the formalisation of the Burns Clubs into the Burns Federation and then, pejoratively, into the ‘Burns Cult’ brought with it an often-stultifying self-belief in the form of the ritual of the Supper and in a sub-kailyard orthodoxy and Highland-Mariolatry of many of the speeches, there were many other Suppers based on different approaches to the poet. The possibility of arranging one to suit a particular group’s politics, location or social views was open to all and was consistently taken up; of course, MacDiarmid personally attended Burns Suppers virtually every year from 1918 to his death 60 years later, which effectively proves this latter point of accessibility.

These errors were magnified and maintained by a mutual distrust which grew in the 20th century between the remaining professional, yet numerically declining, cadre of Burns academics on the one hand and the growing amateur world of the Burns enthusiasts on the other. The former looked upon the latter with the de haut en bas approach of a modern Hugh Blair, asserting that their appreciation of the poet ‘smelt of the smithy’, while the latter disregarded the former as impractical spinners of wool ‘so fine that it is neither fit for weft nor woof’.³ Fortunately a widespread rapprochement over the last 15 years had taken most of the heat out of that false debate with a mutual recognition that Burns appreciation is a complex area and in consequence can be handled in different but equally effective ways without being obliged to compromise one’s tribal standards.

It is also enlightening to see how broad the adoption of the Burns Supper was in geographical terms. For the traditionally Scotto-centric Burnsian, it will be a shock to find that there were Burns Suppers held in Sunderland before Paisley, in Oxford before Kilmarnock, in Philadelphia before Dumfries and in Tasmania before Irvine.

The success of the Burns Supper concept across the world comes from its affinity with the way Burns enjoyed his own poetry. As evidenced internally in his works, his enjoyment of good company and how he saw his own poetical legacy are key themes of importance to Burns. In creating an anniversary dinner at the behest of Burns’s old patron John Ballantine, Hamilton Paul sought to match these two particular tropes of Burns’s life and works to the convivial dining club atmosphere of the period, imbued with Masonic inspired ritual. Paul readily found what Robert Crawford has called the ‘performative’ and ‘bardic’ qualities of Burns, and that empathy crystallised key points in the dinner to echo position statements made by Burns in his own poems about how he saw his own national and bardic inheritance. As Crawford sums it up: ‘Burns wanted to shape how audiences would regard him’ so the dinner was deliberately built on a structure of a toast to him who’s far awa’ with ‘Auld Scotia’ feasting on her ‘haggis and her dram’ while making the most of a ‘rowth o’ rhyme’, or ‘sangs and clatter’ to while away care.⁴ Often, when researchers look at the Cape Club or the Thomson Club, their first response is that these occasions look like Burns Suppers. It is true that they do share a common and convivial format of fellowship, ritual, poetry and drink but those clubs, and literally hundreds of others from that clubbable time, waned while the Burns Supper waxed. There has to be a logical reason for that – it was the way Paul introduced key resonances from Burns himself, in what could be called Burns’s bardic quiddity, or perhaps, his bardic DNA into the format which ensured its longevity. Paul thus combined a basic ritual with sufficient flexibility to allow it to cross boundaries (be they geographical, political, national or, in time, of gender) yet remaining true to a celebration of a great poet and a complex man.

The development of the Burns Supper can be described using the construct of Max Weber’s sociological analysis of the legitimacy of power and leadership to frame its growth patterns.⁵ Starting with a ‘Charismatic’ period between 1801 and to around 1826, where Burns Suppers were driven by friends, Freemasons and mainly minor poets who had been directly influenced by the dead Bard; then a ‘Traditional’ period from then to the founding of the Burns Federation in 1885 which saw the widening ad hoc growth of Burnsian celebration now seen as a tradition (with an undercurrent of prominent figures using Burns to define competing views of Scotland). Next comes a ‘Bureaucratic’ period from 1885 to 1996, covering the period of the growth of the Burns Federation (and a period of many dull, rigidly righteous, Burns Suppers); and finally, the modern, ‘Global’ period (following the relatively unsuccessful 1996 bicentenary and ongoing from then) when modes of Burns Suppers multiplied but with each being still recognisable in Hamilton Paul’s core terms.

