John Prebble's Scotland

by John Prebble

  At best, contemporary Edinburgh only humours its makaris, and perhaps always did, for poetry challenges society to its face and will not, as prose often does, whisper dishonest encouragement in its ear. Church and Law, Medicine and Banking are the city’s pride. In the past the Church directed its conscience, and by that the nation if it could, not always-to its credit. Aged and dying, enraged by what he believed to be the rejection of his counsel, John Knox shouted a bitter valediction from the pulpit of Saint Giles, “The ages to come will be compelled to bear witness to the truth!” And so they have, but not his truth, perhaps. The Church he helped to build – now valiant and now craven, sometimes compassionate, but more often insanely cruel as its liberating ideology decayed into bigotry – this once revolutionary Church has too often been a blight upon the creative spirit of a remarkable people.

  Not the least charge to be laid against it is that it strangled Scotland’s nascent talent for drama. The promising light that suddenly burned with Lindsay’s Thrie Estaitis was then extinguished for more than three centuries. Today, when Scotland seems to produce more actors in proportion to its population than any other part of Britain, I have sometimes thought that beneath their good fellowship and iconoclastic humour they suspect that one day they must answer for the irreligious frivolity of their profession. This may explain why many of them, unlike English actors, pretend they are not players and passionately involve themselves in other activities, not only because acting rarely pays a good man’s living. Now and then the undertow of their country’s history disturbs the surface of their thoughts. On the Black Mount where we were once filming, that fine character player Roddy McMillan sat beside me on a rock, dressed in Sabbath black for his part. For a while we silently contemplated the distant lochans of Rannoch, red with the dark stain of peat-moss. Then he plucked at his costume and smiled and said, “I’ve not looked like this, or felt like this since I went to my grannie’s funeral in Ardnamurchan.” The sectarian precepts taught in childhood sometimes bedevilled an adult tolerance, bogle-wark he called it. Two years or so before his death he took the part of Archbishop Spottiswoode in a short television play I wrote about the martyrdom of John Ogilvy. Although his performance was sensitive and perceptive, he said old prejudices had made it difficult to portray the inquisitor as the script required, a churchman who was as much the prisoner of doctrine and dogma as the Jesuit he was interrogating. “Not agreeing with him or his damn arguments. He was wrong, do you see?”

  The admonitory spires of Edinburgh’s Presbyterian conscience are the last to be seen of the city from Salisbury Crags before the street-lights stitch dusk to darkness, as they are the first to prick the mist at dawn. An Englishman’s visit to Scotland should properly begin and end here on Arthur’s Seat, and not because stone from its escarpment was once sent to make pavements in London. Eight hundred feet and more above sea level the whole city may be encompassed, its historic and geographic setting dramatically realised. When I go there, I stand with my back to the firth and the sea. Inland I can see the three regions that make Scotland, the distant shadow of the Border Hills, the blue rise of the Highlands beyond the valley of the Forth, and westward the roads to Glasgow, crossing the Lowland plain between the Pentlands and the Campsie Fells.

  The long brawl of Scotland’s history began in the bloody cockpit of the Lowlands, eighteen hundred years ago when the Romans abandoned the Antonine Wall and left its forts burning against the night sky. The influential battles of its independence were fought here, and the cut-throat squabbles of Crown, Church and People. Except for the black stronghold of Stirling, like a hawk upon its basalt rock, it is impossible now to imagine the land as it once was. The trees which covered the high ground are long gone with the wolves and the knightly hunters of wolves. The earth is scarred by twisted roads, abandoned mines, urban sprawl and the straggling black towns of distressed or dying industries. On Bonnymuir, below the gentle Kilsyth Hills, new motorways are fittingly entwined in a hangman’s noose. Here in the spring of 1820 radical weavers from Glasgow, Paisley, Rutherglen and Strathaven were bloodily dispersed by local yeomanry and English hussars. Their armed revolt may have been prematurely provoked by Government agents, although their demands for liberty, their uncertain Provisional Government, and the rioting strike of sixty thousand workers in Glasgow were proof that they were planning such a rising. Twenty thousand people watched the hanging of the rebel leaders and afterwards, on the walls of Scotland, protesting placards cried Murder! Murder! Murder! It was the bitter end of a revolutionary cause begun thirty years before, when one of its middle-class leaders – a Highland gentleman, no less – declared that the artisans, miners and peasants of Scotland were “marked by the finger of God to possess, sooner or later, the fullest share of liberty.” But when such men began to talk of pikes and muskets, as the only argument authority might understand, he entreated them to “be not rash, be not impetuous”. But his influence over them was now past. They were literate and well-read, and the weaver-poet Alexander Paisley had demonstrated that their radical fervour was no longer touched by the finger of God alone.

