Stone of Destiny

by Ian Hamilton

  Well, I didn’t. Screw them. I would show them. Fellow Scots and English as well, I would show them. I would show the world, for that matter. There was no enmity towards the English in this and no hatred. I have sometimes made snide remarks about the English that were as unworthy of me as they were of them. These remarks concealed an admiration, which never needed concealment. The English take their love of liberty with them wherever they go. Tom Paine made England too hot to hold him, and emigrated to the United States, where he invented the name they now bear. As in America so also in Scotland. When they come to live among us they very soon become Scots, a nationality which is open to all. But gang warily if you get under an Englishman’s skin. They are a proud people.

  I had no intention in these days of ganging warily. I tripped when I tried. I still do. The only place where I can open my mouth without once again ruining my career is in the dentist’s chair. In 1950, though, I was lucky enough to meet a man after my own heart, who helped to canalise my thoughts, and who set my mind to work in a more practical fashion. He was John MacDonald MacCormick, Lord Rector of Glasgow University, an honorary office. Election to it is by the student body. He was Chairman of the Scottish Covenant Association. The Scottish Covenant of 1948, which was promoted by him, had been signed by two million Scots. It asserted the right of Scotland to a Scottish Parliament for Scottish affairs. I went along with this. I took part. Yet my ambition went far beyond any reform in our political institutions. Scotland is only a small part of the earth’s surface, and reform of our government will be just another shuffle round of the people who hold power. It is reform in our attitude that is necessary. Whatever form of government we had, I wanted us to be a nation once again.

  In the community of the world, nations are the individuals. Unless each nation makes its own separate and distinct contribution, humanity will fall into one amorphous mass, degenerate, indistinct, inactive. Variety is the ideal of nature, and we Scots were losing our distinctive variety. In the Scotland of the 1940s the official address was not Scotland but North Britain. Scotland was sleeping, and ignoring the great abilities that it had always possessed, and over which we had been put on sacred guard. The soul of a nation is in its people’s keeping, and we no longer worried about our nation’s soul. A person’s soul is a trifle. A person who spends his life worrying about his salvation is not one I greatly admire. But a nation is a different thing. When we give away our soul, we have nothing left to give.

  Now these are brave words, but as a young man I had the qualifications to utter them. My prime qualification was that I did not know my place. I never have. So many Scots, forgetting that one of the great features of our history is the mobility between the classes, have lapsed into the English habit of thought best expressed in the words ‘I wouldn’t presume. I hope I know my place.’ I always presume. I have never known my place. I am the second son of a tailor from Paisley, one of Scotland’s provincial towns. Paisley will not easily forgive me for calling it that, for Paisley believes that it is the centre of the universe. Maybe it is. Certainly it was in Paisley, and in my father’s house there, that I first read Disraeli’s great words, ‘Learn to aspire.’

  It was from my father that I also learned another lesson that has never left me, which is this: man is answerable only to God for his conduct, and if there is no God, a matter about which I have always been in great doubt, then he is answerable only to his own conscience. No man-made law tells a free man what to do. All it does is tell him what the punishments will be if he breaks the man-made law. It is the moral conscience of each individual that binds people together, and makes community life possible. Not courts, not lawyers, not judges, and certainly not the police. They are merely the regulators, but we are the people. It is we who make the community. Ourselves alone.

  I was one of these people, and I was very much alone. In the autumn of 1949 I went down to London, and had my first look at the Stone of Destiny.

  Chapter Three

  My first reconnaissance of Westminster Abbey was a leisurely affair, and took in little detail. Detail would come later. I walked round, looked, and came back home satisfied that if I could get a few people together then it would all be possible, but I did not know a single person to turn to for help. It was a lonely time, and that was as far as it went that year. I knew John MacCormick only slightly then, and I had no close friends to confide in. I did indeed take my thoughts to Christopher Murray Grieve, the poet Hugh MacDiarmid, whose work I greatly admired, but the idea was to simmer with me for another year before it was to be formulated into any practical shape.

