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Edited
by Frank R. Shaw, FSA Scot, Dawsonville, GA, USA
Email:
jurascot@earthlink.net
We come
today to pay tribute to the man responsible, more than anyone else, for us
celebrating our annual Burns Suppers all over the world. He has been a hero
of mine for many years, and I usually get around to mentioning him a wee bit
when I speak at Burns Suppers or meetings. I do not believe he could foresee
that he was starting a movement that would grow internationally and involve
millions of people over the years. This remarkable man was the Rev. Hamilton
Paul.
I know
of no one more fitting to talk about Hamilton Paul that our friend Clark
McGinn who has traveled more miles to speak on Burns than anyone else in
history. You may think that is an inaccurate statement, but try and name
another individual who, in
the last seven years, has traveled 166,000 miles (6.7 times
round the globe) to deliver 100 speeches on Burns in 26 cities in 13
countries, and all of them carbon neutral!
I have tried several times through my research to find a
picture of Hamilton Paul, beginning with Clark and followed by Gerry
Carruthers at the University of Glasgow, Patrick Scott at the University of
South Carolina, and Alastair McIntyre, editor/owner of
www.electricscotland.com – all to no avail. If any of our readers are
aware of a photo of Rev. Paul, please send it or any related information to
me and I will see that it is placed with this definitive article by Clark
and full pictorial credit will be given to the sender.
Thank you, Clark, for the time and energy spent on
researching and writing your article on Rev. Paul for the pages of
Robert
Burns Lives!
- I’m sure it will surface in other magazines or chronicles. You did him
proud, and we are proud of you sharing this article with our readers! (FRS:
5.30.12)
A FORGOTTEN HERO
By Clark
McGinn
In the
history of commemorating the life and works of Robert Burns, many names jump
out: we remember national leaders and statesmen who contributed great
speeches to his memory such as Abraham Lincoln or Lord Rosebery; or
churchmen who found solace in his words, including Henry Ward Beecher or
Martin Luther King; there were those who found Burns in the land, as did
Teddy Roosevelt and John Muir; we live with the ever growing army of
memorialists, biographers, sculptors, founders of Burns Clubs and the Burns
Federation, in particular Colin Rae-Brown; and after a long period of
academic neglect, a growing band of keen scholars.
There
is one name, which should be shouted from the thatched roof of Burns
Cottage, commemorated in countless Standard Habbie verses, and have his
likeness engraved on the back page of every Burns Supper programme, yet,
this engaging and interesting character is hardly known at all.
His
name? The Reverend Hamilton Paul.
His
gift to the world? The Burns Supper.
When
the nine million or more folk who slice open a haggis and toast the Immortal
Memory around Burns’s birthday on 25th January each year, a tiny
handful know that they are following a ritual created by this forgotten
Scottish clergyman. And I for one would like to make amends to my fellow
Ayrshire-man.
In 1773
while our Poet was travailing on the fields of Mount Oliphant and first
thinking of verse and Nelly Kirkpatrick, a boy was born in Bargany, Near
Cumnock (Carrick’s ancient capital) to Mrs John Paul the wife of manager of
the Duke of Hamilton’s coal mines. This firstborn was christened after his
father’s employer and in that guise, young Hamilton Paul made his first and
not last into the records of the Kirk. By coincidence, after the Pauls
moved, another famous minor poet – excuse the oxymoron - Hew Ainslie was
born in the same cottage nineteen years after. This man was to emigrate to
the USA and became one of the great promoters of Burns’s memory as a living
example to the spirit of democracy and manifest destiny. Ainslie died in
Louisville KY in 1878.
Hamilton was a bright lad and excelled at his books such that his father
sent him up to The University of Glasgow and where he made lifelong
friendship with a classmate called Thomas Campbell, one of the great
Nineteenth century poets (although very out of fashion today). The poet and
the poetaster treated, complimented, and debated with each other in rhyme –
but when it came to their greatest poetic tussle – the University’s gold
medal for poetic composition, it wasn’t the bookmakers favourite Campbell
who carried the prize, it was the professors’ favourite, the charming
Hamilton.
This
untoward result made no difference to the two men and their friendship, who
upon graduating took the then common role of tutoring in wealthy families,
which left good time for the friends to correspond. After this pedagogic
period, Paul went back to Glasgow to study Divinity, taking his Bachelor of
Divinity degree and returning south to his home county in 1800. He couldn’t
find a full time ministry – that needed patronage – so he took the post of
assistant minister in the parish of Coylton (a village to the East of Ayr,
traditionally supposed to have been the seat of ‘Old King Cole’ of nursery
rhyme fame) but the records do not seem to show this as a particularly
arduous role, even though the minister, Revd David Shaw was in his eighties,
and it was the accumulation of free time which allowed Hamilton to join in
the busy social life of a thriving market town like Ayr.
