by Trevor Royle
If Lyndsay’s play could be cut down and the language revised for a modern audience it would make an ideal vehicle for the fledgling festival. Fortunately the project was put in the hands of the noted producer and impresario Tyrone Guthrie, who engaged the playwright Robert Kemp to adapt it for a modern audience. Then the bold step was taken to mount the production in the General Assembly Hall of the Church of Scotland on the Mound in Edinburgh. All were inspired decisions, and the production of the Satyre was an instant success. Largely this was due to the sense of innovation and Guthrie’s bold staging, but the play’s main theme of a satirical attack on the Thrie Estaitis was represented by the characters Spiritualitie (the first estate, or clergy), Temporalitie (the second estate, or secular lords) and Merchand (the third estate, or burgesses). Other characters include Rex Humanitas, Divyne Correctioune, Gude Counsall plus a host of richly comic figures, and the play concludes with the cleansing of the nation and the reform of the estates. There is little doubt that audiences responded to the play’s main theme, and its message that countries can be corrupted by false leaders who are beguiled by pride and hypocrisy – in a moment of high symbolism the second act opens with the estates entering backwards to signify their moral and political recidivism.
Despite occasional financial and organisational vicissitudes and local carping, the festival never looked back, becoming in time one of the world’s great civilising celebrations and one of the brightest ornaments in Scottish cultural life. And yet, despite this brief revival of national values the overwhelming spirit of the age was governed not by a sense of being Scottish but of being British. This came about mainly a result of the government’s promotion of the war effort, which historians later summed up as embracing ‘an idealised British national identity’.35 Because the direction of the war had been in the hands of the Westminster government, and because the Ministry of Information promoted the concept of the British island race in much of its wartime propaganda output, the idea of everyone being in it together grew, and quickly became established as a national (UK) ideal. This is borne out by many local intelligence reports conducted in the aftermath of the first bombing raids against British cities in 1940. When it became clear that London was on the receiving end of the worst of the attacks, people in Dundee were reported to have said: ‘if only they [German bombers] would give us a turn, they might give London a night’s rest.’36
Conscription also introduced an equality of effort, as well as taking young men and women out of Scotland to serve or work elsewhere in the United Kingdom and further afield in the British Empire where Britain, or England, was the central binding factor. When Maurice Lindsay returned to live and work in ‘shabby down-at-heel’ Glasgow as a journalist and broadcaster he decided quite early on to stop writing in Scots – his first collection Hurlygush appeared in 1948 – and returned to writing in English, having taken ‘a conscious decision to write only in the language I spoke daily’.37 Although he had been an avid pro-Scots advocate during the Glasgow Herald’s debate in 1946, and although he decided that his future working life should be spent in Scotland where he emerged as a gifted writer and energetic cultural activist, the rest of Lindsay’s substantial poetic output was to be principally in English. There is an uneasy metaphor here for Scotland’s condition in the aftermath of the Second World War: it was possible to be British, or unionist, while retaining Scottish or nationalist sensibilities.
Within five years of the first demobilisations and the introduction of the Welfare State, Scotland began to change out of all recognition. Two elections in quick succession, in February 1950 and October 1951, cut Labour’s majority and in Scotland left the once great Liberal Party with only one seat, Orkney and Shetland (Jo Grimond). The Conservatives returned to power, as they did again in 1955 when they won 36 of Scotland’s 71 seats, a feat they were not to repeat again. In 1959 Labour won 38 seats to the Conservative’s 32, although the latter remained in power at Westminster. However, with the economic situation declining in Scotland, the writing was on the wall, and in the 1964 election the Conservatives lost heavily, winning only 24 seats, while Labour took 43 seats to help them secure a small overall majority in London. For the first time in several decades there was a resurgence of interest in the SNP which took second place to Labour in West Lothian.
Against a background of further decline a new economic plan was announced for Scotland at the beginning of 1966, but despite the estimated investment of £2,000 million the heavy industries were already in trouble. The NCB estimated that only 48 pits would still be open by 1970, and demand for shipbuilding had fallen to such an extent that the UK’s global share had fallen to 13 per cent by 1965, with the Clyde’s share of that total only 34 per cent.38
It was perhaps not surprising that the SNP re-emerged in the 1966 election, doubling its vote and coming second in three hotly contested constituencies, a feat that prepared the ground for the party winning the Hamilton by-election in November 1967. In the decade that followed that surprising breakthrough, nationalism returned to the political agenda, and as a result Labour once more came to embrace the concept of home rule; at a meeting held in Glasgow in August 1974 it ended the strict unionist stance which it had adopted after the Second World War, thereby paving the way for the first devolution referendum in 1979.
