The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #45108   Message #666781
Posted By: McGrath of Harlow
11-Mar-02 - 05:39 AM
Thread Name: OBIT: Hamish Henderson (1919-2002)
Subject: RE: OBIT: Hamish Henderson
Here's the full page obituary in today's Guardian

And here is the opening paragraph as a taster:

"The tryst of Hamish Henderson, who has died aged 82, was with Scotland. It was a meeting of high consequence - across the 20th century, in darkness and in sun, Scotland informed all that Henderson was as a man and a poet. In his great sequence of second world war poems, Elegies For The Dead In Cyrenaica, he asks "that we should not disfigure ourselves/With villainy of hatred". It is the MacDonalds of Glencoe that he presents as exemplars. And in his Nelson Mandela freedom song, Rivonia, when Henderson sings, "Spear of the nation unbroken", it is to Scotland as much as South Africa that he refers."

And here is a piece about him published a few years back in Living Tradition, with a photo, and a discussion of one of his most impressive songs.