Looking
back at those halcyon days, his obituary recalled that the young reverend
not only juggled with teaching French and Latin to five families, and
covered the pulpit for a similar number of the Ayr Ministers, he:
was whirled
about in a perpetual vortex of business and pleasure, never a single day
without company at home or abroad. If he could obtain three or four hours
sleep, he was satisfied. He was a member of every club, chaplain to every
society, had a free ticket to every concert and ball, and was a welcome
guest at almost every table.
And on
all these occasions, his wit, good nature and facile poetry gained him many
friends (and a fair few free dinners!) Most of his poetry was literally
ephemeral – a thought or sentiment captured on a day, scribbled on a scrap
of paper or a napkin, recited to the cheers of the diners, concertgoers or
presbyters, then lost on the wind. Again, with hindsight his obituarist
remembered:
Volumes might
be filled with selections from Mr. Paul's poetical compositions. They are to
be found scattered over magazines, reviews, and newspapers, for upwards of
sixty years. He wrote on every kind of subject, and in every species of
measure. His compositions are characterised by great elegance, but they
exhibit versatility of talent and facility of versification rather than
capacity to reach the higher flights of poetry.
His felicity with words prompted his muse to exercise herself
on many subjects: the rolling Ayrshire countryside, the glory of the Psalms,
the joys of friendship. His enquiring mind though drew him to some rather
more unusual topics including the wisdom of teaching girls physics (‘First
and Second Epistles to the Female Students of Natural Philosophy in
Anderson's Institution’), in advocating new developments in healthcare
(‘Vaccination, or Beauty Preserved, a poem), or a hymn to the art of making
Ayrshire’s famous Dunlop Cheese. The combination of love of both food and
county makes this a typical Paul poem:
On Tuesday
morning at the peep of light,
Take all the milk that has stood overnight,
and, by the lustre of the dawning beam,
With a clean clam shell, skim off all the cream,
And from her lazy bed the dairy maid
Be sure to rise, and call her to your aid;
With rosy cheeks and hands as soft as silk,
Bid her hang on the pot and warm the milk,
Let not her heat it with too great a lowe,
But make it tepid, as warm from the cow;
Restore the cream, and put in good strong steep,
But through the molsy first let the milk dreep.
Now pay a due attention to my words;
And press, O gently press, the snow white curds;
Nor mash them small, (now mark well what I say)
Till you have squeez'd out almost all the whey.
Light be the weight for hours, one, two, or three,
And then the pressure may augmented be,
Oft change the clouts, and when the cheese is dried,
Send for the Parish Minister to try't.
His love of writing pressed him to submit his longer works to
the press, and in 1810, Peter Wilson (the brother of Wilson the printer of
the Kilmarnock Edition) was a sick man seeking retirement and he offered the
editorship and majority shareholding of The Ayr Advertiser to Paul, who
snapped up the opportunity. For three years he relished the role – the
recorder of the comings and goings of his town and the attendant country
parishes, adding historical and regional essays to the news and views,
amidst the ‘hatches, matches and dispatches’ that are still the core of that
paper’s appeal to the people of Ayr today.
In 1813 his hard work paid off, as a local landowner Richard
Oswald (whose grandfather was the largest slave dealer in Scottish history
and whose granny was the Mrs Oswald whom Burns horribly lampooned when he
was thrown out of an inn to make way for the poor lady’s funeral party) had
interests in the Borders and presented Hamilton to the charge of Minister of
the trifold parishes of Broughton, Glenholm and Kilbucho, in Peebles-shire.
Now facing the responsibilities of a real parish and the duties attendant on
his own pulpit, Paul had to pack up his comfortable life in Ayr, selling his
shares in the advertiser for a whopping £2,500 and in a final happy jeu
d’esprit, preaching his farewell sermon to the ‘honest men and bonnie
lasses’ of Ayr on the text :Acts
of the Apostles chapter XX, verse 37.
(In
case you have forgotten the quotation it is: ‘And they all wept sore, and
fell on Paul’s neck’ – he did have the sense not to finish the verse which
concludes ‘and kissed him’).