Prior to that Global period, and still occasionally reverberating today, academic, nationalist and left-wing critics sniped at the phenomenon. Tom Devine famously hits two coconuts with one shy in his put down: ‘the Burns Supper School of Scottish History’, but that is ill informed as there can surely be no complete understanding of Scottish cultural history without seeing Burns and his writings in context and in terms of the people’s reception of them. Given the popularity of Burns as both poet and icon, alongside the widespread support of the Burns Supper, this is an important part of how Scottish literary heritage has developed in the last two centuries, so it should not be so lightly dismissed.⁶ It is instructive to think of what the Burns Supper has enabled. During the period of criticism, effectively from after the Second World War, the academic study of the works of Burns had been in steady, apparently irreversible decline (as discussed by Bentman, and more recently by Pittock) yet during that same period, the number of people attending a Burns Supper increased showing an inverse correlation between the scholarly and the popular reception of Burns.⁷ It is no part of this thesis to claim that the quality of the analysis of Burns’s work in Burns Supper speeches on average was, or is, of consistent, rigorous, academic quality but care should be taken to avoid Voltaire’s fallacy of ‘the best being the enemy of the good’ by assuming that any lack of academic tone or critical apparatus in an Immortal Memory speech automatically invalidates its worth or insight.

At bottom, the concept of the Burns Supper is about people meeting around the dinner table enjoying and, to an extent, thinking about the poems of Burns in a context that reminds them of Burns’s self-desire to be remembered as an immortal bard. The Burns Supper has been an inclusive international phenomenon: with greater female participation, more encouragement of other poets, and less drink consumed than its critics would have believed. As with all amateur (in both senses) movements, enthusiasm has at times exceeded critical judgement and the fear of change was, for some time, self-defeating. By a mutual recognition that the Burns Supper, like Burns’s poetry, is not in the ownership of one nationality, one political party or any gender, the Burns Supper remains the largest literary festival in the world and shows no sign of abating.

This book examines the Burns Supper phenomenon first by looking at how Hamilton Paul took the conceits of the dining clubs of Enlightenment Scotland and embedded performative parts of Burns’s work into it to create a ritual whole. Secondly, it explores the rapid growth in participation in the Burns Supper in numbers and by geography over the following two centuries. Thirdly, it looks at the key elements within the Burns Supper programme, when and how they were introduced and their development over time.

In the run up to 2009 and since that 250th anniversary year, the Burns Supper’s popularity has again increased as groups rediscovered that it was possible (canonical, even) to celebrate Burns in a way congenial to their own social or interest group and in so doing to welcome to the table, through the mediation of his poetry, the poet whom Longfellow called his ‘dear guest and ghost’ in a fashion he would recognise and enjoy. As Burns enjoined us:

HERE’S, a bottle and an honest friend!

What wad ye wish for mair, man?

Wha kens, before his life may end,

What his share may be of care, man.

Then catch the moments as they fly,

And use them as ye ought, man: —

Believe me, happiness is shy,

And comes not ay when sought, man.⁸

Part One

The Creation and Growth of The Burns Supper

CHAPTER ONE

Convivial Club Life in Burns’s Time

For thus the royal Mandate ran,

When first the human race began,

‘The social, friendly, honest man,

‘Whate’er he be,

‘’Tis he fulfils great Nature’s plan,

‘And none but he’.⁹

WHEN THE REVEREND HAMILTON Paul agreed to arrange the first anniversary dinner for Robert Burns’s patrons and friends in July 1801 he deliberately planted the Burns Supper seed in identifiably fertile soil: the club milieu of late 18th century Scotland – a scene not unfamiliar to the Bard himself, to say the least. The overall wider context of the genesis of the Burns Supper phenomenon should be seen through work addressing the wider topics around associative entertainments by commentators such as Davis McElroy, Peter Clark and specific aperçus from Corey Andrews, Gerry Carruthers and Rhona Brown.¹⁰ Hamilton Paul is at the end of the period these writers analyse, but he created his format before the particular characteristics of Regency (im)morality and the subsequent counterweight of early Victorian values changed the accidental and alcoholic nature of clubbable life into a more regimented, regulated and self-perceived respectable set of institutions. The key element of the ‘convivial sociability’ which reigned in the decades before, during and immediately after Burns was that Scottish people (mainly but not exclusively men) met in regular gatherings for debate, conversation or song with a modest amount of food and a large (or larger) quantum of alcoholic drink. In the 1950s the equivalently ubiquitous pastime would likely have been described as attending the cinema while smoking and now, perhaps, the commonest social activity of an evening in Scotland may well be sitting side by side on the settee half watching a DVD while posting pointless tweets or playing an electronic game: for Burns and his fellows, it was the life of clubs.

