Roamin’ in the gloamin’ (1928)

98 ROAMIN' IN THE GLOAMIN' ever the stage beckoned. I hadn't been back at work more than a month when, through the influence of J. C. MacDonald, I was offered a month's tour of the Moss and Thornton halls in the north of England finishing up with a couple of weeks at the Scotia and Gaiety, Glasgow. "Nance," said I, "this is the last chance. If I don't make good now I never will. In any case I can't carry on as I'm doing — a week or two in the pits and a week or two on the stage. It has got to be one or the other. The mine managers won't stand for it. I'm finished as a miner; if I can't be a success as a comic singer I'll find another job above ground and never sing another song as long as I live." I was as good as my word. I said farewell to the mines forever. Tom, my brother-in-law, brought up my "graith" — my working tools, lamp, etc. — some weeks after I had gone on a tour and he has them to this day. A year or two ago I donned the old clothes and implements to take part in a big" charity performance in Manchester on behalf of a mining disaster fund. I was so overcome with emotion at all the circumstances that the tears rolled down my face as I stood in the wings and Tom had to thump me on the back and shake me before I was fit to go on and appeal for money for the wives and bairns of the dead miners. But for the accident of fate, I realized, I might myself have ended my days in one of the tragic happenings that are always part and parcel of the poor miner's existence. That first music-hall tour was splendid experience for me. It knocked the rough corners off my acting and the very first night or two — I opened at Newcastle by the way — demonstrated one thing to me in most emphatic fashion. I might be a Scotch comedian, and an exceedingly good one in my own estimation, but it was utterly hopeless to break into England with purely Scottish dialect and words and idioms which nobody over the border understood. This important consideration had certainly been weighed up in