THE US state of North Carolina has strong connections with Scotland, for example every year a Highland Games is held close to the summit of the 6,000 ft Grandfather Mountain. This mountain is the highest of the Blue Ridge range and the games are claimed to be "The largest Gathering of Scottish Clans in the World "- the 57th Gathering will be held July 2012.

After the failure of the 1745 Jacobite Rebellion many followers of Prince Charlie emigrated to the 'Cape Fear' area of North Carolina. Almost 20 years later they were joined by Flora McDonald the heroine who rescued The Prince from King George III's Redcoats. She was treated royally in Carolina and was gifted land before returning to Scotland after many turbulent years of being
involved in the American War of Independence. She has not been forgotten in the colonies, in fact a book telling the history of the peoples of North Carolina devotes a complete and complimentary chapter to Flora.

However North Carolina has much more recent connections with Scotland and Greenock in particular. The state capital of North Carolina is the city of Raleigh and it was here that the IBM Corporation established a very prolific Product Development Laboratory and an extremely productive and high-tech Manufacturing Facility.

Much of this computer development was allocated for production to the Greenock Manufacturing Plant. This resulted in hundreds of Greenock employees – myself included -- making short and long visits to Raleigh. Indeed through the years, scores of families were sent to the North Carolina state on 12 months-plus assignments. A number of these assignees so impressed their US colleagues that they joined the US company.

When my wife and I were married in 1956 we were allocated a two-apartment, rented house in Regent Street, the same house which some years earlier my wife's grandmother had raised six children in. As a consequence we had nostalgic memories of this house, embracing both generations of residents, in particular a poem we enjoyed but could remember little detail of; not knowing the title or the author -- only it's theme which was "something about bairns.”. On and off through the years, I searched for this elusive poem to no avail – these were the days before personal computers and search engines.

However, as we know, truth can be stranger than fiction. In 1977 while I was on an IBM business trip to North Carolina, I was browsing through a bookshop and a US published book of "101 Famous Poems" and there it was!  -- 'Cuddle Doon' by Alexander Anderson, a poet from Dumfriesshire. Certainly not a Robert Burns, nevertheless this work of his is a beautiful reflection of a part of life in a working class home of the day. It is reproduced here in the hope that some readers will identify with it and perhaps others enjoy it as much as we did.

In amongst the '101 Famous Poems were several by Robert Burns. I considered myself fairly well read in Burns but I had never heard of a particular one which was included therein. This was 'Advice to a Young Friend' which, in my opinion, is up there among Burns’s greatest works.

The final verse reflects the typical honesty and reality of Our Immortal Bard when he sends his young friend: the following salutation:

"In ploughman phrase, "God send you speed"
Still daily to grow wiser:
And may ye better reck the rede, (heed the counsel)
Than ever did the advisor!

Reader Comment