Home University of Edinburgh Library Essentials
December 15, 2025
From Barbed Wire to the BBC: The Writings of Tom Burns
Introduction
Throughout his career as researcher, lecturer and finally Professor of Sociology, Tom Burns was a prolific and engaging writer of journal articles, lectures, conference papers and reviews. His works include references to philosophers and political thinkers (Max Weber, Karl Popper, Antonio Gramsci to name a few) and are peppered with wonderful imagery, gentle humour and acute observation. The titles of his works are delightful: Sancho Panza’s Grandmother; The Revolt of the Privileged; Models, Images and Myths. He interweaves his subjects of interest, frequently using the organisation of factories to explore social interactions and urban planning, and technological change to inform notions of community and social status.
Early Works
“We did not feel that we had jettisoned decency for good and all, but that we had pocketed such things until the time came for employing them again”, Men and Barbed Wire
Tom Burns graduated from the University of Bristol with an English degree in 1933. A Quaker, he did not enlist in active service at the outbreak of war but volunteere
d with the Friends Ambulance Unit. Burns was captured in 1941 and spent almost three years as a POW in Germany. He wrote at least 3 pieces discussing his war time experiences, one in Finland before his capture – an unknown piece to which he refers in his collection of selected writings – Calamity Bay written while imprisoned, and finally Men and Barbed Wire, a raw and honest portrayal of a POW’s reaction to repatriation and memories of incarceration:
“…the great herd of men which had been driven through the streets of Kalamata on the morning of 30 April 1941 remained, for the most part, a herd. Dirty, unshaven, undisciplined, shiftless, grubbing continually for bits of food and cigarette ends, indecent, selfish”
“I met a large number of interesting people; many very funny things happened; there were many enjoyable times; a pleasant sort of easy friendliness existed; I had time to read; I had time to think”
Friends and Enemies
Burns was working with the Bournville Village Trust and the West Midland Research Group, both concerned with post-war reconstruction, when he was appointed research lecturer at Edinburgh University.
His main research interest was in the organisational structure of industry, this being the subject of his book The Management of Innovation written with G M. Stalker and published in 1961. But he extended his findings to other branches of sociology, using them to explore and discuss social interaction, leisure time, and the organisation of family life.
His fascinating essay Cliques, Cabals, Confidants explores the behaviour and purpose of different groups found within the workplace and how they can be the force behind success and/or failure. Gossip, he writes, can be exchanged between colleagues or friends but be warned, “it is always necessary to know with whom it is safe to gossip and with whom it is not.” 
The manager of a firm is painted as an isolated figure, not a member of any clique or cabal, but often accompanied by a confidant “always available and correctly responsive for the direct expression of fears, doubts and desires“. Crucially however, “there is no mutuality between confidant pairs; merely a contract“.
In Friends, Enemies and the Polite Fiction, a companion piece to the above, Burns observes how easily members of an organisation can switch the way in which they interact with each other based on what particular role they have assumed at any one time; these different interactions can be justified because “we carry with us the capacity for acting out a number of roles, for occupying a variety of social positions“. He also includes an interesting discussion on the use of banter and irony as tools to navigate situations where an employee finds himself having to play and safeguard two distinct roles.
Of course, Burns was not just talking about the workplace. I have no experience of factories or multi national companies but the similarities with social interactions at the school gates is remarkable!
China Ducks and African Masks
Burns was also interested in how social status is communicated by social acts and visual clues both within and outwith the workplace.
“It is the easiest thing in the world to attach the correct social weighting to looped window curtains as against straight hanging ones, to flights of china ducks against African masks, to an assortment of table lamps as against the central light….the significance lies in the values to which these displayed signs attach their owners [Non-Verbal Communication in Human Society].
In Cold Class War, he laments the middle class re-ignition of a class war despite having thought it put to bed with the end of the Second World War. “The proletarian peril is back with us again, irrational, hostile, nihilistic, getting more and more and doing less and less” and calls for better acceptance and understanding of differences:
“If we admit that within the workers situation there may be standards, judgements and codes of behaviour different from those of the middle class then there may be a possibility of understanding”
Tea and Sunday Newspapers
Industrialisation had, Burns writes in The City as Looking Glass, “separated work from leisure and workplace from home”. He was interested in the notions of community and the impact of urban development. The Planning Movement, he wrote in Neighbourhood Planning, had its roots in the revulsion against the industrial city and that “the millions of bright little gardens which now make up the greater part of the area of urban Britain are as much part of our way of life as tea and Sunday newspapers”.
