‘Journey to the Isles’ – the story of Marjory Kennedy-Fraser
Episode 7 of the Hippodrome Silent Film Festival Podcast is dedicated to our touring HippFest 2022 Commission Journey to the Isles: Marjory Kennedy-Fraser, which just last week travelled to Brittany to open Le Festival International du Film Insulaire du Groix, and which will travel again for another outing at the University of Glasgow Advanced Research Centre in November!
The full performance offers a mesmerizing glimpse into the landscapes, folktales, and songs that inspired Marjory Kennedy-Fraser, one of Scotland’s great early collectors of traditional arts, featuring two of Kennedy-Fraser’s own films preserved by the National Library of Scotland Moving Image Archive. Joining audiences on this journey to the isles are acclaimed live performer, multi instrumentalist and one of Scotland’s leading storytellers, Marion Kenny with award winning musician, singer and songwriter, Mairi Campbell. Both artists co-created a new score, weaving together words, music and song alongside Kennedy-Fraser’s enchanting films.
You can next see the full performance as part of the CinemARC programme at University of Glasgow Advanced Research Centre on Thursday November 16th.
But for those unable to attend, waiting to watch, or anyone listening in curious to hear more about Marjory Kennedy-Fraser’s incredible story, we have adapted a live recording of the show from Eden Court Highlands Cinema in Inverness from October 2022 into this audio-only podcast for your listening pleasure. Researched, developed and performed by Marion Kenny, the story of Marjory Kennedy-Fraser is full of adventurous twists and turns and will paint a vivid picture of what life was like as a song collector in the early 20th century…
We hope you enjoy tuning in!
Various relevant links:
- More about HippFest’s touring commissions
- Book to attend the CinemARC screening (Glasgow) Nov 16th
- Marjory Kennedy-Fraser’s films at the National Library of Scotland Moving Image Archive
- More about Marion Kenny
- More about Mairi Campbell
The original ‘Journey to the Isles: Marjory Kennedy-Fraser’ commission was supported by the Year of Stories 2022 Community Stories Fund, delivered in partnership between VisitScotland and Museums Galleries Scotland with support from The National Lottery Heritage Fund thanks to National Lottery players.
Screening material courtesy of National Library of Scotland Moving Image Archive. Story in episode researched, developed and performed by Marion Kenny.
Performer bios:
Marion Kenny
Marion Kenny is a charismatic live performer, highly regarded multi-instrumentalist and one of Scotland’s leading storytellers. She held the post of ‘Storyteller in Residence’ for the National Museums of Scotland, wrote and performed on Scottish Album of the Year Thirteen Lost & Found (RM Hubbert), and is a pioneer of educational and interpretive storytelling in museums, galleries and heritage sites. Marion is an award-winning artist who has performed, researched and taught extensivelyinternationally.
www.marionkennystoryteller.com | Instagram: @marion_kenny_musician_
Mairi Campbell
Mairi is a pioneering Scottish musician whose work is rooted in, and draws from, her personal stories and cultural concerns. As an interpreter of Scots song, with David Francis, Mairi has contributed many songs to its current canon. She is the recipient of six national music awards and in 2019 was inducted into the Scottish Traditional Music Hall of Fame.
www.mairicampbell.scot | Twitter: @MairiMusic
Show transcript:
Alison Strauss: Hello listeners and welcome to episode seven of the Hippodrome Silent Film Festival podcast! I can’t quite believe that we’ve already passed the longest day of the year and the nights are starting to draw in, which means that our 14th edition of HippFest, Scotland’s first and only festival of silent film with live music, is only seven months away.
Alison Strauss: Before the summer is out, we wanted to dedicate this episode to our touring 2022 commission Journey to the Isles, which just last week travelled to Brittany to open Le Festival International du Film Insulaire du Groix, an annual festival celebrating the island cultures of the world through images and music.
Alison Strauss: After its voyage across the channel, this presentation will travel again for another outing at the University of Glasgow Advanced Research Centre in November. This very special HippFest commission premiered in Bo’ness in 2022, supported by the Year of Stories 2022 Community Stories Fund, and later that year it went on to tour the Scottish Highlands and Islands, supported by the BFI Film Audience Network with National Lottery funding as part of CURIOUS.
