by Ian Hamilton
This was laying it on a bit thick, but of course I was delighted. We had made many blunders. Many of our actions verged on the stupid, and success had been brought to us by an enormous amount of luck. I knew that if the Earl was in possession of all the facts he could hardly describe the episode as brilliant. Still, it was the first praise I had had from anyone unconnected with me or the enterprise. Few men have defences against words like his, and I had none.
‘Now tell me,’ asked the Earl, ‘are you a communist or a republican?’
I assured him that I was neither. Yet I had that strange feeling that it would not have made much difference if I had been. Here was a man who loved his country and everyone in it, whatever views they held. Yet the fact that I held much the same views as himself was no doubt of some reassurance to him. He had been afraid that I might be some form of extremist who would graduate from Stone lifting to bomb throwing, but my support for the Covenant reassured him. You can do much more as a moderate than as an extremist. He too was a Covenanter, and he knew that there were no wild men in that movement.
At length I told him about the petition. He agreed that it was a good idea. There had been much speculation as to who was behind the whole affair, and what their aims could be. This would focus matters, and stop a lot of wild speculation. I produced it and read it to him and he did not think that we should change a word of it.
But when I suggested that he might take it and act as our intermediary, he demurred. He pointed out that someone like him could not become too deeply involved in a plot like ours. Our action was for young unknowns, not for people of title, rank and position. I had to agree with him. I had come in out of the night, an unknown youth, with only verbal guarantees of my politics, and none at all of my sanity. The best I could hope for was a sympathetic hearing, but I could not realistically expect support. It would have been foolish for any public man at that time to have taken an active part in the exploit with people of whom he knew nothing. I had not mentioned John MacCormick’s name, although I suspect that he thought that John had had a hand in it.
‘Still,’ continued the Earl, ‘I may be able to help you. I may be able to let it be known that you have been to see me, and that I’m convinced that you’re not wild men but moderate young people driven to anger at the way Westminster treats Scotland.’
This was no small service, as I realised, and I accepted the offer gratefully.
The Earl shifted about in his bed, and I could see that he still had something on his mind. On the bedclothes lay a copy of the Bulletin which contained the report of my telephone call from Newcastle, in which I had stated that the Stone was in Scotland. He looked uneasily at me, and then his curiosity got the better of him.
‘I . . . er . . . don’t want to know anything about it.’ Then he burst out with a rush: ‘But is it in Scotland yet? I’ve worked it out with maps and times, and I don’t see how it could possibly have been brought over the Border by the time it says here,’ and he indicated the newspaper.
‘No,’ I said. ‘That story was a decoy to let some of us get home.’
‘It’s not in the Serpentine?’ he asked anxiously. Everyone wanted to know if the Stone was in the Serpentine. Why we should carefully remove it from Westminster Abbey and throw it into a puddle in a London park, Scotland Yard alone knew.
‘No. It’s not in the Serpentine,’ I said.
He chuckled. ‘You know you’ll have to be careful,’ he said. ‘They’ll send you to prison when they catch you. The English don’t like a joke against themselves, and you’ve twisted the lion’s tail until it’s come away in your hands.’
I thought to tell him that the unicorn’s horn was as sharp as the lion’s teeth, but I decided to play it low key and simply said, ‘I know.’
As I rose to go he leaned back and looked at the ceiling. ‘Of course if the police ask if I have heard from you people, I shall have to say that you have been to see me.’
I was dismayed, because I had come to his house under safe conduct, and I thought that in these days of scientific crime detection a safe conduct should also cover giving clues to the police. I looked at the decanter from which, at his invitation, I had recently poured myself a generous dram, and wondered if he would be annoyed if I wiped my prints off it.
‘Well,’ I said, my voice filled with dismay, ‘if they ask for a description, I hope you’ll just repeat the one that was given by the policeman outside the Abbey.’
He sat up sharply at that. ‘Description!’ he thundered. ‘Description! I shall give them no description! I shall tell them that I am not an Argyll to betray a fellow countryman.’
