Dance Edinburgh Volunteers 1916

You’ve all heard of Paul Jones,
Have you not, have you not?

In September, 1779, John Paul Jones, considered pirate by the British, hero by the Americans, sailed into the Firth of Forth in Bon Homme Richard, accompanied by Pallas and Vengeance. To the residents along the firth and to the citizens of Edinburgh it was an incredible event. The American war of Independence was arriving on Scotland’s doorstep.

John Paul Jones was a Scot, a gardener’s son from Kirkbean in Kirkcudbrightshire. By a strange coincidence this village on the Solway Firth produced the founder of the American Navy and, at exactly the same time, Dr James Craik who established the American Army Medical Service under George Washington.

Born in 1747 as John Paul, he was apprenticed at the age of twelve to a merchant sailor. He became a mate on a slaver and then master of a vessel trading back and forth across the Atlantic. Accused of the responsibility for the death of a ship’s carpenter whom he had ordered flogged, he slipped away from Scotland to the West Indies to gather evidence against the charge. Soon he was accused of another murder, that of the leader of a mutinous crew. He fled to America and as John Paul Jones offered his services to the revolutionary forces.

Jones had attacked the Cumberland town of Whitehaven in 1778 and, after terrorising the inhabitants, he sailed into the waters near his old home where he made an unsuccessful attempt to capture Dunbar Douglas, 4th Earl of Selkirk, presumably for ransom. The earl was away from home so all Jones got for his trouble was the Douglas family silver which he returned to Lady Selkirk after the war.

Now, a year later, he was in the heart of Scotland. HIs plan was to land at Leith and demand £200,000. If the money was not paid, the port would be levelled. There were no British warships in the area capable of attacking his small but powerful fleet and the guns of Edinburgh Castle did not have the necessary range to blow Jones’ fleet out of the water. Shore batteries were hastily set up while many residents fled to safety. Then, on Sunday, while congregations prayed fervently for deliverance, a violent storm blew up just as the ships had edged close enough to Leith to make good the threat and their landing parties were making ready. People lined both shores of the firth and watched as the three ships were beaten by the wind back into the North Sea. The threat to Edinburgh was over.

A near tragedy had been narrowly averted, but the Edinburgh Town Council realised that positive steps had to be taken to prevent another such incident. A fort was built at Leith with sufficient guns to protect the harbour and a regiment known as the Defensive Band of Volunteers was raised to protect the city of Edinburgh.

The original Edinburgh Volunteers became the Royal Edinburgh Volunteers in 1794 and on their cross-belt plates they wore the thistle and the crown.

On the Continent the Napoleonic Wars broke loose and in 1802, with invasion by the French an awful possibility, the 2nd or Buccleuch Regiment of the Royal Edinburgh Volunteers was raised.

Hard on the heels of victory came a new threat to peace, for after Waterloo industrial unrest held the country in its grip. Great factories had supplanted the small or cottage industries of earlier times and the economic and social burdens imposed upon them were more than working men and their families could bear. In 1817 the Habeas Corpus Act was suspended and the Radical War growing out of the Industrial Revolution had begun. (See “Scottish Reform”) In 1819 the 1st Royal Edinburgh Volunteer Grenadier Company was organised to deal with the riots and strikes by the workers that were erupting in and around Edinburgh.

The tune “Edinburgh Volunteers” is a pipe march used for First Class competitions.