A Time of Tyrants

by Trevor Royle

  Shortly before polling day a Gallup poll conducted in 195 of the UK’s 640 constituencies gave Labour a narrow lead, but the election was followed by the anti-climax of having to wait another three weeks for the result to be known. The outcome was astonishing. Labour had won 393 seats to the Conservatives’ 213, while the Liberals all but disappeared with only 12 seats. There were 22 independents, but none of these were SNP, which had lost its only seat, Motherwell. Otherwise the political landscape in Scotland reflected the scale of the Labour victory: Labour had won 47.9 per cent of the vote, the Conservatives had won 40.3 per cent, the Liberals had won 5.6 per cent, while the SNP share was 1.3 per cent.23 With over one million people having voted for Labour in Scotland, it was by far the dominant party, although the Conservatives had continued to make a good showing outside the central belt and in most rural areas. Inevitably the new order changed Scotland’s political landscape, especially as the incoming Labour government was intent on creating a ‘New Britain’ which would make unemployment a thing of the past and introduce a new system of benefits, the ‘Welfare State’, which would address poverty, health care and education, and in so doing produce ‘cradle to the grave’ security for the people of the UK.

  The reforms had a distinctly British feel in that most of them were settled on a UK basis, but there were regional or national differences, the most notable occurring in the National Health Service. When the NHS in Scotland came into being on 5 July 1948 it already had solid foundations, and to all intents and purposes was built on what already existed. Through pre-war innovations such as the Highlands and Islands Medical Services and the wartime Emergency Hospital Service, Scotland already possessed a system of treatment which was very different (and superior) to what was on offer elsewhere in the UK, and this offered a secure foundation for the new service. There was also an existing infrastructure which allowed for the creation of separate legislation for the fledgling health service in Scotland. The country’s teaching hospitals enjoyed a working relationship with regional hospital boards, and the existence of the Scottish Home and Health Department had created an administrative system for medical staff and civil servants alike. Finally, when Health Minister Aneurin Bevan canvassed his ideas the British Medical Association in Scotland largely supported them, while they were rejected initially by doctors in England. From the very outset the NHS in Scotland would be a very different organisation, even though it was fully integrated into the UK system. The only distinctly Scottish concept that failed to materialise was the creation of the all-inclusive health centres offering a variety of services including dentistry, as promised in chapter six of the booklet which was sent to every potential patient in Scotland at the time of the foundation of the Scottish Health Service.24

  Health was not the first nationalised service to be vested and brought into the public domain. In the previous year, on Monday 6 January 1947, plain blue flags bearing the initials NCB (National Coal Board) had been unfurled on staffs at all of Scotland’s 187 coal mines to mark the moment when the industry came under public ownership. (Officially, vesting day was 1 January, but in Scotland the new year holiday and the weekend had delayed the ceremonies to the beginning of the first working week.) At the Bowhill Colliery near Cardenden in Fife the ceremony was conducted by the pit’s oldest working miner, John Herd, and by its youngest entrant, Adam Drummond, and as the Dunfermline Press reported ‘many informal “smokers” were held throughout the district as part of the general celebrations’.25 Similar celebratory events were held across Scotland to mark a moment which most Scottish miners had demanded throughout their working lives, and although it came at a time of recession within the industry the common reaction was one of passionate satisfaction. In Scotland the new industry was managed by its Scottish Division, one of eight geographical divisions, each under a divisional board which reported to the NCB.

