He’s an Ayrshire man through and through and speaks in a distinctive Kilmarnock – make that Kilmaurnock – Scots.
So it’s something of a surprise to learn that Stuart Paterson was born in a Cornwall convent and spent 14 years in Salford and Manchester.
Now firmly ensconced in sunny Kirkbean, the 56-year-old wordsmith and poet is a passionate advocate of his native tongue. After leaving Truro as a toddler, Stuart grew up in Muirkirk – pronounced Mairkirk locally – then Kilmarnock where his Scots-speaking family and community forged the linguistic stamp he cherishes to this day.
Stuart tells me he came into the world in the Convent of the Epiphany at Truro which, contrary to my assumption that convents and nuns were confined to the Catholic Church, was in fact a High Anglican institution.
His mother Mima and father Barclay had moved south from Ayrshire in 1960 after Barclay got a job as gardener at the convent which is now the upmarket Alverton Hotel.
“I was not even a week old when I made the front page of the Truro Gazette,” laughs Stuart.
“I was the first child to be born at the convent for 100 years – and I still have the cutting from the paper. All the Little Sisters are dead now but 10 years ago I went back to stay at the hotel.
“It was £120 a night so I wasn’t staying long. Unbelievably, one nun, Sister Elizabeth, was still alive then. I went to see her and she could still mind my mum and dad.”
The family, Stuart recounts, returned to Scotland and Muirkirk in 1969, when he was three. The Paterson clan then flitted to Kilmarnock in 1972, where Stuart’s dad worked at the Rowallan Creamery factory producing the popular Banquet Margarine.
The youngest of three siblings, Stuart had Barry and Liz for company growing up on the New Farm Loch estate, then a new scheme on the outskirts of town.
“My sister was named after my mum’s sister Elizabeth who died in front of her in 1934,” he tells me candidly.
“She was burnt to death as a wean when she went to do something at the fire and her new dress went up in flames.”
Despite having an obvious flair for language, Stuart, I learn, left school at 16 in 1982 and went to work as a storeman at McCrindle’s toolmakers for six months through the Youth Opportunities Programme – but his love affair with poetry was only a handful of years away.
“Every summer I worked at Rowallan Creamery where my father worked, then I did landscape gardening for a while,” he recalls.
“When I was 21 I decided to go to Kilmarnock College to do three more Highers and the next year went to Stirling University to do a four-year Honours English degree.
“In 1991 I had a wee booklet of poems published by Leiden University in the Netherlands called Mulaney of Larne.
“It was only three poems which were written when I was thinking about my father’s maternal grandfather who came over from Sligo in 1852 after the famine. The booklet was one of a series of Scottish poets published by the university which included Hugh McDiarmid, George Mackay Brown, Norman McCaig – and me!”
Nearing the end of his degree, Stuart tells me, he decided to enter the Society of Authors’ Eric Gregory Award, a prestigious competition for a collection of poems by British authors under 30 – and won.
“I was chosen as one of the six winners and got £4,000 which was a lot of money then,” he says.
“I paid off my £3,000 student loan then decided to go travelling round Scotland for a week – which turned into six weeks.”
After founding the poetry and prose magazine Spectrum at university, Stuart kept on editing and publishing the review until 1996 when he got a job with Dumfries and Galloway Arts Association for two years as writer in residence.
“I worked with community groups and in every single school in Dumfries and Galloway apart from three,” he said.
“My first book of poems, Saving Graces, was published in 1997.”
Stuart smiles at the memory of his next adventure – a move to Manchester prompted by romantic involvement.
“I was winching somebody in Manchester,” he laughs.
“My first job was a postman, which I did for a year.
“It wasn’t the best – I got chased by dugs and was bitten twice. The second time I ended up in hospital for treatment to a bite on my leg. After that I had 13 years as a residential care worker in children’s homes and in social care. I worked like a trojan – there were a lot of two or three-day shifts.
“Residential was difficult – a lot of young people did not get out of children’s homes.
“A few went on to do quite well but some ended up in jail for murder. And working in community social care for the last five years in Salford was hard too. You would be dealing with families at risk of eviction when their weans were the ones causing the problems.
“How can you enjoy restraining weans when often they have been badly abused themselves?
“It was difficult to handle when you learned what had happened to them and hard to come home from sometimes at night.
“The last five years I was helping young folk get back into school. Where I came from helped – they always said ‘don’t mess with him, he’s Scottish!’
“But more importantly right from the start I was straight with them and what would happen if they did not behave.”
Trying to keep kids out of potentially dangerous situations while striving to improve their life chances, often against heavy odds, took a heavy emotional toll, Stuart admits.
“By December 2012 I’d had enough,” he says frankly.
“I sold my flat and went back down to Cornwall for a week.
“I saw the lodge at the convent where we stayed when I was wee and a tree that my father had planted. Then I came back to Galloway, to Sandyhills, because I really wanted to get back into writing.”
On several occasions since then Stuart’s work in Scots has taken him over The Sheugh – the Irish Sea – to Ireland where Ulster-Scots is spoken across much of the north, particularly where historic Scottish settlement was strongest.
It’s a link he obviously cherishes and was proud to be asked to judge an Ulster-Scots competition in the Linen Hall Library in Belfast and work with children in four Coleraine primary schools.
