Part III
Dreams of Peace & Freedom : Part III
Non Semper Imbres
Words by James Logie Robertson
Music by Sue Casson
Sergeant O'Pikes I & II
Words by Neil Munro/Music by Sue Casson
Sung by Andrew Bolton
Safety Cannon
Music by Sue Casson
David Maxwell Fyfe : Robert Blackmore
Sung by Lily and Sue Casson
Played and narrated by Sue Casson
Violin : Mary Young
Cello : Fraser Bowles
Recorded and mixed at Lana Banana Studios
Sue Casson's settings of two of David Maxwell Fyfe's favourite Scottish dialect poems, Non Semper Imbres by James Logie Robertson and Sergeant o' Pikes
by Neil Munro, tell the story of his early life.
The language of Non Semper Imbres conjurs David Maxwell Fyfe’s familiar childhood landscape; trees, mountains and lochs, as well as poetically expressing his belief in Natural Law, set in the style of a folk air that musically reinforces his Scottish heritage. Memories of childhood holidays with his grandparents in Sutherland are spoken over the music.
In performance, Sergeant o’ Pikes (quoted by Fyfe in an introduction he wrote to the autobiography of the Duke of Sutherland), accompanies a selection of photographs to show the historical background to his life until he was forty-five,
which was was one of world war and Depression.
Munro’s lines on the warlike clansmen echo the ‘brave spirits’ of the past that set alight Fyfe’s romantic imagination. For them ‘the Hielan’s’ were forever at their back driving them on, keeping them true to Scots tradition wherever they were fighting. And so it was with David Maxwell Fyfe. He remained true to his Scottish heart and history as he went out to try to change the world.