  Also nationalised at this time were the railways: the pre-war ‘Big Four’ companies were amalgamated under the auspices of the British Transport Commission (BTC) which had wider responsibilities including docks and inland waterways, hotels, London Transport and road transport. BTC’s Railway Executive traded as British Railways with six different regions, the Scottish Region being responsible for all operations within Scotland. The former companies were London Midland and Scottish; London and North-Eastern; and Southern and Great Western. The priority in the immediate aftermath of nationalisation was to repair wartime damage and clear the backlog of maintenance work, and, in Scotland’s case, to return locomotives and rolling stock which had been moved south to replace war-damaged stock. Plans were also laid to begin replacing steam with electric and diesel-powered locomotives and multiple units, and in the 1955 modernisation proposals Glasgow benefited from its 190 miles of suburban lines being replaced with electric power at a cost of £18 million.26

  The new industrial and social welfare order had repercussions for nationalism. Although home rule did not disappear immediately from Labour’s agenda, it was seen increasingly as being irrelevant at a time when the national UK government was engaged in pushing through the welfare state, a move which enjoyed widespread public support. It also has to be said that by then the concept of political nationalism had suffered during the war against Nazi Germany, and the SNP had become marginalised as an irrelevance. Increasingly Labour in Scotland began to adopt a passive unionist line, and support for any kind of devolution began to wane. As interpreters of this period have put it, to most outsiders the SNP looked ‘more of a sect than a party’.27 Nationalism did not disappear altogether. Although the party spent the next twenty years in a limbo (largely of its own making), nationalism in its widest sense continued to exist within the interstices of the country’s political and cultural life.

  Some of its promptings were predictably romantic, and brought some excitement to the post-war world. On Christmas Day 1950, a group of four students (Ian Hamilton, Gavin Vernon, Kay Matheson and Alan Stuart) broke into Westminster Abbey and removed the Stone of Destiny (or Stone of Scone) from beneath the Coronation Chair and returned it to Scotland. The incident received a huge amount of publicity, and while much of the comment was of the outraged variety, it also gave satisfaction to idealists and closet nationalists everywhere. Such was the stone’s historical significance – as the coronation stone for Scottish kings it had been taken to London in 1296 by King Edward I – it was the best-known symbol of Scottish nationhood, and down the years frequent demands had been made for its return. On those grounds alone its removal seemed to make good a historical grievance and reawakened interest, albeit fitfully and tangentially, in nationalist politics. It also spawned doubts about the stone’s authenticity (it was found to be broken), and when it was placed secretly in Arbroath Abbey a few months later rumours abounded that it was a fake (these were almost certainly untrue).

  Three years later, at the time of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, there was a further protest against regal symbolism when activists blew up a number of post boxes in protest against the new queen’s title and its incorrect relationship to Scotland, but these activities did little more than generate publicity and the issue was soon forgotten. However it was not the end of the matter as far as the Stone of Destiny was concerned. Towards the end of the century, to most people’s surprise, Prime Minister John Major announced that the stone would be returned to Scotland on St Andrew’s Day 1996, and it was subsequently put on display with other regalia in the Crown Room at Edinburgh Castle. The decision was announced at a time when the fortunes of the Conservative government were at a low ebb, especially in Scotland, but Major’s decision provides a good inkling of the stone’s symbolic importance in Scottish life.

  Nationalism, or at least a sense of national cultural identity, also infused the post-war literary scene. On the conclusion of hostilities the poet Hugh MacDiarmid was made redundant from his wartime work, and at Douglas Young’s suggestion he joined the SNP to stand as a candidate for the Kelvingrove constituency in the post-war election. Th
is was won by Labour (J. L. Williams, 12,273) with MacDiarmid (C. M. Grieve) in third place (1,314). Finding himself unemployed, MacDiarmid took employment as a journalist with the Carlisle Journal while his wife and son remained in Glasgow. As ever, he retained a deep interest in literature, producing his second Selected Poems in 1946 and involving himself in a literary row which erupted that same year in the correspondence columns of the Glasgow Herald over the use of Scots. It had been sparked by a lecture which had been broadcast on the BBC by the archivist and historian James Fergusson of Kilkerran who coined the phrase ‘plastic Scots’ to describe the literary language used by MacDiarmid and his followers. Fergusson was the scion of a noted Ayrshire family – his brother was Brigadier Bernard Fergusson – and later became a noted holder of the post of Keeper of the Records, but his broadcast, in which he denigrated poetry in Scots as a ‘bastard language’ caused uproar, with other writers joining in an increasingly outraged correspondence.

