History

A (very) brief history of ESF

In the beginning…………

ESF grew out of the Edinburgh and District Shetland Association (EDSA) itself an organisation started by and for Shetlanders who had moved to Leith and Edinburgh. The association dates back to 1928. In 1962 they purchased a former ballroom in Pilrig Street which was renamed the Zetland Hall. An initially small group of fiddlers led by Willie Johnson got together to play weekly in a room there and by 1969 they were playing at functions for the association

In the seventies..........

In this decade and the very early eighties some of our current members started coming along….Donald Ross, Terry Moug and Donald Gorman were certainly around then. Tom Anderson and others started summer schools in fiddle music in Stirling University and the little yellow book from Tom's course (Haand me doon da Fiddle) and a tape accompanying it were a great source of more tunes. The meetings in the Zetland hall had a lot less chat than our current meetings. Willie Johnson would play a few bars and off we would go into the set. Willie was a great fan of Scottish pipe marches and they were quite prominent in the repertoire, some sets still being used nearly 50 years later! Willie was always supportive of younger players and from time to time he would invite them to play a solo.

In the eighties………

In 1983 the Zetland halls were sold and we moved to an upstairs room in the West End Hotel. In the bigger picture, fewer people were leaving Shetland and some returned home due to the greater prosperity due to the oil boom. Willie retired from leading the group and Bobby Tulloch from Yell, who had moved south in the sixties to become a successful photographer, took over. The meetings were a bit more relaxed in this time and not all the sets would be started by the leader. A new generation of young fiddlers were starting to appear in Shetland  due to the work of Tom Anderson and later others including Trevor Hunter. Tom, Trevor and later others taught the fiddle in Shetland schools. This, and the availability of various commercial recordings and music books, were inspirational to those inside and outwith Shetland who were interested in the music.

In the nineties…….

Numbers were already dwindling by the late eighties and some later meetings in the West End Hotel only had a small number of mostly older members. Bobby Tulloch had moved back to Shetland and the group ceased to meet in the mid nineties but many former members who had learned a lot from their time in ESF were still around in the Edinburgh folk and session scene. In 1999 the society was relaunched by a group of former members and with the support of the EDSA. For various reasons the West End Hotel was no longer suitable for us so we moved to the Royal Scots Club.

ESF in the 21st century.........

The relaunch has proved to be a success. The repertoire of Shetland tunes has increased a lot with new composers active in a thriving tradition and many of us have benefited from the availability of high quality teaching from courses in Shetland such as Fiddle Frenzy. We now meet in the backroom of the Diggers which is better acoustically than the RSC .

A new feature in the last 20 years or so has been that from time to time we have organised workshops with tutors who are experts in Shetland music. These have helped us to learn new tunes and improve our own playing.  In our normal sessions we now take turns to start sets of tunes (but you don’t have to if you don’t want to!). Our links to the EDSA have been maintained not least by playing annually for the Association’s Saucermeat Supper evening function. Covid was a challenge but we continued meeting and playing together using zoom. During this time we had participants from Skye, Southern England and even Sweden. It also had the unexpected benefit of bringing the friendships between our members closer than ever. This helped us to achieve a quick recovery when covid restrictions ended.

On we go!