In his Dictionary of 1775, Samuel Johnson defined ‘club’ as ‘an assembly of good fellows, meeting under certain circumstances’.¹¹ Clubbability, in its broadest sense, was then a national pastime and the clubs that afforded these pursuits were multiform: ranging from local tavern drinking partnerships who might meet daily or weekly through to learned societies whose activities were enshrined in Royal Charters. The interesting characteristic of Scottish clubs of that era is that the majority of them spanned adjacent social classes (they were, so to speak, the ‘vertical’ dimension) and at the same time were not exclusive – a man might be a member of several, perhaps even many, quite different clubs according to his interests and friendships (being a ‘horizontal’ axis). Some care must be taken with the first of these concepts. While, for example, Freemasonry encouraged a view of classless brotherhood which allowed, in theory and to an extent in practice, a working man to participate in lodge business beside a peer, most convivial societies seem to have operated within what might be thought of as social airlocks. Here a median social class formed the bulk of membership with some members or associates joining from social strata a rank (or perhaps more) higher or lower, rather than there being a complete collection of all classes present in one society or association at any one time. Burns, of course, was exceptional in this range of socialisation as in many aspects of his personality, having an entrée to the widest social gamut.¹²

The common factor with all of these clubs, though, was the consumption of alcohol alongside the meeting of the club’s specific raison d’être (assuming it had one, other than drinking). The interesting part is that whether for a purpose or for a party, the club, society or association was a formalised arrangement for a group of ‘social, friendly, honest’ men to bond through drink. Many of these clubs were formed for the common pursuit of a leisure interest from the singing of songs to the enjoyment of sport. At the top of the vertical/social axis, entities such as the Caledonian Hunt or the Western Meeting created opportunities for horseracing and gambling with more controversial hobbies shared by groups like the Crochallan Fencibles, with their penchant for rude wit and bawdry, or the Beggars Benison in Anstruther and its partner The Wig Club of Edinburgh with their allegedly physical, sexual theme.¹³ Many clubs shared an interest beyond the moment of personal pleasure. Some were proponents of policy: in politics the influential Poker Club was named, not for the card game, but as metaphorical red-hot implement to stir up the divisive debate for a Scots militia, while in religion one finds societies like the Sophocardians (a pun on ‘wise-hearted’ Wishart, a proto-martyr of the Reformation). Then there were others with what would now be called a party-political slant, meeting to support specific statesmen or policies; such as the raft of clubs respectively idolising Pitt on the one hand or Fox on the other. Most of these clubs (whatever their ‘unique selling proposition’) enjoyed ephemeral success then terminal decline, which Clark calls ‘a limited shelf life’ of three to four years, as the fashion or the friendships faded and the initial arranger and company died, moved on, sobered up, or found a new affinity in the next fad.¹⁴

A few bodies found ways to institutionalise and endure. Freemasonry was already a thriving institution in Scotland in the late 1780s and is a special case which merits separate discussion below. Of the others, there are three groups of formalised societies functioning today on foundations from that period. The ‘gentleman’s clubs’ such as the New Club in Edinburgh (founded in 1787) or the Western Club in Glasgow (in 1825) acquired premises independent of the tavern or ale-house and thus gained a physical definition beyond the cadre of members at any given point in time, and they remain operative today with the same mandate of practical hospitality. Many debating societies like Burns’s own Tarbolton Bachelors’ Club (1780) or Gilbert’s similar association, the Mauchline Conversation Society (1786) have passed away, but those debaters associated with the universities, such as the Glasgow University Dialectic Society (traditionally founded prior to 1770) or the Speculative Society of Edinburgh (1764) today maintain that same Enlightenment tradition of free speech around university and external politics. Outwith undergraduate life, the formality of debate as a furtherance of academic endeavour can still be seen operating within the learned societies, such as the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland (1780) and the Royal Society of Edinburgh (1783).

Beyond these forms of formal association, three additional species went further and achieved a corporate status in the parallel world view of ‘self-help’ within the wider community. The concept of the public library is built on the more exclusive foundation of the subscription libraries of this period. Burns enjoyed membership of several private library societies in his life, having borrowed (surreptitiously) from the Air Library Society, been directly involved in the management of the library of the Monklands Friendly Society and donated books to the Dumfries Burgh Library. Of course, the widespread success of the public library came mainly latterly through Andrew Carnegie’s benevolence in the late 19th century, although it regrettably appears to be a myth that every Carnegie Library building was obliged by Carnegie’s trust to display a bust of Burns.¹⁵ In the world of finance, the savings bank movement was founded in Ruthwell (near Dumfries) by Burns’s acquaintance, the Reverend Henry Duncan (1774–1846) and expanded throughout the world. In the field of commerce, despite Adam Smith’s oft quoted concern that ‘people of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices’, Glasgow’s 1783 concept of a merchant’s chamber of commerce morphed into an internationally recognised form of virtuous trade association.¹⁶

