Reviewed by Paul Scott Henderson

Towards the end of this book Timothy Neat quotes a poem by Henderson about a conversation with Catherine Grant: "And when we talked, you asked where was Our Boswell?" We now have the answer. This is a superb biography.

Timothy Neat first met Henderson in May 1967. They recognised at once that they were kindred spirits, and collaborated on many projects until Henderson died in 2002. Neat also had access to the vast uncatalogued archive of Henderson's personal papers, as well as the collaboration of his family. The result is a book which is detailed, vivid and fascinating.

Hamish Henderson thought of himself primarily as a poet, but he also had a very full and diverse life. In the second world war he went from Cambridge University more or less straight into the Army. He was responsible for liaison with the partisans in Italy and closely involved with the arrangements for the Italian surrender. The Army wanted him to stay on after the war, but he preferred to pursue his own, and very different, objectives.

His major passion was Scotland, and a desire to help recover her independence, and restore the traditional culture which had been impaired by the Union. Neat writes that "he increasingly saw music and song as the redemptive, purely human force with which he might change Scotland and the world". He was also a socialist with communist leanings and he was deeply concerned about world peace.

Such views as these may seem incongruous with Henderson's English public school and Cambridge education, which in itself was also improbable given the circumstances of his birth and early years. His mother, Janet Henderson, had recently returned from France where she had been stationed with the Army as a Queen Alexandra nurse. She was 39 and unmarried. At that time illegitimacy was regarded as morally intolerable. Without the support of an acknowledged father, mother and child were faced with a difficult future.

They lived at first in a rented cottage at Spittal of Glenshee, where Hamish spent his first five years. In 1924 they moved to his grandmother's house near Blairgowrie so that Hamish could go to the local school. Then in 1928 a sudden change. Janet found a job as a housekeeper in Somerset where they had free accomodation as part of the deal. Hamish went first to an orphanage, then to Dulwich and to Cambridge. Was this achieved by effort and scholarships, as Hamish afterwards maintained, or was there a benevolent patron in the background?

This raises the question, who was the father? Neat believes he was James Scott, the son of a wine merchant in Glasgow. There are faint hints that it might have been the Marquis of Tullibardine, heir to the Duke of Atholl. Queen Alexander nurses were stationed in the family seat, Blair Castle, during the war. Neat thinks that the idea that Tullibardine might have been Hamish's father is "fantastical", but he does discuss the possibility in an appendix. It is just faintly possible that the Atholl family were the discreet sponsors of Hamish's education.

But Hamish saw his English education as a mixed blessing. In a note he wrote to himself, as the war was ending, he remarked: "In the first place my long exile has seriously disfigured me as a Scottish poet; though I may be better as a European poet. Secondly, my English public school education has made a visible (permanent?) deflection in my thought processes and way of life. Thirdly, my Army career, though it has made me 100% more worldly wise and given me a rich experience, has seriously interrupted my reading and normal study." I had many discussions with Hamish during the last 20 years or so of his life, but I never saw the slightest sign of any such "deflection".

Nor, as far as I know, has anyone else ever suggested it. His Scottish impulses were too strong to be overcome by any other influence. When Hamish came back from the war, he worked for a time as a lecturer for the Workers' Educational Association in Northern Ireland, but finally came back to Scotland for good in 1946, after an absence of 18 years. He soon established contact with Hugh MacDiarmid and Sorley MacLean.

Henderson and MacLean had much in common, not only in their literary and political views, but in the shared experience of the war in North Africa. With MacDiarmid he had a more complicated relationship, which Neat calls "a 30-year flyting between the two most original thinkers in 20th century Scottish culture".

This volume ends just as Henderson secures his ideal post as a researcher with the School of Scottish Studies in January 1952. That will be the subject of the next and final volume.

Where then does Henderson stand as a poet? He is largely ignored in the schools and universities and by writers of literary history and anthology editors. His most ambitious work was his Elegies For The Dead In Cyrenaica which won the Somerset Maughan Prize. Neat says it is "consciously literary, symphonic and orderly".

Also, apart from the phrase "mak siccar" it is entirely in English. It seems to me an impressive response to the experiences of both armies fighting in the desert. Henderson never again attempted anything similar. Neat prints a remarkable letter from Douglas Young to Henderson soon after the publication of the poem. As Neat says, in Scotland at the time Young's status as a radical intellectual "was second only to MacDiarmid". He wrote, and criticism could hardly be more wounding, that Henderson's phrases in the poem "are rather journalistic than poetic".

Hamish Henderson's real strength lies in the Scottish tradition to which he was so devoted and to which he has given such an impulse. His songs, The 51st Highland Division's Farewell To Sicily, The John MacLean March and Freedom Come-All-Ye, are now as much a part of Scottish life as Scots Wha' Hae and A Man's A Man For A' That.