George McKelvey
From David Phillips book ‘Jimmy Shand’
Page 47
At this time Jimmy was occasionally augmenting the band of the Dundee Empress Ballroom where an enthusiast named Douglas Henderson organised Scottish Country Dance Sessions…..And, not long after, he himself was leading a group playing for the same type of dancing at a local hall names St. Patrick’s run by Craigie Football Club.
Left-handed fiddler Dave Ireland had a band of his own, but on Monday nights he played with Jimmy’s outfit at St. Patrick’s.
While awaiting call-up, piano-accordionist George McKelvey had sat in with Ireland’s band at a Saturday night in the village of Longforgan ; went along with the fiddler one Monday night to meet Shand ; accepted an invitation to become second-box player.
It was through cousin George that I first came to know Jimmy Shand.
Like Jimmy, George was also one of a family of nine, and started playing the melodeon while still at school.
In spite of hard times, my aunt Annie could always spare a bowl of soup for the needy, and this included the miner-musicians from Fife who came to play in the streets of Dundee during the 1926 Strike.
One day one of them had a piano-accordion (novel then) for sale, and through the timely winning of a sweepstake – and with the balance somehow made up from mother’s purse – young brewery-worker George was able to acquire it. I was often in my aunt’s house when he would come eagerly clattering up the tenement stair to snatch a few minutes practice while the kail was being ladled. Soon he was playing the new box in a trio at Saturday night dances in small halls. His spare-time music-making progressed, although not as spectacularly as Shand’s. But every move was to a better hall, higher fees.
Despite her humble station my aunt Annie was in her way a valuable patroness of the art of music. There was, for instance, the hard-up pianist who regularly tuned up….
Sometimes he would lighten her gargantuan labours at the washboard stuck in the galvanized bath set on a backless wooden kitchen chair, imposing a delecate filigree of capriccio or lilting Highland melody upon the sudsy, rhythmic, rasping, cleaning of semmits and drawers and the intermittent pizzicato of rattling shirt and blouse buttons ; or perhaps he would accompany himself on an old heirloom organ in The Lost Chord while she sat darning or mending on a drowsy afternoon beside the blackleaded iron kettle on the blackleaded hob. In return he would share the family’s simple meal.
The pianist was Tammy McDaniel, one of the trio my cousin George started off with. (The leader had been drummer Stuartie Foy, who would leave the skins to deliver a comic monologue……In dame get-up he would rush onstage, eyes shut – he kept this up until in his seventies without ever once falling over the edge – hands clasped in a wringing gesture, head turning this way and that in perplexity, before launching into the uproarious ‘My Man Tam’ or ‘My Wee Johnny’ – Mind ye that an’ mind ye yon when ye marry my wee John prefacing a long list of the fastidious son’s idiosyncrasies reeled off by the doting mother to the daughter-in-law-to-be, who, in the last verse, rebels with It’s his mither he needs merried on! Ye can keep ye rain wee Johnny!)
There were many small halls in Dundee running dances then, some of them considered somewhat ‘oary’ which means less than respectable.
In my urchinhood, playing in the streets, I saw bobbed and shingled girls setting off in the evenings, their slippers wrapped in paper ; a few escorted, but mostly in twos and threes, chattering gaily, cracking chewing-gum, shouting ”We-ell!” to boys. They smelled of cachous and spearmint and Jockey Club ; and sometimes they woke you up later, returning in groups, singing. At such times you might also hear a stirring of feet in the echoing close below, a girl’s laugh, and a deeper male voice.
Cousin George became one of a quintet playing at one of the less-refined halls ; a hall, which because of its long narrowness was known as the Palais de Loabby. Sometimes there were ugly scenes, even bouts of fisticuffs, in and just outside the hall ; but the checkers and supporters always managed to keep the tide of battle from engulfing the quintet. Admission was only sixpence, yet there could be arguments over that.
One night George gave his wrist-watch to pal John who was on the door. John strapped it on beside his own. Later, a girl sought to gain admission for fourpence. When she was refused she shrieked abuse – no wonder he was able to sport TWO watches at such fancy prices! Well, he would certainly get no more money from her towards a third watch!
