Belle Stewart - Celebrity

Celebrity

While John Stewart worked on a building site in Hatfield, a friend of Ewan MacColl visited. The following week Ewan MacColl visited the Stewart family. Soon the younger members of the family made recordings of ballads in London. A few months later the whole family received invitations to perform at MacColl's "Singers' Club" in London. In March 1954 Hamish Henderson invited the Traveller family to do a concert in Edinburgh alongside "Auld Galoot" (Davie Stewart), Jeannie Robertson and Jimmy MacBeath. Later in 1954 Douglas Kennedy and Peter Kennedy visited them and made recordings. So began their career performing in folk clubs: there the people treated them with respect, unlike the rest of urban society.

As well as singing the songs she heard from other Travellers, Belle was expected to write a new song for Hogmanay. Her most famous composition is "The Berry Fields o' Blair".

In 1966 Peter Shepherd and Jimmy Hutchinson started the Blair Folk Festival. Sheila Stewart won the singing competition with "The Twa Brothers". After 1969 the annual festival relocated to Kinross. Later in the 1960s Alex Stewart made his living in the summer months by playing bagpipes to tourists in Glen Coe and Oban. Belle knew all the songs and decided which of the other members of the family could sing which songs. Ian Stewart became a bagpiper like his father. Belle Stewart became a recipient of the British Empire Medal in 1981. (Her daughter Sheila later received an MBE.) "The Overgate", a folksong with some similarities to "Seventeen Come Sunday" has particular associations with the Robertson/ Higgins/ Stewart family of Travellers. Belle recorded it in 1976. In 1965 the family recorded an album called "The Stewarts of Blair", which the Scottish folk scene took to its heart.

In 1975 another Scottish Traveller, Jeannie Robertson, released an album called The Queen Among the Heather, a compilation of tracks from 1953 onwards. In 1976 Belle Stewart released an album with an almost identical title "Queen Among the Heather". A certain rivalry existed between the two. Alan Lomax preferred Robertson's singing, and Sheila, semi-apologetically, agrees with him in her biography.

In about 1970 the family spent a month performing in America. They made several appearances at the Edinburgh Folk Festival and in folk clubs around the UK. Ewan MacColl featured them in a Radio Ballad. Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger also compiled a collection of the folklore of Belle and other members of her family, called 'Till Doomsday in the Afternoon. After the death of Alex they continued to tour, and appeared at a folk festival in Bologna in 1980 and at Lake Como in 1980, with Ian taking the place of chief piper.

Belle Stewart died aged 91 in 1997, and hundreds of people attended her funeral. Six RAF jets flew in formation overhead during the funeral. This happened by coincidence, not as a tribute, but some found it very appropriate.