However, he also hinted at a more sinister and uncomfortable side to suburbia:
” it is the vast random disorder of suburban development – the utter unrelatedness of the next bit of brick or concrete to anything else which dismays people. Then it was the octopus of ribbon development and urban sprawl; now it is the outrage of subtopia”.
These new “communities” now pose perpetual choices about whom to know, what to do and where to go.
Mass Communication
His paper presented to the Manchester Broadcasting Symposium in 1976, The Meaning of Local Radio in Community, actually says very little about local radio but a lot about community and community studies.
Burns observed that “the awkward, indeed appalling, fact is that the more conflict ridden a place is, the more deeply involved in the community itself are the people who live there” and posed the alarming question – could the practice of broadcasters to lead with death and disaster be an attempt, albeit unconscious, to awaken our sense of community?
Latterly Burns conducted research within the BBC, again he was interested in organisation but also in mass communication and the role of state broadcasting. In The Politics of Broadcasting: The BBC and the British Government he lists the many times government ministers, left and right, have accused the BBC of, in the words of Norman Tebbit, “bias, incompetence, low professional standard or simple error”. It would be fascinating to know what Tom Burns would have made of the current political climate’s impact on society, industry, communication and community.
The following publications can be found in the University Library:
Description, Explanation and Understanding: Selected Writings, Tom Burns, 1994
The Management of Innovation, Tom Burns and G.M. Stalker, 1961
For the last 20 years of his life Tom Burns worked on a book on Organisation. It was never finished. Several early drafts exist within the material being catalogued as part of this project. The most recent draft can be accessed online at: http://www.sociology.ed.ac.uk/tomburns/
New books in the Library for History, Classics and Archaeology
Thanks to recommendations from members of staff and requests via RAB from students the Library is continually adding new books to its collections both online and in print. Here are just a (very) small number of the books that have been added to the Library’s collections in semester two, 2018/19 for the School of History, Classics and Archaeology and these demonstrate the wide range of subjects being taught, studied and researched within School.
–> Find these and more via DiscoverEd.
Akrotiri: the archaeological site and the museum of prehistoric Thera: a brief guide by Christos G. Doumas (shelfmark: DF221.T38 Dou.)
Roman death: the dying and the dead in ancient Rome by Valerie M. Hope (shelfmark: HQ1073.5.R66 Hop. Also available as e-book).
Black revolutionary: William Patterson and the globalization of the African American freedom struggle by Gerald Horne (shelfmark: E185.97.P32 Hor.)
From Augustus to Nero: an intermediate Latin reader edited by Garrett G. Fagan and Paul Murgatroyd (shelfmark: PA2095 Fro.)
Information, communication, and space technology by Mohammad Razani (e-book).
Public sculpture of Edinburgh (vol. 1 and 2) by Ray McKenzie ; with research by Dianne King and Tracy Smith (shelfmark: NB481.E4 Mack.) Read More
Research Data Workshops: Electronic Notebooks Summary of Feedback
In the spring of this year (March & May) the Research Data Service ran two workshops on Electronic Notebooks (ENs) where researchers from all three colleges were invited to share their experiences of using ENs with other researchers. Presentations and demos were given on RSpace, Benchling, Jupyter Notebooks, WikiBench, and Lab Archives. Almost 70 research and support staff attended and participated in the discussions.
This post is a distillation of those discussions and we will use them to inform our plans around Electronic Notebooks over the coming year. It was obvious from the level of attendance and engagement with the discussions that there was quite a lot of enthusiasm for the idea of adopting ENs across a variety of different schools and disciplines. However, it also quickly became clear that many researchers and support staff had quite justified reservations about how effectively they could replace traditional paper notebooks. In addition to the ENs which were the subject of presentations a number of other solutions were also discussed, including; LabGuru, OneNote, SharePoint, and Wikis.