  The Rights of Man is now well kenned

  And read by mony a hunder;

  For Tammy Paine the buik has penned

  And lent the Court a lunder.

  Two of the rebel weavers, Andrew Hardie and John Baird, were hanged at the gate of Stirling Gaol, and then brutally beheaded. They are buried beneath a corroded monument in Sighthill Cemetery, Glasgow, and it is not among the visits recommended by the Scottish Tourist Board.

  I first heard of Bonnymuir during the war, and it is my shame that it struck no responsive chord in my mind, inspired as that was by the English Levellers and their brave stand in Burford Churchyard. An intake of conscripts from Glasgow came to the Welsh camp where I was a junior instructor, many of them aged thirty-five and thirty-eight. As I marched my section up the hill to their barrack-room I saw that some were breathing with difficulty, their lips an alarming blue. The Medical Officer was unimpressed by this, and told them he knew the difference between a man with heart trouble and another who had been chewing cordite to simulate it. Remembering their fathers’ experiences during and after the Great War, they had decided that this was not their struggle and were determined to avoid it if they could. Thirteen weeks later they went to North Africa without open complaint, although some may not have returned from embarkation leave. That first night in the barrack-room, as I introduced them to the military virtues of Brasso, boot-boning and blanco, they bragged of Red Clydeside, of John Maclean and Willie Gallacher, and talked of their rights. I said they would soon be told, and not gently, that the only rights a soldier could expect were twenty-four inches in the ranks and the right to breathe, anything more being a privilege. Upon which the oldest man spoke darkly of Bonnymuir, without explanation but using the word like a slogan, and one which all lance-bombardiers would do well to respect.

  I remembered those men not long ago when a retiring Professor of History at Edinburgh University told a newspaper that my books, which he deplored, had “contributed a great deal to the state of mind of left-wing agitation” in Scotland. I thought it foolish of him to expose his own political bias so naively, and to believe that the memories of his countrymen are so short that they need such incitement. Since he added that he was 68 and had hardly heard of the Clearances until recently, an uncharitable mind may think that now and then there appears to be some truth in Johnson’s harsh accusation that “men bred in the universities of Scotland obtain a mediocrity of knowledge between learning and ignorance.”

  For all its turbulent history and the hard-faced, butting head it turns to the world, Glasgow began in simplicity and saintliness. Its name is Welsh or Gaelic in origin, meaning “green hollow” or “dear stream”, and its vernacular pronunciation today is pleasingly close to those original tongues. It began as a chapel in the sixth century, built by Saint Kentigern, a Briton as his name suggests although he is familiarly known as Mungo. He came from t
he east, expelled by his grandfather Prince Loth of the Votadini, and thus the people of Edinburgh may claim that one of their Lothian predecessors founded the city of Glasgow. A miraculous team of white oxen led Kentigern to that dear stream which would later become the town’s principal sewer. He preached from a mound which Providence had raised for that purpose, and in the 16th century the thought of this evangelical beginning gave the city its motto, taken from an exhortation on a church-bell, Lord, let Glasgow flourish through the preaching of the Word and praising Thy name. Later, when it stood on the threshold of its industrial greatness, it discarded all but the second, third and fourth words, these being most applicable to its pride and ambition. Saint Mungo’s tomb, under superb fan vaulting, is now the heart of Glasgow’s great, columned cathedral. Begun in the 13th century, inspired by English Gothic, it was two hundred years in building and was thus out of date in design when it was completed. That it still exists today is due to the forefathers of those men who ultimately inherited the city’s soul. When the ministers of the Reformed Church gathered a mob to destroy it in 1578, it was defended and saved by merchants and tradesmen under arms.

