Scottish Authors > Joe Corrie Playwright, Poet, Journalist & Short story writer 1894-1968

Joe Corrie was born in Slamannan in 1894 and, after his family's move to Cardenden in Fife, he left school in 1908 to work in the local pit. As a result of his father's ill-health and consequent family poverty Corrie's formal education was patchy but as a young man he attended classes run by the Workers' Educational Association and had access to the library of the Miners' Welfare Institute.

It was during the 1920s that Corrie began writing and his plays, poems, journalism and short stories reflect the harsh living and working conditions the Fife mining community. A fortnightly column in The Miner led to the publication of articles in other socialist newspapers. The first volume of Corrie's poems, The Image o' God and other poems, protesting against the social consequences of poverty and deprivation was published in 1928 and Rebel poems was published by the Independent Labour Party in 1932.

First performances of Corrie's one-act plays Hogmanay and The Shillin'-a-week man were given in 1926 by the amateur Bowhill Players to raise funds for miners' soup kitchens. Corrie's first full-length play, In time o' strife (1927), was written after the General Strike and depicts its divisive effects on the Fife mining community. It was rejected by the Scottish National Players, which led to an acrimonious debate in the Scottish press during 1929. The play was toured, to great acclaim, throughout Central Scotland by the Bowhill Players who, for a short time, became a professional theatre company - the Fife Miner Players. Contemporary critics began to speak of Corrie as the "Scottish Zola" or Scotland's answer to Sean O'Casey but the theatrical establishment continued to demonstrate a strong antipathy to the socialist bias in his dramatisation of Scottish working class life. Corrie's political stance is illustrated in the final lines of In time o' strife. Jenny, one of the strong matriarchal figures featured in many Corrie plays, speaks while voices singing The Red flag are heard in the distance:

(... SHE SPEAKS, AS IF INSPIRED BY SOME GREAT HOPE.)

"That's the spirit, my he'rties! sing! sing! tho' they ha'e ye chained to the wheels and the darkness. Sing! tho' they ha'e ye crushed in the mire. Keep up your he'rts, my laddies, you'll win through yet, for there's nae power on earth can crush the men that can sing on a day like this."

Rejected by the professional theatre Corrie continued to earn a living by writing more than fifty one-act plays for performance by the hundreds of amateur theatre groups who were members of the Scottish Community Drama Association. Although enormously popular, many of these plays are lightweight comedies and romances. During the 1930s, as a result of his relationship with some of the more radical groups, Corrie wrote some of his best short plays, including Hewers of coal (1936/7). Joe Corrie is quoted as saying that he liked to give his audiences a good cry and a good laugh. He died in Edinburgh on 13th November 1968.

Chris Ravenhall

Search Scotland's Culture for more by & about this author. Link will open in a new window.