The Laird of Auchtermuchty

Years ago I put up the sound engineers who were making the film, 'Barry Lyndon' in Bath and the surrounding area. They saved the money they would have spent on hotels and spent it on us in the pub instead. There was a lot of cash floating around the industry in those days.

It was the custom for film crews to make a t-shirt at the end of shooting which would remind everyone involved of the weeks and months spent on it, and I got the job of creating the Barry Lyndon one. 

As you know, there is a lot of hanging around on set during the making of a movie and people try anything they can to alleviate the boredom whilst waiting for the director and actors to get themselves together, and these sound engineers - two of them - began composing an epic poem.

The poem was called, 'The Laird of Auchtermuchty' and featured their idea of a mean and scrimping Laird of a miserable and featureless Southern Scottish town (their description, not mine) would be like. Each day they would add a few lines to it with contributions from actors and crew, and by the end of the film it was dozens of verses long. I can only remember the first few lines, and they were:

The Laird of Auchtermuchty came riding doon the glen.

He gave a cough and his bonnet fell off, in front o' all his men.

"O who'll pick up ma bonnet..." 

...and so on.

The two engineers went to great lengths to describe the physical appearance of the old laird and I made a drawing based on what they said. When I showed it to them they thought I had read their minds, as it fitted their mental image perfectly. The old man had a long and pointy nose with and it reached down to a a thin crooked chin with a large wart and scraggy whiskers. He had a thick and unkempt brow over narrow, shifty eyes, and his tattered bonnet had a broken eagle feather attached.

The image was taken to a printer who transposed it onto about 30 t-shirts. I wonder if one still exists.