This book is more concerned with the wider and generally ephemeral range of social or convivial clubs, which were a recognisable and an important part of social life and enjoyments in Burns’s time. By their nature, many of these societies left no records and few memories. As the recollections of and vestigial archives of the Edinburgh clubs of the period are more extensive than those of Glasgow or of the major county towns such as Ayr, so most analysis tends to focus on the capital as the seat of the Enlightenment club nexus with occasional wider ‘provincial’ research.¹⁷ This has the risk of creating a survivorship fallacy and so care must be taken not to assume that say the Cape Club with its archive at the National Archives of Scotland is the necessary standard base case of how a club was conducted. This chapter seeks, where possible, to look at clubs in a pan-Caledonian fashion taking as its foundation the associational milieu during Burns’s lifetime, with some insights from the Charismatic period of the Burns Supper movement (say between 1801 to 1826). The ubiquity of ‘convivial sociability’ is striking. Focussing on club life during this time, it would be wrong to home in on the prestigious societies of Edinburgh such as the Select Society, the Poker Club or the Speculative Society as the usual exemplars of the form. A ‘club’ could range from a bunch of tavern regulars who met for drinks on a specific (or every) night of the week, to a group who met periodically on a given weekday to dine, or those who planned a formal reunion dinner once a year. Written rules and formality of membership were not uncommon but certainly not obligatory and while there are interesting questions around why a group would choose to bind themselves in a formally written constitution, as opposed to merely gathering along customary lines, that is not a question that is material to this specific point, the agreement by action to create an associational group being what effectively binds the club together and gives it a personality.

Just as the clubs could meet in different ways, these ‘convivial’ groups could be founded by definition along class or political lines, by geography of birth, or around a common interest, a favourite pub or a shared desire to play a specific sport or pastime. Corey Andrews calls this construct of life: ‘drinking and thinking’, wittily adding, ‘the world of mid-century Edinburgh often borrowed more from the model of symposium than trivium and quadrivium’.¹⁸ This has led many commentators – both academic and the wildly successful ‘Scottish Enlightenment’ (or ‘booster’) genre of works, led by Arthur Herman’s extravagantly entitled How The Scots Invented The Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe’s Poorest Nation Created Our World and Everything In It – to focus on the intellectual theme which runs through all Scottish Enlightenment studies and to see this club life as a highly thoughtful enterprise.¹⁹ However, the construct is better thought of as ‘drinking and fill-in-the-gap’ for the ‘thinking’ element took myriad forms from the truly thoughtful whether in formal debate or political chat, through participative poetry and song, to those clubs whose sole aim was to create an entertaining excuse to meet for witty conversation as opposed to solemn ratiocination. The genesis of clubs was truly democratic: for if there were no club that catered for one’s tastes, one found like-minded friends and started a new club to fill that gap. One of the notable traits in this model of creation was to choose a witty or paronomasic name for the group: so we read of the Boar Club, because they met in Hogg’s Tavern, and the Antemanum Club who habitually dined before a hand of cards was played (or as its critics alleged who paid their bill ‘beforehand’ as they would be too drunk to settle up at the end of the night), or the Pious Club whose name reflected their meetings in a succession of Edinburgh pie houses.²⁰

In addition to transcending class, politics and wealth, club life had some limited ability to cross gender lines. While formal female-only clubs were unusual (the Fair Intellectual Club of Edinburgh being a rare documented example) the social convention of ladies making calls or attending soirées filled many of the associational needs that club life provided and the Assembly Rooms as centres of mixed conviviality in major towns is not unfamiliar to any reader of Jane Austen’s novels.²¹ The mingling of the sexes was not easily countenanced; there were more clubbable and more socially challenging events such as the Order of the Horn in Edinburgh in the earlier part of the century which was later described as a notorious ‘species of masquerade in which the sexes were mixed, and all ranks confounded’.²² So some element of gender mixed conviviality, however small, apparently could not be utterly frozen out even in Calvinist Scotland. Another good example is the Oyster Frolics which James Grant censoriously describes as ‘little better than orgies’. Here,

fashionable people made up a party by appointment, especially in winter, when the evenings closed in, and took their carriages as near as they could go conveniently, to these subterranean abysses or vaults... where the raw oysters and flagons of porter were set out plentifully... Ladies and gentlemen alike indulged in unrestrained manner in sallies and witticisms, observations and jests, that would not have been tolerated elsewhere. Brandy or rum punch succeeded the oysters and porter; dancing then followed; and when the ladies had departed in their sedans or carriages, the gentlemen would proceed to crown the evening by an unlimited debauch.²³

