When turnip arrived on our shores it was meant to feed livestock

It all seemed perfectly innocent going into strangers’ hooses in the tenement canyons of deeper Glasgow. Like Neerday, it all seemed so very Scottish, despite claims by Irish Americans, whose folk memories were muddled by stage Irishmen in Hollywood and Boston Tea perties, some 50 years afore the Iberian tottie howkers arrived, starved out of the ould sod and turned into Yankee pumpkin eaters.

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A wee bit of close reading is required not to get the impression that oor Hamish was saying that neeps were as auld as the druids. In fact, like the humble tottie, tobacco and tomato, root plants arrived in Europe from America. The turnip arrived to these islands from Europe during the 18th century Agrarian Revolution, mainly the Netherlands, Germany and the Scandi countries, and was intended to feed livestock, such as sheep, hoarses and coos. It was also used to deed the starving poor, like totties in Ireland. When Dr Johnston said that oats and turnips were used to feed horses and Scotsmen, his sycophantic Scots scribe Boswell said “Ah, but what horses and what men?”

Hamish goes on to quote Burns on the Scots Halloween, Holy e’en, or evening. Burns wrote jestingly of another poor man’s dish, the haggis, or from the French hag or dried-out dish. The Burns Supper became a middle-class, ex-pat event, toasting the haggis and the English Queen Vic and stabbing sheeps’ entrails and scraps wrapped in a sheep’s stomach, with a dirk, or Sgian Dubh, back dirk. During the proscription of tartan, kilts, war pipes and clarsachs, a small boning knife was allowed for drovers on the trail.

Burns was a republican and his refusal to toast the King led to his punishment and back-handed apology, “We’ll ne’er forget the people”. Most of his radical poems were not allowed in Scotland in his lifetime and were taken by his sister to be published and supported in Ireland, where she settled and married after his death.

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To this day Burns clubs are very popular all over Ireland. The Irish radical poet and United Irishman commander, Henry Joy McCracken, who was hanged by the Brits, came with a delegation of United Irishmen to visit Burns in his cottage. McCracken was Presbyterian, whose faimily originated in Gaelic-speaking Gallowa’. McCracken was a form of McNaughton. The United Irishmen was a coalition of Presbyterians and Roman Catholics, who were persecuted by the Anglican Church of Ireland classes, who formed the Anglican Orange Order, forbidding Presbyterians in the ranks till the1840s. Burns himself was also a member of an Edinburgh Jacobite Masonic Lodge that refused to toast the King.

So, if you are ever invited to a posh Masonic Burns Supper, addressed by a middle-class loyalist, dressed in a once-outlawed and now ridiculed Heilan’ dress, spare a thought for the poor man’s dish of horse food neeps and a ragout of liver and oats and a poor man’s humble Ayrshire totties, once picked by Euro and formerly Irish peasants, for English nationalist supermercats and Tory subscribers, wrapped in a plastic Union flag. Don’t wave your gless ower the finger bowls to a King over the watter. Sit ye doon and shout “Suas an Righ”, “Up the King!”

Donald Anderson
Glasgow