A life in letters: Open Airs

Summer Sunday afternoons in the late 1960s in Carluke’s Market Square which is more triangle than square.  A group of people stand round a microphone on a stand, a battery-powered amplifier, and a harmonium. Everyone is smartly dressed; the women wear colourful hats. I am standing at the mike, defiant in the enforced eccentricity of my Hunting Macrae tartan kilt, plodding through  How great thou art. One of the Sisters, sitting decorously upright on the wooden slats of a park bench accompanies me, pedalling languidly. The sound bounces back, echoing off the stone house-fronts surrounding the square.

These ‘open airs’ were held, with the local Council’s permission, Sunday to Sunday from around April through to September. ‘WP and DV’ (Weather permitting and Deo Volente – God Willing.) There would be Gospel hymns from Sankey’s Sacred Songs and Solos, perhaps a testimony of someone’s journey to faith, a solo, and a short sermon from the week’s visiting preacher.

As the service progressed, some of the Brethren and Sisters, armed with gospel tracts walked round the paths criss-crossing the market, and lingered on the pavement adjoining the road where cars heading towards Lanark queued when the traffic lights were at red. When someone wound down a car window – or had a window open because of the heat – and looked quizzically at us over the hedge and chain fence, a tract would be enthusiastically proferred. We heard of at least one person who by that means was drawn to Christian faith.

I was familiar with open airs from childhood. Sunday afternoons in the late 1950s found me leaning against the sun-hot railings in the centre of Milngavie next to the Black Bull pub watching the Allendar Burn sparkle on its way below me while the Brethren spoke and sang. The Baptist Church in Carluke which my parents and I attended for a few years from 1962 did not, as I recall, have open airs on the agenda and so it wasn’t until we joined the local Gospel Hall that I found myself once again participating in these alfresco expeditions, taking to the streets with God’s people.

Young men in the Brethren who were considered to show promise as potential future preachers would be invited to accompany an older, more experienced Brother when he was scheduled to take Sunday services at a nearby meeting. Thus I recall one Sunday being asked to go to Allanton with Ben Schofield.

The evening service was preceded, earlier in the afternoon, by an open air. I remember before we went out of the hall – no more than five or six of us, all men – we prayed together, kneeling on the cold lino at hard wooden benches. Then we went and stood on a deserted street corner. We sang, unaccompanied, and someone prayed, and Ben preached through a megaphone. Perhaps I said a few words. But throughout the time we were there, we saw hardly anyone. There was not even a twitch of curtain. The good folks of Allanton must have been lying low until we left.

Open airs no doubt had had their day, but by then the traditional hit-the-streets-and-preach approach had long ceased to be an effective means of communication.