It appears that across the University there are a very wide range of platforms being used, and not all of them are intended to serve the function of an EN. This is unsurprising as different disciplines have different requirements and an EN designed for the biological sciences, such as Benchling, is unlikely to meet the needs of a researcher in veterinary medicine or humanities. There is also a huge element of personal preference involved, some researchers wish a simple system that will work straight out of the box while others want something more customisable and with greater functionality for an entire lab to use in tandem.
So, within this complex and varied landscape are there any general lessons we can learn? The answer is “Yes” because regardless of platform or discipline there are a number of common functions an EN has to serve, and a number of hurdles they will have to overcome to replace traditional paper lab books.
Firstly, let’s look at common functional requirements:
- Entries in ENs must be trustworthy, anyone using one has to be confident that once an entry is made it cannot be accidentally deleted or altered. All updates or changes must be clearly recorded and timestamped to provide a complete and accurate record of the research conducted and the data collected. This is fundamental to research integrity and to their acceptance by funders, or regulators as a suitable replacement for the traditional, co-signed, lab books.
- They must make sharing within groups and between collaborators easier – it is, in theory, far easier to share the contents of an EN with interested parties whether they are in the same lab or in another country. But in doing so they must not make the contents inappropriately available to others, security is also very important.
- Integration is the next requirement, any EN should be able to integrate smoothly with the other software packages that a researcher uses on a regular basis, as well as with external (or University central) storage, data repositories, and other relevant systems. If it doesn’t do this then researchers may lose the benefits of being able to record, view, and analyse all of their data in one place, and the time savings from being able to directly deposit data into a suitable repository when a project ends or a publication is coming out.
- Portability is also required, it must be possible for a researcher to move from one EN platform to another if, for example, they change institutions. This means they need to be able to extract all of their entries and data in a format that can be understood by another system and which will still allow analysis. Most ENs support PDF exports which are fine for some purposes, but of no use if processing or analysis is desired.
- Finally, all ENs need to be stable and reliable, this is a particular issue with web based ENs which require an internet connection to access and use the EN. This is also an area where the University will have to play a significant role in providing long-term and reliable support for selected ENs. They also need the same longevity as a paper notebook, the records they contain must not disappear if an individual leaves a group, or a group moves to another EN platform.
Secondly, barriers to adoption and support required:
- Hardware:
- Many research environments are not suitable for digital devices, phones / tablets are banned from some “wet” labs on health and safety grounds. If they are allowed in the lab they may not be allowed out again, so space for storage and charging will need to be found. What happens if they get contaminated?
- Field based research may not have reliable internet access so web based platforms wouldn’t work.
- There is unlikely to be space in most labs for a desktop computer(s).
- All of this means there will still be a need for paper based notes in labs with later transfer to the EN, which will result in duplication of effort.
- Cost:
- tablets and similar are not always an allowable research expense for a grant, so who will fund this?
- if the University does not have an enterprise licence for the EN a group uses they will also need to find the funds for this
- additional training and support my also be required
- Support:
- technical support for University adopted systems will need to be provide
- ISG staff will need to be clear on what is available to researchers and able to provide advice on suitable platforms for different needs
- clear incentives for moving to an EN need to be communicated to staff at all levels
- funders, publishers, and regulatory bodies will also need to be clear that ENs are acceptable for their purposes
So, what next? The Research Data Support service will now take all of this feedback and use it to inform our future Electronic Notebook strategy for the University. We will work with other areas of Information Services, the Colleges, and Schools to try to provide researchers in all disciplines with the information they need to use ENs in ways that make their research more efficient and effective. If you have any suggestions, comments, or questions about ENs please visit our ENs page (https://www.ed.ac.uk/information-services/research-support/research-data-service/during/eln). You can also contact us on data-support@ed.ac.uk.
