Scotland, empire and decolonisation in the twentieth century 9781784992255

Table of contents :
Front matter
Contents
List of contributors
Introduction
Part I Migration, diaspora and identities
Initiatives, impediments and identities: Scottish emigration in the twentieth century
Applying the diasporic lens to identity and empire in twentieth-century Scotland
The strange case of jute
Scots in early twentieth-century British Columbia: class, race and gender
Part II Anti-colonialism, the military, decolonisation and nationalism
Anti-colonialism in twentieth-century Scotland
Beating retreat: the Scottish military tradition in decline
Newspapers and empire: bringing Africa to the Scottish public
David Livingstone, the Scottish cultural and political revival and the end of empire in Africa
Three referenda and a by-election: the shadow of empire in devolutionary politics
Index

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STUDIES IN IMPERIALISM

Scotland, empire and decolonisation in the twentieth century Edited by B r ya n S . G l a s s a n d John M. MacKenzie

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General Editor: Andrew S. Thompson

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Founding Editor: John M. MacKenzie

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When the ‘Studies in Imperialism’ series was founded by Professor John M. MacKenzie more than twenty-five years ago, emphasis was laid upon the c­ onviction that ­‘imperialism as a cultural phenomenon had as significant an effect on the dominant as on the subordinate societies’. With well over a hundred titles now published, this remains the prime concern of the series. Cross-disciplinary work has indeed appeared covering the full spectrum of cultural phenomena, as well as examining aspects of gender and sex, frontiers and law, science and the environment, language and literature, migration and patriotic societies, and much else. Moreover, the series has always wished to present comparative work on European and American imperialism, and particularly welcomes the submission of books in these areas. The fascination with imperialism, in all its aspects, shows no sign of abating, and this series will continue to lead the way in encouraging the widest possible range of studies in the field. ‘Studies in Imperialism’ is fully organic in its development, always seeking to be at the cutting edge, responding to the latest interests of scholars and the needs of this ever-expanding area of scholarship.

Scotland, empire and decolonisation in the twentieth century

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SELECTED TITLES AVAILABLE IN THE SERIES WRITING IMPERIAL HISTORIES ed. Andrew S. Thompson

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MUSEUMS AND EMPIRE Natural history, human cultures and colonial identities John M. MacKenzie

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MISSIONARY FAMILIES Race, gender and generation on the spiritual frontier Emily J. Manktelow THE COLONISATION OF TIME Ritual, routine and resistance in the British Empire Giordano Nanni BRITISH CULTURE AND THE END OF EMPIRE ed. Stuart Ward SCIENCE, RACE RELATIONS AND RESISTANCE Britain, 1870–1914 Douglas A. Lorimer GENTEEL WOMEN Empire and domestic material culture, 1840−1910 Dianne Lawrence EUROPEAN EMPIRES AND THE PEOPLE Popular responses to imperialism in France, Britain, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany and Italy ed. John M. MacKenzie SCIENCE AND SOCIETY IN SOUTHERN AFRICA ed. Saul Dubow

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Scotland, empire and decolonisation in the twentieth century Edited by Bryan S. Glass and John M. MacKenzie

MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY PRESS

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Copyright © Manchester University Press 2015 While copyright in the volume as a whole is vested in Manchester University Press, copyright in individual chapters belongs to their respective authors, and no chapter may be reproduced wholly or in part without the express permission in writing of both author and publisher.

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Published by MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY PRESS ALTRINCHAM STREET, MANCHESTER M1 7JA, UK www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for ISBN  978 07190 9617 4 hardback First published 2015 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or­ ­appropriate.

Typeset in Trump Medieval by Koinonia, Manchester

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C ONT EN TS

List of contributors vi

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 1 Introduction  John M. MacKenzie and Bryan S. Glass 1 PART I – Migration, diaspora and identities  2 Initiatives, impediments and identities: Scottish emigration in the twentieth century  Marjory Harper 25  3 Applying the diasporic lens to identity and empire in twentieth-century Scotland  Graeme Morton

44

 4 The strange case of jute  Gordon T. Stewart

65

  5 Scots in early twentieth-century British Columbia: class, race and gender  Michael E. Vance

86

PART II – Anti-colonialism, the military, decolonisation and nationalism  6 Anti-colonialism in twentieth-century Scotland  Stephen Howe