Alison Strauss: The performance offers a mesmerizing glimpse into the landscapes, folktales, and songs that inspired Marjory Kennedy-Fraser, one of Scotland’s great early collectors of traditional arts, featuring two of Kennedy-Fraser’s own films preserved by the National Library of Scotland Moving Image Archive. And just to note, anyone can make an appointment at the Archive Research Viewing Centre in Kelvin Hall to view both the original silent films on site.
Alison Strauss: Marjory Kennedy-Fraser began collecting Hebridean songs in 1905, fired by a desire to preserve and celebrate the musical riches of the island’s people. These two extraordinary films take audiences back over a hundred years to provide a snapshot of her work and the culture of the people she devoted her life to studying.
Alison Strauss: Joining audiences on this journey to the isles are acclaimed live performer, multi instrumentalist and one of Scotland’s leading storytellers, Marion Kenny with award winning musician, singer and songwriter, Mairi Campbell. Both artists have co-created a new score, weaving together words, music and song alongside Kennedy-Fraser’s enchanting films, conjuring the sounds and landscapes captured by one of the key figures of Scotland’s Celtic revival. We really hope that as this commission continues to travel, everyone will be able to enjoy the unique experience of these films and this wonderful music. This is a story which for decades has been contested, misrepresented and denied.
Alison Strauss: And for those as yet unable to attend, for those waiting to watch, all for online listeners anywhere curious to hear more about Marjory Kennedy-Fraser’s incredible story, we have adapted a live recording of the show from Eden Court Highlands Cinema in Inverness in October 2022 into this audio only podcast for your listening pleasure.
Alison Strauss: Researched, developed and performed by Marion Kenny, the story of Marjory Kennedy-Fraser is full of adventurous twists and turns and will paint a vivid picture of what life was like as a song collector in the early 20th century…
Marion Kenny: Well, it was just before Christmas that I went to my favourite art gallery in Edinburgh, and that is the National Portrait Gallery, which is in York Place. And when I was there, I noticed a painting that I’d never ever seen before. It was of an elegant, middle aged woman, sitting in a dignified pose, with her head held high, her pure white hair pulled back into a bun and her shawl was caught by the breeze.
Marion Kenny: And she gazed out of the picture frame at me with her watery blue eyes. She was seated within the unmistakable rich colours of the Hebridean landscape. The portrait had been painted by the Scottish artist John Duncan. And the accompanying words said Marjory Kennedy-Fraser, musician and Hebridean song collector, 1857 to 1930.
Marion Kenny: And I stood admiring this painting for ages and wondered why I had never ever heard of this lady. Wow. It was the very next day that I received an email from Alison Strauss the Director of the Silent Film Festival HippFest, inquiring as to maybe I would like to accept a commission to work at this year’s festival.
Marion Kenny: Alison sent me various films and themes and subjects that I might be interested in exploring and there it was, Marjory Kennedy-Fraser, Song Collecting in the Outer Hebrides, and Marjory Kennedy-Fraser, Song Collecting in Iona. Well, I did a quick Google, and up came the picture at the National Portrait Gallery.
Marion Kenny: And I knew that with such serendipity this was meant to be. Well, I travelled with Alison over to Glasgow to the National Film Archives and they’re housed just opposite the Kelvin Grove Museum. And together we watched the two films that you are going to see tonight. And they absolutely stole my heart. I felt really moved when I watched them because I felt like I was going home to my father’s and my granny’s house, because you see, my family come from Donegal. From the bog road between Ardara and Killybegs. My father was a tweed weaver, a handloom weaver, and as a child when I would go over I would run from cottage to cottage where my dad and my family would all be weaving. My granny lived in a little stone whitewashed thatch cottage.
Marion Kenny: It was actually a twin cottage, so my granny and my great uncle Jim were in one side, and my cousins Mary-Ann and Paddy and Joe, they were in the other side. They had no running water. Outside, there were two wells. Behind my granny’s cottage, they had a bio with cows that they would milk, and in the corner of the cottage well, there was the milk churn.