We shook hands and I let myself out of his room, and found my way downstairs. The Countess, who had been waiting in the hall, opened the door for me. I said good night and passed into the darkness. The door closed and I was once again alone.
I started the car and drove down the drive chuckling. What a delightful man! Not an Argyll indeed! That was a remark I could dine out on anywhere for years to come. Well almost anywhere, but not in Inveraray. No. Certainly not in Inveraray!
The petition still lay in my breast pocket, but my mission had not been entirely fruitless. I had made an ally who, even if he would not play an active part, was quite clearly enchanted by the whole affair. We knew how ordinary people were thinking. Now I had seen an earl’s pennant fluttering in the wind. And the wind was coming from the same direction. On reflection it was really a very brave thing he had done, just to see me. After all, he was the Lord Lieutenant of the County, the King’s representative, and he had done nothing to apprehend me. I felt certain that anything he said about us would be favourable. Even if he made no public announcement, his private conversation would help us. He moved in influential circles where there were public frowns at our action. A private chuckle or two would do no harm at all.
But I had still to get back to Glasgow to make my report, and to decide how best to get rid of the petition, which was still hanging like a penance round my neck. People in Scotland are always suggesting sending petitions to the sovereign. They should try to draft one themselves. Then they should start to wonder how to send it.
I found the road to Perth quite easily, and from there I telephoned Glasgow and asked them to arrange a council of war for my return. Then I had a cup of tea in a melancholy little cafe before I set off on the 60-mile journey. It was late when I arrived in Glasgow, for the roads were abominable. We met after midnight for the second night in succession in John MacCormick’s flat at 5 Park Quadrant. The same four were present, Bill, Bertie Gray, and of course John MacCormick and myself.
I was anxious to get the proceedings over with as quickly as possible for I was very tired. There was really very little to decide. The petition had to be issued quickly, because the public had to know what we were about. I had had doubts all along about the wording of it, but I had now been reassured by an outsider, the Earl, that it was impressive, although it still sounded highfalutin nonsense to me. We decided that next day we would convey the petition directly to the press. Bill undertook to type it out on his mother’s typewriter, so that there would be no chance of handwriting experts tracing it back to its author. John also pointed out that, if we ever wished to issue a similar declaration, the use of the same typewriter would validate it as surely as a signature. Typescripts are unique to each typewriter. I saw Bill looking thoughtful at this. Privately, I held the view that there was no one else in Scotland with the style to frame such a document, and that that would be identification enough. John MacCormick himself was delightfully and naively unique.
Before I went off to bed there was one more matter to be settled. I wanted the petition to be sent out from Edinburgh, since I thought that we might bluff the police into concentrating their inquiries on that town. For the same reason the others wanted it to be sent out from Glasgow. The police, they contended, would expect us to leave it as far as possible from our own doorstep; if we left it in Edinburgh, the police would suspect Glasgo
w, and vice versa. The others were overestimating the forces against us. In actual fact the petition was left in a Glasgow newspaper office and it was on Glasgow that the police immediately concentrated their inquiries. Upon that circumstance no comment can be made.
Chapter Twenty-two
It was late when I awoke that Friday forenoon. It was the first full night’s sleep I had had for a week. I felt great. I lay thinking of recent events. Seven days ago, following months of planning, and years of dreaming, we had left for London. The week had passed; water had flowed under bridges. Yet somehow we had triumphed over time. We had lived years of adventure in seven days. Into each day we had stuffed as many experiences as Santa Claus might stuff toys into a stocking. I felt older by much more than a week. It would be nice to relax and catch up with my social life. Life is for living.
My thoughts were broken by sounds outside my door. For a moment I thought it was the police, and started into careful wakefulness. Then I heard Alan’s voice and knew that I was still safe. A knock came to the door and Gavin’s voice made the room quiver.
