Harkness – MacGillivray Stories

Oor Wullie and The Broons

I talked about the gifts that our family friends Uncle Gavin and Aunt Violet used to give us during Christmas. They often sent us ‘big’ presents, and some of my favorites are the Scottish bi-annuals, ‘Oor Wullie’  and ‘The Broons’.  I even remember how The Broons had their own biennial, alternating each year with ‘Oor Wullie’.  

Among all of us, it was Gavin who was the most avid reader of comics. I do remember reading them whenever they give it to us, but I didn’t become engrossed in them the way that Gavin did.

As a brief background for our readers that belong to the younger generation, ‘Oor Wullie’ (English: Our Willie) is a Scottish comic strip published in the D.C. Thomson newspaper The Sunday Post. It features a character called Wullie; Wullie is the familiar Scots nickname for boys named William. His trademarks are spiky hair, dungarees and an upturned bucket which he uses as a seat.

Most strips begin and end with a single panel of Wullie sitting on his bucket. The comic strip differs from the English comics of the period in that Wullie speaks a ‘comic book’ outdated variation of Scots English, such as, “I nivver get ony fun roond here!”⁹⁵  Without doing deeper research, it seems like the Scottish slang of the ‘Oor Wullie’ and other comics used the so-called ‘archaic’ Scottish English such as “Jings, crivvens an’ help ma boab!” 

All the Gavins

As mentioned, so far we have three Gavins in the family that you know of. Aunt Violet, Uncle Gavin, and little Gavin often visited us when we moved to Billericay. Around the time, I was about 16 already, my brother Gavin was about 7, and little Gavin was perhaps 4-5 years old.

I remember how my brother Gavin became engrossed in little Gavin’s ‘Scottish English’ baby language. Because of this, brother Gavin somehow managed to mix little Gavin’s‘ Scottish English with Oor Wullie’s dialect, creating his very own idiolect. He would use this in his day-to-day communication with others – always with an implicit humoristic content and references usually only he could understand.

I seem to remember he extended this idiolect when he started reading English comics which also used outdated schoolboy English such as the Dandy, Beezer, Beano, and so on.

In fact, it is perhaps only in retrospect that I have become aware of my younger brother’s idiolect. I guess I never gave it a second thought when I was a teenager. I just thought ‘Well, that’s the way Gavin talks’.

Looking back, it was not only Gavin who developed an idiolect but even my brother Alistair. His seemed to be bound up with adopting a ‘working class’ persona to annoy our mother. I am also willing to admit that I don’t think I could reproduce neither Gavin’s nor Alistair’s idiolects today.

I have more stories concerning my life as a teenager living in Billericay, Essex which I intend to write about in another book I might call “Memories of Youth”. But since this story concerns ‘Oor Wullie’, I’ve decided to just include it here.

⁹⁵ Edited from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oor_Wullie#Characters_and_story Date of reading: 2 Feb. 2022.