Marion Kenny: Chickens ran in and out, and in the evenings, well, everybody would gather around the turf fire where they would share stories and yarns and songs and they plucked down from the rafters fiddles because of course Donegal is famous for its fiddlers and when me and my family would fall asleep well then they would put us in the bed cupboard which was by the turf fire and that was the warmest place in the cottage. And when you see this film, and when I saw it, I felt like I was going home and I could see my family in this landscape.
Marion Kenny: Well, Ali said, and I said, wouldn’t it be wonderful if there were some living relatives alive? And we had to gain permission to use the films. And lo and behold, Topher Dawson replied, and he was the great, great grandson. And we were invited, or I was invited, up to the house. So in that cold, icy, wintry spell we had at the beginning of January, I actually stopped here in Inverness to break the journey before taking the road with only one screen wiper working all the way up to Topher’s house where they welcomed me like one of the members of the family. They were so kind and hospitable. And in one corner of the room they had put all of the books and the newspaper clippings of Marjory and in the other corner was her piano.
Marion Kenny: It was very, very special. Well, of course, I knew that if I was going to do any justice, then I would need a singer. And so I contacted Mairi Campbell. And I think you’ll agree that she has a voice as rich as an open cast gold mine. And when I contacted her, she said, I would love to. This sounds just like the project that’s at my street.
Marion Kenny: But under one condition. You will need to come up to the Hebrides, to Lismore, to rehearse, because that’s where I’m living now. Because I thought she was 15 minutes away in Portobello. So straight away, this project was taking me up, up north to Ullapool, up north to the islands, up north to the very places that Marjory was collecting, and of course now this tour has taken us right around the places that she would have been.
Marion Kenny: But that painting that I saw in the National Portrait Gallery marked a pivotal moment in her life. You see, by this stage she was already a very famous musician, but her husband… Alec Yule, the love of her life, had tragically died after only three years of marriage.
Marion Kenny: And she had two children, David and Petufa. So she moved back to Edinburgh to live with her mother. And she started teaching the piano and she started teaching singing. And remarkably for a woman of this era, she became the chief music critic for Edinburgh Evening News. People would travel far and wide to study with her.
Marion Kenny: She was a renowned singer. And in the evenings, well, there used to be these meetings called the Summer Meetings, and they happened in a house in Charlotte Square. They were organised by Geddes, Patrick Geddes and Arthur Thompson, and all of the leading figures of the Celtic revivalist music, uh, would attend.
Marion Kenny: And there they would share stories and tunes and philosophies. And they would have ceilidhs in the evening. And at these ceilidhs, Marjory would play the piano and sing. And it was at one of the summer meetings in Charlotte Square that she met the young Scottish painter John Duncan. He’d already been working in America teaching at Chicago University in Celtic Art, and the two of them got on like a house on fire.
Marion Kenny: And pretty soon he discovered she’d always had a passion to study Gaelic song. In fact, she had studied Gaelic for a while when she was young, but her studies had been broken. And you’ll discover why later. Well, when he was visiting the little island of Eriskay and he found out it was so rich in the culture of stories and songs, he wrote straight away and said, Marjory, I think that I have found the place for you.
Marion Kenny: Well, that journey from Edinburgh to Oban would be one she would make many, many times, taking the night train to Oban and the little steamer over to Eriskay. Sailing into a world that would hold her under its spell for the rest of her life. And as soon as she arrived, well, John Duncan met her and he took her to a wee cottage and he brought a little girl called Mary MacKinnison, sat her on Marjory’s knee and she began to sing gaelic songs, one after the other, and she was entirely enchanted. She felt so at home in this place. And just like my granny’s house in Donegal, the island had the little thatched cottages with huge stacks of peat lined up outside, people carrying creels on their back, collecting the turf, collecting cockles from the beach.
Marion Kenny: The air was filled with the rhythmic clickety clack of the weaving looms as the shuttles flew back and forth, locking weft into warp, the click of the spinning wheel turning. She found herself submerged in a soundscape of wailing wind, surging sea, the songs of the birds and the seals. Well, there was a priest called Father Alan who lived there and he spoke the Gaelic well and he enjoyed meeting Marjory and he helped her with the first translations. And she did this with just a piece of manuscript paper and a pencil. And she tried to record as many of the songs as she could on this first trip. And this first trip in the year of 1905 would mark the beginning of the quest which would make her world famous, the search for the songs of the Hebrides.
