In New Zealand education was accorded less of a priority among Otago’s Presbyterian pioneers, with fewer than 100 out of a possible 270 children living in and around Dunedin attending school in 1853. Schooling was controlled by the provincial government, rather than — as the founding fathers had hoped — by the Church, and there were periodic complaints that the colonists were more interested in making money than in making provision for their children’s education. 62 In due course, however, educational development throughout New Zealand received, in the opinion of historian Tom Brooking, ‘greater assistance from the Scots than any other immigrant group’. 63 Aberdeen-born James MacAndrew, who became a leading merchant and politician in Dunedin, was instrumental in establishing training colleges and schools, as well as the University of Dunedin. Thanks largely to him, over 100 schools had been established by 1871, and that year also saw the establishment of the first girls’ secondary school in New Zealand. Two years earlier New Zealand’s first university had been founded at Dunedin and both it and the Victoria University of Wellington were administered and staffed largely by Scots. After MacAndrew’s death in 1887, the people of Otago commemorated this founding father by instituting a £500 scholarship in his memory, to be used to send deserving medical students from Otago to the University of Aberdeen to complete their training.
For many emigrants, church and school were clearly much more than simply institutions that met their spiritual and intellectual needs. They were powerful symbols of a transplanted identity — ‘a rallying-point for Scottish sentiment and tradition’, as the Church of Scotland reported of the Scots Kirk in Colombo, Ceylon, in 1920. 64 But emigrants could also demonstrate their identity and solidarity through a range of purely secular institutions, notably the St Andrew’s societies and Caledonian clubs that sprang up wherever Scots congregated. The Scots Charitable Society of Boston, founded in 1657, was the oldest Scottish society in North America, while that of Halifax, founded in 1768, was the oldest in Canada. Some associations were based on precise local origins. The Fraser-burgh Society of Winnipeg, for instance, was formed in 1911, although by the end of the year that definition was soon found to be too narrow and, under the new name of the Aberdeenshire, Kincardineshire and Banffshire Association of Winnipeg, it opened its doors to a wider membership. Antipodean Scots were slower to follow suit. Although Sydney had a St Andrew’s Club in the 1820s, Caledonian societies began to appear in other parts of Australia, mainly Victoria, only in the 1850s, but by the 1890s there were Scottish societies in almost all the Australian states. In New Zealand these societies were even slower to develop, partly because the colonists were more concerned with material issues and the forging of a new nation than with the preservation of their identity. Gaelic was disparaged as the language of backwardness, and although Caledonian societies existed from the 1850s, they did not really take off until the 1890s, which was also when Burns clubs began to be founded. By 1905 there were over forty Highland and Caledonian societies in South Africa, and in November of that year The South African Scot was founded as a monthly journal, to give the societies greater coherence and promote ‘all that is worth preserving in the heritage of the Scottish people ’. 65
The function of these élite associations, particularly in North America, was partly philanthropic, at times even repatriating those who had fallen on particularly hard times and frequently offering practical assistance to needy settlers.
18. Statue of William Wallace, Druid Park, Baltimore, Maryland. The statue was presented to the city by Wallace Spence, a Scot who emigrated in 1833, and unveiled on St Andrew’s Day 1893, with 12,000 spectators, the St Andrew’s Society of Baltimore, pipers and marching bands.