‘Come on! Come on! Come on! Can’t lie in bed all day.’ He beat thunderously on the door. I sighed and rose and let them in. They sat down and Alan gave me a cigarette. As we smoked I told them of the happenings of the last two days, and they agreed that the petition was an excellent idea.
As I spoke I could see that Alan had something on his mind. He was only giving half his attention to what I was saying, and he paced up and down the room like an uneasy animal, which was unlike his usual casual manner. He was solemn and silent until I had finished, and then he told me his trouble.
‘My father’s terribly worried about the Stone,’ he said. ‘He thinks that it will disintegrate if we don’t do something about it soon.’
It appeared that after I had left him the previous morning his father had taken thought. Stuart and Stuart were a major civil engineering firm in the west of Scotland, so of course Mr Stuart knew a lot about stone. It occurred to him that any piece of sandstone that had lain for six centuries in a dry and constant atmosphere might have lost a great deal of its strength. If it were now exposed to the elements for any length of time, it might suck up water like blotting paper and split into fragments when the water froze.
This had not occurred to me. It seemed feasible enough, for ice can split stone. I sat on the edge of my bed and cupped my chin in my hands and thought how nice it would be to take a day off and have a casual lunchtime pint. That evening I had a longstanding arrangement to take a girl out for dinner. I had had no social life for a fortnight. My dinner jacket was lying crumpled on the floor, and I had been stepping round it since I had last worn it a fortnight before at Daft Friday. I hadn’t had time to hang it up. It would be nice to be normal again. Then I thought about the Stone lying in that wood, covered only by leaves and freezing soil, and of the hunt that was still on for it. If this information were accurate then we would have to get back on the road again.
But was it accurate? I had no means of knowing. If it was, I would have expected the police to issue a statement saying so. They would know that that would force us to take it out of hiding, and they would have their roadblocks out again everywhere. On the other hand, the police might not have the intelligence and knowledge that Mr Stuart had. And as Gavin painted a lurid picture of our going back for the Stone and having to shovel it into paper pokes, I sighed and agreed that something had better be done.
While Alan went off to discuss the matter with his father I dressed and went over to the Union to tell Bill Craig of the new complication. We must now do everything in our power to preserve the Stone, and Alan must reassure Mr Stuart that this was being done. Mr Stuart was an unknown factor.
When I met Bill, he was inclined to treat the whole matter as a joke. He took me to the door of the Union and patted the wall. ‘This is stone,’ he said. ‘It’s sandstone. In the summer it’s dry. In the winter it’s wet. The rain falls on it. The frost freezes it. Yet the Union isn’t falling down.’
I was more inclined to listen to Mr Stuart than to Bill, for while Bill had the fluent tongue, Mr Stuart had the technical knowledge. There are a few occasions when knowledge is preferable to blarney, although as a law student I much prefer the latter. But this was a time for knowledge. I had arranged with Alan that we would meet his father outside the King’s Theatre, and although Bill protested that he had much work to do, and that he was unshaven and tired, I dragged him down town to the meeting.
When we met Mr Stuart there was little doubt that he was very anxious. He put forward a strong prima facie case for the immediate recovery of the Stone. His sense of urgency transferred itself to me, and to Bill also, and we promised him that we would act immediately to recover the Stone and bring it into a place of shelter from the elements. Meanwhile, Mr Stuart suggested that Alan should drive up to Ross-shire and discover from Kay where her piece of Stone was lying. He wanted reassurance that it was under cover. Bill and I made an appointment to meet Councillor Gray and John MacCormick that afternoon, and arranged that Gavin and Alan should keep in touch with us. Then we left Mr Stuart, full of worries for the slowly disintegrating Stone.
It was late that afternoon before John MacCormick, Bertie Gray, Bill and myself were able to get together. It was Friday, the last Friday in 1950, and the offices were closing down for the long weekend. Even in times of crisis ordinary things must go forward, and although Bill and I chafed at the delay we knew that there was nothing we could do to speed up the meeting. Finally, when the last figure had been totted up, and the last account paid, the four of us got together and I put the new situation before them.