Marion Kenny: And when she got back, she started that work but you see, teaching from nine until four, being Chief Music Critic for the Edinburgh Evening News, doing recitals, having children. Well, she literally had to burn the candle at both ends and it was a long, long time before that first edition came out.
Marion Kenny: But when it did, it was very well received indeed. But she realised, with the death of Father Alan, which was heavy on her heart, that if she was to continue her work, she needed to find somebody to help her with the Gaelic translations. And so Edinburgh University introduced her to the Reverend Kenneth MacLeod.
Marion Kenny: He was from the Isle of Eigg, or rather he grew up on the Isle of Eigg, because his father was from the Isle of Skye, and tragically, rather like Marjory, his wife had died very young and very suddenly, leaving him with children. So he took the job as teacher in the little school on the island of Eigg and he’d been brought up steeped in folklore and song.
Marion Kenny: And when he met Marjorie, the two of them got on like a house on fire, and he was as enthusiastic and as passionate as she was in collecting and preserving these Gaelic songs. Well, these editions, The Songs of the Hebrides… They are exquisite. They’re works of art in themselves. Because they’ve got really important introductory material.
Marion Kenny: They have short excerpts of the songs that were handwritten before she set them to piano or harp. And they were very sensitive accompaniments. She was a highly accomplished musician and singer. She had studied not just with her father. But with opera singers in Paris and Milan, there were photographs in them and these wonderful arrangements. They became hugely important, popular as art songs in this Edwardian era. They were huge sorts of inspiration for the people of this time. In fact, one of the composers, Granville Bantock, actually wrote an opera called The Seal Woman’s Opera and he used much of the material that Marjory had sourced and used them in this book.
Marion Kenny: He invited her to do the libretto for the opera and at the age of 66 she sang the character of Mary MacLeod, the old crone, and it was performed in Birmingham, my hometown, under the baton of the world famous conductor Sir Adrian Bolt. Now, many of these became so famous because of the really wonderful performances that Marjory would do with her daughter, Petufa, who was the first harp player ever recorded.
Marion Kenny: And Petufa would accompany Marjory on these trips around the islands and she would help her, carrying a graphophone, which was a huge, cumbersome piece of equipment to record the songs on. And Petufa would sit there with her mother, helping her record the songs. And the wax cylinders that they recorded, they are housed in Edinburgh University.
Marion Kenny: And you can listen to them. So the work she did, the first woman to ever take recording equipment into the Gàidhealtachd to record tunes, is really remarkable. Well, she was awarded an MBE for her work as a musician and a song collector and she was also awarded a huge honour which was permission to be buried on the sacred island of Iona the resting place of kings.
Marion Kenny: She was world famous when she died. But to understand why she had this huge passion to collect these songs and preserve them, I need to go back further. Further than the moment that she met the Scottish artist John Duncan, who painted that art piece that I saw in the National Gallery. Because you see, Marjory was born into a musical family that hailed from the countryside outside of Perth.
Marion Kenny: Her grandfather was called David Kennedy and he was a very fine singer. He was also a handloom weaver, just like my dad. He was what you’d call a presenter. That means he led the congregations in song in the church with the hymns and the psalms and parts of the church service. And his brother was also a presenter.
Marion Kenny: So it ran in the family. And Marjory’s grandmother, well, she was renowned as a fantastic ballad singer and they were Gaelic singers. They were to have only one child, and that was David, and as far as they were concerned, there couldn’t be enough Davids in their life. And he was born with a rich, mellow tenor voice.
Marion Kenny: And from an early age, he would sit and sing in the church with the Psalms, and he decided that he would take on that family role as a presenter as well. He was keenly aware of the Highland Clearances and the exodus of Scots people, the diaspora of the Scots around the world. And he’d always had a passion to take the songs of Scotland and to sing them to these poor people who may never ever come back to Scottish soil.
Marion Kenny: Well, he fell in love young and he married a wonderful woman called Helen and they had three children together but sadly she died. But he would go on to find love again. And he married Elizabeth Fraser, Marjory’s mother. And the two of them, well, they moved to Edinburgh where he took a job as a presenter in a congregation.
