The remarkable life of musician and folklorist Margaret Fay Shaw

She married John Lorne Campbell – “My John”, as she called him – who bought the island of Canna which they maintained in traditional style, with an emphasis on Gaelic and a deep appreciation of the environment, natural and cultural.

Theirs was a benign landlordism, and when they could no longer manage the island themselves, they gave it to the National Trust for Scotland. Sadly, they had no children to whom they might pass on their ideals.

They shared a deep commitment to the Roman Catholic church – for centuries the faith of the people of Canna – and which they hoped to restore.

Margaret told her own story in a wonderful autobiography, From The Alleghenies To The Hebrides, and she and her work, notably Folksong And Folklore Of South Uist, have often been written about and portrayed on television.

In her last years, she and I corresponded at length, she almost blind, typing erratically into the nights when sleep evaded her, so what follows is a personal encounter. Her letters are trenchant and what I have reproduced is with the agreement of her estate. I have corrected typos but the typing is so characteristic it is a delight in itself!

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It was music – particularly the classical music of Scotland – that brought about the correspondence. I sent to her and Magda Sagarzazu, her much-loved and loyal Basque companion, several CDs in most of which I had had a hand. The music was unknown to them and they adored it.

“Delighted to know Mackenzie inspired Elgar! I found the whole of this splendid accumulation LOVELY music – The Benedictus exceptionally moving, beautiful.

“The Burns rhapsody full of Scots LIFE. It is the Coriolanus Marche funèbre that gave me sorrow – it floods with profound gloom of today. Why is Mackenzie so ignored. Is it the lack of appreciation of music in Scotland. Is it due to the English who can’t think of any worth hearing but Elgar? ... The Coriolanus Marche Funèbre is vastly superior to that heavy footed Dead March Of Saul. Dead is the word.”

Strong stuff! Handel’s Dead March is famous. But Margaret was right – and she loved Handel’s music, as we shall see. We had met more than once, the first time I, as a “mature” student of Gaelic, with two fellow students working together on a cultural study of the island.

We were a little nervous. The ever-hospitable Magda put us at our ease and Margaret herself was a joy to meet, but her forbearance was often sorely stretched by the many visitors, including the press: “Many were civil, others impudent, asking me how many cigarettes I smoked a day. I said I never count and it is none of your business ... I used to wish for a week at the Paris Ritz with all expenses paid ... now I want a cell in a Trappist House.”

I remember a little woman, hunched up in an armchair, yet somehow erect in stature, chain-smoking with a bourbon at her side and herself made of Pittsburgh steel. That is the outward image. The domestic truth was more sensitive – a classically trained pianist with a profound sense of justice that included cats.

HOW many were there? I once asked. They were legion. There were house cats and feral cats, semi-domesticated cats and criminal cats Margaret loved them all with a tender realism full of forgiveness. The smell of cat was prominent but one got used to it. Here she is, characteristically defending her creatures:

“My guest ... does not mind the cats jumping on the table, licking the butter ... As long as a guest is not allergic the cats must be tolerated. They are my solace from heaven – they and the Steinway. Schweitzer, the renowned Bach scholar and African missionary, gave as his two solaces in his worst days – ‘Bach and my cats’!”

“CATS! A French Cardinal said that God gave us the cat so that we have the pleasure of caressing the tiger. Very true ... WHY do people think that cats are disloyal? ... I have Titypoo beside me as I type – a dear and loyal friend for years. One of the eight and four were once her kittens. All are cherished friends.

“The eighth is wild Tom, a brown tiger, who arrived from the wild, refuses to be tamed, but he tholes Magda and me, will not eat with the others so is served alone. But we admire his independence and he appreciates our respect.”

On one occasion, expressing my frustration at having some of my work appropriated, in an attempt at philosophical resignation I quoted to Margaret Dean Swift’s famous epitaph: “Ubi saeva indignatio ulterius cor lacerare nequit – where savage indignation no longer lacerates his heart.”

Her response? “My saeva indignatio comes from generations of Pittsburgh iron and steel. I know it has increased my cranium so that these cracks – 4 in 4 years – disturb my equilibrium and nothing else. I need a stick and I have a good one with a round knob that gives me temptation.