  It is not easy for one young man on his own to formulate a plan of action. Dreams are for dreaming, and I did not regard myself as any sort of man of action. In a settled society ambitions are modest; day follows day, rubbing life thin, without any wear being noticed. The soldier who goes into action has a long training behind him, and is urged forward by the society he lives in. Ever present is the sanction of public opinion, forcing him to do things that would otherwise be forbidden. Nothing public urged me forward and indeed public opinion was very much against any sort of individual action. What I had in mind would put me outside the law, and I would have to face the consequences. In these circumstances the personal bar to action was very considerable. A cocoon of loneliness kept my dreams apart from reality.

  Then in the autumn of 1950 I was invited to join the Glasgow student committee supporting John MacCormick’s rectorial candidature. I met all sorts of people through that and the cocoon began to wear thin. I met people who began to talk of strong measures, and who pointed to the melancholy history of Ireland. ‘From the blood of martyrs,’ they muttered, ‘grow living nations.’ Their eagerness to find a martyr was only paralleled by their desire to live to see the fruits of martyrdom. To be fair to them, most of them have lived to become martyrs to endless committee meetings in the Labour Party, or the Scottish National Party, so they are not to be laughed at. For my part, I would rather have the fire at the stake. Yet I listened to their talk.

  Nowadays people sing rather than talk, but the old songs had not been revived then, and the new ones were unwritten. I listened silently to talk of sending Blue Bonnets over the Border, and wondered what it all meant. Of course it meant nothing, but I had not the self-confidence to see that, and I felt that there was something missing in me. Did they know something I didn’t know? Were they going to do something that I couldn’t do? Students have talked like this from time immemorial, but I did not know that then. I was overawed by their terribly grown-up sophistication, but I enjoyed being a spectator at their performance. Blue Bonnets over the Border sounded great.

  It was still a long way from listening to such talk to crossing the Border on my own account. Clearly I needed a leader. I had not yet learned the lesson that there are no leaders worth following; that leaders are egocentric humbugs, who casually use others for their own ends. The way of a man with a maid is easily explained, but the way of a leader with those who follow him and think he is great is one of the mysteries of life. Born leaders should be locked up. Leadership should be made a crime.

  Yet the crime I contemplated needed a leader, and the crime itself fascinated me. Thoughts of it would not go away. It was, as I hear kids say in the slang of today, ‘neat’. The Stone had been taken from Scotland to show that we had lost our liberty. Recovering it could be a pointer to our regaining it. A promise had been made by the Treaty of Northampton of 1328 that it would be returned, and that promise had never been kept. Why should fulfilment of that promise not be wrung from them by spiriting the Stone away at dead of night? It only weighed 4 or 5 hundredweight, which was not an impossible load for several men to carry. An empty chair speaks louder than a full house. Much louder than a full house if that house is a House of the Westminster Parliament. It might just speak loud enough to awaken the people of Scotland.

  For more than 2,000 years the Stone had been the talisman of the Scottish people, and, for all I knew, they might stil
l venerate it. My childhood memories came back to me and I remembered my mother’s stories. I could almost see the thin smile on the long, lean, sallow face of my great hero, that slit-throat, the Good Lord James, the great guerilla leader of the Wars of Independence. Here was a guerilla operation in modern times, to be carried out not by ambush, but by careful stealth in the enemy camp. The very audacity of the idea would have made him chuckle. It might have the same effect on the Scots of today. It was difficult; it could be spectacular; it was symbolic; it struck at the very heart of Englishry; it righted an ancient wrong; yet it hurt no one. Spiriting away four or five hundredweight of sacred Stone from the very heart of the Empire might fire the imagination of the world if it were carefully carried out. If we bungled it, we would be the only sufferers. But we must not bungle it. Who was to be the Good Lord James?