A party of 229 Lewis emigrants had reason to be grateful for such assistance when, in 1841, a handout from the St Andrew’s Society of Montreal allegedly saved them from starvation and enabled them to reach their final destinations in the Eastern Townships. Similarly, the ‘Scotch Colonists’, whose disembarkation at Saint John in May 1873 had been celebrated by the St Andrew’s Society in that town, were less than a year later given a $100 grant by the same society after around seventy settlers had fallen victim to sickness, unemployment and destitution in their isolated, unprepared settlement in the heart of New Brunswick. Following the foundation of the Order of Scottish Clans at St Louis in 1878, Scottish granite tradesmen in New England were among those who upheld their national identity by forming branches of this mutual benefit and insurance society in the towns where they worked. In Barre, Vermont, the Scots’ social life revolved around Clan Gordon Number Twelve, established in 1884, which provided financial aid to disabled members and to the dependants of men who had died. But the Scottish organizations did not help only settlers in distress; in 1863 the Guelph St Andrew’s Society donated £20 to the Lord Provost of Glasgow for unemployed cotton spinners in that city, while the Vancouver St Andrew’s and Caledonian Society, founded in 1886, donated money raised by its 1893 tug-of-war with the St George ’s Society to the indigent citizens of Vancouver, and in 1909 helped to sponsor the St Andrew’s and Caledonian Society Ward in the city’s General Hospital.
19. Past Presidents of the Caledonian Society, Montreal, 1889.
Some of the Highland societies, particularly in Canada, were also anxious to erase memories of poverty and enforced clearance in favour of a more sanitized interpretation of Highland emigration that reproduced the social hierarchies of the homeland. The prominent and successful Scots — non-Gaels as well as Highlanders — who ran these societies fostered an identity based on the settlers’ military prowess and conservatism, particularly in the wake of the war of 1812 and the 1837 rebellions. ‘In the hands of the colonial élite,’ says Rusty Bitterman, ‘the construction of Highland traditions and their public celebration went hand in hand with affirmations of loyalty and deference to authority.’ 66 The icons of that carefully constructed identity were bagpipes, plaids and banners displaying the arms of the parent society, the Highland Society of London. On the other side of theworld, the proliferation of Scottish societies, newspapers, magazines and statuary in Australia at the end of the century was in part a rearguard action against the perceived ‘homogenization of Scots’ into a predominantly English culture. 67
But by no means all Scottish societies were so self-conscious or defensive. Many simply gave their members the opportunity to celebrate their national origins through a range of social functions. While picnics and sporting fixtures were popular, St Andrew’s Day Balls on 30 November and Burns Night dinners on 25 January were generally the two highlights of the social calendar. In 1800 the St Andrew’s Day celebrations in Wilmington, North Carolina, drew an approving comment from the local newspaper:
Sunday last being St. Andrew’s Day, the same was observed on Monday, when the NATIVE and SONS OF NATIVE BRITONERS, residing in Town, having previously invited all fashionable company within twenty miles, gave a most splendid Ball and Supper. Upwards of two hundred Ladies and Gentlemen were entertained during the evening, to their most perfect satisfaction, not a single cloud hovering near the sun of Festivity. A set supper was given, exhibiting all the luxuries of the season, at which Robert Muter and Henry Urquhart, Esquires, presided, and drank the usual Toasts, viz. ‘The Immortal memory of St. Andrew,’ ‘Land of Cakes,’ ‘Beggar’s Bennison,’ ‘Land we live in,’ etc. etc. Between the set dances, the Ladies and Gentlemen entertained themselves with Scotch Reels in an adjoining room. 68
And the normally austere John Dunmore Lang responded in verse when invited to an anniversary ball by members of the St Andrew’s Club in Sydney in 1823:
Friends of St Andrew and the Thistle,
Accept, I pray, this short epistle.
In answer to your invitation
To the Grand Ball and Cold Collation.
I wish you well as well may be,
Long may you live in harmony.
And every year in hot November
The Caledonian Saint remember! 69
Sc
otland’s National Bard was even more enthusiastically commemorated than her patron saint. As early as July 1787 copies of Burns’s Poems were on sale in the United States, and were snapped up like hot cakes. Two American editions appeared the following year, and the nineteenth century saw the sprouting of statues of Burns all over the world, the largest crafted by the Aberdeen granite masons of Barre, Vermont. Burns clubs, as well as sporting and piping associations, were usually purely social in function, and shinty, curling or Highland dancing contests were usually followed by dinners at which people recited or sang of a Scotland many of them had either never seen or could not remember. Curling, shinty, golf and dancing were exported largely by Scottish regiments. The Montreal Curling Club was allegedly ‘the first organized sports club in British North America’, promoting a sport which soon became — and remained — hugely popular in Canada. 70 Although shinty did not generally survive beyond the first generation of emigrants, it contributed to the subsequent development of ice hockey and was played in some surprising locations. In 1842, for instance, the Inverness Courier reported on a shinty match at Montevideo on the River Plate:
