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THE SONGS AND POEMS OF ZETTA SINCLAIR
CONTENTS
Introduction to Zetta Sinclair A Review Acknowledgements
KIST OF MEMORIES CD
Track Notes Music and Lyrics
POETRY
Introduction to the Poems Poems


INTRODUCTION TO ZETTA SINCLAIR by Isla St Clair


The collection of songs on the Kist of Memories CD were composed by my mother, Zetta (Georzetta) Sinclair, who was born in the North East Scottish harbour town of Buckie, in 1920. Her parents, George and Isabella Sinclair, were part of a close and deeply religious community of fisherfolk, whose ancestors had lived around the Moray Firth for many generations, fishing the often treacherous North Sea.
George, a quiet, kindly man, was both fisherman and naval reservist who served during both world wars of the twentieth century. Isabella, in the early years of her marriage, was strong enough to carry her husband to his boat in order to protect his leather sea boots from the salt water. Her other tasks were to mend and bait nets as well as tend to her family and home.
The family owned their own home in Gordon Street, Buckie, where Zetta was to spend her childhood. Unfortunately, she was a sickly child who suffered the first of two bouts of pneumonia at the age of three and was not expected to survive. The toddler rallied, but thereafter was cosseted at home at the slightest sign of any chest infection. These times at home ensured a strong bond between mother and daughter. The little girl was included in the daily chores which were always accompanied by much singing. In fact, all the family were good singers and Zetta’s brothers also played in the local pipes and drums.
At school, Zetta was a very able student. Her teachers praised her ability to write stories and poems, even suggesting she should be allowed to continue with further education. This idea was
met by her parents with a usual response in those days, “It’s nae for the like’s o’ us”. Zetta, like most teenagers of her time, left school at fourteen and found work locally.
As the second world war approached, and the country was suffering severe economic depression, many young men from Buckie decided to join the army. The local regiment was the famous Gordon Highlanders whose pipe band would perform spectacular displays in the surrounding towns to encourage recruitment. This was a common sight in those days and Zetta neatly captures the excitement in her song, The Call Tae Arms.


Zetta’s desire to create poems and songs was overwhelming. It was a way for her to express thoughts, opinions and emotions in what could be a repressive society.
In 1939 Zetta married Bob Dyce and their first child, George Sinclair, was born the following year. In 1943, tragedy befell the family when a second child, Wilma, died at only a few months old. Joy returned two years later when another daughter, Christine Mary, was born and finally, in 1952, I arrived and was named Isabella Margaret but always known as Isla.
The second world war brought immense grief into Zetta’s life with the loss of both brothers serving in the army, as well as the death of both parents and her baby, Wilma. In addition to these family bereavements, Zetta suffered from serious bouts of ill health throughout her life, including diphtheria in her early twenties. She found solace and peace in nature, drawing inspiration from the fisherfolk community and the outstanding beauty around her home in the Moray Firth as well as her growing personal experiences of life.
By 1948 Zetta’s marriage to Bob began to fail. To help revive their union they decided to leave the Moray Firth for a different life in the south of Scotland. By nature, a quiet reserved man, Bob was no match for his wife’s bright mind and vivacious personality and despite their effort to find common ground they separated. Now, without Bob, my mother decided to start a new life with her children in the tiny harbour village of Findochty just a few miles from her hometown of Buckie.
We lived in a small house in Commerce street, opposite the Salvation Army Hall which backed on to the picturesque Findochty harbour. Zetta now acquired a motorbike, and found employment collecting donations for an Aberdeen based charity for the blind. It was indeed a rare sight to see a woman riding a motorbike in the 1950s let alone one roaring around the Highlands of Scotland.