  I found him on John MacCormick’s Rectorial Committee. Among all the others he stood out as being the born leader of such an expedition. He was Bill Craig, who was President of the Union that year, and a big man in the corporate life of the university. He had already graduated with one degree, and was studying for a further one. He had charm and ability, and above all he was able to lead. Indeed in the fun and frolic of a rectorial election he led me into much temptation to which I readily succumbed, and together we got into all sorts of trouble, which was not real trouble because he had the useful facility of knowing how not to be caught. I learned much from him.

  He was 26, a year older than me, as I was just newly 25. Like me he was small in stature, but he had a commanding presence. By sheer force of argument and personality he could persuade the most reluctant audience whether in public or private, because he was as able a speaker in debate as he was in committee. He was a ready-witted politician in the Liberal cause, which, then as now, permitted its adherents to formulate their own policy, and I don’t mean that as a jibe.

  For the job we contemplated, qualities were needed other than those of a politician, and he possessed these par excellence. Calm and unruffled in the most adverse of circumstances, he had that type of temperament which can never admit defeat, and will turn disaster into glorious victory. Add to this that he is small and Pictish, like so many Scots, because we are all as much Picts as Scots, and imagine a Puckish smile concealing a wicked sense of humour, and you have a picture of Bill.

  Yet before I approached him I wanted to have something to lay before him. I dropped no more than a hint in the right quarter and saw from the reaction that there were people in Scotland not averse to financing such an enterprise. For my part the idea had now grown from a mere discontent to a passion that made me think of little else. Apart from the hint about finance I had mentioned the scheme to no one. The need for secrecy was great. I had seen others bluster and talk about what they were going to do, and then fail to get to the starting point, and I did not wish to be one of them.

  My starting point came in early November of 1950. I knew then that my decision was made. I was going after the Stone. Hell mend you or bend you, I was going to have a crack at it. I became impatient of politics, and discussions and arguments, and closed my mind to them, for I was now convinced that my course of conduct was right, and if it was wrong, it hurt no one but myself. Further dreaming could not have made the issue clearer. I decided to approach Bill Craig.

  I met him in the street one November afternoon, and prised him apart from his friends. I told him in a few words what was on my mind.

  He laughed and swore at me when he heard what I had to say, and called me his evil genius. Here he was, on the threshold of his career, when I came along to tempt him from the path of success. I was a fool, and the scheme was hair-brained and impossible, to say nothing of being illegal.

  I reminded him of some of the things we had been up to recently, which had been on yon side of the law, and yet were still sweet to remember. There had been various misadventures including a Tory loudspeaker van that had been unaccountably silenced. He grinned.

  ‘What are you going to do with it when you get it back to Scotland?’ he asked.

  ‘I haven’t thought that far,’ I said. ‘We’ll have to leave that to the people of Scotland. But it will at least show us whether or not they’re worth fighting for. If they don’t support us, then Scotland’s as dead as Queen Anne.’

  He thought for a long time, standing there in the street, as the light closed in on a grey November afternoon. It was in Sauchie-hall Street, along near Charing Cross.

  ‘All right,’ he said at last. ‘I’ll come.’

  I was rapturous. At last I had someone to whom I could pour out all my arguments, someone to whom I could tell how I thought it could be done. We walked together along the street towards the university, two little short men, their heads close together, the one small and dark and thin and intense, the other open faced and frank and laughing at my enthusiasms.

  ‘It will shake the world,’ I said. ‘To raid the heart of London. To bring back the age-old symbol of our country. A big stone gone and only an empty chair. Five pounds’ worth of stone. Two thousand years of history. Scotland will wake again.’

  ‘You’re a silly romantic,’ he said. ‘But I’ll come.’

  Chapter Four

  With Bill Craig in the operation, I was certain that our chances of success were greatly enhanced, and we settled down like a general staff to plan our campaign.

  I do not think we were at all presumptuous in what we were trying to do. In the space of a few short hours we planned to show to the English government that there was a limit to their domination of Scotland; we planned also to show to the world that Scotland was awake again, and above all we wished to give to the Scottish people a symbol of their liberty.