20. Curling on the St Lawrence, composite, 1878.
The fourth of April being a holiday, the sons of the mountains, resident in this province, had determined to try a game of shinty for auld lang syne. Though the weather was very threatening in the morning, the players were not to be daunted, but crossed the Bay in boats, and marched to the ground … under the inspiring strains of the bagpipes, to the tune of ‘The Campbells are Coming,’ where they were greeted by a large concourse of people, assembled to witness the game.
After sides were called, and a few other preliminaries arranged, playing commenced, and was carried on with great spirit till four P.M., when the players sat down on the grass and partook of an asado de carvo con cuero (beef roasted with the hide on,) and plenty of Ferintosh [whisky] (Aldourie and Brackla being scarce.) Dancing then commenced, and the Highland Fling danced by Messrs Maclennan and Macrae; Gille Callum, by Captain MacLellan; Sean Truise, by Mr MacDougall; and several other Scotch reels were greatly admired.
At half-past seven o’clock, the bagpipes struck up the ‘Gathering’ and the whole, forming two deep, marched from the field to the place of embarkation, to the tune of ‘Gillean na Feileadh,’ amidst loud cheering, and still louder vivas from the natives.
At nine o’clock, the players sat down to a comfortable supper at the Steamboat Hotel; and, after the cloth was removed, and bumpers quaffed for the Royal family, and the President of the Republic, Don Frutuoso Rivera, the Chairman called for a special glass for the toast of the evening and, in a neat and appropriate speech, interspersed with Gaelic, proposed, ‘Tir nam bean, ’s nan gleann, ’s na gaisgich,’ which was drunk with great enthusiasm amidst deafening cheering.
Several Gaelic and other songs were sung during the evening, and the health of our chairman, Captain Maclellan, of the ship Orpheus, being proposed, and the thanks of the company returned him, for the spirited manner inwhich he conducted the proceedings of the day, the whole separated at two in the morning, after drinking ‘Deoch an dorus,’ highly delighted with the day’s amusement. 71
The aim of those who founded the New York Highlanders’ Shinty Club in 1903 was ‘to keep alive in the land of their adoption the game which in their youth, afforded them such delight, and which in some measure at least gave them that grit and pluck which are essential in fighting the stern battle of life ’. One of their players, Angus MacPherson, an emigrant from Laggan, was not only expert at shinty but was also ‘in the very forefront of pipers and dancers’. 72 Piping and dancing performances usually took place under the umbrella of the Highland or Caledonian Games, a phenomenon that provided the model for the later development of the professional athletics circuit. Although such gatherings were not actually exported from Scotland — the first Highland Games in Canada and Scotland both took place simultaneously, in 1819 — they rapidly became part of the invented Scottish identity overseas. ‘On the whole the result of the Highland gathering is good’, reported the Celtic Monthly of a Canadian meeting in 1893. ‘The national sentiment is stimulated, and the best phases of our national character are the more easily reached and cultivated because of the manly exercises and the games of the old home being kept alive.’ 73
Intermarriage between expatriate Scots was common throughout the Scottish diaspora, and many people met their partners through Scottish churches and secular societies. Wedding celebrations themselves offered a further opportunity to celebrate old country customs, not least in that notable but neglected Scottish outpost in the South Atlantic, the Falkland Islands:
On Thursday August 4 [1892], the marriage of Mr Archibald McCall (Superintendent of the North Area Section of the Falkland Island Company’s Camp) and Miss Jennings, of Darwin, was celebrated.