  Thomas Pennant was impressed by the cathedral, although in general he was disgusted by the “slovenly and indecent manner in which the houses of God in Scotland are kept.” He thought the streets of Glasgow were in good taste, but his praise was at best deflationary, “the best-built of any second-rate city I ever saw.” It was already growing fat when he visited it. A town which had once lived by curing herrings and netting salmon in the Clyde was now importing forty thousand hogsheads of tobacco every year from the colony of Virginia, and selling it to Europe. When the American Revolution threatened this trade, Glasgow merchants raised volunteer regiments to subdue the colonists, and having failed to do that they turned their active minds to cotton, coal and weaving, iron and shipbuilding, making the city one of the greatest in Britain, and ultimately second only to London in importance.

  It is hard to love Glasgow unless one is born there, and perhaps not always then. It is easy to think it ugly if one sees only the filth on its face. Greed, indifference and poverty have neglected it. It is perhaps too large, and has spread itself thoughtlessly across the surrounding fields and green allotments where its hand-weavers once grew fine Savoy cabbages. As the rich and influential and uncaring moved outward in the last century, first to the pleasant suburb of the Gorbals across the Clyde, the “plain and unaffected” houses commended by Pennant became slums, and when they were replaced by tenements these too became slums, as did the inner suburbs once they were abandoned. Northward toward Lochlomondside and northwestward to Kelvindale, the new and ebullient middle-classes built themselves fine streets and mansions in emulation of Edinburgh’s New Town. They razed the centre of the city with a freedom modern planners must envy, and in a euphoria of architectural abandon they erected great halls in which to place their fine libraries and galleries, red-stone kirks where they could thank God for rewarding their humility. Above all, they built grand public buildings which would properly honour the industries that brought them wealth and power –Renaissance, Flemish and Venetian palaces, baronial keeps, Gothic cathedrals, Greek and Egyptian temples. The only originality exercised was in the design of their central railway station, magnificently yawning in iron and glass. By this century the monumental orgasm had exhausted itself, and with bomb-clearance and slum-clearance there came tall, cloud-touching blocks of flats, standing like megaliths in peripheral wastelands, a terrible indictment of the men who designed and built them, and of authority’s contempt for the people who must live in them.

  It is the people who make Glasgow, not its arrogant, money-proud buildings. In Edinburgh it is possible to leave the National Portrait Gallery and see the same 17th- or 18th-century faces in a bus queue or across a shop counter, high cheekbones, wide-set eyes, pale skin and sand-brown hair. I have never had that experience in Glasgow, perhaps because its people are a more complex mixture, or have faces that were rarely painted in the past, either as the sitter or a servant in attendance. Their forebears came from Cork and Kildare, Lochaber and Morvern, the bitter fields and cities of Europe. They crowded into neglected tenements, believing they might one day earn or steal enough to buy their passage to America or Australia, but at last abandoned all hope of escape. They have made Glasgow a defiant city, a raw, bold and defiant city. They anaesthetise their despair with astringent and perceptive humour. They spit abusive contempt from broken windows, drink their grief away in night-dark streets, defend their perverse independence in folk-lore songs of obscene iconoclasm, and spray their aerosol irreverence across the purple grime of their city’s sandstone walls.