“It was all about the kids using Scots, writing in it and knowing more about it,” he says.
“They absolutely loved it.
“And the Linen Hall has the Gibson Collection, the biggest archive of Robert Burns’ books in the world. It originally belonged to Andrew Gibson, who was from Ayrshire originally.
“He collected a massive amount of Burns-related material in the 1860s and 1870s.”
Very much a Burns aficionado, Stuart decries the sterile portrayal of the Bard as a drunken womaniser with a “heaven sent” poetic talent.
“A lot of Burns’ works could not be published at the time,” he says.
“That was because he ended up working for the British Government as a gauger – an exciseman. He would have been imprisoned or executed for his political views if those poems had seen the light of day – and he had to feed his family.
“The government was constantly looking out for things that were seen as revolutionary.
“Burns wrote in English and Scots and was aware of Scotland’s third native language, Gaelic. That comes through in the form, rhythm and repeats of his poems and songs – some of which are in the Bardic tradition.
“I have a lot of connections to Burns – I came from Ayrshire to Dumfries and Galloway as well.”
Stuart has another link to the poet – a condition linked to the rheumatic fever which killed Burns and nearly killed him.
“I was in Edinburgh one day four years ago and I ended up in Edinburgh Royal Infirmary with a blood clot in my lung.
“The next day I had an aortic valve collapse and was told I wisnae far off dyin’. They put a new valve in made out of pig flesh. My cardiac consultant rang me when I was at Ellisland Farm, the home Robert Burns built near Dumfries, to check how my heart was doing. He asked where I was and when I telt him.
“Well, he said, what nearly killed you four years ago we are absolutely certain killed Rabbie Burns. It turns out that if people had rheumatic fever as weans it can make the aortic valve really weak. Folk were dying from it in their twenties, thirties or forties – and Rabbie was 37.
“So that’s another wee connection to Rabbie!
“I got an MRI scan in March and given a heart loop monitor which recorded everything over five or six weeks,” adds Stuart.
“They found out my heart would stop working for up to 30 seconds at a time while I was sleeping. I’ve now got a pacemaker fitted tae keep things richt.”
Another watershed moment, Stuart tells me, was being appointed BBC Scotland Poet in Residence for 2017-18, a sinecure which provided the chance to broadcast Scots to a wider audience.
“If you’re getting your voice and poems out there more folk are able to appreciate them,” he says. “On the Janice Forsyth show on Radio Scotland folk were asked what was their favourite Scots word.
“There were 20,000 replies for Annual Poetry Day 2017 and they asked me to do a poem.
“A lot of the words were actually about the weather so that’s what my poem Here’s the Weather was about.
“It went out on Radio Scotland in the morning and afternoon and Radio 2 at night.
“Two weeks later at Pacific Quay – BBC Scotland’s Glasgow HQ – they made a wee film which started off with me in a suit doing a proper weather forecast with the graphics map of Scotland behind.
“Then in a jokey way I moan to the producer about the forecast lacking ‘authenticity’ – then read out my poem to the viewers.”
The performance – a light-hearted take on how “folk fae schemes tae the islands, fae high-rise tae glen” always find a way to moan about the climate – is in the wonderfully expressive Ayrshire Scots and well worth the watching.
“It’s had over 600,000 hits so far – pretty amazing for a guy reading a poem in Scots about the weather!” Stuart laughs.
During his residency Stuart brought Radio Scotland broadcasters down to Galloway, on one notable occasion working with Mark Stephen on the Out of Doors show featuring the Almorness peninsula near Palnackie.
“After the recording I wrote a wee poem about Almorness,” Stuart says. “It’s quiet, it’s old, it’s got a beautiful coast and cliffs, lovely woods and great views – you hardly see anybody when you are down there. I suppose it was a bit of local and national advertising for Galloway which is as beautiful and diverse as the Highlands.
“Recently I went out in a rowing boat on Loch Trool for the first time.
“I looked about me and thought to myself I could be anywhere in Scotland.”
Promoting and writing in Scots is clearly Stuart’s passion – and he’s determined to encourage young people to use their native tongue at home and abroad.
And, with funding from the Galloway Association of Glasgow, in 2019 he went out to Rhodes University in Grahamstown, South Africa, to support students in their poetry.
And his latest work, A Squatter of Bairnrhymes, a collection of Scots ditties for children, is going down a storm as the first big book of Scots poems for weans in decades. The work earned rave reviews and helped Stuart to be publicly voted Scots Language Writer of the Year in 2020.
The book has since been put to music by Kirkpatrick Durham folk singer and musician Nicola Black under the title A Squatter of Bairnsangs.
As a parting shot, Stuart welcomes the more enlightened attitude in Scotland these days towards the country’s native tongue.
“Not that long ago weans were telt that speakin’ Scots was wrang,” he smiles. “Ah mind yin day bein’ asked by the teacher whit we hud seen on oor wey in tae schuil that mornin’.
“So ah pipes up ‘ah seen a wee speug sittin’ oan tap o’ a dyke.’
“She said ‘No Stuart, you mean you saw a sparrow sitting on top of a dry stone wall.’
“Ah’m gled things hae cheynged.”
