For decades, this time of year was one of the most exciting on the Aberdeen calendar.
Today, the only vestige remaining of Aberdeen University Charities Week is the student show at HMT, Mounthoolin Rouge! Well done, you talented craiters. Keep up the great work.
Yet, how sad that the city is empty of the hundreds of harum-scarum young folk, rattling their tins through schools, shops, factories, ending in the superb climax of the Torcher Parade from Marischal College to Queen’s Cross, then Union Street. The last one, in 2019, was a damp squib – not enough, and duff, floats. Oh, for the event to rise from the ashes.
In the good old days, the week was a huge delight for bairns, thrilled to be chased for their precious pennies aboot their classrooms and roon the pavements by clowns, monsters, ghosties, cowboys – a huge array of brilliantly fancy-dressed undergrads.
At its decades-long peak, the ultimate spectacle of The Torcher brought thousands packing the streets to watch as many as 50 long-planned and painstakingly-decorated floats. (It was the all-too-realistic medical school truck which sparked my lifelong blood-phobia in the late 1950s, featuring gory surgery on some peer, blood-soaked patient, with guts and body parts sprayed on to the screechin’ crowds. Horrified wee Mo wisna so much scraikin’ as spewin’.)
My first chance to take part in Charities Week, in 1966, was a truly exciting one-off. Teenage radio ham genius Paul Harris, studying international relations, had already become something of a world expert on pirate radio, which burst onto the high seas with Radio Caroline two years before.
He called for recruits to help set up an Aberdeen Uni pirate radio station. If moored three or four miles off the coast, it was legally impossible to close down.
Fired with the glam of it all, me and my pal Jenny stood in line to volunteer. He had the trawler, he’d the promise of a personal appearance from Kiki Dee – back then: fa’s she? But, at the end of the day, the city cooncil found a way to scupper his ambitious plan.
Maybe just as well, since me and Jenny had been allocated jobs as the ship’s cleaners. Gads. Nae exactly the showbiz buzz we’d anticipated.
Un-fancy dress
Mum aye made me highly original get-ups, two a taddy ower-popular wi’ the masses. The year the Dons were in the cup final, she made stunning red-and-white satin rosettes to pin on my shorts and top, while dad crafted a cardboard, spray-painted trophy cup for my back.
It never occurred to us that my superb accoutrements would act like magnets to those fans heading for Hampden. I’d to roll up at the post-Torcher bash at the Beach Ballroom plucked bare, in totally plain shorts and top. I mind a cheeky gadgie asking: “Is that fit ye ca’ an un-fancy dress?” Sod. Especially fin he was jist sportin’ his rugby kit.
Second verse, same as the first, the year the slogan was “Popabobin”. Yup, me covered in magnificent, danglie silver shillings. Not a bawbee left at the end of the night.
If only the true joy and hullabaloo of Charities Week could be revived big time. Come on, you students, get organising. Treat yourselves and city folk to the best time!
Moreen Simpson is a former assistant editor of the Evening Express and The Press and Journal, and started her journalism career in 1970
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