Gangrel Body remembers Fastern's E'en

This year Shrove Tuesday falls on Tuesday 13th February. As discussed in two earlier blogs this day would have been an eventful one in Yetholm - the date on which the Fastern's E'en games were held; a tradition which must have dated back to medieval times, surviving the abolition of such festivals from the ecclesiatical calendar at the establishment of Presbyterian worship in 1688.

The first blog can be found HERE and the second HERE. This seems an appropriate moment to round off the series with a look at a very exuberant poem about the Yetholm Fastern's E'en games, the first verses of which are shown above. First published in the Kelso Chronicle, the YHS archives contain a carefully cut-out copy of the poem, although the author has remained a mystery until recently. The verses are signed 'Gangrel Body' and dated February 20th 1943. Fortunately a few years ago Jean Reynolds gave to the Society a copy of her father's poems and - lo and behold! - there is the mysterious poem. 'Gangrel Body' (ie a ragged tramp) was, it turns out, none other than the Rev. Prof. John Gray, one of the most eminent academics that Yetholm has produced. A scan of the full poem, with a brief biographical note at the end, can be found by clicking HERE.

The biographical note which we have included is somewhat mistaken in saying that John was born in 1913 in Yetholm. In fact he was born in Roxburgh Street, Kelso, the son of James Gray, a master tailor, who served his apprenticeship at Humes. James was called up in 1914 and while he was away in France his wife, with baby son, decided to move to Kirk Yetholm. At the end of the war he returned and joined his wife (and unfamiliar son), who were living in Cross Keys House in Kirk Yetholm. He obviously liked it, because that's where he remained for the rest of his career, earning a living by making Sunday suits for the many shepherds that there once were in the area.

Jean says her grandfather would walk to farms to take measurements and when the job was done the finished article was wrapped in brown paper and sent out to the grateful client. Her father was once dispatched with one of these parcels - at the tender age of 7 - up the Halterburn valley and over the hills to the farm steading at Trowupburn in Northumberland!

James Gray was, according to Jean, a somewhat stern figure, but he clearly joined in festive activities such as the Fastern's E'en games. He was a keen bagpipe player and while serving in France (as a tailor - which perhaps helps explain how he survived the bloodshed) he made his own set of bagpipes from bits of cloth, which have remained in the family. His grandson Walter Gray, chairman of the Scottish Piobaireachd Society, once owned them and they are now played by great-grandson Will. In a newspaper extract quoted in one of the earlier blogs it mentions that in 1922 the Fastern's E'en festivities began in the early morning when 'the village was aroused by the martial strains of Johnnie Cope played by piper Gray'. Whether everyone in the village welcomed being awakened in that way is open to question! As there is only one family called Gray living in Yetholm in the 1921 census it is safe to assume that the 'piper Gray' mentioned here must be James Gray, the tailor from Kirk Yetholm.

The poem by 'Gangrel Body' is full of vivid pen-portraits of the characters who thronged to the games on the haugh. As discussed in one of the earlier blogs, the games seem to have ended in the late-1920s so, although written in 1943, the poem must be describing events in the 1920s. In fact one of the character's is the author's own father, the piper 'Jeems' Gray:

John Gray standing. Left to right: James Gray, Derek Gray, James' wife Mary Anne Patterson. Photo taken c.1930.

In retirement James Gray and his wife moved to Cheviot Villa, in the Crescent, Town Yetholm. He died there in 1953 aged 69.  John Gray worked in university departments in both the UK and abroad, but continued to visit Yetholm throughout his life. In 1943, when he appears to have written this poem, he was recently married and a minister at Kilmory on Arran, having returned from Palestine via South Africa on a Norwegian freighter (on which vessel he learned to speak Norwegian - one of many languages, both ancient and modern, in which he was fluent). His brother Derek was less fortunate, being a prisoner of the Japanese in Sumatra.

While ministering on Arran, John Gray worked on his PhD thesis, the subject of which was the recently discovered texts written on clay tablets in the extinct language of Ugartic from around 1,500 BC. Writing a poem in Border's dialect - and dreaming of his childhood days in Kirk Yetholm - may have been a way of turning his mind from the knotty problems of translation and the anxieties, both personal and communal, of a world at war.

John Gray's final academic work was a commentary on the Book of Job, one of the most difficult books in the Old Testament to translate. His son Ian has recently extracted and published his father's translation of the basic text from the dense web of scholarship that supports it. Alongside the biblical text, Ian has included Job in a Cheviot Plaid, a lively poetic paraphrase of the Book of Job written in Borders dialect. Clearly the spirit which inspired 'Gangrel Body' when he was writing in 1943 was still active at the end of his life while working on his scholarly commentary. A copy of this book has been generously donated to the YHS archive, should anyone fancy having a dip into it.