Scotland

SIR ALEC DOUGLAS-HOME is a Scot, and never lets you forget it. “I am the first Scottish prime minister since Harold Macmillan,” he remarks in at least every second speech, and even an English audience loves the joke.

Often Sir Alec mixes the Scottish corn with Scottish pathos. He frequently recalls, no doubt with genuine feeling, the bad days of the Scottish depression before the war, when he stood for the coal-mining seat of Lanarkshire. In those unhappy times, he seriously suggested that the problem of unemployment might be mitigated if Scots went down to southeast England to work as domestics. In fact, the members of the Douglas-Home family, many of whom work in London, are examples of the Scottish exodus that has bedeviled the country for two hundred years. That great Scot-hater Dr. Samuel Johnson used to complain that London was full of Scots; he was not, therefore, surprised to find during his tour of the Highlands how few were left in their native land. Today there are ten times as many émigré Scots in London, but there are actually fewer inhabitants in the Highlands than when Dr. Johnson visited there.

Sir Alec is a symbol of what is wrong with Scotland. Admittedly he still has an estate there to which he will retire. But too many able, ambitious Scots look to London. More than 30,000 Scotsmen emigrated last year from a country whose population is only live million. Scots are as numerous as the English in the new car and steel industries of the English Midland cities.

In London, a high proportion of Scots can be found among newspapermen, television producers, and Soho stripteasers. The Scots more than ever give their character to the British Army. It was principally fierce Highland and Glasgow troops who engaged in a series of brawls with German civilians at Minden a few years ago. The Germans, horrified by these small, belligerent soldiers, called them “Poison Dwarfs.”

The reasons for this exodus remain largely economic. Because of its poorer soil, Scotland has never supported such a strong agriculture as England has. It had its industrial revolution during the last century. But the basic Scottish industries — coal, shipbuilding, and textiles — have suffered the most in the last three decades. The Lanarkshire coalfields have increased productivity at a higher rate than any in Britain have, but they still cannot compete with the rich seams of the British Midlands.

The shipyards of the Clyde went idle during the pre-war depression. And last year was their worst since 1934. For this both management and men are to blame. Many in management are Londonbased heirs of the family fortune, who deputize their jobs to foremen dressed in the traditional bowler hat and thick brown boots. The labor force is splintered by interunion rivalry or demarcation disputes. Small wonder that the industry lags behind foreign competitors, or that the Blue Funnel Line this year, in dividing its order for new ships between Clydeside and Mitsubishi in Japan, went out of its way to say that it would have given the whole order to Mitsubishi but for the belief that Britain’s shipbuilding industry needed support.

Scotland, like Northern Ireland and to a lesser extent the north of England, suffers economically from its peripheral position in Europe. Freight to the Continent costs more, and rail, air, and road transport are limited.

Industry looks up

The slums of Glasgow are legendary, but one can see poverty almost as bad in the elegant New Town district of Edinburgh. “Aye, we’ve got a toilet,” said one flooded-out landlady, “but you need an umbrella and rubber boots to visit it.” Edinburgh is the only city in Europe with sixstory, sixteenth-century slums.

Economically, things are looking up this year. The latest industrial plan for central Scotland seems to have forced more industry into the area by a mixture of bribery and threat. The Rootes automobile factory, which the company set up near Glasgow when the government would not allow them to build in the Midlands, has turned out to be a great success. The Hillman Imp car, which was originated there, has sold well; the Glaswegian workers have proved themselves adaptable to assembly-line work. The Forth Bridge, linking Edinburgh and the north, should be completed this year, and John Brown, the shipbuilders, hope to get an order for a Q-3 ship to succeed the Queen Mary and the Queen Elizabeth.

No bright lights

Much of the Scottish exodus has nothing to do with economic troubles. The youngsters who leave the Highlands and islands for jobs in England are not afraid of starvation at home. There is adequate money in small farming, liberally helped out by government subsidy and perhaps supplemented by some weaving of Harris tweed. Most of the émigrés tell you frankly enough that they leave because they are bored. “There’s no youth club in my village,” said a Hebridean youth, “let alone a jukebox. The minister would na allow it.”

Whatever its cause, the exodus produces political discontent. Although Sir Alec won a seat comfortably in the patrician, agricultural county of Kinross, most of Scotland is staunchly radical.

Radical movements become more extreme north of the border. In England the teachers agitated for higher wages. In Glasgow they went on strike, to the great joy of the children. The English anti-bomb marchers normally content themselves with a march through London. It was their Scottish counterparts who became involved in brawls near the Polaris submarine base in Holy Loch. A separate Scotland, such as the Scottish nationalists wish, would certainly be a socialist state.

Yet the nationalists themselves are not a very revolutionary bunch. One meets a few of them in Red Clydeside, but their strongholds are among the middle-class literati of Edinburgh, London, and the Commonwealth. The real Scottish revolutionary lives in Glasgow, wears a coarse blue suit and a white cap, follows football, and votes Labor. The typical Scottish nationalist lives in Edinburgh, wears a kilt (except at the office), follows rugby, and votes Conservative. He is often only part Scots. At a lunch given for journalists by the proprietress of a famous whiskey firm who wanted some nice publicity for the product, there was good Scottish food, a certain amount of bagpipe music, and a “loyal toast” to Bonnie Prince Charlie.

