Annual Burns Supper

BINDT’s Scottish Branch held its annual Burns Supper in January at the Lynnhurst Hotel, Johnstone, near Glasgow. Following the day’s seminar and exhibition: ‘Educating the Future NDT Engineer’, the Burns Supper included Scottish food, music, recitations, dancing and the famous Toasts. The Toast to the Immortal Memory of Robert Burns, the Toast to the Lassies and the Reply from the Lassies were given by Samantha McInnes Rankin, Katherine Kirk and Danielle Adams, respectively.

I cannot recreate the flavour of the haggis in this column, but I am able to give you a flavour of the Toasts in the extracts below. As we celebrate Robert Burns, we do not ignore his faults, but we can also recognise the challenges he faced in pursuing his chosen profession throughout his life.

Samantha began: “When I was asked to do the Toast to the Immortal Memory of Robert Burns, I thought I needed to find out more about this guy, so I did what any good non-destructive testing (NDT) professional does when they want to find out more information about someone: I typed their name into BINDT’s PCN verification form…

But obviously that is not the Robert Burns I am here to talk about tonight; I am here to talk about The Storyteller, The Poet, The Lyricist, The Realist, The Romanticist, The Fornicator, The Farmer and The Rebel – Rabbie Burns.

Rabbie Burns was born about a 50-minute drive  down the road in Alloway, Ayr, on 25 January 1759,  265 years ago. He was the son of a farmer and was a farmer himself, which was the inspiration behind the moniker Ploughman Poet. However, during his youth his parents ensured he received a somewhat decent education, which led to a love of reading and eventually writing poetry at the age of 15.

At 27, Burns, a relatively unknown poor farmer, released his first collection of poems as a way to fund a trip Jamaica. Rabbie was going to abandon his poor pregnant fiancée and run off to the West Indies with his lover to make his fortune.

But instead, his poetry took off, selling 612 copies in first printing, so he abandoned Jamaica and his lover and headed to Edinburgh to live amongst the wealthy and influential. After a few more love affairs and tiring of the Edinburgh scene, he settled in Dumfries with the fiancée he abandoned years before, eventually taking a job as a tax man (I know, tax man! Not anywhere near as cool as poet and lyricist, is it?)

Robert Burns died in 1796 at the age of 37, having written over 550 poems and having fathered at least 12 children to four different women. He has over 900 living descendants and one of them seems to hold a Level 2 PCN in penetrant testing, magnetic particle testing, ultrasonic testing and eddy current!”

After more music and Burns’ poetry, Katherine continued with the Toast to the Lassies: “I want to talk about the women engineers, the lassies, who were training as engineers at the Galloway Engineering Company in Tongland in South West Scotland during the First World War.

The factory, making high-power aero engines, was staffed by women apprentices and their trainers. It came about through the idea of Dorothée Pullinger, who herself trained at her father’s motor factory, Arrol-Johnston in Paisley.

This was not just war work but a new profession for women: engineering. In Dorothée Pullinger’s words from a newspaper article in 1917: “Why should a woman not become a manager and earn £1500 a year? Why should she not invent, and create, wonderful machines?”

About 100 women apprentices came from all over the UK. We do not know all their names but here are three: Margaret Rowbotham, a founder member of the Women’s Engineering Society; Frida Bull, whose family had Bull’s Metal and Melloid Company; and Freda Reilly, who later became a Woman Technical Officer in the Second World War.

We know about these woman apprentices from their works’ magazine The Limit, which had the strapline ‘A record of our unlimited talent’. Each year they had a party to celebrate the works’ anniversary, 12 February, which often falls in National Apprentice Week and ought to be made a special day for women engineering apprentices, maybe ‘Our Unlimited Talent’ Day.”

As for the Reply from the Lassies, Danielle followed with some frankly eye-watering stories from her work, but you will have to ask someone who was there about that!

If you have any thoughts or ideas, or are interested in joining the D&I Advisory Group, please get in touch: diversity@bindt.org