Superintendent Barratt

DESCRIPTION: "O, Sherlock Holmes is deid lang syne In some forgotten garrett, But aa o youse hae heard the news O' Superintendant Barratt." Barratt comes north to seek the Stone, dislikes the weather, gives up, and goes home
AUTHOR: Words: Morris Blythman ("Thurso Berwick") (1919-1981) [Called "Maurice Blythman" by MacColl-PersonalChoice]
EARLIEST DATE: 1962 (MacColl-PersonalChoice)
KEYWORDS: humorous travel theft | Stone of Scone Sherlock Holmes
HISTORICAL REFERENCES:
Dec 25, 1950 - Four Scottish students break into Westminster Abbey and steal the Stone of Scone
FOUND IN:
REFERENCES (2 citations):
MacColl-PersonalChoice, p. 15, "Superintendent Barratt" (1 text)
DT, BARRETT
NOTES [1099 words]: Obviously not traditional; I'm not sure why MacColl included this in what is otherwise a book of traditional songs. Maybe he just wanted to poke John Bull about the seizure of the Stone of Scone -- "the Stone of Destiny," the rock on which Kings of Scotland were crowned, which was stolen at Christmas 1950. Some people still think the "official" stone was hidden away (Magnuson, pp. 679-680), but a stone that was accepted as the original was returned to Westminster in 1951 (OxfordCompanion, p. 842) after being placed in Arbroath Abbey wrapped in a Scottish flag, a symbolic protest since it was there that the 1320 Declaration of Arbroath declared Scotland independent of England (Keay/Keay, p. 847). Still, the first attempts to find the Stone were unsuccessful, which would explain this song.
Hamish Henderson, in his essay "The Voice of the People," commented, "The 'reiving' of the Stone of Destiny from Westminster Abbey on Christmas Day 1950 inspired a host of celebratory songs. Most were ephemeral, but one -- Johnny McEvoy's 'The Wee Magic Stane' -- has survived to join the present-day corpus of Scots folk song." Maybe, but there appear to be no actual traditional collections of either song. The lyrics of "The Wee Magic Stane" are in the DT (file: WEESTANE)
Lynch, p. 570, calls the Stone of Scone "a rectangular block of sandstone on which the early kings of Alba, later Scotland, were inaugurated.... Weighing 335 lb (152 kg), it is a plain, somewhat battered slab of pinkish sandstone which probably comes from the Lower Old Red Sandstone rocks of the Perth region. This suggests (although there is no specific evidence as such) tht it may have been an item in royal ceremonies of the Pictish kingdom centered on Scone, and that it was taken over as a royal inaugural stone when Kenneth mac Alpin established his hegemony over the Picts in AD 843. The first firmly documented use of the Stone was in the inauguration of the boy king Alexander III (1249-1286) in 1249. But John of Fordun... stated that the seating of a king on the Stone was already an ancient ritual considered indispensable to kingly authority." There were other legends about it, but those were the facts.
Still, it must have been seen as important at the time, because Edward I, in his determination to take over Scotland, removed the Stone to England in 1296. John Balliol was the last Scottish king to be crowned upon the Stone. Thereafter, it was taken to Westminster and used to crown English monarchs. The Scots, of course, wanted it back.
Contrary to the implication of the song, the theft was not particularly smooth and the pursuit not entirely inept. "In the event, [the theft] only succeeded after a series of errors, narrow squeaks and almost unbelievable coincidences worthy of an Ealing comedy" (Magnusson, p. 675). Among other things, the robbers broke the stone, and were caught in the act by a policeman who was fooled into thinking two of the thieves were lovers making out (Magnusson, p. 676). And while this fellow Barratt may have been unable to find a clue, a certain Inspector Willie Kerr had interviewed the leading thief based on library records (Magnusson, pp. 678-679), so the investigation did involve some original thinking.
One of the thieves actually published a book about the event half a century later: Ian Hamilton, Stone of Destiny, 2008. I have no ides if it's reliable.
The tune is said to be "Barbara Allen." Pick your favorite version....
Incidentally, it cannot be said with absolute certainty that Sherlock Holmes would have been dead in 1950, although the death of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in 1930 obviously meant that there were no more true Holmes stories, and the last Holmes story by internal chronology, "His Last Bow," is set in 1914. Doyle never gave an absolute date for Holmes's birth (and probably never decided on one), but "The speculations of scholars have placed this important event variously in the years 1852, 1853, 1854, 1855, 1857-58, and even in 1867" (AnnotatedHolmes, volume I, p. 47). The latter date is not really possible, since Holmes was an adult at the time of "A Study in Scarlet" in 1881, but a date in the mid- to late-1850s is reasonable and, indeed, almost necessary. The most explicit reference to his age is in "His Last Bow," which says that he was "a tall, gaunt man of sixty," which, since "His Last Bow" is dated 1914, makes his birth year 1854 plus or minus a few months (Bunson, p. 108). However, the statement of his age is made by a third party, so I think we should treat that as "sixty-ish," and merely say that Holmes was born in the 1850s.
There is no reference in any of Doyle's works to Holmes's death, which I suppose could be used as an argument that it was after 1930. In fact, Bunson, p. 112, quotes W. S. Baring-Gould's Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street as saying Holmes died on January 6, 1957. (Don't ask me where the date came from. Baring-Gould had strong folklore connections -- he was the co-editor of Baring-Gould-AnnotatedMotherGoose, and the grandson of Sabine Baring-Gould -- but the "biography" is basically fiction and its arguments undocumented. His "explanation" is that Holmes discovered a trick of longevity in his bee researches.) In any case, it is at least possible Holmes could have still been around, although perhaps not of sound mind or capable of his old investigative behaviors, in 1950.
Ironically, there is a book, Richard T. Ryan, The Stone of Destiny: A Sherlock Holmes Adventure, which, according to publishers' descriptions, involves this plot: someone steals the stone and Holmes is charged with investigating. However, it is set at the end of the reign of Queen Victoria.
Although the theft of the Stone failed, it was formally returned to Scotland in 1996 (Lynch, p. 571), though the plan was to take it back to Westminster for future coronations of British sovereigns. Perhaps this gesture by John Major's covernment helps explain why songs about the theft have faded away.
According to Henderson, p. 3, "Thurso Berwick" would later be involved in the 1961 protests against Polaris missile submarines that resulted most notably in the song "Ding Dong Dollar." The name presumably goes back to references to the distance "from Thurso to Berwick" -- the northernmost town in mainland Scotland to Berwick-on-Tweed, not the southernmost but the most noteworthy town actually on the English border. He was important enough to earn a Wikipedia entry. Ewan McVicar reports that "He got major poets of Scotland to write anonymously the 1951 Sangs O The Stane" about this event. - RBW
Bibliography Last updated in version 7.1
File: McPCSuBa

Go to the Ballad Search form
Go to the Ballad Index Song List

Go to the Ballad Index Instructions
Go to the Ballad Index Bibliography or Discography

The Ballad Index Copyright 2025 by Robert B. Waltz and David G. Engle.