Sixty years earlier when Scotland had gone into the war to defend the rights of small nations a Liberal-sponsored home rule bill had been on the verge of becoming law, only to be swept away in the storm that engulfed the rest of Europe. During the inter-war years devolution remained in the national consciousness, albeit fitfully in the dire economic climate, only to disappear once more in the crusade to defeat Nazi Germany and imperialist Japan. During that time the Liberals all but vanished and the Conservatives went into the long decline which saw them become a marginal party in Scotland by the end of the twentieth century. For good or for ill – in the west of Scotland, perhaps the latter – in the second half of the twentieth century Labour remained the dominant party with its own command culture. At the same time the country had to accept the decline and eventual death of its heavy industries as reliance on public sector employment and, later, the financial sector, became paramount. From that point of view it was an odd outcome for those who had served their country during the Second World War and wanted the world they inherited to be a better place.
However, on the credit side, the conflict had helped to end laissez-faire politics, and paved the way for an inclusive and interventionist approach to government which would benefit everyone. Hopes were high in Scotland that this would lead to a prosperous future of full employment and decent housing with development areas, inward investment and the creation of new towns at Cumbernauld, East Kilbride, Glenrothes, Irvine and Livingstone. Central to Labour’s post-war philosophy was a belief that never again should Scotland be forced to return to the bad old days of unemployment, lack of investment, endemic poverty and social malaise that had followed the First World War. If that earlier conflict had been the war which had been fought to end war, then the Second World War would be the war which ushered in a brave new world of social justice and economic parity. Or, as Tom Johnston put it so eloquently in his memoirs, in the unity of the war years lay the strength which should accompany the peace: ‘if only we could lift great social crusades like better housing and health from the arena of partisan strife, what magnificent achievements could be ours.’39
It did not quite turn out that way, but the experience of the war had proved many things to the people of Scotland. After the false hopes of the 1920s and the doldrums of the 1930s, a sense of common cause had been created, and in the election of the post-war Labour government with its reforming instincts Scots had been shown that they had nothing to fear but fear itself, if only they could rise above all their trepidations and learn to master them. As 1945 drew to a close it was very far from being a sombre prospect, and most importantly of all it was one which thousands of Scots yearned to embrace as their rightful inheri
tance.
Epilogue
The Beginning of a New Song
On a warm and pleasant summer’s morning on the first day of July 1999, the Crown of Scotland was paraded before the people of Scotland in a ceremony presided over by the Duke of Hamilton, Scotland’s premier peer, before it was placed in front of the Queen in the General Assembly Hall of the Church of Scotland, the temporary chamber of Scotland’s new parliament. It was the centrepiece of a day of festivities to mark the reopening of Scotland’s parliament in which public celebration was mixed with ceremonial to mark a new beginning in the country’s history. Crowds lined the Royal Mile, soldiers were on parade, bands played and later Concorde swooped across the Edinburgh skyline accompanied by the Red Arrows, the RAF’s spectacular display team. As the Queen finished her speech, a specially commissioned mace was unveiled in public for the first time, a gift from Her Majesty marking the new parliament’s authority.
But for all the pageantry there was a distinct lack of the kind of high pomp and ceremony that usually marks national occasions of this kind. It was certainly an historic moment, but as the new First Minister Donald Dewar reminded everyone in his opening speech, it was a turning point not just in the history of Scotland, but also in the history of democracy within the United Kingdom.
This is about more than our politics and our laws. This is about who we are, how we carry ourselves. And in the quiet moments of today – if there are any – we might hear some echoes from the past: the shout of the welder in the din of the great Clyde shipyards, the speak of the Mearns rooted in the land, the discourse of the Enlightenment when Edinburgh and Glasgow were indeed a light held to the intellectual life of Europe, the wild cry of the great pipes and back to the distant noise of battles in the days of Bruce and Wallace.
Dewar had every reason to wax eloquent, as he was one of the architects of that historic moment and, quite rightly, had emerged as Scotland’s founding First Minister. For one day at least, many of the squabbles which had proceeded the event were forgotten – notably the row over the cost and the design of the new parliament building which was still taking shape, slowly, laboriously and expensively, at the foot of the Royal Mile opposite the Palace of Holyroodhouse. Instead of looking back and complaining, those who celebrated the occasion hoped that a bright dawn was breaking, that ‘new politics’ would be at the heart of a fresh way of doing things, and that Scotland had at last gained home rule in reasonable measure. After an absence of just under three hundred years it seemed that once again Scotland’s parliament had come back into its own. All told, it was very much a Scottish day in which the actual ceremonial was short and well-judged, while as far as was possible a human face was put on the public celebrations. Few present at the opening ceremony will forget Sheena Wellington’s luminous rendition of Robert Burns’s great song ‘A Man’s a Man’ or the reading of eleven-year-old Amy Linekar’s poem ‘How to Create a Great Country’.
It also represented the general desire of the Scottish people to take their fate back into their own hands. Two years earlier on 11 September 1997, Scotland had gone to the polls in a referendum on devolution, and the result was overwhelmingly positive, with 74 per cent voting in favour of a Scottish parliament and 63 per cent voting for the parliament to have powers to vary the basic rate of income tax. From that point onwards things proceeded quickly and tolerably smoothly, and the following year saw the emergence of the Scotland Act which paved the way for the creation of the new Scottish parliament.
