Hamish Henderson

Born in Blairgowrie, Perthshire[1] on the first Armistice Day 11 November 1919, to a single mother, Janet Henderson, a Queen's Nurse who had served in France, and was then working in the war hospital at Blair Castle.

[dubious – discuss] He studied Modern Languages at Downing College, Cambridge, in the years leading up to World War II, and as a visiting student in Germany ran messages for an organization run by the Society of Friends aiding the German resistance and helping to rescue Jews.

[5] Henderson collected the lyrics to "D-Day Dodgers," a satirical song to the tune of "Lili Marlene", attributed to Lance-Sergeant Harry Pynn, who served in Italy.

The book in which these were collected, Ballads of World War II, was published "privately" to evade censorship, but earned Henderson a ten-year ban from BBC radio, preventing a series on ballad-making from being made.

Henderson continued to host the events every year until 1954, when the Communist ties of several members of the People's Festival Committee led to the Labour Party declaring it a "Proscribed Organisation".

He also spoke at a Riddle's Court meeting which had hosted in the past, the Workers' Educational Association when he said that Calvinism was repressive in the Scottish psyche and that 'we had to divest ourselves of layers or preconception and misconception before we could come to grips with Scotland and its people.

'[7] Henderson was a socialist,[1] and beside his academic work for the University, he produced translations of the Prison Letters of Antonio Gramsci,[8] whom he had first heard of among Communist Italian partisans during the war.

[1][9] In 1983, Henderson was voted Scot of the Year by Radio Scotland listeners when he, in protest of the Thatcher government's nuclear weapons policy, turned down an OBE.

As a radical democrat whose political beliefs were closely bound up in the study of folk culture and high literature, Henderson's work expresses a tension between romantic nationalism and socialist internationalism which has been reaffirmed in public life in Scotland since his death.

[13] Debate on his parenting, and a possible link to the eighth Duke of Atholl or a 'cousin' of that lineage,[1] has continued into considering the 'cultural context' of the eighth Duke's role in designing the Scottish National War Memorial (opened 1927) bringing together the culture of 'the people', but also looking into Henderson possibly being of royal or aristocratic blood, 'acknowledging a heritage that meant a lot to him, while still protecting his anonymity, and the power of his life's work to identify with everyman and everywoman.