Memories of Edinburgh University Glee Club - the Early Sixties

By Peter Freshwater, MA 1964

(Peter Freshwater was a member of the Glee Club from 1960 to 1984, and Honorary Secretary 1963/63. This article first appeared in the University of Edinburgh Journal in December 2011, and is reproduced here by kind permission of the Editor.)

I joined the Glee Club during my first term at University, the Autumn Term 1960. I hadn’t intended to at first, having decided to join the Music Society Choir for its big work that year, the Bach B Minor Mass. However, my room- mate in Cowan House, who had joined the Club at the Societies’ Fair during Freshers’ Week, told me that it was great fun and persuaded me to come along to one of its early meetings. So I did, and stayed for four years.

The Glee Club rehearsed early on Monday evenings in the SRC (Students’ Representative Council) Hall in the basement of the north side of Old College, with the expressed purpose of ‘singing away the Monday blues’. It had been founded in 1958 by David Bruce, son of the writer and broadcaster George Bruce. Under David’s direction (I don’t remember David using a baton) rehearsals were very informal – chatting and even smoking were accepted in the early days! Rehearsal discipline began to tighten up, however, once the Club started working for as regular schedule of performances, particularly in a guest spot at the University Carol Concert in the McEwan Hall, as well as in its own annual show with invited guest performers, in the University Chaplaincy Centre in Forrest Road (now the Bedlam Theatre). David continued as Musical Director until he graduated in 1962, when he was followed by Ian Mackenzie who extended the Glee Club’s still rather limited repertoire. After one very eventful year with the Glee Club, Ian had to move on and away from Edinburgh, and Brian Archer, who had been the Club’s accompanist for two years, took over as Musical Director.

At this time the Glee Club was one of only two music groups in the University which operated outwith the umbrella of the University Music Society. (The other was the Edinburgh University Singers, which was then conducted by the University (and High Kirk of St Giles) organist Herrick Bunney.) It claimed to be the only male-voice choir in a British university, and felt a kinship with the Glee Clubs of the American universities. We were delighted when, in 1961/62 a visiting postgraduate student from Cornell University, Richard Heyman, a member of the Cornell Glee Club, became a member of the EU Glee Club for his year at Edinburgh. Since many of its favourite pieces were negro spirituals, the Club also admired the music of the George Mitchell Minstrels and their performances in the popular London West End and BBC TV Black and White Minstrel Show. The Glee Club never blacked-up, but longed to model its performance style of negro songs on that of the Mitchell Minstrels.

The Glee Club still sang songs from the Scottish Students’ Song Book – ‘Gaudeamus Igitur’, ‘Tarpaulin Jacket’, ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’, ‘Tavern in the Town’, ‘John Brown’s Body’, ‘The Spanish Guitar’, ‘Clementine’ (usually to the Welsh hymn tune ‘Cwm Rhondda’) and others. It was one of the last bastions of the Scottish student song tradition, although St Andrews was, and continued for some years more to be, regarded as Scotland’s singing university. David Bruce wrote a short article on the Glee Club and student song for Gambit, Edinburgh University’s best-ever student arts magazine, in which he lamented the trend of student song in the early 1960s towards becoming ‘rugby songs’, lewd to sing and, in those days, still too lewd to appear in print.

The first Glee Club show, in 1961, was entitled 52 Beats in a Bar; with guest soloists Roy Guest, Eva & Ken, Ian Purves (later to become founder of Purves Puppets and the Biggar Puppet Theatre), George Gordon and Jason Spencer Cooke, it had 52 performers in its line-up. It was an informal affair, in the University Chaplaincy Centre (now the Bedlam Theatre), except that the programme opened and closed with the whole Club singing groups of favourite songs while dressed in their uniform. This was a dark suit with the Club tie (bearing a single gold lyre on a navy blue ground) and, like the Music Society Choir, the toga, the scarlet gown traditionally (but by then, seldom) worn by Edinburgh undergraduates, and distinctively different from the St Andrews and Aberdeen scarlet gowns. By 1962 the membership had increased, and the show, with a greatly extended programme, became 62 Beats in a Bar; guest soloists included John Darling, Joan Abbott, Ian Purves, and folk-singers Murray Young and Archie Fisher. In 1963 the Club decided to go for broke, and invited the Geordie bass-baritone Owen Brannigan to be its guest soloist. The show was moved from the Chaplaincy Centre to the much larger Heriot-Watt University Hall in Chambers Street. It was a sell-out and a resounding success. In 1964 the venue stayed at Heriot-Watt, and the guest solo spot that year was occupied by an excellent but little-known folk group called the Cumberland Three who seemed destined to rival the Kingston Trio. I never heard of them again, however.

