If ever proof was needed that Leith has poetry in its soul, it is this bilious Burnsian homage to a stormy romance, penned by a now forgotten Victorian denizen of The Shore. Some knew this maritime wanderer as Sleekit Joak – fae the Doak; indeed many contemporary accounts noted his weasely countenance and pilfering proclivities. But unbeknownst to the sweaty old salts fog-horning in the fug of Tod’s Tap, their sometime drinking partner Joak was leading a double life…

My love is like a whaling ship,
A hellish blubbery mess,
Her mast a stick o’ baccy,
Her sails a gingham dress

With Burns night nearly upon us, Colin Montgomery investigates the apocryphal tale of the long forgotten Bard O’ Leith. ...

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For like Burns himself, Joak’s gifts for rough-hewn poetic truth saw him feted in polite circles. In wealthy merchant’s parlours – where ordinarily he would have been horsewhipped and used as an ashtray – Joak held court, dispensing stanzas like a careless toff dropping silken handkerchiefs. Influential gentlemen marvelled at the range of his verse.

The tight bodiced fairer sex simply admired his range – a cooking range – a cast iron monster that he famously took to every reading as a good luck charm. Sadly, good luck did not accompany Joak’s personal effects when his light was eventually extinguished. His collected works were scattered to the four winds when the horse drawing the carriage containing Joak’s estate, was startled by a Newhaven fishwife’s shrill, lurid, verbiage (bawdy badinage being a useful sales tool in those days).

And that was that. Or so it was thought. Until, following renovation work at the Corn Exchange a few years ago, a dislodged flagstone revealed hidden treasures; alongside a Readers Wives from 1986, were dirtier pages that contained spidery verse penned on the reverse of a whaler’s ledger. Which proved to be nothing less than a poetic valediction from the master. Yes, you’ve guessed it, the last works of Joak. These four poems constitute a ghostly whisper from another age. And they confirmed the truth of his genius.

Tragedy struck again though. Soon after discovery, a private collector in Japan snapped up the artefacts (Joak’s whaling past sees him revered by those partial to the Leviathan of the deep).

So it is then that a great injustice persists to this very day. For Burns, the ploughman turned poet, a lofty plinth on Bernard Street – just a few quills lengths away from his beloved ‘chieftain o’ the pudding’ race being deep fried to perfection by the boys in Pierino’s. For Joak, naught but the cold hard anonymity of the unlamented.

There is one last twist to the tale though. A culturally aware brickie, who was present when the Corn Exchange discovery was made, was quick-witted enough to make a copy of one of Joak’s long lost pages. On it were to be found the lovelorn lines shown above, and one other work of genius, the bleak beauty that is ‘Kirkgate Supper’.

Kirkgate Supper
I wandered lonely streets,
My thoughts like boiled tongue for tea,
For salt, I used a single tear,
For pepper, reverie.

And every man and every child,
To me looked like a pint of mild,
I drank them in and felt all giddy,
Then tumbled like a shoogly biddy.