Zetta, like many of her generation, enjoyed the Brownies. She was the initiator of the first Brownie pack in Findochty and, as Brown Owl, she encouraged the girls to sing and play as well as knit and sew. I was allowed to attend along with my sister, in an honorary capacity, as I was only a toddler. In fact, I made my first solo public appearance singing nursery rhymes as part of my mother’s Brownie concert on the stage of the ‘wee hallie’ in Findochty before I was three years old.
My mother had a good friend, Bob Johnson, nicknamed Spike, a well-known local journalist particularly noted for his humorous, satirical pieces in the local Doric language. He consistently encouraged my mother like a guide and mentor. In the 1940’s quite a number of Zetta’s poems (often under her pseudonyms of George or Georgie,) were published in The Banffshire Advertiser, known to the locals as The Buckie Squeak!
Life as a single mother in 1950’s Findochty was proving very difficult and so when an opportunity came for a total change, Zetta grasped it wholeheartedly. She had recently struck up a friendship with a young English couple who were planning to return to their home in Crewe. They offered her temporary accommodation should she consider embarking on a life down south. Zetta liked the idea and in March 1956, we boarded the steam train in Aberdeen bound for Crewe, England.
After a difficult beginning, with all of us sharing a single room for a few months, my mother managed to find some domestic work with a local farmer. With the job came the rental of a council house in the small hamlet of Bradfield Green.
Living conditions were very basic with no electricity and so we made use of Aladdin lamps and a coal fire. Hot water was always in short supply and the weekly washing was done by hand in a small outhouse. Cooking was done on a solid fuel Rayburn. On one occasion, a chip pan caught alight and Zetta, in a panic, tried to douse the flames but was severely burned on her hands and face requiring considerable treatment. Soon after this trauma, my mother became ill with rheumatic fever which weakened her heart muscle leaving her with lifelong heart problems.
Despite the difficulties, there was much to appreciate in our English home with warmer weather and a very friendly


community. Zetta joined in many local activities including Scottish Country dancing. She had always had an interest in astronomy and was able to attend regular lectures in Crewe, sometimes given by astronomer Sir Patrick Moore. Fond of animals and to my great delight, she fostered some sick dogs from a local animal refuge. On one occasion her affection was tested when Lassie, a handsome golden Labrador, took to chasing the neighbour’s hens and sometimes dispatching them! The local hunt also met on the village green, which was a disturbing experience for my mother whose sympathy lay with the fox. This experience produced her powerful protest song, The Hunt.
My mother was a wonderful storyteller and her love of music and singing was something we all shared. Apart from making our own entertainment we all enjoyed listening to the radio. I believe that the Scottish and Irish dance band music, popular at that time, must have influenced some of her melodic compositions.
Zetta’s life in England produced more songs and poems, some of exile and others of love. While living in Findochty and before moving to England, Zetta had begun a romance with George MacDonald, a handsome Gaelic speaking man from Stornoway, in the Outer Hebrides. He came to see us in Bradfield Green and she visited his family in Lewis. The couple married in April 1960 and we all returned northwards to live in the ‘Silver City by the Grey North Sea’, Aberdeen.
In Aberdeen, Zetta noticed an advert in the local newspaper, asking for people to gather who might be interested in traditional folk song and music to form a society. She went along to that meeting and in 1962, became one of the founding members of The Aberdeen Folk Song Club.
The instigator and driving force of the folk song club was Arthur Argo, a fine singer and grandson of the great folk song collector Gavin Greig. He and Zetta became close friends and soon the club attracted a strong nucleus of exceptional singers including, Norman Kennedy, Tom Spiers, Andy Hunter and Peter Hall. There were also frequent appearances from what are now considered the last of the real traditional singers such as, Jeannie Robertson and her daughter Lizzie, Jimmy MacBeath and Davie Stewart. My mother was absolutely in her element, both singing and listening to the songs in the company of like-minded people. She would host ceilidhs in our tiny flat and had the enthusiasm to organise charity appearances, cajoling folk singers from the Club to entertain the residents of my brother’s workplace, the psychiatric hospital in Aberdeen.


Just before my eleventh birthday, in 1963, I was introduced to sing at the folk song club. My mother was pivotal in encouraging my early passion to learn, perform and thoroughly enjoy traditional song and music. We often sang together where I would hold the melody and she soared naturally in the high harmony. It made a lovely sound and in fact we performed together many times throughout my teenage years.
Zetta was continually trying to improve her writing and create new works. She could neither read nor write music and just relied on picking out notes on an old piano to compose her melodies. Her songs, Dunkirk, Lullin the Littlin and the definitive song of her hometown The Bonnie Boats o’ Buckie, were all awarded top prizes in songwriting competitions.
Articles were written about Zetta in The Scots Magazine and other publications. The confidence that my mother gained from the recognition of her work brought many other rewards, including correspondence with the Scottish poet and writer, George Mackay Brown. By now, she was immersed in the world of traditional folk music regularly taking part in folk festivals and gatherings around Scotland and spending time in Edinburgh with her good friend, legendary poet, songwriter and intellectual, Hamish Henderson, who rightly described Zetta as, “an important tradition-bearer, as well as a talented singer and songwriter”.
Unfortunately, Zetta’s marriage to Geordie failed. Now in her late forties she met and married Albert Doran, from Buckie, and returned once more to live in her birthplace. Albert, an active liberal supporter, councillor and local headmaster was happy to embrace the world of folk music, enjoying travelling to various festivals with my mother. Once retired, the pair spent some time living in the beautiful Glen of Isla, which produced her delightful song, Glen Isla.
As the years progressed, my mother’s general health deteriorated further. As well as requiring a double heart by-pass she was involved in a serious car crash requiring surgery and lengthy recuperation. However, this did not prevent her from enjoying some overseas trips to the USA, Romania, Italy and Holland as well as continuing her involvement with the folk song community at home in Scotland.


