Bab M'Keen

Forethocht

The writings of "Bab M'Keen" about everyday life in and around Ballymena (or "M'Keenstoon" as he calls it), are an important record of the local Ulster-Scots tongue and culture from the 1880s right through until the middle of the 20th century. The significance of this record from the Ulster-Scots language point of view is, however, immeasurable.

Over the past 400 years, the Ulster-Scots literary tradition has gone through several changes of character. Best known is the Burnsian age of the Ulster-Scots poets, which lasted from the early 1700s until the middle of the 1800s. This of course mirrored the renaissance of Scottish vernacular poetry under Ramsay, Fergusson and Burns during the same period. Then with the arrival of Sir Walter Scott's epic novels using Scots for the dialogue of the characters, a new era of Scots prose writing began in the early 1800s. Thus began the golden age of the Scots "kail-yard novel" which lasted for half a century. Although both poetry and kail-yard novels continued to be written in Ulster-Scots down to the present, another new style became dominant in late-Victorian Scotland and Ulster. This is the style typified by "Bab M'Keen" and was almost exclusively carried in the local newspapers of Scots-speaking communities. This new form of Scots prose writing tended to be more realistic and less romantic than the kail-yard books. It was wholly written in Scots - not just the dialogue - even if the Scots forms used were light and accessible. The supposed authors, like "Bab", were Scots-speaking characters themselves. They were fictional spokesmen and women for their communities on all the social, economic and moral issues of the day. As they were vox pop, or "voices of the people", the characters had to balance the understandability of their Scots writing to outsiders, with the more pressing need to be credible as actual users of local speech. In fact, the creators of these fictional newspaper correspondents were often the newspaper editors themselves. The sheer volume of published Scots and Ulster-Scots in this form is spectacular, but almost all lost in the archives of countless back issues of local newspapers.

In Ulster, this tradition came into its own through two literary giants of their time; John Wier, or "Bab M'Keen in county Antrim and Wesley Guard Lyttle, or "Rabin Gordon" in County Down. Lyttle wrote his weekly "Robin's Readings" in county Down Ulster-Scots for the Newtownards Chronicle from the 1880s, and then for his own paper, the North Down Gazette. But taking the lead in this tradition in Ulster was John Wier in County Antrim. Wier was the proprietor and editor of the Ballymena Observer from 1886 until 1927 when his son William Weir took over the newspaper - and the weekly contributions under Bab's name. Just as Lyttle also included more items from Rabin in his annual North Down Almanac, so too did the Wiers in their annual Ballymena and North Down Almanac and Gazetteer. This was also known as "Bab M'Keen's Almanac". Bab M'Keen most often appears as a country handloom weaver, but at times he was a shopkeeper in M'Keenstoon itself, and so could speak for town or country. In the tradition of this style of writing, Bab"s subjects cover almost every aspect of life. From a linguistic point of view, the Ulster-Scots phonetic spellings, words and grammar needed to have what we now call "street credibility" for local readers who were Ulster-Scots speakers themselves. So when now obsolete forms such as "ken" for "know", or "gang" for "go" were used by Bab, it can suggest something about how mid-Antrim Ulster-Scots may have changed in the past century. It is one of the most important tasks of the Ulster-Scots Language Society and the Ulster-Scots Academy to raise awareness of the richness of the Ulster-Scots literary tradition. Republishing these original works becomes even more important when the originals are all but unobtainable today.

"Bab M'Keen's" contribution to the entire corpus of Ulster-Scots literature is as significant as any other individual writer, both in terms of quantity and quality. The Mid-Antrim Ulster-Scots Society (and in particular Willie Drennan and Jack Adams) are to be warmly congratulated for bringing this careful selection of Bab M'Keen's writings back into the public domain.

Dr. Philip Robinson

Ulster-Scots Academy