In the world of the 1930s, the Depression, the Spanish Civil War and the rise of fascism, and Scottish nationalism at home, would each shape Henderson's worldview and political outlook. When war broke out in September 1939, Henderson attempted to enlist in the Cameron Highlanders but he was rejected because of weak eyesight. He was called up the following year, joining the pioneer corps. However, with a gift for languages, he was commissioned at the rank of second lieutenant as an intelligence officer in January 1942, and served in north Africa with the Eighth Army. His service in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Sicily, and Italy provided him with the opportunity to note and to remember moments that would later become poems and series of poems, such as Elegies for the Dead in Cyrenaica, and the song The 51st (Highland) Division's Farewell to Sicily. During 1947 and 1948 he took various teaching engagements, including one at a German high school teachers' summer school in Bad Godesberg, and another working with German prisoners of war in Comrie, Perthshire. Between 1948 and 1949 he was also a district secretary for the Workers' Educational Association. At the same time he was producing a great deal of literary and political criticism, poetry, and songs. In his work, Henderson swung between English and Scots, like Burns before him, writing only rarely in Gaelic. Henderson's influence travelled far wider than Scotland. He fed songs, disquisition, and polemic into the international folk scene too. He took up political argument through his poems and songs, on issues to do with land ownership and access, anti-Polaris missile, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, and the anti-apartheid struggle. Henderson was very much a part of the ‘folk process’ he championed. For some, this position was problematic and riddled with contradictions, but these were contradictions that Henderson himself embraced. His affinity with the cultural politics of the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci is important here. A constant theme in Henderson’s writing, like Gramsci’s, is the role of the intellectual in society. Gramsci famously ‘hated indifference,’ believing that ‘living means taking sides.’ ‘Those who really live’ he wrote, ‘cannot help being a citizen and a partisan.’ In this spirit, Henderson refused to separate his life, scholarship, art and politics – writing,

Following the outbreak of war, Hamish tried to enroll with the Cameron Highlanders on 4 September 1939, but poor eyesight meant his call-up was delayed. Returning to Cambridge, he continued to use debates at the Union and various political meetings to speak up against Chamberlain and in favour of socialism. In late 1939, he was involved in setting up the Cambridge Students’ People’s Convention, ‘to steer government policy towards a Socialist future’. Boat Club photograph, family collection and now in the Hamish Henderson archive, University of Edinburgh (credit: Lafayette Photography Ltd)Corey Gibson (2015) The Voice of the People: Hamish Henderson and Scottish Cultural Politics, (In Inglis) Edinburgh University Press [12] I suspect that Hamish is still being talked about in Breton fishing villages. The reality is that he is still being talked about in Scotland, which is the important thing. He was a fixture in Edinburgh when I was a student of Scottish history and literature in the early 1970s. He had a reputation not just for extraordinary scholarship, but for his strong and constant advocacy, to which John McAllion referred, for those who could not speak for themselves or who could not be heard in the clamour of the capitalist 20 th century. The obituaries spoke of a feud with Hugh MacDiarmid and his biographer, Alan Bold. Hamish and Alan were banned from Milne's Bar for fighting. Passions had run high following a disagreement in the columns of The Scotsman about Hugh MacDiarmid's attitude to poetry. The feud is often remembered, but the cause has been forgotten. I believe that that cause is significant and worth revisiting, as it tells us much about Hamish's principles and the way that they permeated all his activities.