… About 150 gathered in from the Camps, some on horseback, others in cutters and a few, from the near neighbourhood, on foot. As there are but 12 inhabited houses in Darwin, much wonder will be felt as to where they all managed to find room: but the Darwinites were equal to the occasion and opened their doors most hospitably to all friends and acquaintances. The eve of the wedding was devoted to the peculiar Scotch custom of ‘washing the bridegroom’s feet’, namely, giving them a brilliant polish with blacklead brushes &c. The opportunity for carrying out this custom occurs so seldom, that all who have been married within the last ten years had to submit to the ordeal. The evening was closed with a dance which was vigorously kept up from 6 P. M. until broad daylight. 74
Loss of identity
We have seen how, all over the world, Scots emigrants strove to preserve or recreate the linguistic, religious and social symbols of their national identity. Frequently, however, these efforts were made in the face of overt or insidious challenges, not the least of which came from within the Scottish settlements themselves. In Canada, for example, where Confederation provided a new focus for allegiance and where sports such as curling had virtually lost their Scottish identity by the end of the century, Wilfrid Campbell was led to lament in 1911 that the Scots had become ‘ever afraid to act as a community and uphold their most sacred ideals’. 75 Like many other commentators, he equated the preservation of ethnic identity with material comfort and moral integrity, but perhaps more scholarly attention should now be paid to the other side of the coin — namely, the desire and ability of numerous Scots to assimilate imperceptibly and successfully into their host societies.
Loss of identity was perhaps most noticeable in Gaelic-speaking communities. In the Eastern Townships of Quebec, some of the Hebridean place names imported by the settlers were replaced by French names, and Stornoway, the hub of the Scottish community, became entirely French-speaking. ‘Bienvenu à Scotstown’ or ‘Stornoway vous Acceuille ’ are the messages greeting modern visitors to that corner of Quebec, where the Hebridean component of the population dropped from over 20 per cent to 6 per cent between the 1880s and 1931. Out-migration, particularly to New England, led to the closure of churches and schools, while the use of Gaelic was eroded by exogamous marriages, the loss of community resulting from material success and a perception among the settlers that English was the language of progress. ‘Guard the Gaelic’ was a poem written at the end of the nineteenth century by Angus MacKay (Oscar Dhu), a bard from the Eastern Townships, who, as this extract shows, lamented the cultural effects of the haemorrhage of Highlanders to the Boston States:
Lads and lasses in their teens
Wearing airs of kings and queens —
Just a taste of Boston beans
Makes them lose their Gaelic!
They return with finer clothes
Speaking ‘Yankee’ through their nose!
That’s the way the Gaelic goes,
Pop! Goes the Gaelic. 76
More bitter opprobrium was reserved for emigrants who turned their backs on their religious heritage. Chapter 1 demonstrated how would-be emigrants were warned about the i
rreligion and sharp business practice of American society, 77 but Scots could just as easily fall prey to such temptations when surrounded by their own countrymen. Preaching in the Perth district of Upper Canada in the 1820s, the Reverend William Bell was disappointed, not only at the clannishness of the Scottish settlers, who wanted him to confine his services entirely to them, but also at evidence of their spiritual backsliding:
On looking round me … I saw a moral as well as a natural wilderness requiring my cultivation. With regard to a great majority of the settlers, religion seemed to occupy no part of their attention. The Sabbath was awfully profaned, and drunkenness, swearing, and other vices, were thought matters of course. The number of those inclined to attend public worship was small, and of those possessing real piety still smaller … In going to and returning from the place of worship, I could not help making comparisons between my native country and this. Many were at work at their ordinary employments, and I began to see that religious instruction, by a great part of the population, so far from being considered a privilege, would be considered a great hindrance to the prosecution of their plans. 78
It was not only clergymen who were critical of Sabbath-breaking. Thirty years later a correspondent of the Inverness Advertiser, who had emigrated reluctantly to Upper Canada to find work, complained that he had not heard a Gaelic sermon since he left home, and confirmed Bell’s impression with the following anecdote:
Adventurers And Exiles_The Great Scottish Exodus Page 48