  Seen from the perspective of a later age, the row has all the ingredients of the kind of writers’ spat or ‘flyting’ which typified Scottish letters in the age of MacDiarmid, but at the time it was solidly based on a realistic attempt to bring some stylistic and lexicographical coherence to the use of Scots in contemporary poetry and prose. Also known as ‘Lallans’, a word used by both Robert Burns and Robert Louis Stevenson, Scots as a poetic language had always been in wide general use, and since the 1920s it had been associated with MacDiarmid’s post-war Scottish renaissance movement. Fergusson disputed the use of this kind of language and reserved much of his bile for Young, whom he regarded as a fake because he ‘and his companions will hardly believe that the language in which they are claiming that they naturally express themselves in poetry bears other than the remotest relation to any form of Scots current today.’28

  The argument was taken a stage further when Fergusson claimed that the poets, or self-styled ‘makars’, were motivated by political reasons and were attempting to disassociate contemporary Scottish literature from English literary traditions. To this charge Young took grave exception, and in an address given at the Masonic Hall in Glasgow on 22 December 1946, he offered a stern rebuttal and laid out his stall for the position that he believed should be taken by post-war poets in Scotland. His speech was later issued as a pamphlet by the literary publisher William MacLellan: ‘Now this allegation contains but a partial truth, for the Makars – I believe I can say all of them – share a desire to re-establish the cultural contacts of Lallans as a national language fit for all purposes of verse, and indeed of literature generally. If in the pursuit of this aim some of them are more or less militantly Anglophobe, that is a necessary result of the imperialist tendency of the English language in Scotland, claiming and by Act of Parliament securing a monopoly in schools and so forth.’29

  To drive home the point, Young mischievously claimed that only a few years previously the Glasgow Herald had criticised the Nazi policy of Germanification in its occupied territories, notably Poland, yet it was not inclined to support a similar status for the Scots language. The correspondence was concluded at the end of December, but Young and his fellow makars took the issue of ‘plastic Scots’ further the following year at a meeting of poets known as the Makars’ Club in the Abbotsford bar in Edinburgh’s Rose Street on 11 April 1947. Chaired by the poet A. D. Mackie, it produced the Scots Style Sheet, a regularised orthography of the correct use of Scots, and amongst those who created it were Young and a host of younger poets who had served in the Second World War including J. K. Annand, Robert Garioch, Maurice Lindsay and Alexander Scott. While the political involvement was subsidiary to the literary intention, the Scots Style Sheet helped to regularise the use of Lallans, and many of those involved regarded it as a political statement of intent.30

  Other moves were more practical, and were aimed at giving some renewed substance to the structure of political nationalism following the wartime splits within the movement. Following McIntyre’s failure to hold Motherwell and the generally insipid performance at the 1945 election, the SNP adopted a manifesto which went hell-for-leather for independence, while MacCormick, having stood unsuccessfully as a Liberal, continued to put his faith in consensus politics.

  The result was the creation of the Scottish Convention which aimed to swing the people of Scotland behind an irresistible tide of support for the creation of a single-chamber assembly which would have responsibility for Scottish affairs within the UK government. It held its first Scottish National Assembly in Glasgow in March 1947, and culminated its business with a third assembly which was held in the General Assembly Hall of the Church of Scotland in Edinburgh on 29 October 1949. It proved to be a sonorous occasion, and one that positively reeked of history, for in allying the movement to a covenant, MacCormick had self-consciously related it to the Solemn League and Covenant of 1643 which bound Scottish and English Presbyterians in common cause to support the ideals of the reformed church. Delegates signed up for change and put their names to the call for the creation of ‘a parliament with adequate legislative authority in Scottish affairs’. It was a fine thing to attempt, and MacCormick had not been far wrong when he insisted that if Scotland wanted to change direction he and his fellow Covenanters had to seize the historical moment: ‘We can use the Scottish Convention to that end. It is open to us all. It will become what the Scottish people make of it. Will it be another of the high dreams and sudden cold awakening with which our history has so often been familiar? Or will it be the promise kept at last and the giving of what is ours to the world?’31