will not be fashioned in a vacuum; it will be fashioned by the painful and difficult struggles of definite communities, in definite places; it will be achieved on farms and in workshops, in mines and in shipyards, and not only by courtesy of an Act of Parliament." Though he was born in Blairgowrie, Perthshire, [3] Henderson spent his early years in nearby Glen Shee and eventually moved to England with his mother. He won a scholarship to Dulwich School in London; however, his mother died shortly before he was due to take up his place and he had to live in an orphanage while studying there. [ dubious – discuss] In 1948 – 1949, Henderson workit wi the Workers' Educational Association and wis screiving in Inglis an Scots. [3] Frae 1955 tae 1987 he warkit at the Scuil o Scots Studies at the Varsity o Edinburgh, [3] an wis flyting wi Hugh MacDiarmid. He whiles translatit the letters frae prison o socialist Antonio Gramsci. [4] [2] His ‘ The Flyting o’ Life and Daith’ (1964) and ithir works in Scots wir promuivin the Scots Renaissance. [4] Tobar an Dualchais - Freedom Come-All-Ye". Tobar an Dualchais. Archived from the original on 3 March 2016 . Retrieved 29 July 2014. Henderson’s friendships extended into many spheres which may have seemed incompatible but were brought together in his enormous energies, voracious reading, extraordinary linguistic ability and deep commitment to socialist politics. Among other notable achievements, he translated the prison letters of Antonio Gramsci; accompanied the American folklorist Alan Lomax on the collecting tour of Scotland which proved the impetus for the folk revival; promoted the singer and storyteller Jeanie Robertson, who carried the tradition of the travelling people; locating that tradition was also Henderson’s great work; he became one of the founding members of the School of Scottish Studies at the University of Edinburgh; and effectively laid foundations for the Festival Fringe.Gramsci helped Henderson to formulate his agenda which, after the War, was increasingly the promotion of the Scottish Folk Revival. For Gramsci as for Henderson, folk culture presented an alternative, a ‘subaltern’ view of society and history, alternative to the ‘official’, ‘bourgeois’ or ‘establishment’ version of the rulers. Folklore was to be understood as ‘a reflection of the conditions of [the] cultural life of the people,’ and thus representing ‘a conception of the world’ in opposition to ‘official’ conceptions of the world. Or, in Hamish Henderson’s words: ‘Folk art is an implicit — and in many aspects an explicit — challenge to the ruling class way of looking at the world.’ He saw folk art as the manifestation of a rebel ‘underground’.

Gibson, Corey (2015). The voice of the people: Hamish Henderson and Scottish cultural politics. Edinburgh. ISBN 978-0-7486-9996-4. OCLC 919188115.And that brings us full circle to the animating core of Henderson’s work in all forms, at all stages of his career, though variously expressed. This, in an interview of 1966: Through both language and form, this strives for anonymity – to sink through the subconscious as part of a folk tradition, expressing an elemental conflict. At the same time the strength of the Scots diction, the cunning balance between formality and colloquial speech, and the cumulative structural design add up to a considerable poetic achievement, not unlike the ballad poetry of Goethe.

Those lines are a mark of the man's internationalism, but they are also a mark of his nationalism. I look forward to our country being independent and being a country that can match that sentiment, and becoming the kind of country that other places all over the world will look up to because of our statement of peace and freedom. I thank Hamish Henderson for encapsulating that for me in so few words. The collection included the songs and styles of the travelling people that Hamish would first have heard in the berry fields of Blairgowrie, which was the area where he was born. Hamish realised that other collectors had neglected those songs and styles and set about correcting that neglect, not as a curator, but as a friend. He had a commitment to the oral tradition and the way in which songs evolved to reflect the lives of the people who sing them. Unfortunately, funds were short, tapes were expensive and the recordings were not always permanent. Norman Buchan on Hamish, Tocher no 43, School of Scottish Studies, University of Edinburgh, 1991, p 19-21

Collection organization

Many song-makers might have stopped there in righteous anger, but Henderson adds depth, tragic irony: Duncan Glen, ‘Hamish Henderson: poetry becomes people’ in Selected Scottish and Other Essays (Kirkcaldy: Akros Publications, 1999) The " Freedom Come-All-Ye" ( Scottish Gaelic: Thig Saorsa Uile) is a Scots language song written by Hamish Henderson in 1960. As Jamie McGrigor reminded us, Hamish Henderson made a distinguished contribution as an intelligence officer during the war. He gave shrewd advice on the invasion of Sicily and accepted the surrender of Marshall Graziani of the Italian army. From 1955 to 1987 he was on the staff of the University of Edinburgh's School of Scottish Studies which he co-founded with Calum Maclean: there he contributed to the sound archives that are now available on-line. Henderson held several honorary degrees and after his retirement became an honorary fellow of the School of Scottish Studies. For many years he held court in Sandy Bell's Bar, the meeting place for local and visiting folk musicians. In April 1979, he was ' the prevailing spirit' at the first Edinburgh International Folk Festival conference ' The People's Past' both on ballads and in challenging traditional history telling. He also spoke at a Riddle's Court meeting which had hosted in the past, the Workers' Educational Association when he said that Calvinism was repressive in the Scottish psyche and that 'we had to divest ourselves of layers or preconception and misconception before we could come to grips with Scotland and its people.' [7]