The formulae of clubs are capricious – groups of like-minded people finding a common purpose of enjoyment (would the use of the word ‘clubbing’ today be the same thought albeit a very different activity?) The underlying principle is clear: any group regardless of size, or class and to a limited extent, gender, can form a club. In Burns’s time, there were some well-known ‘clubbable men’: Smellie, Erskine and Parker were all boon companions. In Hans Hecht’s words, Burns had stumbled on:

The great intimacy which existed at that time throughout the literary world in Scotland. A brotherly bond seemed to unite its members; they were constantly meeting, in parties, in the daily discharge of their official duties, or in the numerous and varied clubs where they passed a considerable part of their spare time. They had the same habits, the same interests, the same amiable virtues and vices.²⁴

A noticeable feature of clubbable life was the horizontal axis – the fact that most men would be members or affiliates of several often quite diverse clubs. Peter Clark estimated that ‘three or four... were probably close to the maximum for most people, given the constraints of time and money’ and it is noticeable in the recollections of many clubs that one of the defining features in Scotland was a maximum spend on food and drink set within several of the clubs’ rules or customs which by creating a mutual sumptuary cap potentially allowed a man to be associated with more clubs than the national average.²⁵ Mark Wallace provides an invaluable review of the integrated and associational nature of Edinburgh clubs, by cross-referencing major men and their affiliation and from that research it would appear that many in Edinburgh did not recognise the numerical constraint posited by Peter Clark.²⁶ According to various contemporary records James Cumming (or Cummyng) of the Lyon Office (the heraldic court of Scotland) had sufficient free time to be a noted antiquary, a subscriber to Burns’s First Edinburgh Edition, and reputedly be the most clubbable man in eminently clubbable Edinburgh.²⁷ He was an active member of at least 15 clubs including:

The Cape Club

(as ‘Sir Nun and Abbess’ he served as Sovereign 1783–84)

The Jolly (or Jollie) Society

The Canongate Catch Club

The Royal Company of Archers

The Society of Fair Anglers

Thistle Lodge No 64 (Freemasons)

Gormandising Club

The Royal Order

The Royal Oak

The Society of Teachers

Mrs Hamilton’s Club

The Society of Antiquaries (Secretary)

Johnie Dowie’s ‘Circle’ ²⁸

And that is merely a list of where we know he went to drink formally.

In another social milieu, Ayrshire, Robert Burns enjoyed club life with the Tarbolton Bachelors and his fellow Freemasons. Looking at Burns’s life, particularly during his Edinburgh visits, his peak associational range was not far short of Cumming’s.²⁹ In addition to his home Freemasonic affiliations (he served as Depute Master of St James’s, Tarbolton, No.135 and later in life as Senior Warden in St Andrew’s Lodge, Dumfries, No.179), he accumulated four further honorary Lodge memberships: Canongate Kilwinning, No.2; Loudon Kilwinning, Newmilns, No.46; St John’s Kilwinning Kilmarnock, No.22 and St Abbe’s Lodge (Royal Arch) Eyemouth, No.70.³⁰ Beyond the Lodge, he was a paid-up member of the Crochallan Fencibles and an honorary member of the socially elite Royal Company of Archers in Edinburgh. In Dumfries, he acted as secretary of the Monklands Friendly Society library and served as a private in the Loyal Dumfries Volunteers. Furthermore, Burns was made an honorary burgess of six Scottish burghs: three of his ‘Five Carlins’ – Dumfries, Lochmaben and Sanquhar and three stages during his tours: Jedburgh, Dumbarton and Linlithgow. Additionally, he performed the role of ‘poet laureate’ to a range of institutional dinners and for various clubs and was a similar spirit at formal Excise dinners.³¹ He freely gave songs and poems to his Freemasonic brethren, famously being recognised by the Grand Master Mason as ‘Caledonia’s Bard’ when visiting Edinburgh.³² He contributed the verse expected at club dinners, too, whether grudgingly, as for the Earl of Buchan’s Thomson Club in absentia or as discussed below, more enthusiastically for the ‘proto-celebration’ of the Haggis Supper. Towards the end of his life he promised to send James Macdonald ‘an ode he composed when chosen poet laureate to a dinner for a party of Jacobite gentlemen on 31 December 1787 in Edinburgh’.³³