At first Bertie Gray laughed at the idea of going down for the Stone that night. As a monumental sculptor he had worked with stone all his life, and the technical question of the Stone’s safety came within the scope of his experience. It would take no hurt, he maintained. The meeting resolved into a contest between Bertie and myself. He pointed out that the police hunt was at its height, and that there was every likelihood of our car being stopped and searched as we crossed the Border. We had just come back from danger. ‘Don’t,’ he pleaded. ‘Don’t go back down there again and take more risks. At least wait until the weather is better. More snow is forecast.’
I was not so sure. I did not want to find myself caught in the nip of two elderly experts, each contradicting the other. Even if the Stone were not in danger, Mr Stuart’s belief that danger existed must be a factor in the equation. Anyway, it had to be brought back sometime. The police had been active right along the Border for five days now, and we had got through safely. They could not go on stopping cars for ever. By Sunday the Border would be open. Again, it was possible that Alan and I might be arrested at any moment, and it would be of considerable advantage if one or other of us were to accompany the expedition to fetch it back. After all, we had hidden it.
I advocated my case with some fluency, for my heart was in it. Anyone who has ever tasted adventure knows that it is the hardest thing in the world to sit still. Bertie’s arguments were good, but Mr Stuart’s were good too. Where there was a division of opinion, I was on the side of immediate action. In the back of my mind lurked the threat of impending arrest; and tucked away behind that was my own belief in myself. I suppose it was vanity, but I felt that if I was arrested everything might go to pigs and whistles. The Stone must be recovered before that happened. At last, when John MacCormick and Bill Craig had thrown their arguments onto my side of the scale, Bertie gave way. To this day he maintains that we took an unnecessary risk in going south that night, but he immediately started to organise our expedition.
There was one subject, however, on which the four of us were in complete harmony. We were all certain that Alan’s projected trip north to Kay’s home involved the taking of risks out of all proportion to any possible gain. Inverasdale is a small remote village, and very few cars would arrive there in the dead of winter. If Alan and Gavin paid a flying visit to Kay, people would
talk. And none of us could afford to be kenspeckle figures at that time. Nor were we worried about the small piece of the Stone. We knew that it was in the boot of the Anglia, in someone’s garage, and that was the best place for it. We had no qualms about that.
As we had been talking about Alan’s trip north, we had also been planning my trip south. Bertie Gray tried to insist that those of us who had been to London at Christmas should not go back again. We had tried our luck enough, and by now it must be wearing thin. Better to send a fresh team.
I laughed at his arguments. I had been in the affair from the beginning, and I was not going to be shouldered out of it now. To let someone else bring the Stone back was unthinkable. Who would he get, eh? Was he going to go out into Sauchiehall Street and shout, ‘Hi, Jimmy. C’mere a minute. Gonna go down and bring us the Stone?’ What was wrong with me anyway? Who else could do it better than me, eh?
We nearly had a face-to-face argument about it, because I don’t think he was used to being laughed at, but his idea was absurd, and I saw John MacCormick turn away to hide a smile. I was, however, prepared to concede Bertie’s point to the extent of taking a new team apart from myself. I felt it unfair to expose Alan and Gavin to further risks. Alan especially. He was much younger than I was and we had not had all that much rest in these last seven days. Bill was his natural stand-in, and he had assumed all that evening that he would be called upon to go. There was of course no one better qualified than himself. Although he could not drive, he excelled at all human relationships. The occasion was soon to arise when this excellence was to be put to the test.
Simultaneously, Bill and I thought of our third man. John Josselyn was an Englishman by birth, and the son of a rear admiral, but he had been educated in Scotland and had come to regard himself as one of us. We certainly so regarded him. He had arrived for Hogmanay from Bath in Somerset where he was employed in the Admiralty in some frightfully hush-hush work on submarines. Trust the Admiralty to have their submarine section on a trickle of river. Bill immediately set out to recruit him. He found him drinking coffee in the Union and approached him quietly.
