Galoshins remembered : 'a penny was a lot in these days'

'Galoshins' was a seasonal folk drama learned orally and performed, mostly by boys, in people's houses.

They were rewarded with food or pennies. It took place on New Year's Eve ('Old Year's Night')or on Hallowe'en in central and southern Scotland at the very end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th.

The drama took the form of a fight, sometimes with 'swords', and then a 'doctor' performed a comic turn in bringing the injured party back to life.

These oral reminiscences, gathered for the first time in book form, were collected in the 1970s for the School of Scottish Studies Sound Archives, University of Edinburgh.