  Building Glasgow’s industrial empire, its middle classes have always feared the hostility of the work-force their prosperity required. A century and more ago its police were impotent when starving unemployed took to the streets in protest. Locked in their chambers, the members of the city council could only appeal to the people not to listen “to the bad advice of designing men, preaching to you about your rights.” An old cry and a persistent cry. From the 18th century until this, each new generation, every arrival of bewildered incomers has created another stratum of distressed and deprived in Glasgow, pressing down upon those preceding. There was no escape from abysmal poverty but the sea and the Army. When the selective charity of emigration societies made the former difficult, there was only the latter, and long before the Great War the city had replaced the Highlands as Scotland’s “nursery of soldiers”. Some years ago John Baynes, an officer of the Cameronians, wrote a book1 in which he sought a military and sociological explanation for the superb behaviour of his regiment in one particular battle. In March, 1915, it went into action at Neuve Chapelle and when it was withdrawn a week later only 150 men of the original 900 were left, commanded by a second-lieutenant. But their morale and discipline were still high. Baynes discovered that seventy percent of these riflemen, mostly from Glasgow, had come from a class so depressed, so far beneath any other in Britain that he could only describe it as “real lower-class”. He did not, perhaps, find an easy explanation for their superlative courage and discipline, except that they were time-serving soldiers to whom the regiment had become family, friend and country.

  Among the dead and the survivors were the fathers or brothers of some of those blue-lipped recruits I marched to their barrack-room at Bodelwyddan, forty years ago.

  In grief and joy, Glasgow is still the prisoner of its past, and can still be corrupted by those who exploit it, but from its beginning on that providential mound it has been an inspiration to the religious and political conscience of Scotland. Its people could claim, if they wished, that but for their city there might have been no War of Independence and thus no Scottish nation. When Bruce murdered John Comyn before the high altar of the Minorite church in Dumfries he rode to Glasgow for sanctuary and absolution, and was given both by its pragmatic bishop who then sanctified his coronation at Scone. It was the people of Glasgow, not Edinburgh, who assembled under arms to resist the Treaty of Union, and again a century later in the cause of liberty which ended with the death of Baird and Hardie. The city has also been a seeding-bed for the cultural genius of Scotland, unpredictable and startling in its brief and sudden growth. For a while at the turn of this century Glasgow was the centre of that remarkable resurgence of talent now known as the Second Scottish Enlightenment, and the memory and influence of it have managed to survive that patronising description. Architects, designers, writers, painters and scholars brought originality, invention and excitement to a kingdom embalmed in Victorian mediocrity. Coincidental with this renaissance, a part of it and party to it, was a political awakening which, through men like John Burns and John Maclean, gave muscle and heart to the British socialist movement.

  If Edinburgh rightly thinks of itself as the mind and intellect of Scotland, Glasgow is most certainly its generous heart. Its pride is not in fine streets, noble prospects, and in being a northern pied-à-te
rre for absent Royalty. Its brawling, questing people are its majesty. The tartan of their nationalism is not worn to Highland bails but irreverently on their heads as football bonnets, and the crowd that fills Hampden Park for an international roars a terrible truth from its ignorant defiance.

  Morale, by John Baynes, Cassell, 1967.

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  Chapter 4

  Driving slowly northward by glen Aray I paused at its highest point, where the road twists down to Cladich and Loch Awe. I had seen a hare moving toward me through the cotton-grass, and now, when I stopped to watch it, a carrion crow dropped heavily to earth beyond us, as if expecting the animal to be the victim of my wheels. Rain was still falling on the lower glen behind me, from slate-blue clouds above Loch Fyne. Four miles ahead another squall was drawing a curtain across the Pass of Brander, but here the sky was open, the sun strong, and the winter-dead land rising eastward to Beinn Bhuidhe was as rich in glistening colour as the best marmalade.

  The brown hare of the Highlands has always reminded me of the jack-rabbit of my boyhood, and this morning I remembered a Saskatchewan summer when gophers were so troublesome that farmers paid three cents for every tail we brought them. As we flushed these appealing rodents from their holes, with water poured from red lard-pails, two motionless jack-rabbits watched us at a safe distance. The hare at the Glen Aray roadside studied me as they did, by one black-wet eye in the elliptical profile of its head, its body nervously tensed on powerful hind legs, and its fore-feet lightly lifted like a pianist’s hands above the keys. When it moved it seemed to cross the road in one effortless leap, and the crow took flight in rasping protest. I left the car and followed them up the brae. It was early spring but already too late, I knew, to witness a demented mating-tryst of brown hares. I had never seen this leaping, whirling dance and I did not see it that day. When I got to Neil Munro’s cairn at the top of the rise the hare was long gone into the russet heather.