Glasgow Jolly Beggars Burns Club

Overview

There is very little currently known about this club. Outwith a mention of this group in the Memorial Catalogue of the Burns Exhibition, the only other information we have to date is from the 1892 Annual Burns Chronicle and Club Directory, which lists the club’s meeting place as 80 Gloucester Street (listed in the Glasgow Post Office directory for the same year as the premises of William Millar, wine merchant), along the names and addresses of the President and Secretary.

Date of Existence

1887-1909; 1914-? Federated 1888

Source of Information

1. ‘Directory of Burns Clubs and Scottish Clubs, for 1892’, in BC, ed. by John Muir, No. I (Kilmarnock: D. Brown & Co., 25 January 1892), p. 130;

2. Memorial Catalogue of the Burns Exhibition. Held in the Galleries of the Royal Glasgow Institute of the Fine Arts, 175 Sauchiehall Street, Glasgow, From 15th July till 31st October, 1896 (Glasgow: William Hodge & Company and T. & R. Annan & Sons, 1898), p. xvi

Repository

Mitchell Library Special Collections (MLSC) (Annual Burns Chronicle, and Memorial Catalogue)

National Library of Scotland (NLS) (Annual Burns Chronicle)

Reference Number

Mitchell (AL) 14A MEM 472108 (MLSC) (Memorial Catalogue)

BNS19BUR (MLSC) (Annual Burns Chronicle)

General Reading Room (stored offsite), Y.233, available no. 1-34 25th Jan. 1892-Jan. 1925 (NLS) (Annual Burns Chronicle)

Additional Notes

Where there are breaks in the dates of a club’s existence, it was the case that the directories listed them as ‘dormant’ during the intervening years.

BC‘ refers to the Annual Burns Chronicle and Club Directory, which was published yearly since 1892. Hard copies are available at the Mitchell Library Special Collections and the National Library of Scotland. Many of them have been digitised and are available through the Robert Burns World Federation website: http://www.rbwf.org.uk/digitised-chronicles/.

This list of Burns chronicles as sources of information gives the first year the club was included in the chronicle, and thereafter only for the years where the information is different from the previous year’s listing. In keeping with the scope of this study (1800-1914), only the chronicles published between 1892 and 1914 are included.