  With our total ages little more than half the age of any single senior politician, we hoped to do something that might earn a place in the history books, and would almost certainly earn us an English jail-room. So what? It has been pointed out to me that many of the minor events that have gone to make Scottish history have been carried through by young men and women. It will be a bad day for any country when its young sit at home and do as their elders tell them. It will be even worse, and the end of all our freedoms, for the old as well as the young, when youngsters of conscience are afraid of the police.

  From the beginning, we accepted that the police would inevitably catch up with us. Both Bill and myself were known as active supporters of the Covenant movement in Glasgow. Because there had been little illegal Nationalist activity since before the war, we surmised that the police would have no dossiers of suspects to guide them. Police do not work by magic. When a crime is committed they look at the crime. Then they look at the modus operandi. Then they look at who’s out of prison and draw up a list of suspects. For this crime there was a whole nation of suspects, or so we hoped. On the other hand, it seemed obvious to us that an exploit of this type could only be carried through by people with a great deal of free time on their hands. Such deduction on the part of the police would force them to suspect students, and since Glasgow University has always been a centre of Nationalist activity, we guessed that it would not be long before the police were on our tracks. There were then 7,000 students at Glasgow University, but we prided ourselves that we would be high on the list of suspects.

  We were entirely mistaken in our assumption. We had always been led to believe that Scotland Yard, although perhaps slow, inexorably sifts every clue until it gets its man. It is rather disturbing to a law-abiding citizen like myself to discover that this is not the case. We sprinkled the Abbey with clues, yet Scotland Yard were clueless. So far from using induction and deduction, and all the scientific methods of criminal investigation, Scotland Yard seemed to lapse back into the days of the incantation and the bubbling pot. They conferred with a clairvoyant, who held his head in silence, and with a water-diviner who led them, presumably at public expense, to the River Trent. Up and down the country, in their search for the Stone, water-diviners could be seen twitching twigs. Scotland Ya
rd went daft.

  Fortunately for the reputation of the British constabulary, things were different in Glasgow. While Scotland Yard was establishing its Department of Criminal Telepathy, Glasgow’s Serious Crime squad, under Detective Inspector Kerr, was working quietly at the job he was paid to do. I have the most lively respect for Mr Kerr and his colleagues. As public officials they could have no sympathies, yet I know they must have hated their job. That did not matter; they had their duty to do and they did it efficiently. As far as I could ascertain, all the laurels on the side of the authorities must go to them. I have met the brains of Scotland Yard and was not impressed, but Inspector Kerr is a policeman with whom it is a privilege to have crossed swords.

  Accepting the myth of the unbeatable police, we aimed not so much at success without discovery, but at success at all costs. Had we taken even elementary precautions, such as arranging alibis, laying down false clues, and ensuring that all who took part maintained complete silence, after the event as well as before, I do not think we would ever have been discovered. As it was, we accepted certain arrest; waited for the police to come; and it took them three months to find us.

  Towards the middle of November I went along to Glasgow’s Mitchell Library and withdrew all the books I could find that dealt with Westminster Abbey and the Stone of Destiny. I signed for these books in my own name, for if I had used a false one I might have been recognised, and the subject of my studies clearly revealed. In the face of arrest it seemed to matter little what name I used, although in the end the library slips with my name on them was the only concrete piece of evidence the police had against me.

  I waded through pages of description and history, drew several maps, made calculations, and studied photographs. I followed all the guides step by step from the west door to the Battle of Britain Memorial. I found much that was of interest to me and a little that was of use to me. In the midst of my studies I was interrupted by a fellow student who, peering over my shoulder, was astounded at my choice of reading matter. I hastily explained that I was preparing a lecture that I was shortly to deliver to a church youth club. He accepted the explanation, although when the news broke at Christmas he must have thought it a thin one. To my knowledge he never mentioned the subject of my studies to anyone. He was a canny Scot who knew how to keep a quiet tongue in a time of seething interest.