He
packed his clerical bags and decamped to the beautiful Borders, setting up
his convivial home round a cheery heath and a welcoming table in Broughton
Manse, where he ministered to the spiritual, poetical and culinary needs of
his happy flock until he died on 28th February, 1854, a
well-loved bachelor minister (he poetically proposed to the landlady of the
ancient Crook Inn – the poet Hogg’s local pub and a bar which had Burns,
Scott and century later John Buchan as regulars, but his versicles were
insufficient to turn Jenny’s head). Looking at his life, he appears almost a
walk-on character in a novel by Sir Walter Scott and in death, true to form,
he sleeps under a crazy monument ornamented extravagantly with a cherub, a
lyre and sheaves of poetic his ephemeral compositions.
A
thousand words into this essay, and I hear the reader say – might have been
nice to meet him, bet you the poetry got a bit dull after a while , but he’d
make sure your glass was full. But why is he anything important – there are
hundreds of dead and eccentric ministers – why choose this one?
Fair
point, dear reader, the great centre of Paul’s life and the reason he is one
of my heroes (and I hope will be one of yours after reading this) is that as
a poet, and a ‘New Licht’ (reform-minded) minister, Hamilton Paul was an
avid reader of Robert Burns’s works. So in 1801 when ex-Provost John
Ballantine, Burns’s old patron, decided to mark the fifth anniversary of the
poet’s early death with a Memorial Dinner, he asked two friends to persuade
Hamilton Paul to make the arrangements. And this it was that on 21st
July, 1801 in the ‘But’ of the Burns Cottage in Alloway, Reverend Hamilton
Paul invited eight men to convene and eat dinner in memory of their poetic
friend, in a way that seems so modern, so recognisable to us:
These nine sat
down to a comfortable dinner, of which sheep's head and haggis formed an
interesting part. The 'Address to the Haggis’ was read, and every toast was
drank by three times three, i.e., by nine
Hamilton Paul had invented the Burns Supper. He used concepts familiar to
him as a Scottish Freemason, and took themes from the poet’s own like to
create this memorable commemoration. The guests were very happy: Ballantine
and ‘Orator Bob’ Aitken (to whom RB had dedicated the Brigs of Ayr and The
Cottar’s Saturday Night respectively); Patrick Douglas of Garallan (who
found him that damnable job in Jamaica); David Scott (the banker who had
been arbiter for RB’s father’s dispute with his landlord); William Crawford
(whose father employed the poet’s father); Captain Primrose Kennedy (who had
been ambushed with Braddock, and invalided out after Bunker Hill); Thomas
Jackson (the Rector of Ayr Academy) and Captain Hugh Fergusson, the
barrackmaster of Ayr.
Before breaking up, the
company unanimously resolved that the Anniversary of Burns should be
regularly celebrated, and that H. Paul should exhibit an annual poetical
production in praise of the Bard of Coila, and that the meeting should take
place on 29th January, the supposed birthday of the Poet
And in the interval,
Hamilton Paul wrote reports for the papers starting an annual event which
took hold, as we well know, not just in Alloway, but through the West of
Scotland and out to the whole world, each dinner following Paul’s blueprint
of haggis, toasts and poems. For the toast to Burns – what we now call ‘the
Immortal Memory’ – Paul started a tradition of writing a poetic tribute (and
he was known as the ‘poet laureate’ of the Allowa’ Club) and to modern ears,
this is a tradition that will not be missed. While we applaud the
sentiments, the style seems at least quaint, and maybe simply awful.
He
wrote the first nine Odes and attended each Supper (though he would give the
honour of recitation often to the chief guest) until his decampment to
Peebles, but in the following years, he helped his Ayr friends by mailing an
annual verse for them. This is an untypical example, it is shorter than
most:
He also
established the first Burns Supper in Glasgow, for The Glasgow Ayrshire
Society in 1812, and ghost-wrote its Annual Ode to The Immortal Memory for a
long time (all of these are lost), and finally was the lynchpin of the
Broughton Burns Club, his enthusiasm being so keen that the local publican
changed the village pub’s name to The Burns Inn. While living in Broughton,
it was Paul who rescued the Brig o’Doon, made famous by Tam o’Shanter, from
destruction by the philistine Roads Commissioners who saw not the beauty and
poetry in the bridge, but sought the ‘keystane o’ the brig’ as good stones
to repair a few furlongs of road at a lesser expense. Paul’s poem ‘An Appeal
from the Old Brig o’Doon’ captured the attention of everyone whose
imagination had been captured by the closing scenes of Tam’o Shanter and the
public subscription shamed the petty officials into saving this piece of
national heritage.