Marion Kenny: In George Street, they would go on, he would have 11 children. And he became so successful, he started doing his own concert programmes. And news travelled and tongues wagged and pretty soon he was invited to do concerts everywhere. And he headed down the road to London, where he became a professional and highly acclaimed singer.
Marion Kenny: Well, he taught every single member in the family how to play music and he formed ensembles with the older children and they would do tours both here and around the world. In fact, he would go on with his family to do no less than three world tours taking in Australia. New Zealand, India, South Africa, America, Canada, Europe, Britain.
Marion Kenny: And he would take the older children away. And when that happened, well, Marjory would stay with the younger children with her grandparents outside of Perth, which she loved. She would also stay with the family in Edinburgh. And by the time she was 12 years old, she was such a fine pianist that her father said: “Well, Marjory? Now, I think it’s time.”
Marion Kenny: And she became his main pianist and it would only be two years later that there they would be setting off for a four and a half year tour around the world. By this stage David Kennedy was the most famous Scottish singer and with them, they took their own piano. It was a grand piano, cut down to size so it was easy to transport, down to four and a half octaves. What they called the Mozart Piano. And they set sail on March the 6th, 1872 from Glasgow in a clipper ship called the Ben Leddy and the Ben Leddy was famous and always in the papers because of its record breaking times.
Marion Kenny: It could get to Melbourne in Australia faster than any clipper ship. Three months and there they were and every single day when they were on that voyage the family would practice the piano. And they would practice singing. It travelled down around the tip of Cape Hope. It travelled right the way down to Antarctica, where it picked up the trade winds that pushed it on to Australia.
Marion Kenny: And when they arrived in Melbourne, this was a city still in its infancy. It had only a couple of railroads. It had no roads. It wasn’t attached to the rest of the world by cable. Perth didn’t even exist. And when they arrived, well, people had heard they were coming. And they sang concerts six nights a week for two months.
Marion Kenny: To sell out audiences, desperate to hear the songs of Scotland. And after each concert, well, people would throw bouquets of flowers onto the stage. And Marjory and her sisters would gather up the bouquets and take them back to the rooms where they were staying. Well, David Kennedy decided that they would do an 18 month tour through Victoria, new South Wales and Queensland, and there were seven of them on this tour. And well, in order to do this, they needed carriage, a four horse carriage. They needed saddle horses so that they could take turns being in the carriage and being on horses. And of course they had with them their piano.
Marion Kenny: They travelled through the rough bush, and of course this was very dangerous in this time in history. There were ferocious gangs, bandits, called Bush Rangers. Now the most famous of these gangs, of course, was Ned Kelly and his gang. And they’d been caught only one week before Marjory and the family were on the very same road as him.
Marion Kenny: They would travel for 50 miles every day only taking one stop. And wherever they stopped, well, sometimes there was in, sometimes there was a house, and sometimes they would just have to camp up in the creek and collect water from the stream. Wherever they did stop, if there was a hall, or if there was a barn, they would give a concert.
Marion Kenny: And people would come from every direction, on horseback and by carriage, to hear this family from Scotland who’d come to sing. Sometimes people would ride for a hundred miles to tether their horse on a post, to listen to the singing before they returned. Well, it was 500 miles that they travelled from Melbourne to Sydney.
Marion Kenny: And when they got there, people knew they were coming. And they sold out the concert halls and again, they sang every night apart from a Sunday, packed out audiences. Who adored them and again threw bouquets of flowers on the stage and the press wrote about this family, this wonderful family of musicians.
Marion Kenny: After Sydney, well, they boarded a boat and they put their carriage and their horses and their piano. Onto the boat and they set sail right to the north of Australia, up to the coast of Brisbane. But here, well, the temperature was very, very different to the rough bush that they’d experienced around Victoria. Now they were into tropical temperatures. Huge, immense forests. Rainfall. Fierce thunderstorms. The mud was so thick it was ankle deep, and the horses and their carriage would get stuck and it would overturn. They would have to go across rivers that had no bridges, that had no ferries, dragging the horses and the piano and the equipment with them.
Marion Kenny: It was hot. It was humid. There were vast swarms of monstrous mosquitoes. There were flying cockroaches. There was snake. There were spiders. There were crocodiles. And at night time Marjorie couldn’t sleep because there was a big, black, hairy tarantula hanging in the net above her face. But despite the difficulties, it was a matter of pride that they would never ever miss a concert.
