Monday 17 December 2012

White Sands

It seems to me you used to get a better class of grafitti when I was a young man, or maybe I simply used to get around more.  The loos in the old British Museum Reading Room were an epicentre of original and off-centre wit, a place where scholars and cranks (there is a difference, though admittedly the overlap was larger in those days) could offload barbed little aperçus about life, the universe, and the library staff.  But interesting stuff could appear pretty much anywhere, or so it seemed.

The Situationists had raised the bar with their witty daubings in Paris 1968, of course.  They ironised and sensitised the street as a canvas for ephemeral political art. I remember passing under a railway bridge on which someone had painted, in big block capitals, MAN UNITED!  It took me several beats to realise this probably referred to football, and not political philosophy.  Ah, well.  The early, pre-gallery Banksy gave the French a run for their money, it's true, but the internet has now become the new, virtual "street", and returned the real ones to the "taggers", endlessly repeating those overweight personal logos that are as boringly sclerotic, stylistically, as heavy metal music.


One piece of grafitti which I read around 1974, written in a careful hand on the formica partition of a college lavatory, has stayed with me ever since.  No, not the much-copied one written above the loo-roll dispenser ("Sociology degrees: please take one") and, no, not the even more factitious two-hander that joined the plaint  "My mother made me a homosexual!"with the retort "Cool! If I get her the wool, will she make me one, too?"  No, this one was to all appearances a quotation from a poem.  It went:

On white sands     sands
Scottish pipers run      run

Whole movies flowed through my imagination when I read those simple, evocative words.  It has the feel of a lament, not a triumph.  These pipers are surely men out of place, far from the highlands and the streets of Glasgow, fleeing for their lives under a tropical sun.  It makes me think of Zulu, not Chariots of Fire.  For decades -- in a casual sort of way -- I have been attempting to find their source.


Now, there is a place called Mersa Matruh on the North African coast, which is famous for its white sands.  It is also famous as the site of a battle in 1942, where Rommel's Afrika Korps routed British, Australian, New Zealand and Indian troops, before the tide of battle turned at El Alamein.  When I noticed that, it seemed like it might be just the sort of place where Scottish pipers might have been running on white sands.

Not least because there also happens to be a piece of pipe music, a solemn march, called  "The White Sands of Mersah Matruh", composed by Major David H.A. Kemble, of the 1st Battalion Scots Guards.  I felt very close to a solution when I discovered that.  But: that regiment was stationed there in 1940, leading up to the Battle of Sidi Barrani, which was an early Allied triumph against the Italians.  As far as I know, no Scottish regiment was at the Battle of Mersa Matruh in 1942.

Of course, Scottish troops had been deployed along this coast before, in WW1.  But there are plenty of other places in the world with white sands where Scottish pipers may have had cause to run, the British Empire having extended over so much of the globe, and Scottish regiments having so often found themselves at the "sharp end" of imperial blundering.  But, so far, I have failed to identify the source.

Assuming, of course, there is one, and these haunting words are not just the spontaneous effusion of some poetic Scot with a biro and five minutes to kill.

13 comments:

Zouk Delors said...

Perhaps you can confirm that a certain wall of the Bodleian's Gentlemen's Room once exhibited the manuscript legend:

Who is Armitage?
And what is shanking?

[Those (foreigners?) who are as baffled as the alleged grafittista purports to be, may obtain relief by going to, e.g.,

http://www.supaprice.co.uk/p/result.jsp?ga=uk14&q=armitage+shanks+urinals

(Other purveyors of porcelain are available).]

Mike C. said...

Zouk,

Ha! Now that is what you call a British joke...

I'm not even sure there is a gents in the Bodleian, but if there is, this is what ought to be written in it.

Mike

Mauro Thon Giudici said...