All the guests but one regarded these pranks with good-natured, tolerant amusement. The exception was an Australian, on his first visit ever to this land of his ancestors, who had arrived in a brand-new kilt, tweed jacket, sporran, garters, and dirk. In proposing the toast he wept tears of emotion, described this lunch as the most moving experience of his life, and then delivered a fiery attack on the British for having deprived his ancestors of their land in 1745. He ended by draining the toast and smashing the glass over his shoulder in true Stuart fashion. Unhappily it was an unbreakable glass which the hostess had bought from Woolworth’s.

The Edinburgh Festival

The neurosis of Scottish nationalism shows at its worst during the annual Edinburgh Festival. When the Earl of Harewood, director of the festival, gives his morning press conference, a good part of the time is invariably spent in answering angry questions from Scottish nationalist journalists or people posing as journalists. Why can’t we have a Scottish national opera house? Why can’t we have only Scottish plays at the festival?

The Earl is polite, but these questions, in fact, answer themselves. The people of Edinburgh show scant support for opera outside the festival season; during the season, they talk and whistle through the performances. There are simply not enough good Scots plays to support a fortnight’s drama festival. There is plenty of brilliant conversation in Edinburgh — not to mention an excellent university — but most of its writers have joined the great Scottish diaspora. The much praised New Saltire review closed down this year.

During the first writers’ conference at the Edinburgh Festival, in 1962, the session devoted to Scottish authors broke up in shouting. In the furious interchange among the panel of authors, who discussed almost everything from dope addiction to Lallans (Lowland) medieval poetry, it soon became clear that several authors had come straight from a heavy lunch of malt whiskey at the Abbotsford, the intellectuals’ pub. The doyen of Scottish poets, Hugh McDiarmid, delivered his usual furious speech in favor of Scottish nationalism and the Communist Party — which he had rejoined after Hungary. But even his wrath could not deter the panel from shouting and singing.

During last year’s writers’ conference, somebody wheeled a naked girl across the gallery of Ussher’s Hall. This, coming on all that talk about dope and perversion, caused a great deal of scandal in Edinburgh, and the third festival was held in Berlin.

During the 1962 Edinburgh Festival, when the spear from Epstein’s statue of St. Michael was blown off and smashed by a gale, a small crowd of pious folk gathered the next night to shake their heads and whisper of God’s vengeance on blasphemous artists. But it was Moral Rearmament that got rid of the writers’ conference. Its carefully drilled supporters stirred up popular wrath over the naked-girl incident by sending indignant letters to newspapers and politicians.

Real Scottish puritanism lives on in the Highlands and islands. “Dread God” says the sign over a butcher’s shop near Inverness. Neither dancing nor drinking is allowed in many a Highland village. On the enchanting island of Lewis, farther out to sea even than Skye, the Kirk still exercises the same discipline as it did in New England three hundred years ago. Ministers threaten hellfire to parents who let their children join a youth club or even the Boy Scouts.

Television and motels

This year change has touched even the far-flung islands. The Reverend Kenneth MacRae, minister of Stornoway Free Church for thirty-two years, foe of every sin from papery to ping-pong, gave up his severe ghost in May. “In an age of indecision and doubt,” said a brother minister, “Mr. MacRae was unequivocal in his views.” And the congregations had listened to him with the same Gaelic intensity which they gave in leisure moments to other island enthusiasms such as whiskey drinking and poetry.

The extension of television to every remote island of Scotland is blamed by many for changing the old Highland habits. But a columnist in the Stornoway Gazette (which serves the Hebrides) was realistic: “It’s no use moaning that television, when it comes, will kill the ceilidh [gay party]. The ceilidh, as we know it, has been moribund for years. The spontaneity has gone. It’s no longer a case of donning a clean pinny and taking oneself and one’s knitting to any house fancied, with one’s reception assured, the company congenial, the ‘Balagam air do bhois’ coming round to lubricate tongues dried up by overwork. It’s all so genteel nowadays. The date is set; the baking done, the best china dusted, the tobacco-chewing Bodach rusticated. Everything is nice and bright and shiny but you are not having a ceilidh. You are having the English version— a visit — a very different thing.”

It speaks well for Highland education and intelligence that the Stornoway Gazette is a better written newspaper than any in Britain, not excluding the Times, New Statesman, and Observer.

The Department of Agriculture for Scotland this year offered technical and financial support to farmers willing to build holidaymakers’ chalets on their land. There are several good lochside motels in the Highlands, and many caravan sites in the deer forests. Such tourist facilities — not to mention the spread of industry-shock many Englishmen and Scottish nationalists. But the alternative to modernization is continued decay, until the Highlands and islands are quite barren. The Highlanders themselves are the last people to want that.