Even allowing for an element of lionising and the gifting of honorary memberships, Burns can be seen as having given and received significant stimulation through the spectrum of associational club engagement, both structured and less structured, in a defined, enjoyable social environment. The creation of that shared environment is key. The Cape Club, perhaps the most famous of the Edinburgh clubs, sought:

after the business of the day was over to pass the evening socially with a set of select companions in an agreeable but at the same time a rational and frugal manner; for this purpose beer and porter were their liquors, from fourpence to sixpence each the extent of their usual expense, conversation and a song their amusement, gaming generally prohibited and a freedom for each to come and depart at their pleasure was always considered as essential to the constitution of the Society.³⁴

And as a core part of that agreeable sociability, many clubs appointed poets laureate as seen with Burns above. The Cape Club firstly relied on the talents of David Herd (1732–1810), then on those of Robert Ferguson (1750–1774) to record and regale the members poetically and in song:

In freedom’s gay frolick we shorten the night

With humorous pitching & Songs of Delight,

Then who would not rather in Cape hall get drunk

As can be inferred from the list of his Freemasonic affiliations, the ‘brothers of the mystic tie’ were an important commitment in Burns’s life.³⁶ Freemasonry can be seen as the archetypal club of that period, spanning rank and geography internally in Scotland, but also including a network across the three kingdoms and beyond the seas such that it could be seen as the broadest associational network, absent the Kirk, in Scotland at that time. The craft had quite recently evolved from the merchant guilds of stone masons (‘the operatives’) into the Enlightenment movement of the ‘speculative’ (or ‘non-operative’ or ‘geometric’) Freemasons who used allegories of the ancient craft skills, projected onto the Biblical story of the building of Solomon’s Temple, to create a rule of life, brotherhood and personal behaviour. This transitioned the movement’s purpose from beyond the practical regulation of the guild or mystery of stone crafting into exemplifying a value-system based upon the fellowship of enlightened men who shared a belief in an unspecific Supreme Being and an all-encompassing fraternal duty of charity and mutual support.

The underlying themes... were improvement and enlightenment, with a stress on merit as the measure of men, education, and the joys of fraternal association; in sum, a utopian world detached from political, religious or attached social status.³⁷

There is a strong adherence even today and particularly in Ayrshire, to the belief that Freemasonry came into this post-mythological existence through agency of the stone masons who built Kilwinning Abbey. This is underpinned by the Schaw Statutes (of 1598 and 1599) where the master of works for the King of Scots referred to the workings of Kilwinning Lodge in ancient and honoured terms and this was further emphasised by the tradition that the first speculative mason was a Boswell of Auchinleck.³⁸ This belief is so strong that the modern Lodge in Kilwinning has special status within the Grand Lodge of Scotland being denominated ‘Mother Kilwinning’, constituting its own province and standing at the top of the roll of lodges as Lodge No. 0.

As an ancient house, Mother Kilwinning formerly had the power to charter new lodges. Several of the lodges with Burns affiliations are filials of Kilwinning, notably Canongate Kilwinning No.2 in Edinburgh which in Burns’s day was the focal point of ‘the western gentlemen’. This lodge effectively operated as the embassy of Ayrshire in the nation’s capital. The leading men of the county were prominent members, including Sir James Hunter Blair (the city’s Lord Provost and quondam MP whose banking fortune prospered after the Ayr Bank collapse) and Sir John Whitefoord (who lost his estates in that same debacle), James Dalrymple of Orange-field, the Earls of Eglinton (on the rise) and of Glencairn (on the decline), Thomas Miller, Lord Barskimming (on the highest bench) and, in literature, William Creech (who was an Ayrshire ‘faggot voter’ through Glencairn’s interests), Professor Dugald Stewart of Catrine and James Boswell of Auchinleck.

Any discussion of Freemasonic history is a challenging debate, but it would seem common ground that the Masonic fellowship certainly implies not only respectful working practices, but beyond that a social contentment amongst brethren. As Mark Wallace astutely comments: ‘Freemasonry has too often been viewed from a strictly Masonic context that frequently ignores its wider impact and influence on Enlightenment sociability’.³⁹ Certainly in Burns’s time, the Freemasons embodied Corey Andrew’s ‘thinking and drinking’ concept. As they were not confined to a particular locality, nor to a class, Freemasons met firstly in the ritual of their lodge meeting (‘thinking’) then afterwards to dine together (‘drinking’) with no apparent dichotomy. As an example, the minutes of Canongate Kilwinning for 1 February 1787 report Burns’s election as an honorary member of the Lodge (but not an election to a Laureate post) and then record that: ‘[h]aving spent the evening in a very social manner, as the meetings of the Lodge always have been, it was adjourned till next monthly meeting’.⁴⁰ Or, another example, quoted by Mark Wallace, at Roman Eagle Lodge, No. 160 in Edinburgh, where the minutes for 1 August 1785 conclude:

What with eating and drinking and appropriate conversation... passed the time with much good humour and sparkling wit till past eight o’clock in the evening. Finally, after several songs in Latin, French, Italian, English, and Gaelic, the Lodge was closed in the usual manner.⁴¹

The important thing to remember is that the working of the Masonic ritual was always followed by the social interaction around ‘the festive board’, which in the Scottish Masonic tradition is called the ‘Harmony,’ connoting both the custom of interspersing toasts with songs and more broadly the over-arching concept of fraternal bonding conducted after each regular lodge meeting. Harmony would also follow the traditional Annual Banquets, which were usually held on the feast of St John the Baptist (24 June) and/or St John the Evangelist (27 December) and typically on the anniversary of the date of lodge’s foundation charter.

As discussed above, the second part of a Masonic evening was scarcely different to the range of convivial societies popular at the time but what made Freemasonic Harmony different was that the philosophy of universal brotherhood amongst Masons gave any visiting Mason from out of town the right and ability to join his brethren (after confirming his bona fides through word, sign and grip) in a way that could not happen in mainstream clubs where membership was closed to all save recognised members and possibly their invited guests. That is not to say that there exist some examples of other societies which established offshoots, branches, or sister clubs: the Cape Club blessed daughters in Glasgow, Manchester and London and possibly in Charleston, South Carolina and The Beggar’s Benison permitted meetings outwith Anstruther in Edinburgh (and perhaps the US colonies).⁴² However, these have the feel of core members from the mother club moving away from home and being granted a dispensation to hold meetings rather than them sending out missionaries or embassies to found a new branch in partibus infidelium where old friends from home might never visit. Strang, the historian of the Glasgow clubs, reports one such event:

Mr Thomas Orr... went to Tobago. Previous to his leaving Glasgow, the brotherhood [of the What-You-Please-Club], on the 22nd October, 1807, presented him with a charter to hold a What-You-Please-Club in that island, under the annual tribute of sending a turtle to the mother club. ⁴³

That being true in a limited sense, but Freemasons were the only body to have the franchise concept institutionalised as an integral part of the organisation at this time. This was heightened through the new concept of the Grand Lodge of Scotland which recognised 49 lodges at its foundation in 1736, some 267 by 1785 and a total of 330 by 1800.⁴⁴ This fraternal concept of lodge membership had a dual commitment to both a particular local loyalty and simultaneously to a wider inherent bond to the wider Masonic community. This can clearly be seen in Burns’s own Masonic career both in his receipt of hospitable invitations to attend lodges as much as in the formal acknowledgments he received through the awards of honorary membership. It is important, however, to point out that, part of the successful growth of the movement during this period was the relatively straightforward ability for a group of master masons to obtain the charter for a new lodge to fill a geographical or –importantly – social gap. The creation of the Grand Lodge of Scotland (at least, after the feud over Kilwinning ancient privileges was eventually and peaceably resolved in 1807) still left individual lodges a great deal of freedom to express an individual character in membership, rules and non-ritual practices and it was this approach, combined with the ban on discussion or debate in the two then divisive topics of Scottish life – politics (effectively, who should be the King) and religion (how should the Kirk be governed) – which made the institution highly appealing to the broadest range of Scotsmen. It would be wrong, however, not to see that Freemasonic model as a part of the convivial associational whole, albeit the most highly developed and ultimately the most replicable and sustainable over centuries. So, when David Shields asks:

Whereas Freemasonry supplied a model for aestheticising community and had religious or quasi-religious cults, regalia, ceremony, and invented tradition, why do the clubs lack these things? And what are we to make of sincere nationalistic expressions that merge with the largely satiric, the burlesque, or the parodic?⁴⁵

Simply answered, there was as much ‘regalia, ceremony, and invented tradition’ such as the associational group sought and which was commensurate with convivial enjoyment. The Cape Club sat at the high end of this formality, with Johnnie Dowie’s coterie or Lucky Middlemas’s oyster frolics at the bottom end. For many men, their Mason Lodge fulfilled the appetite for structured associational life, so other enjoyments appear less formalised. Whether through the serious ritual of holding a Lodge and working the Masonic Degrees, or in the buffoon ritual of the Cape Club, the purpose was the same: an avowal of togetherness which then flowed absolutely and directly into the sharing of food and drink alongside a concomitant programme of toasts, poems, songs and participation. This was an essential part of the social life of Scotland at the time, and an essential part of Robert Burns’s enjoyment of life.⁴⁶

The associational life of ‘drinking and thinking’ was a defining element of the culture of Scotland in Burns’s time, and Burns grasped that part of life with both hands. His portfolio of club involvement was triple: a core commitment to Freemasonry, a periodic attachment to formal clubs where he lived and a popular ‘freelance’ role as poet laureate at large to many differing groups. As a participant and as a provider, Burns was a child of those clubbable times.