The notes that were taken during both events can be read here Combined_discussion_notes_V1.2
Some presentations from the two workshops are available below, others will be added when they become available:
| Speaker(s) | Topic | Link |
| Mary Donaldson (Service Coordinator, Research Data Management Service, University of Glasgow) | Jisc Research Notebooks Study | Mary_Donaldson_ELN_Jisc |
| Ralitsa Madsen (Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Centre for Cardiovascular Science) | RSpace | 2019-03-14_ELN_RSpace_RRM |
| Uriel Urquiza Garcia (Postdoctoral Research Associate, Institute of Molecular Plant Science) | Benchling | |
| Yixi Chen (PhD Student, Kunath Group, Institute for Stem Cell Research) | Lab Archives | 20190509_LabArchives_Yixi_no_videos |
| Andrew Millar (Chair of Systems Biology) | WikiBench | |
| Ugur Ozdemir (Lecturer – Quantitative Political Science or Quantitative IR) | Jupyter Notebooks | WS_Talk |
| James slack & Núria Ruiz (Digital Learning Applications and Media) | Jupyter Notebooks for Research | Jupyter_Noteable_Research_Presentation |
Kerry Miller, Research Data Support Officer, Research Data Service
On trial: Medieval and Early Modern Studies
*The Library has now purchased access to this resource. See New to the Library: Medieval and Early Modern Studies.*
Thanks to a request from staff in HCA the Library currently has trial access to the Adam Matthew Digital research resource Medieval and Early Modern Studies. This offers you access to a huge range of primary sources covering social, cultural, political, scientific and religious perspectives, from the 15th to early 18th centuries.
You can access Medieval and Early Modern Studies from the E-resources trials page.
Access is available on and off-campus.
Trial access ends 17th June 2019.
The breadth of resources provided within this collection is extensive, from sources concerning the Black Death to Restoration of the English monarchy and the Glorious Revolution. Read More
Contributors to the Old Statistical Account: Reverend Doctor James Octavius Playfair (1738-1819)
This is the second guest blog post from the independent researcher John Moore, who is writing to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the death of a number of contributors to the Old Statistical Account. This time, he is focusing on the Reverend Doctor James Octavius Playfair.
________________________________
On 26th May 1819, the Reverend Doctor James Octavius Playfair, minister of the Perthshire charge of Meigle (1777-1800), died and we commemorate the bi-centenary of his death this month. Playfair was the author of the entries for both Meigle, a parish lying in the centre of Strathmore (OSA, Vol. I, 1791, p. 503-518) and the adjacent Angus parish of Eassie and Nevay (OSA, Vol. XVI, 1795, p. 212-221) in the Statistical Account.
Born the son of a farmer at West Bendochy in Perthshire, he studied at St. Andrew’s University before becoming minister of Newtyle in 1770, having been presented by James Stuart Mackenzie, Lord Privy Seal. In 1773 he married Margaret Lyon, daughter of the Reverend George Lyon of Longforgan. Seven years later, he transferred to the neighbouring parish of Meigle. During his time there, he wrote A System of Chronology in 1782, his alma mater awarded him an honorary doctorate in divinity (DD) in 1779 and in 1787 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.
The Meigle description appears in the first volume of the Old Statistical Account (1791) and much of the text reflects Playfair’s interests. He notes the heights of several local hills with great accuracy as ascertained by barometrical measurement and describes carefully the course of the river Isla. However, his discussion of local antiquaries, Playfair is quite scornful of early writings, stating that ‘the tales and stories related by fabulous writers are, for the most part, too wild and extravagant to merit belief’ (OSA, Vol. I, 1791, p. 505). In describing a monument in Meigle churchyard said to be dedicated to Vanora (or Guinevar), he comments that ‘the antiquary may amuse himself with the fragments that remain; but he can scarcely form one plausible conjecture with respect to their original meaning and design’ (OSA, Vol. I, 1791, p. 507).
The memorial to Rev James Playfair, St Andrews Cathedral churchyard
By 1791 the parish had a population of 1148 but the description of Meigle as an ancient, inconsiderable and meanly built town suggests that Playfair had little love for his charge, particularly as he scarcely mentions the conditions of its people. There can be no doubt, however, about where Playfair’s loyalties lay. He praises the period since 1745 as a fortunate epoch for Scotland, contrasting the formal rude and uncivilised state of the country with the benefits enjoyed following the introduction of many agricultural improvements, including his own use of a better quality of oats. The production of linen was the parish’s principal manufacture and Playfair details how progress would result from the construction of a canal between Perth and Forfar.
