Coupar Angus and the Celebrities

Our world today is dominated by the cult of celebrity. A new American president ie even described as a “hunk” in The Times colour supplement though other politicians apparently do not measure up so well when snapped on the beach apparently, particularly Clinton and Blair. I doubt if Nellie would even have used the word celebrity in the way we do today. Yet her town was surely not immune to the idea of fame. It is surely possible that the Royal train may have passed through Coupar Angus station, taking Queen Victoria and some of her many progeny up to Balmoral. Would the locals have crowded the platform here to wave at their monarch?

Unlike my grandmother , down in Warwickshire, Nellie did not tell tales of the naughty antics of  Bertie, later Edward VII. Granny, who worked for a Lord and Lady Wiseman, claimed that they entertained the prince down in the country and one of his alleged mistresses, Lily Langtry. I wonder if Lily read about the theatre stars in the Dundee Courier? Nor quite the same as the magazines like “Heat” that my colleagues scan for gossip about contemporary stars! It did cover the Antarctic expedition made by the Dundee ship, the Discovery, under the command of R.F. Scott. That must have been a big news story.

I had a quick look on the web, and though I found that two film stars had been born in Blairgowrie, I think it unlikely that Nellie would ever have heard of them even though one began his career before the talkies. He was called Andy Clyde. Both my husband and I would have been interested in his later career as an old man in the “Lassie” t.v. shows. One probably watched them, the other always became too worried that Lassie would be hurt, to cope! The second, George Anton is a modern film and t.v. actor so not much likelihood of Nellie seeing him.

What about poor old Coupar Angus? Has anybody famous come from there? Not that I’ve found so far. I’d quite like Nellie and her postcard collection to be better known, but I realise there are hundreds of other blogs out there dealing with our cult of the ancestor. We do have a star living locally who seems quite amenable to adding a bit of glitz to local events. All right, so I’ve never seen her and I don’t watch her television programme , but my partner reports that he’s been in the co-op around the same time. Unfortunately, he is completely disinterested in the cult of celebrity, so it didn’t mean much when some-one said, “Do you know who that was who just walked out? That was Lorraine Kelly!’

I think you might meet more famous Scots if you walked through Regent Street or Soho on a visit to London. Maybe this Burns homecoming, for the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of his birth will bring the celebrity Scots back to the country of their birth. I think the Scottish government is hoping for visitors whose ancestors came from Scotland to return. That way there would be a very welcome boost to the Scots tourist trade. Any foreign currency coming in to our cash strapped nation would be good. As an aside on this, I put on a new shirt this morning, snapped up as a bargain reduction in that hated shop, Tesco. I would usually pay this amount for a charity shop purchase but the shock came when I looked at the original price tag. £15 or €22:50. Less than a year will have passed since the product went into the shop, and now we have parity with the euro! Nellie had none of these worries. Her stamps for the postcards remained at that halfpenny rate for years. The post office then did not have to bother with commemorative stamps. Nor would they dare to force you to buy extra stamps to obtain the Burns commemoratives, illustrated here.

 

I’m sure there must have been Burns suppers in the nineteen hundreds when Nellie lived in Coupar Angus. Maybe not on the sort of level of today, where children are encouraged to learn the most famous poems, like “To a Mouse” to recite in return for a certificate from the Burns Federation. Perhaps they were too drunken and riotous for a nice young lady to attend. I seem to have an idea, from my parents time in Ayrshire, that the Masonic societies may have favoured Burns. Even though there is still a Masonic Hall in Gray Street  in the town, complete with a rather nice carved stone above the doorway, Nellie would not have gone there.

 My final hint of celebrity and Coupar Angus came one year during” Doors Open Day”. A building Nellie would have passed every Sunday on her way to church has been made save and was open to those prepared to make the tortuous, not to say strenuous climb up to view the town and its surroundings. The Tolbooth , on the Dundee road, was once the town’s prison or lock-up. It dates from 1702 or 1702 depending which site you believe. As my partner and I climbed up the temporary wooden staircase put in by Lottery Funding to replace the decaying stone, we saw names scratched into the soft redsandstone. Were they the names of former prisoners, or people like us who had come to look around? Our guide was eager to point out the finer points of the building, claiming that one scrawl marked a visit by John Lennon and Yoko. Who knows how serious he was? Certainly this celebrated couple did visit Scotland, by car , to see the village in Durness, Sutherland where John had stayed with his aunt, way back in his childhood. Yes, they travelled by car, in an Austin Maxi, of all things, Yes, they could hve come up this way en route. That holiday was to end in John crashing the car and him spending time in hospital, though . Both he, Yoko and her daughter Kyoko were detained in Lawson Memorial Hospital, Golspie. Only Julian was uninjured. Does undoubted fact here blend with mere conjecture? Who knows? What is certain is that Nellie knew of the Steeple or Tolbooth tower and here is a modern postcard of it.

 The last hint  of Coupar Angus and celebrity certainly has nothing to do with Nellie. Indeed. I’m sure , like our parents on first hearing rock music , she would be shocked. Yes, Coupar Angus has featured, if not dominated , a modern rock song. I would almost call it thrash metal. I’ll let the band, “Splen” speak for themselves, at this gig from the now closed Royal Bar in 1997. One band member, Stuart Finnie, appears top have gone on to other, if not greater, things. He’s put a few more videos of his gigs at King Tuts Wah Wah Hut up on U-Tube.

Sadly, the things mentioned in the Coupar Angus song, do not hint at the tranquility Nellie would have known in a quiet back water of Perthshire, in the nineteen hundreds. The smell of chicken. the petrol pumps, and I think, ice cream are mentioned. Now there is a link. My mother in law, for reasons best known to herself, declares the whippy ice-cream sold at Lamb and Gardiner’s garage, to be the best ever. This from a woman who lived all her adult life opposite a real Italian Ice cream parlour, Guilianotti’s , in Perth.

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Tags: American President, Andy Clyde, Austin Maxi, Balmoral, Blair, Celebrities, Clinton, Coupar Angus Tolbooth, Doors Open Day, Dundee Courier, Durness, Edward VII, George Anton, Golspie, Guilianottii's icecream, icecream, John Lennon and Yoko, King Tut's Wah Wah Hut, Kyoto and Julian Lennon, Lamb and Gardiner's garage, Lassie, Lawson Memorial Hospital, Lily Langtry, Lord and Lady Wiseman, Lorraine Kelly, Queen Victoria, R.F.Scott, Robert Burns, Splen, Stuart Finnie, The Burns Federation, The Discovery, The Homecoming, The Royal Bar Coupar Angus, To a Mouse