Dance The Glasgow Highlanders 2498

Tue 2020-03-10 Robb Quint wrote:

RQ Having Marjorie McLaughlin "on the line" and knowing how knowledgeable she is about SCD history, I questioned her about something that had made me curious:

RQ My source information for the dance had come from the SCDDB, that The Glasgow Highlanders had been devised by one Walter F. Gillies (1851-1909) in the 1880s. And I had consulted my own dusty old copy of RSCDS Book 2 (no printing date, but it shows "Miss M. F. Hadden" as secretary, and she retired in 1967) to see whether there was anything more, and I had been surprised to find less, in fact nothing whatsoever about any deviser. Now I know that the folks at the SCDDB don't just make things up, so I figured that perhaps subsequent research had led to the Society's having added that source information in a later printing, and indeed Marjorie solved that particular mystery with:

MM My copy of Book 2 is a 1998 revised edition, and it does include the source as W. F. Gillies Manual of Dancing, or a Companion to the Ballroom, Glasgow, c. 1885.

RQ This still seemed odd to me, so I queried further. I mentioned to Marjorie that there is a "deviser gap" of about 150 years in RSCDS-published books in that dances from the 1923 founding of the Society until today have either been republished from devisers (if cited at all) in old manuscripts of the latter-18th or early-19th centuries or modern devisers whose dances were published sporadically from the 1960s onward and not consistently until the 1980s. And this RSCDS-dance deviser Walter Gillies, listed in the SCDDB with no other dances to his name (no doubt taken from the RSCDS information) from the latter 19th century, is just an anachronistic oddity with no other such that I had e'er seen from RSCDS-published materials...i.e., as previously mentioned, devisers otherwise all seeming to be early 1800s and earlier or 1960s and later with virtually none in between.

To this Marjorie in her wisdom replied:

MM I have no idea who found it there and thought that to be the origin of the dance, but RSCDS Publications Committee references, particularly in the early books, are suspect or nonexistent! It is very unlikely that Mr. Gillies can be credited with "devising" the dance; rather his 1885 publication happens to be the one to which the Society had access. I've reread references to The Glasgow Highlanders in Thurston's Scotland's Dances, Emmerson's Scotland Through Her Country Dances, and the Fletts' Traditional Dancing in Scotland. All of them mention The Glasgow Highlanders frequently but not one makes mention of W.F. Gillies. It's quite clear that the dance was one of many that were in the repertoire of all of the itinerant dancing masters of the late 19th century. And it appears in Mozart Allan's 1895 Ball-room Guide (of which I own a treasured copy), which itself is mentioned in the Fletts' book specifically with reference to The Glasgow Highlanders. I would therefore say that Mr. Gillies was just one publisher of many who reprinted the dance.

Eric Ferguson (co-editor): On the basis of his information I have reset "Author" to "(unknown)", and removed the date of creation. 2020-03-10.