Page 63
Accordionist George McKelvey had been working in Baxter’s jute mill for thirteen years. It wasn’t a bad job he had, as jobs in jute-mills went in those days.
He worked in the calendar department, at the lapping ; the starched and finished jute cloth being pressed through hot rollers, then lapped – a final folding process. The next stage was the dispatch department.
One night in 1946 when he finished work Jimmy was waiting at the mill-gate for him…..On the Friday he folded the last batch of cloth and went on to dispatch himself.
If he had been privileged to spend most of his evenings with his family during the war, peace was to be very different. Part-time playing was limited – a day’s work made demands, and engagements could not be accepted very far away from home. Full-time meant no limit.
Wife Flo saw little of him, and young Billy and Audrey even less.
Obviously, Jimmy must have had seen a long vista of jobs ahead before asking the band to take the plunge.
Far ahead?
Well, how many folk get a diary, fill in the first few days then forget about it? George wasn’t one of these – he was able to fill the whole book up right away – “Jimmy used to give us the jobs for a year ahead at a time.”
Wives and bairns saw little of their dads, yet, this was not because the band relaxed in hotels before and after the more distant engagements. They would finish down south in the early hours of the morning and immediately pile into Jimmy’s Morris and head back through the night to Dundee – like as not to be off to the north after a few hours sleep. Seven nights a week playing was soon nothing unusual.
Excerpts from George’s diary – South Shields one night, Glasgow the next ; and how much sleep can you get playing Brampton Friday night and Aberdeen Saturday night? Surprisingly, perhaps, the majority of their engagements soon were seen to be in England ; which meant a lot of travel ; example, Inverness one night, the following night the Albert Hall in London.
But in snow storms, lashing rain ; in the middle of the nights of a calm high-riding full moon ; at dawn ; in pitch-dark, at all hours, in all weathers the bandsmen put their latch-keys in the locks and rejoined their families, fresh from new triumphs – wait ; make that exhausted from new conquests. They had eschewed the possibilities of a comfortable night’s rent in a hotel to snatch and hour or two at home ; but it was like playing a part in Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake much of the time ; disturbing nocturnal visitations.
“I had to be father and mother as well,” said George’s wife, Flo. “My kids grew up thinking I was too much of a disciplinarian ; I was definitely against spoiling them.”
Flo was also most frequently the hostess to the band in the early years. They did most of their ‘practising’ as she calls it, in the Corporation tenement flat in which they then lived in Hepburn Street.
This behind-the-scenes ‘practising’ endowed the group with what was to become an eerie rapport. Eventually a stage was reached when if Jimmy made a mistake the whole band made it with him.
The time came when Sandy Tulloch stopped off a professional medical tour he was on to say hello to Jimmy and the band in Glasgow just an hour before they were to broadcast……
“What are you playing?” he asked George.
“Don’t know yet.”
Sandy found this hard to believe. Surely it had all been rehearsed and rehearsed until a satisfactory standard had been reached?
True, separate tunes were constantly practiced ; programmes were not.
Jimmy would casually mention – maybe just before they were due to go on – “We’ll start wi’ this, follow wi’ that – an’ then we’ll see…..”
It worked.
And then they would rope Owney’s drums onto the roof of the car and pile in and head home.
Page 96
March 1957
“Jimmy Shand’s Last Dance” mourned the Daily Record ; “Scotland’s number one ambassador of music has quit.” (On the eve of his retirement he received many messages ; protests, condolences ; and one message over the radio which touched him most of all – “We have elected you and your band Musicians of the Year,” from the staff of the Australian Station – Mawson in the Antarctic!)
The People’s Journal not only announced “Jimmy Shand Gives Up” but also “And so do two of his band” and went on –
What of the band that has served him faithfully through the years?
It has experienced shows without Punch before. The Shand Band went on its merry music-making way while the maestro was in hospital for his stomach operation.
It was the same when Jimmy toured America and Canada. The knights of King Jimmy absorbed so much of his rhythm that sometimes the dancers scarcely missed the king himself.
But this time the outlook is not so bright. For the Jimmy Shand Band is not only losing Jimmy Shand. It is in fact being split in half.
When the boss announced his decision, Sid Chalmers, violinist and one of the band’s most skilled musicians, decided that he, too, would retire for the present.