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“Much time in this house has been hard to thole. I give you a taste of it: the two guests arrive for breakfast. She says we have solved a mystery. Those two jars of currants and crumbs in the bathroom window are for the BIRDS. ‘Do they like currants?’ I reply that they do and why I have them there. ‘You say that Magda has a full time occupation in the library. Is it so important ... I must see it ... Why isn’t she married? ... A Basque must find it strange on Canna.

“You say her father and your husband were great friends. How did they meet? To endure this every waking hour one is apt to become dangerous. Living on Canna has kept me out of the Libel Court ... but a week of this left me so exhaustapated (as Popeye the sailor would say) I spent two days in bed.”

More than anything it was music that saw her through, not only the discomforts of old age, but also of their environment, especially during a storm:

“Sunday morning: Magda and I were making hot drinks of cranberry juice at 3am as no sleep from the roar. It is increasing and the Atlantic waves that soar over the footbridge dash onto the road and the pier; the bridge may fall as it has done before.

‘THE cats have returned to bed with the suggestion we do likewise ... The house is chilled and damp. In the night – 2 or later – I heard from dear knows where – Handel – a foreign announcer and I think he said ‘Acis and Galatia’ and not in English ... two; soprano and a baritone with accompaniment that sounded baroque.

“The soprano was a JOY – so clear and TRUE, no tremolo which I despise. I had never heard it before and was THRILLED. Handel is supreme.

“We are always hearing Bach and Mozart and rarely Handel, and why? This superb soprano had an English name that began with B Like battle.”

I have worked with the soprano she means, the incomparable Catherine Bott. The wonders of radio, that she was heard from a foreign station in a stormy night on Canna, delighting the heart of a woman of profound appreciation!

It is good to have a big audience, and that is how much is measured these days – in internet clicks.

But an audience of one who truly understands is sufficient. The letter continues the next morning:

“A wren lives in the tunnel that leads to the house [a tunnel of escallonia] The only bird who sings to cheer us these grim days D.G. [Deo Gratias] ... ‘ I come in the little things, saith the Lord’ ... I descended the stairs just now to find Magda to play your gift.

“No sign of her but a hen met me in the hall – all doors blown open, and a cat fight in progress in the back hall. I got them apart, one fled out the kitchen door, but I have had to leave the hen to enjoy the house until Magda appears.

“She has gone to see what damage the gale is accomplishing ... Roars and rattles envelope and no sign of it subsiding. You will have it in Skye. Having given us five months of glorious summer, Nature now shows us who is in charge.”

These are the realities behind her achievements: nobody ever more real than Margaret. As a personal tribute to her, I shall conclude with a story of two cats.

PUSHKAS AND PEKOE

PUSHKAS was an alley cat, mostly resident with a Czech neighbour (hence his name) but who, in his latter slobbery years, often came to visit us. He was elderly.

Of his four clawed feet, only two were wholly intact, the others having been caught in traps. Both his ears were ragged and suppurated. His teeth were broken and jagged and he slavered.

He had never been properly house trained. Even if he had, in his old age it would have been of little avail. He trickled urine, modestly, was sick only on occasion, and his greatest achievement was to have a bout of copious diarrhoea on the African rush matting.

Every night Pushkas ventured forth into the back lanes of the west end of Glasgow in search of females, for whose cause he fought, whether out of possessive lust or chivalric protection it would be unjust to choose.

He was a doughty hero and deserved a cat’s war grave, but his ultimate defeat was very terrible. We had acquired a tiny pure-bred Burmese kitten. A beauty. If you put him on a worn-out sofa of the kind occupied by drunken artists over years, he made it look like an ottoman treasure.

But on the day of his acquisition this tiny bundle of aristocracy was placed tenderly by the coal-fired stove in the kitchen and we looked upon it in wonder. It was at that moment that Pushkas appeared at the window.

The kitten, supernaturally aware of Pushkas’s presence, gave out a sound which I never hope to hear again in this or any life. It was straight out of hell, so utterly shocking and hate-ridden, it made one’s vitals shrink. We never saw Pushkas again. There was no cause for this.

Pekoe – so he was named – had had a happy childhood with a life of luxury before him. The hell within him was there from the start. Nonetheless we remained his servants until he attempted to smother our daughter.

We put a cat net over the hood of her pram to protect her, but he pushed it back and tried to lie on her face, determined she was to breathe her last.

We gave him to neighbours who had no children and who treated him like the eastern prince he assumed himself to be. He ended up grossly fat and in permanent possession of the best chair in their house.

They loved him. As my mother was fond of saying: “The devil looks after his own.”