The account of Eassie and Nevay did not appear until four years later. Local rivers are again detailed and Playfair makes mention of James Mackenzie as its chief proprietor. Most of the text discusses various aspects of agricultural change – farms, inclosure, manures and livestock. With a population of 630, the parish inhabitants are described as ‘sober and industrious, strangers alike to intemperance and dissipation of every kind’.
At the end of 1799, he was appointed to be principal of the United Colleges of St. Leonard’s and St. Salvator’s in St. Andrew’s and moved to become minister of the congregation of St. Leonard’s in that city. It was during his time there that Playfair came into his own as a writer on geography. He published a sizeable System of Geography, Ancient and Modern between 1810 and 1814, followed by a four-volume General Atlas, Ancient and Modern (1814) and a Geographical and Statistical Description of Scotland in 1819. This final work is almost entirely based on the original Statistical Account of Scotland. In addition, Playfair was the official historiographer of the then Prince of Wales. He admired the work of Robert Burns and was one of the defenders of the authenticity of Ossian’s poems.
________________________
We would like to thank John for this guest post.
Crowdsourcing Conservation – Thomas Nelson Collection
Following on from the popular “Crowdsourcing Conservation” sessions held in February 2017 and 2018, the Centre for Research Collections held seven more crowdsourcing events from October 2018 to March 2019. This time, we focussed on the Thomas Nelson collection. Over seven days, 67 volunteers helped to rehouse 197 boxes of archival material. The collections are now stored in acid-free folders and boxes, and are much easier to handle and access.
Thomas Nelson Collection, before rehousing
Thomas Nelson Collection, after rehousing
New books in the Library for Social and Political Science
Thanks to recommendations from members of staff and requests via RAB from students the Library is continually adding new books to its collections both online and in print. Here are just a (very) small number of the books that have been added to the Library’s collections in semester two, 2018/19 for the School of Social and Political Science and these demonstrate the wide range of subjects being taught, studied and researched within School.
–> Find these and more via DiscoverEd.
Heart: a history by Sandeep Jauhar (shelfmark: QP111.4 Jau.)
Heineken in Africa: a multinational unleashed by Olivier van Beemen ; translated by Bram Posthumus (HD9397.N44 Bee.)
Tangled diagnoses: prenatal testing, women, and risk by Ilana Löwy (e-book).
Pervasive punishment: making sense of mass supervision by Fergus McNeill (shelfmark: HV7419 Macn. Also available as e-book).
Can we all be feminists?: seventeen writers on intersectionality, identity, and finding the right way forward for feminism edited by June Eric-Udorie (shelfmark: HQ1221 Can.)
Energy and geopolitics by Per Högselius (e-book).
Reclaiming Afrikan: queer perspectives on sexual and gender identities curated by Zethu Matebeni (shelfmark: HQ75.16.A35 Rec.) Read More
On trial: Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS) Daily Reports, 1941-1996
Thanks to a request from staff in HCA the Library currently has trial access to all collections from Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS) Daily Reports, 1941-1996 from Readex. A unique 20th-century archive for students and scholars of international studies, political science and world history.
You can access Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS) Daily Reports from the E-resources trials page.
Access is available on and off-campus.
Trial access ends 21st June 2019. Read More
New! E-journals from Edinburgh University Press
With our 2019 renewal to Edinburgh University Press E-Journals package, we gain access to the following titles.
Ancient Philosophy Today: DIALOGOI provides a forum for the mutual engagement between ancient and contemporary philosophy. The journal connects interpretative work in ancient philosophy to current discussions in metaphysics, epistemology and ethics, and assesses the continuing relevance of ancient theories to current philosophical interests and debates.
Gothic Studies – The official journal of the International Gothic Association considers the field of Gothic studies from the eighteenth century to the present day.
Scottish Church History is the journal of the Scottish Church History Society. Founded in 1922 to promote the study of the history of Christianity in Scotland, the journal covers all periods and branches of Scottish churches from the early to the modern.
Fifty Years of ‘An Orkney Tapestry’
This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of two of George Mackay Brown’s landmark publications, An Orkney Tapestry and A Time to Keep. While Brown was already well established as a poet, these works made his reputation as a master of prose.