113

 7 Beating retreat: the Scottish military tradition in decline  Stuart Allan

131

  8 Newspapers and empire: bringing Africa to the Scottish public  Bryan S. Glass

155

 9 David Livingstone, the Scottish cultural and political revival and the end of empire in Africa  John M. MacKenzie 180 10 Three referenda and a by-election: the shadow of empire in devolutionary politics  Jimmi Østergaard Nielsen and Stuart Ward 200

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  Index 223

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C ONT R I BU TO RS

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Stuart Allan is Principal Curator of Scottish Late Modern Collections at National Museums Scotland. He has published widely on Scottish military history, including (with Allan Carswell) The Thin Red Line: War, Empire and Visions of Scotland (2004). Bryan S. Glass is Senior Lecturer in History at Texas State University. He is the author of The Scottish Nation at Empire’s End (2014) and is founding member and General Editor of The British Scholar Society. Marjory Harper is Professor at the University of Aberdeen. Among her many books on emigration is the recent Scotland No More: The Scots who Left Scotland in the Twentieth Century (2012). Stephen Howe is Senior Research Fellow at the University of Bristol. Recent publications include The New Imperial Histories Reader (2009). John M. MacKenzie is Honorary Professorial Fellow at the University of Edinburgh and Honorary Professor at the Universities of Aberdeen and St Andrews. He is the author of The Scots in South Africa (2007) and co-editor (with T. M. Devine) of Scotland and the British Empire (2011). Graeme Morton is Professor of Modern History at the University of Dundee. His publications include The Scottish Diaspora (with T. Bueltmann and A. Hinson) and William Wallace: A National Tale (2014). Jimmi Østergaard Nielsen is a postgraduate student at the University of Copenhagen. He has worked on Scottish nationalism relating to Empire, particularly the Hamilton by-election of 1967, and is preparing a dissertation on the semantics of British identity in the processes of global decolonisation. Gordon T. Stewart is Professor at Michigan State University. He has published extensively on Dundee and jute. A recent book is Journeys to Empire: Enlightenment, Imperialism and the British Encounter with Tibet 1774–1904 (2009). Michael E. Vance is Professor at St Mary’s University, Halifax, Nova Scotia. Among his books is Imperial Immigrants: Scottish Settlers in the Upper Ottawa Valley 1815–1840 (2012). Stuart Ward is Professor at the University of Copenhagen and Provost of Regenson College. He co-authored (with Deryck Schreuder) Australia’s Empire (2008).

[ vi ]

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CHA P T E R O N E

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John M. MacKenzie and Bryan S. Glass

The relationship between Scotland and the British Empire in the twentieth century was both wide-ranging and highly complex. In the opening year of the century, the Scottish economy was still strongly connected with imperial infrastructures (like railways, engineering, construction and shipping), and colonial trade and investment. The industrial profile of Glasgow was securing a ‘war dividend’ for the city in booming production connected with the Anglo-Boer War of 1899–1902. Perhaps as a result, Glaswegians – and people in many towns and cities throughout Scotland – were eager to take time off to indulge in notable street celebrations for such events as the Reliefs of Ladysmith and of Mafeking.1 Nevertheless, for many Scottish people, migration remained a major means of escaping poverty or unemployment, or of seeking opportunities not available at home, and within a few years the migratory routes would be undergoing a major shift from the United States to the British dominions.2 Many Scots were serving overseas in the army or other services, not least in the war in South Africa, while in the election of 1900, the imperial and patriotic party, the Conservatives, won a major victory, even if their triumph was to prove ephemeral.3 Scottish missions were active throughout the empire and many Scots portrayed themselves as a distinctively religious – largely but far from exclusively Protestant – people, notably distinguished for their work in proselytisation, in education and in medical work.4 Scottish intellectual, political and literary figures appeared to continue to be intrigued by the possibilities of empire, not least by its capacity to transform a small and marginal country with a slight population into a source of major global influence.5 The supposed national characteristics of the Scots seemed to be inseparably bound up with empire – the martial race visibly active in campaigns everywhere, hardy settlers coping with harsh frontier conditions, devoted missionaries and well-trained doctors and educationalists active in [1]

