Speakout: Dunoon and the Mod

1 Sep 2006 in Argyll & the Islands, Music

Mods and knockers

BRIAN MORTON considers the changing relationship of the Royal National Mod and its host town for this year, Dunoon

THE ELDERLY WOMAN at Dunoon pier seems perturbed by the crowds. “I thought this was supposed to be a quiet place.” “This is nothing”, I tell her. “Just wait till Cowal Games day . . . and then there’s the Mod invasion in October.”
She looks even more startled. “You have my sympathy”, she says, in an accent that I’m beginning to identify as English South Coast, “we had a lot of trouble with them as well”. Now it’s my turn to register surprise. “Really?” “Oh, yes, I remember it well; Mods and Rockers knocking seven bells out of each other on Brighton seafront.” And with that she’s gone.

I may not have done local tourism the best of turns by leaving her with the impression that my adopted (and now re-adopted) home town is going to look like the set of ‘Quadrophenia’ in a few weeks time. The reality, of course, is a little gentler.

The only cultural clash Dunoon is likely to witness is that between the singers and reciters of the 2006 Royal National Mod and the ghosts of a few jazzers who remember the town’s other and lamented music festival and can’t quite leave the place.

Dunoon has undergone some startling sociological and demographic changes over the past century and a half. Like almost all holiday resorts, it saw its initial douce smartness overtaken by hordes of working-class trippers, including at least one phalanx of committed Sabbath breakers.

There is a certain local cynicism about Dunoon’s Gaelification, but the often repeated canard that the Mod has no history in Dunoon is no more than that

By the later 50s, though, the advent of cheap foreign holidays (cue sorrowful lines like: at least in Spain you’re guaranteed good weather or, more loyally and stoically, if only it were like this every day, you wouldn’t want to go anywhere else) and the mushrooming of car ownership (which meant an expensive ferry fare or a sickbag-clutching ride along the old Rest and Be Thankful switchback) more or less took the prefix off Cowal’s pen-insular status.

The old place looked set for a slide into shabby neglect. Then the Americans came. Everyone hated it until the tills started ringing louder than the St John’s and St Cuthbert’s bells, and local businessmen quietly put away their CND badges and “over-paid, over-sexed and over here” mutters.

Then the Cold War ended and the Holy Loch took on a more pious aspect again. The Americans left, all but those who’d married in, and left behind a greater taste for country-and-western than is strictly healthy. (There are still more stetsons on Argyll Street than anywhere east of Fort Worth.)

And once again Dunoon looked fated to slide into the same time-warp that had lain in wait in 1960. This time, though, in keeping with all the redrawing of borders that was going on elsewhere, Dunoon set about repositioning itself: no longer the last fortified outpost of the Lowlands, but as the gateway to the Highlands, and, as Dunomhainn, the visitor’s first taste of Gaeldom.

Let me tell you how unexpectedly this chimes to one who grew up there during “the American years”. Nothing illustrates it better than a Just William-ish misunderstanding I shared with my pal Stewart. Esso were running a campaign under the slogan I’VE GOT A TIGER IN MY TANK. Cars trundled about with striped, furry tails dangling from the petrol filler-cap, though in the wet of Dunoon I’VE GOT A DROWNED COYPU IN MY TANK might have been closer to the visual effect.

Stewart and I were sitting by the roadside one day, musing on schoolboy things like the Ontological Proof and which of the girls in the class was already wearing a bra when a large Plymouth sedan went past, carrying two American sailors and two girls who were most emphatically wearing bras. We glanced admiringly at the unfamiliar roominess – the car, not the lingerie – and then saw a familiar/unfamiliar bumper sticker, which had the [TIGER] logo in the appropriate place, but in a sentence which conveyed precisely nothing to either of us.

“What language is that?”, said Stewart, in deference to my narrow superiority in linguistics. I had by then small Latin, very much less Greek, badly accented French, and thanks to my father, an ability to ask the time in Hausa, but this was beyond me.

The words on that bumper sticker looked like something you might have come up with in an I-Spy codebook. It was Stewart who came up with an inspired answer. “I know what it is! Vietnamese!”, “Eh?”, “American car. Vietnamese. Obvious.” The logic was overwhelming.

I don’t recall when I first saw Gaelic written down, but I do recall the heat of embarrassment coming up my neck when I realised that dumb, if inspired, mistake. In the Dunoon of the 1960s, Gaelic was spoken in a few houses, sung with enthusiasm by a couple of choirs, but was rarely seen in print.

There was certainly no nonsense about bi-lingual road signs, and Gaelic wasn’t an O-Grade option at Dunoon Grammar School, despite some politicking to make it so. Greek, yes; navigation, yes; but no chance to pick up a qualification in Scotland’s other national tongue.

There is a certain local cynicism about Dunoon’s Gaelification, but the often repeated canard that the Mod has no history in Dunoon is no more than that. In fact the town hosted a Mod as early as 1930, and again in 1950, 1968, 1994 and in the millennium year, the last a pretty significant coup.

So there is a deeper history than might at first appear. Nor is there any irony in hosting the year’s most important celebration of Gaelic culture in an area where the language survives only in place-names rather than as a living vernacular.

It’s important that the Mod does have a presence in areas where the language has receded into a folkloric twilight, precisely because it acts as a strong and positive reminder that the language is embattled, sustained by individual passions, the expensive but excellent Gaelic broadcasting service of BBC Scotland (an organisation still somewhat dominated by Gaels), and by the network of literary and musical societies which give the annual Mods their vitality.

As a schoolboy, I was caught in the strange position of singing lessons made up largely of material like “Hearts of Oak” and “Men of Harlech” (neither of which exactly engaged our experience) and listening to Gaelic choirs and soloists singing in a language at least two of us thought might have originated in South East Asia.

I’m still shamefully ignorant of the tongue, though one of my former BBC colleagues flatteringly insists on addressing me in it on the slender but generous assumption that I look as if I might understand it. My wife’s family come from Uist and Gareloch, but there isn’t a Gaelic speaker among them any more, though that is currently being addressed.

Growing up among Americans and going through a schooling that still clung to remnants of an old imperialism – certainly in its history, literature and music teaching – meant that I was better versed in American jazz and in English folk song and its traditions than I was in the indigenous music of the region, however specialised a tradition that had become.

I used to dream of Dunoon as a kind of New Orleans-on-Clyde where one day there might be a jazz festival. Against all odds, that came to pass, and its passing is a matter of much regret. I welcome the Mod, not because it seems like a quaintly authentic spectacle got up for the tourists, but precisely because it’s one of the few things Dunoon has to offer that isn’t pitched at southron tastes. It’s got a Celtic tiger in its tank. Let’s just hope the rockers stay away.

Am Mòd Nàiseanta Rìoghail takes place at various venues in Dunoon from 13–21 October, 2006.