Unusually, An Orkney Tapestry was a commissioned publication. In late 1967, literary agent Giles Gordon approached Brown on behalf of Victor Gollancz publishers to inquire whether he might be interested in writing a general guide to his native Orkney. Although it was not the kind of work that appealed to Brown, Gollancz were offering a generous advance, and it presented an opportunity of visiting parts of the Orkney archipelago that he had not previously seen. The manuscript that Brown eventually submitted, however, was very far from a conventional guidebook. Instead, in An Orkney Tapestry, Brown wove prose, poetry, and drama together to commemorate the stories and traditions that had forged the character of the islands and their inhabitants.
The book consists of six sections: a polemical sketch of contemporary Orcadian life; a history of the ‘ghost village’ of Rackwick; a retelling of crucial episodes from the Orkneyinga Saga; an essayistic account of Orkney folklore; a short story-like evocation of a ballad singer’s performance at the Renaissance court of Earl Patrick Stuart; and a play ‘The Watcher’ concerning the apparition of an angel in an everyday Orkney setting.
Brown’s intention was to stress the importance of stories in creating a community and holding it together. A community cuts itself off from these formative stories at its own peril (p. 23), and Brown feared that the life of contemporary Orkney was increasingly meaningless (p. 19). An Orkney Tapestry is as much a jeremiad as a celebration. Time and again, Brown rails against progress–or rather a dogmatic, utilitarian ‘religion’ of Progress–as a ‘cancer’ that ‘drains the life’ out of ‘an elemental community’ (p. 53). He laments the loss of the old Orcadian speech and the uniformity created by compulsory education and the omnipresent new media of radio and television. With An Orkney Tapestry, he hopes to reawaken Orcadians to their history and traditions, and to inspire them to return to their life-giving roots.
Edinburgh University Library hold a much-corrected MS draft of An Orkney Tapestry (Gen 1868/5) together with a fair copy with instructions for a typist (Gen 1868/4).
We also hold George Mackay Brown’s letters to fellow poet Charles Senior (E2000.11), in which he traces the genesis of An Orkney Tapestry. In a letter of 28 December 1967, Brown tells Senior that he has been commissioned to write ‘a book about Orkney’. It is not ‘the kind of thing I like doing’ but should ‘bring in a couple of hundred quid or so’. On 8 January 1968, he reports that his usual publisher Chatto & Windus have reluctantly granted him permission to write for Gollancz, but Brown is unsure ‘whether I’ll be good at that sort of thing or no’. By 13 January, his doubts have grown: ‘I’m not good at patient research and reappraisal and I have no idea where the drift of history is taking the Orcadians’. He hopes to hit upon some ‘valid & original way’ to tackle the commission. On 20 January, he declares that he is determined, at least, not to write ‘some kind of a glorified guide book’. By Candlemas Day (2 February), the book is clearly beginning to take shape. It will be ‘highly impressionistic’ and entirely free of statistics: ‘I shun figures and tables as I would the devil’. He is planning a chapter on Rackwick, and a section contrasting a medieval or renaissance bard with the contemporary Orkney poet Robert Rendall. By 9 February, he reveals that he has been working on the ‘Orkney book’ all week, and has finished the first draft of the chapter on Rackwick (‘interlarded with poems’). This has left him ‘with a flush of achievement’, though he suspects that closer scrutiny may discover ‘a hundred flaws’. On 16 February, he laments the difficult of translating (‘or, rather, freely adapting’) Norse heroic verses for the third chapter of An Orkney Tapestry. These ‘stretched all my faculties to the utmost’ but ‘it’s good for writers to tackle something hard now and again’. Unfortunately, the correspondence with Senior is suspended at this point, as Senior was now, in fact, living close by in Orkney. These few letters, however, give a vivid impression of how An Orkney Tapestry swiftly evolved from impersonal commission to personal vision.
Within a fortnight of publication, An Orkney Tapestry had sold over 3,000 copies. One of its first readers, composer Peter Maxwell-Davies was so transfixed by Brown’s prose, that he was inspired to move to Orkney and make it his base for the rest of his life. Edinburgh University holds manuscript librettos for three works that Brown wrote for Maxwell-Davies: Apples and Carrots (MS 2846/4/2), Lullaby for Lucy (MS 2843/8/1), and Solstice of Light (Gen. 2134/2/4).