For several years the Glee Club had a spot in the annual Freshers’ Week show Varsity Diversities, occasional guest spots in the Charities Week revues, and hired an open-top bus from which it serenaded the Edinburgh suburbs while shakers of collecting tins knocked on doors and collected from passers-by. Tours frequently ended at the Old Chain Pier bar in Newhaven. After all,

‘The boy stood on the tramway line, the driver rang the bell (Ting!)

Shouting out the battle-cry of “Freedom!”

The tram went up to Morningside, the boy went down to … Joppa!

Shouting out the battle-cry of “Freedom!”

Newhaven was as near to Joppa as we were prepared to go.

The Carol Concert spots ended when the Club proposed one year to sing the Cowboy Carol which Malcolm Sargent had arranged a few years earlier for the Moral Re-Armament movement (formerly the Oxford Group), a controversial organisation that engaged the City of Edinburgh in a huge recruitment drive, spear-headed by a formidable stage show, Space is so Startling. Music with MRA connections, even if arranged by Sargent, was not welcome in the much-loved University Carol Concert. The appearance in the Students’ Handbook of my name and address as Honorary Secretary of the Glee Club brought the local MRA recruiting team uninvited to my digs on three Sunday afternoons running. My landlady and fellow lodgers were not pleased, and neither was I!

For a couple of years the Glee Club took no part in religious shows, but the musical directorship of Ian Mackenzie steered it back. A former Assistant Minister at St Giles and Scottish Secretary of the Student Christian Movement, he moved in many ecclesiastical as well as musical circles, and enabled the Club to take a slot in the Sunday evening series of short concerts at the High Kirk of St Giles, St Giles at Six. We performed a set of negro spirituals (then the only religious pieces that we did sing) together with three of Sydney Carter’s Songs of Faith and Doubt, singing from authorised photocopies of the composer’s manuscript (the songs had not yet been published) and with the composer’s generous permission. The Glee Club thus sang the first performances in Scotland of ‘Lord of the Dance’, ‘Friday Morning’ and ‘Every Star Shall Sing a Carol’, and loved singing them. The St Giles’ congregation loved hearing them, and the Minister, Dr Harry Whitley, asked for an encore on the spot. The following year a Nigerian member, Adebayo Olusanya had the Club singing his own arrangement of Kum Bah Yah before it became a popular folk-song in the West.

For three summers a group of members of the Club travelled to France to attend the annual Festival International Culturel Étudiant, organised by UNEF, the Union Nationale des Étudiants de France. This was held in Poitiers in 1961, in Lille in 1962 and in Rouen in 1963; this last was the only one that I was able to attend. Ten enjoyable days were filled with concerts, défilés in costume (our red togas were much admired) through the city streets, informal song sessions with any other group who happened to be around, such as the Yale Russian Chorus, and receptions to meet local political and trade union leaders – UNEF considered itself part of the trade union movement in France.

The Glee Club kept going until the mid-1970s. A reunion of members is planned for the end of April 2012, and we are trying also to assemble a collection of memorabilia which will bring back memories of great days of singing for fun and which we can photograph and add to the web site. We would love to hear from any readers of this article who were members of the Club and who have not received any communication from us or from the University Development and Alumni Office. Please feel free to visit the web site and to get in touch with us.