So did accordionist George McKelvey.
At this time Jimmy was occasionally augmenting the band of the Dundee Empress Ballroom where an enthusiast named Douglas Henderson organised Scottish Country Dance Sessions…..And, not long after, he himself was leading a group playing for the same type of dancing at a local hall names St. Patrick’s run by Craigie Football Club.
Left-handed fiddler Dave Ireland had a band of his own, but on Monday nights he played with Jimmy’s outfit at St. Patrick’s.
While awaiting call-up, piano-accordionist George McKelvey had sat in with Ireland’s band at a Saturday night in the village of Longforgan ; went along with the fiddler one Monday night to meet Shand ; accepted an invitation to become second-box player.
It was through cousin George that I first came to know Jimmy Shand.
Like Jimmy, George was also one of a family of nine, and started playing the melodeon while still at school.
In spite of hard times, my aunt Annie could always spare a bowl of soup for the needy, and this included the miner-musicians from Fife who came to play in the streets of Dundee during the 1926 Strike.
One day one of them had a piano-accordion (novel then) for sale, and through the timely winning of a sweepstake – and with the balance somehow made up from mother’s purse – young brewery-worker George was able to acquire it. I was often in my aunt’s house when he would come eagerly clattering up the tenement stair to snatch a few minutes practice while the kail was being ladled. Soon he was playing the new box in a trio at Saturday night dances in small halls. His spare-time music-making progressed, although not as spectacularly as Shand’s. But every move was to a better hall, higher fees.
Despite her humble station my aunt Annie was in her way a valuable patroness of the art of music. There was, for instance, the hard-up pianist who regularly tuned up….
Sometimes he would lighten her gargantuan labours at the washboard stuck in the galvanized bath set on a backless wooden kitchen chair, imposing a delecate filigree of capriccio or lilting Highland melody upon the sudsy, rhythmic, rasping, cleaning of semmits and drawers and the intermittent pizzicato of rattling shirt and blouse buttons ; or perhaps he would accompany himself on an old heirloom organ in The Lost Chord while she sat darning or mending on a drowsy afternoon beside the blackleaded iron kettle on the blackleaded hob. In return he would share the family’s simple meal.
The pianist was Tammy McDaniel, one of the trio my cousin George started off with. (The leader had been drummer Stuartie Foy, who would leave the skins to deliver a comic monologue……In dame get-up he would rush onstage, eyes shut – he kept this up until in his seventies without ever once falling over the edge – hands clasped in a wringing gesture, head turning this way and that in perplexity, before launching into the uproarious ‘My Man Tam’ or ‘My Wee Johnny’ – Mind ye that an’ mind ye yon when ye marry my wee John prefacing a long list of the fastidious son’s idiosyncrasies reeled off by the doting mother to the daughter-in-law-to-be, who, in the last verse, rebels with It’s his mither he needs merried on! Ye can keep ye rain wee Johnny!)
There were many small halls in Dundee running dances then, some of them considered somewhat ‘oary’ which means less than respectable.
In my urchinhood, playing in the streets, I saw bobbed and shingled girls setting off in the evenings, their slippers wrapped in paper ; a few escorted, but mostly in twos and threes, chattering gaily, cracking chewing-gum, shouting ”We-ell!” to boys. They smelled of cachous and spearmint and Jockey Club ; and sometimes they woke you up later, returning in groups, singing. At such times you might also hear a stirring of feet in the echoing close below, a girl’s laugh, and a deeper male voice.
Cousin George became one of a quintet playing at one of the less-refined halls ; a hall, which because of its long narrowness was known as the Palais de Loabby. Sometimes there were ugly scenes, even bouts of fisticuffs, in and just outside the hall ; but the checkers and supporters always managed to keep the tide of battle from engulfing the quintet. Admission was only sixpence, yet there could be arguments over that.
One night George gave his wrist-watch to pal John who was on the door. John strapped it on beside his own. Later, a girl sought to gain admission for fourpence. When she was refused she shrieked abuse – no wonder he was able to sport TWO watches at such fancy prices! Well, he would certainly get no more money from her towards a third watch!
Page 63
Accordionist George McKelvey had been working in Baxter’s jute mill for thirteen years. It wasn’t a bad job he had, as jobs in jute-mills went in those days.