Another enthusiastic reader was veteran poet Helen B. Cruickshank. We hold Cruickshank’s well-thumbed copy of An Orkney Tapestry (JA3388), inscribed on the title-page by Brown and by artist Sylvia Wishart (whose illustrations for An Orkney Tapestry first brought her to prominence). There is also a brief letter from Brown on the half-title page, congratulating Cruickshank on the receipt of an honorary M.A. from Edinburgh University. A further letter from Brown in our Helen Cruickshank Papers (Coll-81) grants Cruickshank permission to quote a line from An Orkney Tapestry in her memoir Octobiography (Montrose: Standard, 1976): ‘Decay of language is always the symptom of a more serious sickness’. What Brown says of the decay of Orcadian speech (An Orkney Tapestry, 30), Cruickshank applies to the decline of her native Scots (Octobiography, p. 77).
The commercial success of An Orkney Tapestry was largely matched by critical approval. Seamus Heaney praised it as ‘a spectrum of lore, legend and literature, a highly coloured reaction as Orkney breaks open in the prisms of a poet’s mind and memory’ (Listener, 21 August 1969). For J. K. Annand, it was ‘one of those rare books which capture and convey the essential character of a place’ (Akros, January 1970). Not everyone, however, was entirely convinced. Robin Fulton, in the New Edinburgh Review (November 1969), felt that the problems raised by Brown ‘deserve more serious treatment than can be afforded by polemics and jeremiads’ and wondered ‘how closely in touch’ Brown was ‘with the way of life he professes to reject’. Brown rails against progress as a ‘new religion’ but ‘in fact who does in 1969 naively accept such a belief?’ (p. 6). Similarly, Janet Adam Smith felt that ‘Mr Brown is a far better poet than preacher and some of his diatribes on the present run too glibly’ (Times, 12 July 1969).
No such doubts were expressed about Brown’s second major publication of 1969, A Time to Keep, his second short-story collection after A Calendar of Love (1967). Alexander Scott wrote that Brown ‘gives more fundamental insights into our common humanity in even the shortest of his stories than will be found in a hundred full-length fictions of the conventional kind’ (Lines Review, 28 March 1969). Janice Elliot described him as a ‘precise, poetic, and dazzling writer’ (Guardian, 7 February 1969). Paul Bailey wrote the stories ‘often brought me close to tears’ and that there ‘are few writers alive today with the courage to be so simple and direct, or with the talent—the sheer, unforced talent—to lighten up the most humdrum detail’ (Observer, 2 March 1969). Even Robin Fulton, despite some reservations about the volume as a whole, declared that its strongest tales were ‘among the finest stories written by any Scottish writer’.
We do not hold any manuscripts or working papers relating to A Time to Keep. We do, however, have Norman MacCaig’s personal copy of the volume, signed by MacCaig on the half-title page.
For further information on our Papers of George Mackay Brown, see:
Sources (other than previously cited)
- Timothy Baker, George Mackay Brown and the Philosophy of Community (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009)
- Maggie Fergusson, George Mackay Brown: The Life (London: John Murray, 2007)
- Berthold Schoene-Harwood, The Making of Orcadia: Narrative Identity in the Prose Work of George Mackay Brown (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1995)
- Hilda D. Spear, George Mackay Brown: A Survey of his Work and a Full Bibliography (Lewiston: E. Mellen Press, 2000)
Collections
Hill and Adamson Collection: an insight into Edinburgh’s past
My name is Phoebe Kirkland, I am an MSc East Asian Studies student, and for...
Cataloguing the private papers of Archibald Hunter Campbell: A Journey Through Correspondence
My name is Pauline Vincent, I am a student in my last year of a...
Projects
Cataloguing the private papers of Archibald Hunter Campbell: A Journey Through Correspondence
My name is Pauline Vincent, I am a student in my last year of a...
Archival Provenance Research Project: Lishan’s Experience
Presentation My name is Lishan Zou, I am a fourth year History and Politics student....