Oh Mike an year out of the internet seems so much time ... your pictures have taken a brighter look that I really like (did not change the monitor by the way). The ones in the previous post are really gorgeous too. As for the white sands: I'm not sure of the exact provenance of the troops but there have been for sure a landing in northern Corsica near Saint-Florent where there is one of the beautiest white sand coasts of the Mediterranean Sea. It was a secretly managed landing aimed at organizing the local partisans against the German base at the south end of the island. Since that, among our enemies :-), it was English that did those kind of jobs I suppose that there may had been Scottish troops among them but I did not have a deeper look at it.

Mauro

ps: I've lost your e-mail address could you please send it again ?

Mike C. said...

Thanks, Mauro -- I must be happier this year!

Interesting about Corsica, but somehow I doubt they'd have taken bagpipers along on a clandestine mission. Although nothing about military planning would surprise me.

Mike

Mike C. said...

Having said that, I believe Lord Lovat (commando leader and genuine Scottish aristocrat warrior-lunatic) had his personal piper lead his troops into action, so who knows?

Mike

Mauro Thon Giudici said...

Of course there was no battle but there was a compatibility with the local characters for sure ... :-D

Huw said...

Mike,

Photos can represent places in unfamiliar light, and here, underneath the South Bank, I expect gloom, noise and self-concious teenage skaters. Not these luminous pictures - I've noticed the same change as Mauro.

Huw

Mike C. said...

Huw,

Well, first I had my assistants chase all the skaters away then set up my lighting trucks just so... I also had to hire the police to set up barriers to stop anyone coming back on the set until I was finished. It took two days. Gregory Crewdson couldn't have done it better!

Mike

Zouk Delors said...

Oh well, as long as it raised half a laugh from a scholar...

Actually, this blogpost has possibly provided the key to a personal mystery. I once travelled by car from Alex to Mersa Matrouh. It took a long time, and the only thing I remember about it was that there didn't seem to be much there to justify the journey. I did take a photo however, and every time I see it I wonder why I took it, because it doesn't really appear to have a subject; it's just a rather blurred, slightly overexposed shot looking down at where the Med meets the shore twenty or thirty feet away. Now, I've often had cause to regret not making a note on the back of prints (especially that one of old whassername) and I now realize this one should have been endorsed at the time, "The famous white sands of Mersa Matrouh".

PS Perhaps it continued:
From heavy metal bands bands
Though not from any gun gun

Or perhaps not.

Mike C. said...

Zouk,

No, no: "Ha!" is my full-on laugh... "Ha ha ha ha!" looks too much like mockery.

A scholar? Me? I'll have none of that language round here.

Yes, MM is one of those names you know you recognise, but can't remember why. Battles do tend to take place in the middle of nowhere, I suppose, especially when tanks are involved. I imagine El Alamein is about as dramatic as Cromer.

Mike

Gavin McL said...

This brought to mind a barely remembered poem by Sorley Maclean which is set on Ruweisat Ridge - Death Valley. Ruweisat Ridge is near Mersa Matrouh but Maclean talks only of "dun sand dirty yellow"
I did a bit of searching and did find this academic note on Gaelic poetry which mentions a couple of poems by an Alexander MacKinnon who fought in the Napoleonic wars with the Gordon Highlanders. One describes a battle in Holland by the sea and another about their landing in Egypt
http://www.gla.ac.uk/media/media_164190_en.pdf
Unfortunately I couldn't find the poems themselves on-line.
Maybe -
Good Luck in your hunt

Mike C. said...

Gavin,

Many thanks for this: Sorley MacLean may indeed be the man -- Scottish poet who served in N. Africa and was wounded at El Alamein... I'm not at work today, but tomorrow I'll get my spade out.

Do you read Gaelic? It's yet another of those languages I thought I might learn, but then backed away from the sheer complexity.

Mike

Gavin McL said...

Mike

No I don't read or speak Gaelic. I did try to teach myself some once but I only remember some vocab - enough to have a rough idea of what some place names on maps or charts mean which can come in handy when walking or navigating round the Western Isles.

I once sailed into Portree on Skye and some men were unloading peat from a barge by hand and they were talking in "the Gaelic". It is such a different language to most European languages I felt like I'd arrived in a foreign country.

Good Luck tomorrow