True story of man behind The Corries

When Robbie Renwick won the 200 metres freestyle for Scotland at the Commonwealth Games in Delhi last October, the tune played as he stood on the podium was Flower of Scotland. It was the first time a Scottish team had used it for that purpose. Earlier in 2010 the athletes selected for Delhi had been asked to choose a victory anthem from a shortlist, and they dropped Scotland the Brave, which had served since the 1950s, in favour of a folk song written in the mid-1960s (Team Scotland’s record of the Delhi Games).

The man who wrote it did not live to see any of this. Roy Williamson died in August 1990 at the age of 54, and outside folk circles he is remembered mostly as a name on a songsheet. A long profile by the journalist Alan Campbell in The Herald set out to change that. Its argument was that the relaxed figure audiences saw on stage had been shaped by a hard and unsettled childhood, and that few in those audiences knew anything of it. That is Campbell’s reading, drawn from conversations with people who knew Williamson. What follows keeps to the public record.

An Edinburgh boy sent north

Williamson was born in Edinburgh in 1936. His father, an advocate, died when Roy was eight, and the boy was sent to board in Moray, first at Aberlour House and then at Gordonstoun. He had asthma all his life, which did not stop him becoming a useful rugby winger, later turning out for Edinburgh Wanderers. After school he spent a spell teaching seamanship and navigation at Burghead, and the sea stayed with him. In later years he co-designed a boat of his own.

He went on to Edinburgh College of Art, where in 1955 he met another student, Ronnie Browne. Both trained as art teachers. Neither, at that point, was a professional musician.

From trio to duo

The group that became The Corries started in 1962 as the Corrie Folk Trio: Williamson, the guitarist Bill Smith and, after an early change of line-up, Browne. The Northern Irish singer Paddie Bell joined them, and as the Corrie Folk Trio and Paddie Bell they were regulars on BBC television during the folk boom, including a spell as resident group on the Hoot’nanny Show. Bell left in 1965 and Smith in 1966. Williamson and Browne carried on as a pair.

Both men were still art teachers when the television work began, and a folk club in the north on a school night is a long way from a classroom in Edinburgh the next morning. Once they were on screen every week, it was plain which job had to go.

A two-man enterprise

What they did next is the part of the story that interests a site about community enterprise. The Corries left the folk club circuit behind and began promoting their own tours of Scotland’s concert halls, taking on the risk of an empty house in return for the whole of a full one.

In the 1970s they went further and put out their own records on their own labels, Pan-Audio and Dara, including the four volumes of Live from Scotland between 1974 and 1977. Between the band and the audience there was no promoter and no record company taking a share, because the band was both. It was an ordinary small business run by two partners, and it kept them in work for more than twenty years.

Williamson also made the instruments. In the summer of 1969 he designed and built the combolins, two hybrid instruments that combined mandolin, guitar and bandurria with sympathetic strings that rang when the main strings were played. They can be heard on the 1970 album Strings and Things.

The song

Flower of Scotland was first heard in public in a BBC television series in 1967, at first without the third verse, and it appeared on The Corries in Concert in 1969. Its subject is the defeat of Edward II’s army by Robert the Bruce at Bannockburn in 1314, and its refrain asks when Scotland will see the like of the men who fought there again.

Rugby players took to it first. On the British and Irish Lions tour of South Africa in 1974 the Scotland winger Billy Steele got his teammates singing it. In the 1990 Five Nations it became the Scotland team’s pre-match anthem, and on 17 March that year, with the Grand Slam at stake, Murrayfield sang it before Scotland beat England 13 to 7. Williamson was already ill by then. The Scottish Football Association began using the song in 1993 and adopted it formally in 1997.

It has never been made an official anthem, because Scotland does not have one. When the Royal Scottish National Orchestra held an online poll in 2006, asking people to choose between five candidates, Flower of Scotland took 41 per cent of about 10,000 votes. When the Commonwealth Games athletes made their choice in January 2010, Loch Lomond and Highland Cathedral were on their list as well, and the result matched the orchestra’s poll. Its critics say it looks back seven centuries to a single battle and has little to offer a country that is not at war with anyone. Its defenders answer that crowds chose it long before any committee did, which is more than can be said for most national songs.

The last years

In his last years Williamson lived in Forres in Moray, not far from where he had gone to school, and he was a painter as well as a player. Illness brought his performing to an end in 1989. The cause was a brain tumour, and he died in Forres on 12 August 1990.

Browne carried on performing alone and painting. The song has travelled further than either man. More than twenty years after its writer’s death it is sung by crowds of tens of thousands, and many of those singing could not name the man who wrote it. Campbell’s profile was an attempt to put that right. The simplest version of the correction is shorter than his: an art teacher from Edinburgh wrote it, and ran his own music like a small business for as long as he was able.