Alexander Moffat’s Milne's Bar and the secrets the painting holds

Here Alan introduces Sandy’s painting of one of the poet’s favourite watering-holes in Edinburgh, which he’d visit and return from, on the Biggar bus, often not entirely sober. But beyond the masculinities and dark frivolities of the era, was something deeper going on?

In the 1950s and 1960s, a number of Scottish poets, almost all men, met fairly regularly in what was Milne’s Bar, in Rose Street, Edinburgh. You would go down a set of steps from the pavement to the doors, and once in the bar, a further set of steps on your right took you further down into a smaller room, in which there was what looked like a garden hut. This was referred to as “The Little Kremlin”.

READ MORE: A poignant sonnet about urban poverty, family love and helplessness

It was a dark, dingy, beer-and-whisky permeated atmosphere, thick with cigarette-and-pipe tobacco smoke and the murmur, sometimes raised volume, of male voices in conversation, concurrence, disagreement, congratulations, denigrations, ploys and plays, furtive assignations planned, civil demonstrations plotted, publications manoeuvred towards, relationships begun and ended, designs, public and private, engineered at various levels of consciousness and intuitive projection. The company of women was rare. And yet there were a few brave souls who took their place, would not have a place dictated to them, stood their ground, whether subversively or confrontationally, as participants, as fatal attractions, as victims of the patriarchal supremacy that ruled, with all the vulnerabilities and liabilities that implies.

It was different era, gone for good, and I’m sure we’d all agree, things are very much better nowadays. Are they really? Boutiques and nail-varnish parlours? Cake shops and perfumeries? There’s more than one way to tell this story, and more depth to the history than a superficial glance and acceptance of the clichés will allow.

Milne’s Bar, the Abbotsford, and the Café Royal were the three bars frequented by what was known as the Rose Street poets, while Hamish Henderson was most frequently ensconced in Sandy Bell’s Bar, up in Forrest Road, on the other side of Princes Street Gardens, where he would hold forth and sing, solo or in company, a living embodiment of an oral tradition the more literary gents in Rose Street often disdained.

The polarity is misleading, although the flyting between Hugh MacDiarmid and Hamish Henderson explored its ramifications with a marvellously vigorous abandon and lavish investment, in the pages of The Scotsman in 1964 (back in the days when we had more than one newspaper with commitment to Scotland’s culture).

Alexander Moffat’s famous and iconic painting, “Poets’ Pub” (now in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery) represents a collective group of the poets, while his more recent painting “Scotland’s Voices” brings Hamish into the picture alongside the singers, musicians, storytellers, performers and the oral tradition-bearers. The two paintings are complementary.

But there is another complementarity in a more recent painting, “Milne’s Bar” (2021), which complicates the story further. Here we have the usual suspects recognisable from “Poets’ Pub”: MacDiarmid, George Mackay Brown, Sydney Goodsir Smith, Robert Garioch, and Norman MacCaig centre-stage, but alongside them are MacDiarmid’s wife Valda, and Margaret Tait, the Orcadian experimental film-maker and poet, and Stella Cartwright, tragic muse of some of the poets, and George Campbell Hay, lonely, isolated, a forlorn figure in this assorted company of individuals, and in the far corner, a group of figures is coming down a nearby sets of stairs, a younger generation unobtrusively approaching.

Who are they? Maybe Sandy Moffat himself and his friend John Bellany and John’s wife Helen? John and Sandy were sharing a studio close by and visited the bar in awe and respect for what they might hear or overhear there.

Sandy Moffat's Milne's Bar

The painting is carefully co-ordinated, with the darker blues and greens on the far borders, left and right, and the warmer reds and yellows centring the atmosphere, with MacCaig’s tones and attitude both centring and balancing. He acts as a connecting figure but holds each side in scales of balance, with the great mountain of Assynt in the far Highlands, Suilven, rising behind him, while the city and beyond that the national landscape encompasses them all. The figures and their setting, the national context, is in its moment and yet mythically eternalised, both from the 1950s and 1960s, and yet appearing as if in a dream to us today, in an air we have to work to look back into, to see through to what might have been, must have been, there, more than half a century ago. And what comes through to us from then.

Can we go deeper? What was going on in this place? Is there something more to be said about the life that was cradled and rocked in this location that for many people today might signify only an utterly repellent quality of toxic masculinity?

Well, let’s demolish once and for all the idea that Milne’s, or the Abbotsford or the Café Royal, were dens of “toxic masculinity”.

Sandy Moffat comments: “They were actually the only three ‘civilised’ bars in Edinburgh where a young art student (male or female) wouldn’t be met with hostility or ridicule. In other bars the atmosphere was indeed toxic, as old soldiers congregated to toast their hero Field Marshall Montgomery and boast of how many ‘Germans and Japs’ they’d killed. Can you imagine George Mackay Brown or George Campbell Hay behaving like that? The male poets offered a clear alternative to that brutish world and that’s why other kindred spirits gathered around. We were all inspired and elated to be in their company….”