In 1995, I made a six-part radio series for the BBC called Tatties and Herrin in which I told through word and song the story of the Scottish North East fishing and farming industries. My mother’s songs written from her own experience in the fishing community made a particularly valuable contribution. The script was written by Ian Olson, the Scottish historian, poet and ethnologist, who described my mother’s work in the following passage:
“winning hearts with her thoughtful, moving creations, often in her native Scots, and based on her own experience of an often difficult life. Her natural ability with words and a deep understanding of her own community were allied to a constant search for truth and understanding of the human condition to produce compassionate poetry and song, both universal and personal”.
My mother died in 1995. Regrettably, it was before she could hear me perform one of her most powerful songs, Dunkirk, at The Royal Albert Hall, London, to commemorate the sixtieth anniversary of that famous evacuation.
In the course of collating, researching and recording my mother’s work and life I have come to a much clearer understanding and admiration of her character, resilience and talent. I speak for both Zetta and myself in the hope that her songs will continue to be enjoyed and sung in the spirit they were created.
Copyright Isla St Clair, 2021.


THE SONGS OF ZETTA SINCLAIR
A Review by Professor Alison Lumsden, Regius Professor of English Literature
The folk revival in Scotland played a significant part in the renewal of a sense of Scottish identity in the twentieth century. The most significant figures in this revival are well known and their place in the cultural landscape of Scotland rightly established. However, what is less well remembered is the fact that these figures had standing at their backs a whole host of people working in local contexts, people who were working within their own traditions and dialects. It is to this often-forgotten group that Zetta Sinclair belongs.
Scottish song can trace its origins to the oral ballad tradition and has several recurring themes: history, and the lament and celebration that accompanies key historical moments; a celebration of the local; place and landscape and, in more recent times, working life. All these themes can be found in Zetta Sinclair’s work, but this work is never merely derivative or stuck within the patterns laid down by its predecessors. Rather, Sinclair takes these themes and deftly adapts them to her own circumstances and her own times. Consequently, while traditional Scottish historical moments such as the Glencoe massacre are commemorated, more recent and pressing circumstances such as Dunkirk are also urgently present in her work. The places of which she writes are those often celebrated in song, such as the west coast islands, but so too her more local landscape of Cullen, Aberdeen and Glen Isla find a place in her work and are deftly captured in the Scots of the north- east. As a result, the hardships of the fishing industry form a theme, one often forgotten in more ‘official’ folk song. The hard work and worry faced by women in this environment are poignantly captured, and motherhood and marriage are also foregrounded in a body of work that is clearly female in its approach.
Zetta Sinclair’s work deserves to be remembered both for itself, and for what it represents. It is a reminder to us that there is a long-standing and energetic tradition of song writing in Scotland and that this is most lively at the local level and among those who are in danger of being written out of the story of Scots song. It also reminds us that much of this local tradition resides with and has been preserved by women and that the unique perspective of women may be found within it.


ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
My grateful thanks go to those who have helped bring the songs and poems of my mother, Zetta Sinclair, to your attention.
Production
Patrick King, Ian Stuart Lynn, Bill Reed,
Ian Green, Phil Cunningham, Ian Olson,
Marion Welch, Professor Alison Lumsden,
Urda Cotter, Chris Henderson, Patricia MacDonald and my sons, Elliott and Calum.
Digital Cover photograph
Andy Hall
CD Cover Design
Louis Hillier
Musicians
Isla St Clair: Vocals
Ian Lynn: Keyboards, violin
Phil Cunningham: Keyboards, accordion, whistle
Snare drum Tony McManus: Guitar
Bob Thomas: Guitar
Danny Prendergast: Guitar
Ian Hardie: Fiddle and double bass
Publisher
Merlin Management
Web Design
Stephen Hill
Recorded in the United Kingdom Copyright 2021 Isla St Clair