The Sandstone Blog
Death of a song and dance man
At about 2.00am on the morning of 1st January 2008 the Madrid Metro was crammed with people heading back from the City Centre. Two, I guess, must have stood out from the rest; the rest being dressed in coats, scarves, more or less sensibly, more or less fashionably. One was wearing jeans, a blackberry coloured fleecetop (made in Poolewe and labelled to prove it) with one of those little gold-coloured Munro-Compleatist badges, carrying a paper bag with, yes, a bottle of Glenmorangie in it. As Popeye memorably said, ‘I am what I am’.
New Year for Scots is about as close to the sacred as anything gets. We renew friendships, meet and share (whatever we carry) with strangers and when we say, ‘All the best in the coming year’, we mean it. Tears might be fed by alcohol, as likely by regrets, or then again the sentiment might come from the heights of our best-of-times in the full understanding that the good times don’t so much last as come around.
After my first fifty-and-a-few New Years in Scotland had rolled by I decided to enter the export market and found that, after the shock of being greeted by a stranger with a funny-familiar accent, people responded in kind. No one was reluctant to accept a shot of fine malt whisky in Barcelona, Florence, York or Madrid city centre.
Close to me on the Metro a dapper black man in blazer and flannels, shirt and tie, eyed me with curiosity. Perhaps I eyed him and his obvious Establishment signals in similar fashion. Doubly distanced by race and social class I freed my arms, got the bottle out and offered it with the usual greeting. ‘Ah,’ he said, coolly, ‘Harry Lauder’, and when he turned away the encounter ended, sadly to my mind.
Sir Harry Lauder has been as much a presence to me, as much a traveller through life, as Robert Burns. For most of that time his reputation in Scotland has been subject to a strongly negative critique. The kilt, the joke stinginess, the now-hackneyed songs all get the blame for the stereotyping of Scots, especially by the Left. I don’t think anyone else really gives a toss and that is just as big a pity.
Harry (I’ll just call him Harry) was a superstar of his time, an international figure before Charlie Chaplin. Stories of his popularity and rapport with audiences are many. My favourite is of the New York crowd who waited for hours in the Theatre because his ship was late in arriving from Southampton. They continued to wait after the band had gone home, waited even after the management left. Travel stained and exhausted, Harry went straight to the theatre and did the show, sans orchestra, sans slap, sans programme, sans everything but a crooked walking stick. As with later stars, advantaged by film, later television, eventually the internet, he offered something transcendental to go along with his international appeal.
Harry and his wife Ann had a son John who was killed age 25 at Poiziers in 1916, round about New Year, when Harry was 46. They had no other children and no grandchildren. Now looking into an empty personal future, by no means alone in this after the First World War, Harry wrote ‘Keep Right On To the End Of The Road’.
At a time when belief in an afterlife was the norm the force of this lyric in the private, internal worlds of the bereaved can hardly be overestimated. Difficult as it might be to understand in our more secular era, the solace of a hope, a faith, that there can somehow be a reuniting with lost loved ones was real. Harry not only offered a reason to go on but an example.
These thoughts come at the end of the week in which Michael Jackson died and, in particular, one commentator’s claim that he ‘soundtracked the lives of a generation’. I am sure that is a true statement although I am not part of that generation. Then again, I am not part of Harry’s generation either, and his work is meaningful to me. His talent was probably wider than Michael Jackson’s since he not only sang and danced but also wrote, songs, memoirs, books, and lived close to the people he wrote for.
On the Madrid Metro the opportunity of a personal commonwealth was refused. I should have pressed a little harder but, the fact is, I was lost in amazement at the staying power of a song and dance man’s legacy.
It’s a tenuous linkage but perhaps it will do; the black man with the air of a cricket club official and the American song and dance man, somehow matched with the scruffy Scottish traveller and Sir Harry Lauder. The world mourns for Michael now as it once mourned for Harry, but soon Michael’s life and heritage will be dissected as cynically as Harry’s. I suspect that black people afraid of total identification will engineer a rejection quite as complete as Scotland’s of Harry. This will have to be tholed until a longer perspective overcomes it, such as can and should be taken for Harry now.
Sir Harry Lauder is part of my background, my culture, in these ways part of me. I am neither ashamed nor proud. It is simply the case and, because of it, I would like to see his work better understood. Whatever else, the experience in the Madrid metro proved it is part of the sum of global culture. If we see it right, it is to the good. Above all we must remember that it is the work we are left with. The life is ended. It is our job to grow larger than the stereotypes and extend the culture in our time.
I would like to meet my nearly-friend again because the fact is he failed me, failed us both and something greater than us both. Death is not to be kept at the forefront of our minds but the knowledge of death can help us live well. Differences in the world over energy resource, religious grievance, and land increase, and the wars just get worse. Add to that the invoice coming in from the 19th century. Divided as he and I might be by skin colour, traditions, nationality and social class (he is distinctly upwards of me), we could still hasten all kinds of healing by recognising a common humanity, by one-world thinking and the sharing of small gifts. That’s a Killer Idea whose time will never pass.