Marion Kenny: And even after driving and being caked in mud, from the bottom of the hem of her dress to the top of the bodice, she would be changed out of that dress and into a pretty pink concert smock, and on stage to start the concert. On the dot of eight. Well, from there they travelled around Tasmania, and after 18 months in Australia, they sold the horses, but they took with them the carriages, and their luggage, and of course the piano.
Marion Kenny: And they boarded another ship and set sail 2,000 miles to New Zealand, to Aotearoa, the land of the long white cloud. And their first port of call was Dunedin, Old Edinburgh. Packed with nostalgic Scots people who wanted to hear the songs of Scotland. They sold out every concert that they performed in.
Marion Kenny: And after a month, well, then they took the horses and the carriage and the piano and they travelled from the tip of Dunedin all the way up, took the boat from Wellington over to the other island and all the way up to the tropical Northlands where Marjory encountered Maoris and volcanoes and geysers and on the South Island they’d see mountains and glaciers.
Marion Kenny: After travelling around New Zealand, they boarded a ship and they head towards America. There was a storm, so ferocious it blew for a week. It was so wild that it washed the family out of their bunk beds. And people thought that for sure, they were lost. They touched briefly in Hawaii, where they saw the Polynesian dancers singing their songs with flowers bedecking their hair and their neck and the grass skirts.
Marion Kenny: Onwards they sailed until they reached San Francisco. And again the people in America knew this family were coming and they were hugely celebrated singing their songs until they crossed the border. into Canada, which this time was still under British rule. Well, they would be in Canada for over a year.
Marion Kenny: They would sing in six different towns every single week. And on a Sunday they would give two concerts to the God fearing people of the Presbyterian church here in Canada. Of course, the climate was very different to the heat that they’d experienced in Australia. Because now, they were experiencing the freezing cold of the Northlands.
Marion Kenny: Now, those carriages were of no use because here, the people were travelling in sledges. So they hired two sledges for travel and horses to pull them. But, well, they weren’t very comfortable. Because you see there was no windscreen, there was no roof, they weren’t protected from the elements, they were like an open freezing wooden box on a couple of skis. And one evening, well, they travelled 20 miles in the temperature. Was 22 below zero. The snow fell so thickly, it was so cold that they couldn’t see from one sledge to the other because it was a complete whiteout. The poor horses struggled to pull and move through the huge mounds of powdery white snow.
Marion Kenny: The steam from the horse’s nostrils turned into two long icicles. David, Marjory’s brother, had two blobs of ice on his eyeballs that had to be picked off with difficulty before he could see again. Her brother Charles, he had frostbite on his nose, and her sister had sheets of ice on her cheeks. All the lapels were frozen, all the clothes were frozen, and when finally they did reach the safety of a wayside, in that had a roaring fire inside the people in the inn held them back and wouldn’t let them get too close to the flames because they knew that that was the worst possible thing for frostbite. Well Marjory had never ever experienced cold like that before in her life and she would never ever experience cold like that again.
Marion Kenny: And that four and a half year tour came to the end in Halifax in Nova Scotia and St John’s in Newfoundland and the year was 1876. And by now, Marjorie wasn’t the 14 year old lass that had left Scotland. Now, she was 18 years old. And that would be the first of many, many world tours that she would take in her lifetime.
Marion Kenny: But those are stories for another time. But now, maybe it’s easier to understand why Marjory had this deep passion to collect and preserve Gaelic song for future generations. Because you see, being brought up in a world of song, and this family who’d taken the songs of Scotland around the world, well for sure, the apple hadn’t fallen far from the tree.
Alison Strauss: Listen out for more episodes, like and subscribe wherever you are listening. We would love it if you would rate and review this podcast to help us reach a bigger and broader audience.
Alison Strauss: A final request. HippFest needs help, and you might be our missing link. We rely on grants and sponsorship for more than 80% of HippFest costs to bring you great films with live music and much more. Could you or someone you know benefit from a sponsorship slot in this very podcast? If so, then please get in touch by emailing hippfest@falkirk.gov.uk.
Alison Strauss: We’d love to hear from you. Thank you so much.
The Hippodrome Silent Film Festival 