Duncan Livingstone


Duncan Livingstone was a Scottish Gaelic Bard from the Isle of Mull, who lived most of his life in South Africa.

Family Origins

The Poet's great-great-great grandfather and namesake, Duncan Livingstone, fought under the command of Allan Maclean of Torloisk at the Battle of Culloden in 1746. With Duncan also fought his brothers, brother-in-law, and his father, who was killed there. According to the local oral tradition, Duncan Livingstone eloped with Anne MacLean, whose father Hector was the disinherited eldest son of Donald, 10th Chief of Clan MacLean of Coll and whose mother was Isobel, the only daughter of Ruairi Mear, 17th Chief of Clan MacLeod of Dunvegan. After the elopement, Duncan and Anne were granted the mill at Ensay by MacLean of Torloisk. Duncan is said also to have composed the song Mo Rùn Geal Dìleas in honor of his wife.
The poet's grandfather, Alexander Livingstone, was further said to have been the uncle of the African explorer and missionary David Livingstone.

Life

Duncan Livingstone was born in his grandfather's Croft at Reudle, near Torloisk on the Isle of Mull. His father, Donald Livingstone was a joiner and stone-mason. The Poet's mother was Jane MacIntyre , a native of Ballachulish who was said to be the grandniece of the Gaelic poet Duncan Ban MacIntyre. The Bard was the third of seven children and the outlines of the house where he was born may still be seen today.
Duncan's parents had married in Glasgow in 1872. His mother had worked as a domestic servant. His father had lived in Canada and worked in the construction of timber houses. When Duncan was 18-months old, his family moved to Tobermory, where he was educated. He later recalled, however, "The scholars of my day were thrashed if they spoke Gaelic in the school or it's environs."
When Livingstone was 16, his family moved to 126 Talisman Road in Glasgow. Duncan first became a clerk and then a stonemason's apprentice. When the Second Boer War broke out, he learned that the Laird of Torloisk was raising a cavalry regiment and immediately enlisted.
During combat against the Boer Commandos, Duncan Livingstone was shot through the ankle and returned, lamed, to Glasgow. At this time, he carved the inscription Tigh Mo Chridhe, Tigh Mo Gràidh on the lintel of the main door of Saint Columba Church of Scotland on St. Vincent Street in Glasgow.
On 3 March 1903, the poet left Southampton on the S.S. Staffordshire on a voyage back to South Africa. He never returned to Scotland and was soon joined in South Africa by his brothers John and Alex. The three brothers briefly owned a house building company in Johannesburg, but disbanded their partnership and the poet joined the Public Works Department. His brother John went on to prosper through gold mining, while Alex became a sugar cane farmer in Natal.
In 1911, Catriona MacDonald of Pennyghael in Mull, came to South Africa and became the Poet's wife. They were never to have children, however.
There was a lively community of Scottish Gaels in Pretoria when the poet first settled there and he, his wife, and both of his brothers were very active in both Scottish and Gaelic circles. Duncan and Alex Lingstone edited a Gaelic page in the Caledonian Society's journal. Duncan also founded the Celtic Society of Pretoria, which was a literary association consisting of forty members with Scottish, Irish, and Welsh origins. Also Duncan established a Celtic section in the State Library, Pretoria, which consisted by 1954 of almost a thousand books.
According to literary historian Ronald Black, Duncan Livingstone's poetry was doubtlessly assisted by the Gaelic broadcasts which he began making from South Africa for the BBC during the early 1930s. His first poem to be published was A fàgail Aifric in 1939. He published three other poems in Gaelic about the war and also wrote a lament, in imitation of Sìleas na Ceapaich's Lament for Alasdair of Glengarry, for his nephew Pilot Officer Alasdair Ferguson Bruce of the Royal Air Force, who was shot down and killed during a mission over Nazi Germany in 1941.
Catriona died in September 1951 and Duncan, who adored her, never recovered from the blow. He spent his retirement both writing and playing bowls.
Livingstone contemptuously mocked the collapse of the British Empire after World War II with the satirical Gaelic poem, Feasgar an Duine Ghil.
The rise of the National Party and it's policy of Apartheid troubled Livingstone deeply. The Poet's nephew, Prof. Ian Livingstone, recalls, "I visited Duncan at his hotel in 1959. He was resident there. Later, when I was back in Uganda, he sent me a long poem, in English on Sharpeville, where some 77 Africans had been shot dead by police. This had obviously affected him greatly. Unfortunately, I don't have the copy anymore."
The Sharpeville Massacre also inspired Livingstone to write the Gaelic poem Bean Dubha' Caoidh a Fir a Chaidh a Marbhadh leis a' Phoiles.
He died in Pretoria on 25 May 1964 and lies buried in Rosetta Street Cemetery.

Legacy

In a paper about The Gaelic Literature of Argyll, Donald E. Meek describes, Duncan Livingstone as a, "very fine modern Gaelic poet", who, "wrote some splendidly prophetic verse on the twentieth-century challenges which were to confront white rule in South Africa. He thus has a claim to be included in any forthcoming survey of the Gaelic literature of Africa!"
In an essay, Wilson MacLeod describes Duncan Livingstone as a, "poet of significance who became a perceptive critic," of the British Empire. MacLeod adds, however, that such poets, "must be considered isolated voices. The great majority of Gaelic verse, from the eighteenth century onwards, was steadfastly Pro-British and Pro-Empire, with several poets, including Aonghas Moireasdan and Dòmhnall MacAoidh, enthusiastically asserting the conventual justificatory rationale for imperial expansion, that it was a civilising mission rather than a process of conquest and expropriation. Conversely, there is no evidence that Gaelic poets saw a connection between their own difficult history and the experience of colonised people in other parts of the world."