Verse

Barrowsgate’s verses were almost always written in Doric and in multiple stanzas of alternate rhyming couplets (usually abab cdcd). In terms of subject matter and structure, Barrowsgate’s poems have a lot in common with Bothy Ballads, mostly concerning the everyday life of the working folk of north east Scotland. According to his son Murray (interviewed by folklorist Tom McKean in 1994), several of his verses were, in fact performed.

As Lewis Grassic Gibbon pointed out in his review of “Blethers”, Barrowsgate used “humour and wit allied with a considerable technique to present our kindly, crabbit folk of the land in their lighter moods”. Barrowsgate managed to squeeze a smile out of even the most grim situations, such as “A Helpin’ Han’” where Jock comes across a pedlar who had hanged himself but doesn’t cut him down because he wasn’t quite dead yet.

The Blethers o’ Barrowsgate

The Doric debate in the newspapers in 1932 may have been the catalyst for Barrowsgate gathering together a selection of forty-five of his own verses written in Doric and having them published by D. Wyllie & Son of Aberdeen in the autumn of 1933. As with his sister Jean’s book A’ Ae ‘Oo’, “The Blethers o’ Barrowsgate” contained a Foreword by J M Bulloch.

The verses that appeared in “The Blethers” were probably amongst his best, but at least twenty-four other verses were published in the Bon Accord and other journals over the years. Notable amongst these is Hairst O’ War, which was first published in the Mearns Leader in May 1931. This is one of less than a handful of verses whose subject matter concerns the War and it confirms Grassic Gibbon’s view that Jim was more than capable of writing about more serious matters.

n.b. Where a modern date is shown in the list below, it is because a publication date has not yet been identified.