Beard Liberation Front
25th January
Contact BLF Organiser Keith Flett @keithbeard.bsky.social
PROOF THAT BURNS HAD A BEARD
The Beard Liberation Front, the informal network of beard wearers, has said that after years of debate it has found what it believes to be definitive proof that Robert Burns had a beard.
His 1786 poem Address to The Toothache makes it clear that he grew a beard when a tooth problem meant it was too painful to shave. The campaigners say that if Burns admitted in a poem to growing a beard once it is very likely that he did so on other occasions
The campaign group says that Burns appears clean shaven in official portraits
and clearly felt Establishment pressure to appear without a beard even though
evidence suggests that he was at root a hirsute rebel.
It seems that Burns may have felt that if his image did conform to that required
by Scottish society in the late eighteenth century and his official job as an
Exciseman, his poetry would be spurned.
The key hirsute passage from Address to The Toothache is:
Adown my beard the slavers trickle
I throw the wee stools o’er the mickle,
While round the fire the giglets keckle,
To see me loup,
While, raving mad, I wish a heckle
BLF Organiser Keith Flett said Address to The Toothache matters. It demonstrates that centuries of portraying Burns as a clean shaven man of the Establishment were wrong. He was a hirsute rebel
Kmflett's Blog 
this is not definitive evidence – it is clear from the poem that burns was in a severe state of physical and mental distress-this was no ordinary toothache- it could easily be that he was so unwell he simply stopped shaving as most men do when they are unwell