  MacCormick’s questions were soon answered, although not in the manner he might have wished. Around two million people put their names to the document, but no number of signatures could have changed the status quo, and home rule remained a romantic dream. The National Covenant gave voice to a widespread nationalist sentiment and satisfied the longings of those who craved change, but nothing came of the initiative. It gathered signatures, but that was all: as a result political nationalism, and along with it the SNP, went into a long decline, so much so that Arthur Donaldson was able to remark that ‘all the activists of the SNP could have been the complement of a small passenger aircraft, and had they flown together and crashed without survivors, the cause of independence would have been lost to view for many years.’32

  Yet by an odd quirk the encroachment of nationalism into Scotland’s cultural and political life did not bring with it a narrow parochialism. Far from it: during the war the country had grown used to the sight of overseas service personnel, most of them from European countries, and while most had returned within months of the war ending, some echoes of their presence remained.

  As we have seen, the British Council had responded to the foreign invasion by arranging a series of cultural events and establishing International House in Edinburgh’s Princes Street as a gathering place for poetry readings, discussions and opportunities to learn and study English. The mastermind behind this initiative was Henry Harvey Wood, an able administrator and cultural ambassador who had been born and brought up in Edinburgh and who had been recruited by the British Council after failing his medical for military service. At any time Wood would have been a valuable addition to a nation’s cultural life, and his contribution in Scotland proved to be decisive. Towards the end of the war Rudolf Bing, the distinguished manager of the Glyndebourne Festival, had been investigating the possibility of setting up a festival which ‘might establish in Britain a centre of world resort for lovers of music, drama, opera, ballet and the graphic arts’. During one fateful meeting at the end of 1944 with British Council officials in a restaurant in London’s Hanover Square, Bing was persuaded by Wood’s argument that Edinburgh would be the right location, provided that it attracted sufficient local and civic support.

  Despite the enthusiasm which had been generated at the meeting, Wood had to work hard to convince potential supporters in Edinburgh, notably Lord Provost Sir John Falconer and Murray Watson, editor of the Scotsman, but ev
entually a decision was taken to mount the festival in August 1947. Problems still abounded, and would continue to dog the project – one of Wood’s biographers claimed that ‘the festival plan almost foundered on the rocks of apathy, civic obstruction, and local government politics’ – but the first ever Edinburgh International Festival was a triumph.33 As the recently demobbed poet Maurice Lindsay put it, ‘it is impossible to exaggerate the impact the Festival made upon us in that long-ago sunny summer, when Europe was still in the process of dragging itself out of the shadows of war.’34 Even the sun shone throughout the event, and the closing concert by the Vienna Philharmonic was hailed as a manifestation of ‘the unconquerable spirit of European civilisation’. No one who heard Kathleen Ferrier singing Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde to Bruno Walter’s conducting, ever forgot the experience.

  There was another side-effect. From the outset the festival was firmly international in its approach. It was also solidly British in its execution but Scottish in its location, and therein lay a problem. Early complaints about the lack of a Scottish cultural input (not all of them received from within Scotland) were quickly addressed by the decision to revive the Scottish morality play Ane Plesant Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis by Scotland’s first known dramatist, Sir David Lyndsay of the Mount, which was the highlight of the second Edinburgh International Festival in 1948. This was an inspired decision because from the very outset the portents were not promising. While the play had undoubted literary integrity, it had only been performed twice since its first staging at the Royal Court in Linlithgow on Twelfth Night, 1540. It was also seven hours long, prolix and written in Scots, and there existed no modern version capable of being staged in contemporary terms. Against that, and strongly in its favour, Lyndsay’s play was richly humorous, with a strong satirical bent, and it mixed comedy with moral seriousness. Above all, in its central character John the Common-Weill, who represents the welfare of the nation, it possessed one of the great levelling democrats in Scottish literature, a figure who would be instantly recognisable anywhere in the post-war world.