Although its powers were limited in that the body could only pass legislation on devolved matters, which included education, health, agriculture and justice, devolution helped to settle the issue of home rule which had existed since 1914 and which had aggravated the body politic in the years that followed. Before the new parliament came into being, between the revitalisation of the SNP in the late 1960s and the change in Scotland’s economic and political fortunes which followed, the devolution movement (as it became) was subject to many false dawns, frequently bewildering changes of fortune, under-hand horse-trading and (this being Scotland) considerable bloodletting and character assassination.
Scotland’s political history in the second half of the twentieth century is not the purpose of this narrative, and so it can be briefly told. As we have seen, in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War nationalism had ceased to be a burning issue and the SNP had gone into a sharp decline, but according to the writer John Herdman, by the late 1960s it had ‘moved almost stealthily to a position from which it would be able to launch a significant raid on mainstream politics and deliver a strike at the heart of the unionist establishment’.1 One result of this improvement was the party’s success at Hamilton in 1967 and its continuing popular support in the following decade. The pinnacle was reached in the general election of October 1974 when the SNP polled almost a third of all votes in Scotland and returned eleven MPs to the Westminster parliament.
At the same time there was a renewal of cultural nationalism which, while not related in any direct way to party politics, was centred on the status and well-being of the country’s artistic life, especially its literature. In 1967 the magazine Scottish International was founded under the editorship of Robert Tait with a policy of embracing political as well as cultural matters and providing a platform for debate. That same year also saw the arrival of the nationalist magazine Catalyst which aimed to ‘stimulate discussion in the question of an independent Scotland’.2 Then, four years later, the literary magazine Lines Review gave over its summer issue to the publication of a polemical essay by the poet Alan Jackson entitled ‘The Knitted Claymore: An Essay on Culture and Nationalism’ which became the subject of heated argument and prompted a long-running and equally impassioned correspondence in the pages of the Scotsman. Other manifestations included the 1974 production of the play The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil by the radical 7:84 Theatre Company which cast a leery eye at Highland history, from the Clearances to the recent exploitation of oil in the North Sea. It too provoked a huge amount of questioning of Scotland’s role and the need for change.
The discovery of oil also played a role in stimulating that national conversation. The SNP adopted the slogan ‘It’s Scotland’s Oil’, and a debate was sparked about the revenues and their ownership, the implication being that these should be purely for the benefit of the Scots. At a time of mounting unemployment, particularly in the declining heavy industries, arguments of that kind carried popular resonance. The decade was also marked by some spectacular political jousting with ‘Nat-bashing’ being a feature on both the left and the right. At one stage the SNP were anathematised as ‘Tartan Tories’ but there were also those within the Labour, Liberal and Conservative parties who understood the potency of the demands for devolution or home rule. Those tensions formed the backdrop to the introduction of a Scotland Bill formulating the creation of a Scottish Assembly, which received the Royal assent on 31 July 1978 and which would become law if it survived a referendum the following year.
Thanks to a complicated system of scoring the results (a 40 per cent majority was required), a modest turnout and some last-minute political chicanery, the 1979 referendum failed to win the necessary support and for the time being devolution was out for the count. But it was not yet dead. The following decade saw a renewal of mainly positive action to revive the debate and keep the issue alive, and by the end of the 1980s devolution was still a potent political issue. It also crossed the party-political divide and gained widespread support through the creation of the Campaign for a Scottish Assembly, which was followed in 1989 by the Scottish Constitutional Convention under the joint chairmanship of Lord Ewing of Kirkford and Sir David Steel MP. This represented the latest attempt to harness public opinion by encouraging pro-devolution groups and individuals within Scottish politics and civic life and its final report Scotland’s Parliament, Scotland’s Right, published on 30 November 1995 provided a blueprint for devolution which had a profound influence on the crea
tion of future policy.
Following the return of the deeply unpopular (in Scotland at least) Conservative government under John Major in 1992, a final push was provided by other pro-devolution groups such as Scotland United, Democracy for Scotland and, above all, Common Cause, and a real head of steam was created. With an election looming in 1997, the Labour Party promised in its manifesto to create a Scottish parliament, and when it came to power under Prime Minister Tony Blair – as it did in May with a huge majority – the detailed proposals were unveiled in the White Paper Scotland’s Parliament (Cmd. 3658) on 24 July 1997.3
Suddenly the future had arrived, and with it the great matter of home rule had finally been resolved; this was indeed the ‘settled will of the Scottish people’, as had been promised by devolution’s supporters. It was not perfect. There was considerable dissatisfaction with the Additional Member System form of proportional representation, which used closed party lists to elect members in addition to constituency members, who are elected using the standard first-past-the-post system, and in the early stages at least there was much carping about the standards of debate and parliamentary behaviour, but the new parliament quickly settled in, and by its tenth anniversary the institution had become just that, part and parcel of the fabric of Scottish life. So low-key was the occasion that many MSPs did not attend when parliament was once more addressed by the Queen on 1 July 2010. By then an SNP administration had been in power for three years, albeit as a minority administration; by then the parliament was in its new home; and by then, too, the fledgling institution had learned how to fly.
