The 20th Century

An early student was W.S. Graham, a young engineer from Greenock who had drifted to Newbattle in 1938 out of a longing for something new and different from the drab world of the industrial west coast.

Graham said that he had no interest in politics at all. What he did have was a thirst for language and ideas. He studied Philosophy and Literature, and the writers and thoughts that he was exposed to at Newbattle provided him with the great turning-point of his life.. T.S. Eliot himself was later to praise Graham as a great poet. He also met his future wife Nessie Dunsmuir and this Newbattle romance was to inspire some of the most moving love-poems in twentieth-century literature.

W.S. Graham

Edwin Muir

Newbattle’s association with poetry was to be deepened by the 5 brief years that Edwin and Willa Muir were to spend at the College.  After a lifetime of literary wandering, they thought that they had found a perfect home in Newbattle.  Muir was an ideal man to carry forward the vision of the College’s founder: a self-taught man, without any formal education, he knew the value of adult education.  Above all, he saw the importance of Newbattle as an intimate community, and nurtured it. Muir wrote some of his finest poems at  Newbattle- the title of his collection ‘One Foot in Eden’ accurately sums up Muir’s attitude towards Newbattle.

Perhaps even more importantly, Muir nurtured a new generation of writers, many of whom came to Newbattle to experience the impact of his teaching and unique personal presence. The most important of these was George Mackay Brown, a young fellow Orcadian. Muir encouraged George to write poetry, and the memory of Muir’s esteem carried George through the hard years that followed. George looked back years later on his time at Newbattle as his ‘Golden Age’.  Other writers to emerge from Muir’s time as warden included Tom Scott, poet and preserver of a tradition of Scots writing that extended back to the Makars , and Archie Hind, a novelist in the great Glasgow working-class tradition.

The poet, novelist and short story writer, George Mackay Brown, was born in Stromness on the mainland of Orkney. His mother was a crofter-fisherman's daughter and his father was the local tailor and postman. Due to the onset of tuberculosis in his teens, Brown was unable to attend university, do military service or go to sea. It was not until he was in his late thirties that he attended the University of Edinburgh, after a formative period at Newbattle Abbey College under the poet Edwin Muir. In these years he became a member of the circle of distinguished poets in the capital which included Sydney Goodsir Smith and Norman MacCaig.

After this sojourn in Edinburgh, Brown returned to Orkney where he spent the rest of his life. His writings draw on Orcadian folklore, tales of the sea and Scandinavian sagas. A convent to Roman Catholicism at the age of forty, his work is marked by spirituality and a kind of Christian fatalism. Another poet, Douglas Dunn, has said of him: 'He was very unusual among Scottish poets in that there is not a trace of aggression in his work'. In some ways he might be seen as the poetic antithesis of Hugh MacDiarmid. Brown's character was gentle, benevolent and melancholic.

For Muir and Mackay Brown, Newbattle was a unique place, a healing contrast to the harsh values of the world around it.Some said that this was sentimental, but Newbattle has always encouraged creative self-expression, as well as the academic subjects. Newbattle has also spawned academics and critics such as Bill Findlay, Bernard Bergonzi and Harry McGurk, all of whom went on to make creative contributions in the field ofdrama, literary studies and Psychology.

Painting of the Poets in Milnes Bar

The Poets’ Pub

Scottish poets and writers of the second half of the 20th Century would meet in Edinburgh drinking haunts – Milne’s Bar and the Abbotsford on Rose Street.  From left to right:  Norman MacCaig, Hugh MacDiarmid, Sorley Maclean, Iain Crichton Smith, George Mackay Brown, Sydney Goodsir, Edwin Morgan and Robert Garioch.