And the difference between the realm of the Rose Street poets and that of Hamish Henderson and Sandy Bell’s in Forrest Road is describable. Sandy again: “On the few occasions I was in Sandy Bell’s no one ever discussed Delacroix or Pound or Shostakovich, as we did in Rose Street. That’s a difference worth noting. And Sydney Goodsir Smith would appear with a young woman on his arm every night. He opened our eyes to the ‘romantic toun’ we lived in but hadn’t quite noticed. And if further proof is needed of the decency and tolerance of the Rose Street drinkers, we could refer to John Tonge, who, at a time when gay men were hounded from pillar to post, felt completely at home in Milne’s.”

To accompany the painting, I’ve written a poem which explores the possibility of what was happening there, in this underground world.

Underground, or undersea? Sometimes the air in Edinburgh feels fresh and open as the prospect of a future undefined. Sometimes it can feel as oppressive as an ocean weighing down on you. The capital of Unionist Scotland, or the “capital-in-waiting” (as MacCaig called it) of an independent nation yet to be. The conversations that took place there were perhaps radio signals in a cosmic darkness, looking for receptive listeners, unsuspecting of what futures even yet might be made.

So it’s worth tuning in once again, to see what we can make of them, first in their own historical moment and then in their long traverse of air, spanning then till now. The poetry of such men and women stays and keeps its strength and value. Neglect it at your cost: you are less without it. But hold on the image for a moment, and if we’re counting the cost of damage done to others by such commitments to personal indulgence and all the limitations as such men and women might have been proscribed by, we need to count the value too, the worth of what they left.

In this world, it’s not so much that poems carry a political message, it’s rather that poetry IS politics. There’s so much more to learn, even now, in 2022.

MILNE'S BAR. A poem by Alan Riach:

The music from a city undersea,

The capital-in-waiting is itself a vast Cathedral,

The crown above St Giles, the castle on its dark volcanic plug,

Down the long slope of the Old Town mile, to

The newest of designs, the parliament of Holyrood,

And in one sweeping arc around,

Encompassing the New Town of some centuries ago:

All of it a labyrinth, as any city must be,

And all of it beneath the deepest ocean: the air itself

Is Union. Inhabitants and denizens, citizens and subjects,

Who choose who they would wish to be, and swim within its atmosphere.

Its habitat assumes a British Empire. The Butcher’s Apron flies upon its pole

Above it all, rising from the waters like a periscope,

Turning as the wind blows, here or there.

But deep within this undersea Cathedral,

There are some swimming people unpersuaded,

Who breathe by different means, whose gills are out of kilter with

Ascendancy of English, whose languages are different,

Gaelic, Scots, and flavoured with a music of a different kind and character.

Observe them swim through streets and wynds and alleyways,

Alone or in small shoals of three or five, chart them move as if upon a radar screen,

Or from the mappa mundi of the Outlook Tower:

Their currents turn and curve them, they come now towards a confluence,

A rendezvous approaches, somewhere in a dark and narrow street,

Run parallel to Princes Street, that broad, high-fronted, half-open shopping mall,

Commerce hard behind its walls and windows, outstretching to the gardens,

But with the Castle looming above, and that serrated ridge of rooftops

Looking down from Old Town. 

Run parallel behind the brassy shopping,

There is a darker artery of blood: 

Rose Street: shadowy in summer, cool,

Both sinister and welcoming, dangerous and warm.

Milne’s Bar. There at the corner, a short stone staircase takes you down

To further depths, beneath the city’s sea. Go down these steps

And through this door and enter in

To this vast Cathedral’s deepest vault.

The shadows thicken, multiply,

Their subterranean depth and darkness.

Now the music that you heard so faintly from above it all begins to be

Articulate in voices, conversations, polyphonic, purposive, dynamics of

Communicative angles and directions of unknown approach.

And to the side, within the cavern now, another, smaller set of stairs

Leads further down, into the very crypt of this Cathedral. So let’s go 

down.

And step by step,

                         We do.

The sign is on the wall: this is the

“Little Kremlin”. The company we keep

Is here: the music of this whole encompassing

Cathedral undersea, has its source here.

We are in the thick of it, immersed in all its magic, now.

So listen, and, we’ll hear what it says.

It flies to a different flag.

It touches the ear, enters through the cochlea,

Swims through the brain like a viral infection of health, an antidote to villainy.

Something is improving, getting better in the drift

Of swirling currents, vivid faces, gestures, love and carelessness

And sheer flamboyant fun,

As all the choral waters of the deep resistant world

Rise up through weights of water and oppression,

And filter out to atmospheres today, and politics yet, unwon.