CHAPTER TWO

The Creation of the First Burns Supper

The posthumous fame of Burns is without parallel in the annals of poetry. Soon after his death, meetings were held in various parts of the British Empire, commemorative of his excellencies as a son of inspiration.⁴⁷

Alloway, July 1801

IT WAS WITHIN THIS social and intellectual milieu of ‘drinking and thinking’ that John Ballantine of Ayr, in 1801, asked two friends to call on Reverend Hamilton Paul, himself a well-known and clubbable man, to arrange for ‘a select party of the friends of Burns... to dine in the cottage in which he was born, and to offer a tribute to the memory of departed genius’.⁴⁸ Thus the fifth anniversary of the death of Robert Burns, 21 July 1801, saw nine gentlemen from Ayr dine at Burns Cottage, Alloway in commemoration of the life and works of their fellow Ayrshireman: the Bard of Coila, the Bard of Ayrshire, and a man who was being increasingly recognised as the Bard of Scotland.

To the extent that ‘The Allowa’ Club’ only held a series of annual suppers within the Cottage that would be an unremarkable story. If the sole thing that Hamilton Paul had done was create an annual dinner anchored in their poet’s veritable birthplace in Alloway that would be the end of a much shorter story. Many other birthplaces had such commemorations. What was to prove unusual, arguably unique, was the way in which the format of that first occasion immediately de-linked from the poet’s physical birthplace and spread through the West Coast, then across the remainder of Scotland and England and thence throughout the British colonies, trading posts and expatriate Scots communities. In a timescale shorter than the life of the poet, it was to become a globally recognised and annually enacted ‘convivial’ memorialisation of Robert Burns over a dining table by all modes and manners of men. This has been a neglected area of study and where academics and Burnsians have addressed it, they have conflated two distinct social incidents: the Burns Supper on the one hand and the formal Burns Clubs on the other. As there have always been more Burns Suppers than Burns Clubs, writing the history of popular celebration of the Bard by focussing on club activities and structures and, latterly, the Burns Federation, necessarily limits the understanding of the spontaneous and popular appeal of the Burns Supper. A much wider grouping of Scots by birth, descent, affiliation, or residence along with other national and political groups use the Burns Supper as a re-confirmation of shared values through the prism of the life and poetic works of Robert Burns. Just as the convivial clubs of Scotland in Burns’s time ranged from the formal to the occasional in constitutional terms, so Hamilton Paul’s creation of a ritual format could be adopted by different groups with whatever level of written obligation or even cultism that might appeal to the particular participants.

The creation of the first Burns Supper was at one level a spontaneous mark of affection by a former patron of Burns to mark the fifth anniversary of his protégé’s death and, at another level, it occurred not long after the first nationwide publication of his complete works and life story, as edited by Dr James Currie. One a localised, one an international, channel of memory.

As has been discussed, in the glory of the Edinburgh salons, Burns was seen part of the social circle of the ‘western gentry’ as Sir Walter Scott described them to Lockhart, which is to say, the Ayrshire élite.⁴⁹ At the date of the first Alloway supper, the poet’s designation was still most often ‘Burns, the Ayrshire Poet’, and so it is totally unsurprising that this celebratory development occurred within the core of polite society within the Royal Burgh of Ayr. At that time in Scottish society, Ayrshire was a rich county with the largest number of parliamentary electors of any county in Scotland built on a long list of ancient earls’ seats and a growing number of estates bought by the new wealth of the substantial nabobs and plantocrat slave owners. An early supportive critic of Burns’s poems described ‘[t]he county of Ayr is perhaps superior to any in Scotland in the number of its Peers, Nabobs, and wealthy Commoners’.⁵⁰ This was at the cusp of the agricultural and industrial revolutions when Ayr had a larger banking house than Glasgow, and with Kilwinning being (perhaps controversially) the seat of Scottish Freemasonry (rather than Edinburgh). The county of Ayr had a nexus of power, fortune, influence and pride. In some ways, the county was calling out for a poet to blaze its fame.⁵¹

Burns’s involvement with Ayr and his Ayrshire friends appears to have been virtually non-existent after his move to Dumfries in 1791, leading to the unresolved conjecture that the poet’s breach with Gavin Hamilton made him nervous of,