He worked in the calendar department, at the lapping ; the starched and finished jute cloth being pressed through hot rollers, then lapped – a final folding process. The next stage was the dispatch department.
One night in 1946 when he finished work Jimmy was waiting at the mill-gate for him…..On the Friday he folded the last batch of cloth and went on to dispatch himself.
If he had been privileged to spend most of his evenings with his family during the war, peace was to be very different. Part-time playing was limited – a day’s work made demands, and engagements could not be accepted very far away from home. Full-time meant no limit.
Wife Flo saw little of him, and young Billy and Audrey even less.
Obviously, Jimmy must have had seen a long vista of jobs ahead before asking the band to take the plunge.
Far ahead?
Well, how many folk get a diary, fill in the first few days then forget about it? George wasn’t one of these – he was able to fill the whole book up right away – “Jimmy used to give us the jobs for a year ahead at a time.”
Wives and bairns saw little of their dads, yet, this was not because the band relaxed in hotels before and after the more distant engagements. They would finish down south in the early hours of the morning and immediately pile into Jimmy’s Morris and head back through the night to Dundee – like as not to be off to the north after a few hours sleep. Seven nights a week playing was soon nothing unusual.
Excerpts from George’s diary – South Shields one night, Glasgow the next ; and how much sleep can you get playing Brampton Friday night and Aberdeen Saturday night? Surprisingly, perhaps, the majority of their engagements soon were seen to be in England ; which meant a lot of travel ; example, Inverness one night, the following night the Albert Hall in London.
But in snow storms, lashing rain ; in the middle of the nights of a calm high-riding full moon ; at dawn ; in pitch-dark, at all hours, in all weathers the bandsmen put their latch-keys in the locks and rejoined their families, fresh from new triumphs – wait ; make that exhausted from new conquests. They had eschewed the possibilities of a comfortable night’s rent in a hotel to snatch and hour or two at home ; but it was like playing a part in Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake much of the time ; disturbing nocturnal visitations.
“I had to be father and mother as well,” said George’s wife, Flo. “My kids grew up thinking I was too much of a disciplinarian ; I was definitely against spoiling them.”
Flo was also most frequently the hostess to the band in the early years. They did most of their ‘practising’ as she calls it, in the Corporation tenement flat in which they then lived in Hepburn Street.
This behind-the-scenes ‘practising’ endowed the group with what was to become an eerie rapport. Eventually a stage was reached when if Jimmy made a mistake the whole band made it with him.
The time came when Sandy Tulloch stopped off a professional medical tour he was on to say hello to Jimmy and the band in Glasgow just an hour before they were to broadcast……
“What are you playing?” he asked George.
“Don’t know yet.”
Sandy found this hard to believe. Surely it had all been rehearsed and rehearsed until a satisfactory standard had been reached?
True, separate tunes were constantly practiced ; programmes were not.
Jimmy would casually mention – maybe just before they were due to go on – “We’ll start wi’ this, follow wi’ that – an’ then we’ll see…..”
It worked.
And then they would rope Owney’s drums onto the roof of the car and pile in and head home.
Page 96
March 1957
“Jimmy Shand’s Last Dance” mourned the Daily Record ; “Scotland’s number one ambassador of music has quit.” (On the eve of his retirement he received many messages ; protests, condolences ; and one message over the radio which touched him most of all – “We have elected you and your band Musicians of the Year,” from the staff of the Australian Station – Mawson in the Antarctic!)
The People’s Journal not only announced “Jimmy Shand Gives Up” but also “And so do two of his band” and went on –
What of the band that has served him faithfully through the years?
It has experienced shows without Punch before. The Shand Band went on its merry music-making way while the maestro was in hospital for his stomach operation.
It was the same when Jimmy toured America and Canada. The knights of King Jimmy absorbed so much of his rhythm that sometimes the dancers scarcely missed the king himself.
But this time the outlook is not so bright. For the Jimmy Shand Band is not only losing Jimmy Shand. It is in fact being split in half.
When the boss announced his decision, Sid Chalmers, violinist and one of the band’s most skilled musicians, decided that he, too, would retire for the present.
So did accordionist George McKelvey.