The
Burns Monument, too, owes a debt to our cheery chaplain. He read a notice in
the papers that there was to be a public meeting in the town hall of Ayr to
raise the subscription to a fitting Monument to Ayrshire’s bard. He arrived
post-haste to find but one other in the room: Alexander Boswell of
Auchinleck (Bozzie’s son and a leading Tory landowner). Slightly perplexed
at the absence of popular support Paul called Boswell to take the Chair
anyway, and from that position of authority Boswell appointed Paul Secretary
of the meeting, with the upshot that the motion to proceed with the
subscription was carried (as Paul reported to the papers) ‘nemine
contradicente’, but then it’s pretty easy to get unanimous majority of both
attendees!
All’s
well that ends well, and the two gentlemen were proud on Burns‘s Birthday
1820 when in full Masonic fig, in the company of hundreds of brethren,
Brother Boswell (Depute Grand Master) followed the benediction prayer of
Brother Paul (Lodge Chaplain) to lay the foundation stone. They worked
together until poor Boswell was slain in a duel, leaving the Auchinleck
properties embarrassed, and Hamilton Paul lonely.
The
culmination of Paul’s love of Burns was his editorship of the 1819 Ayr (or
Air) edition which was printed by his former colleagues at the Advertiser:
Wilson Jr and McCormick: not one to wear his colours on his sleeve Hamilton
resolutely entitled his edition:
The poems & songs, with a
life of the author, containing a variety of particulars, drawn from sources
inaccessible by former biographers. To which is subjoined, an appendix,
consisting of a panegyrical ode, and a demonstration of Burns' superiority
to every other poet as a writer of songs. By Hamilton Paul
He
upheld banner for Burns against naesayers like his fellow minister William
Peebles, who called the Greenock Burns Supper ‘Burnomania’ and was
insightful on Burns’s pastoral poems and the value of Burns’s work in
capturing Scottish song. Where he broke ranks was on the clerical satires.
This causes a firestorm. Holy Willie’s prayer alone was seen by many as
utterly unacceptable, our Hamilton looking for a softer view of human
frailty than the ‘Auld Licht’ über Calvinists, saw Burn’s sharp tongue as a
refiner’s fire to burn out the hypocrisy of the old school.
The
case drew much comment for and against, JG Lockhart, Scott’s pugnatious Tory
son-in–law
The Reverend
Hamilton Paul may he considered as expressing in the above, and in other
passages of a similar tendency, the sentiments with which even the most
audacious of Burns's anti Calvinistic satires were received among the
Ayrshire divines of the New Light. That performances so blasphemous should
have been, not only pardoned, but applauded by ministers of religion, is a
singular circumstance, which may go far to make the reader comprehend the
exaggerated state of party feeling in Burns's native county
While
in a later edition of the Complete Works, Hogg (The Ettrick Shepherd’) could
but cuddle him:
the Rev.
Hamilton Paul. There is a hero for you. Any man will stand up for a friend,
who, while he is manifestly in the right, is suffering injuries from the
envy or malice of others; but how few like Mr Paul to have the courage to
step forward and defend a friend whether he is right or wrong.
The Rev.
Hamilton Paul stood forward as the champion of the deceased bard, and in the
face of every obloquy which he knew would be poured on him from every
quarter as a divine of the Church of Scotland ... yet he would neither be
persuaded to flinch from the task, nor yet to succumb, or eat in a word
afterwards. ... I must acknowledge that I admire that venerable parson
although differing from him on many points.
The
wrath of the diehards almost caused the case to appear before the highest
disciplinary court in the General assembly of the Church of Scotland, but
the debate petered out before the wrathful divines could meet in Edinburgh.
But it would take a lot more than these tempests to blow the equanimity of
the jolly clerical gent off course.
He
carried on hosting happy dinner parties and undertaking the duties of his
cloth – in those days and until comparatively recently in the kirk the mark
of a Minister was the quality of his sermons, which his obituary called '
not of the kind calculated to attract the million’ but it was neither his
prose, nor even truly his verse which makes him a forgotten hero. It was
taking elements of Burns life and writings and creating a ritual to remember
him by. He even foretold the global spread of the Burns supper:
In his
Edition of the Bard’s works, Hamilton said that the world had given our poet
‘ever honour except canonisation’ and because of his efforts, and genius in
inventing the Burns Supper, 193 years after Paul wrote that summation, ,
Burns has even achieved a secular form of canonisation, with Burns Night
being the true national day of Scotland.
Thank
you Hamilton Paul!
© Clark McGinn, 2012.
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