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SCOTLAND, EMPIRE AND DECOLONISATION

many colonies. In addition to all of this, for the great majority of Scots, slight increases in both leisure time and income had produced a great burgeoning of popular cultural activity, including some forms where patriotic and imperial content was mixed in with other fare – the music hall, variety, other theatrical forms, exhibitions, and later the cinema.6 By the end of the century, however, the Scottish economy, its politics, and its society had been through major upheavals which many connected with the decline and end of the British Empire.7 The dramatic swings in the economic cycle during the century had fully exposed the fragility of an economy over-dependent on heavy industries. Scottish politics had at least given the impression of being more turbulent than elsewhere on the British mainland, reacting strongly to events in Ireland, producing in ‘Red Clydeside’ a reputation for radicalism, and appearing to spawn lively nationalist sentiment, even if this has to be qualified by the fact that the voting behaviour of the Scottish people showed little inclination either in the direction of a major leftward shift or towards genuine nationalism, in the latter case at least not until the century was well advanced.8 Moreover, Scotland had become a strikingly secular society, Presbyterian Church attendance falling strongly from its highs early in the century, with only a relatively brief resurgence in the decade or more after the Second World War.9 Migration also experienced a new boom during the decades at the middle of the century, but swiftly tailed off as such migration became increasingly restricted by quotas and financial or other qualifications.10 After a peak of electoral performance in the 1955 election, the power of the Tory party went into a long decline, reaching its nadir by the end of the century, impelled by a Scottish revulsion against Thatcherism. Scotland had also become a much more notably diverse religious and multi-ethnic society, even if in some respects less so than England and Wales. Intellectual and literary Scotland had passed through the postcolonial revolution, in which various forms of guilt, revisionism and distancing had replaced the old certainties, however much the latter had always been hedged about with qualifications. Although echoes of empire continued to resonate through modern mass media like television or the cinematic revival at the end of the century, these tended to take forms of nostalgic questioning very different from their counterparts a hundred years earlier. In any case, in many respects they were largely drowned out by the vast range of popular cultural forms as well as the almost overwhelming diversity of information and communications opportunities available on the internet and on social media. Perhaps paradoxically, however, empire at the same time was resurrected as a major source of study, research and publication for scholars in a number of disciplines, perhaps arising from a sense that empire [2]

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INTRODUCTION

had been, at least in theory, a precursor of modern globalisation, or at the very least had been a significant component in the framing of the world we had inherited. But the global and the international were also being placed in the context of the national and local. Simultaneously with these scholarly developments, the problems of the nature and manufacture of Scottish history, as well as of allegedly Celtic identities, were also subject to considerable debate.11 Yet these snapshots of the relationship between Scotland and empire at the beginning and end of the twentieth century should not be seen as symbolising a shift from one absolute to another, from some starkly positive to strikingly negative attitudes. If there is one word which symbolises most strikingly the relationship between Scotland and empire over this period, it is surely ‘ambivalence’. Some commentators a hundred years and more ago saw empire as a vast zone of opportunity, with even those on the Left like James Keir Hardie and James Ramsay MacDonald viewing the colonial world as a global field for the spread of socialist ideas or for the extension of moral political action (see below for some fleshing out of the thinking and influence of these two personalities). But others saw it as draining away Scottish talent and Scots population, as well as diverting attention from social deprivation. The apparently intractable poverty and slum conditions of Scottish cities and towns seemed to be emphasised by the overseas investment practices of a bourgeoisie apparently distracted from opportunities for development at home. Indeed, the low wages that helped to produce the profits that went into such diversionary investment served to emphasise endemic consumer under-consumption.12 Many spotted the fact that the Scottish economy remained dangerously skewed while even aspects of the well-defined Scottish social hierarchy, embedded in land ownership and certain agricultural specialisms, seemed to be promoted by the imperial relationship. Wars, such as the Anglo-Boer at the beginning of the century and the Great War after 1914, seemed to produce a tremendous resurgence in imperial sentiment, even in the use of the words Britain and British, which to some critical commentators appeared to detract from efforts to maintain the distinctiveness of Scottish politics, culture and society.13 And if that were not enough, the old accusation of Dr Samuel Johnson about the ‘high road to England’ still seemed to hold good.14 Those Scots who did not leave for the empire were just as likely to head south looking for work, while, as is well known, Scottish companies often departed in the same direction in order to maximise their opportunities. All this seemed to be reflected in the decennial censuses which continued to reveal that Scotland, uniquely among advanced societies, had a population that was more likely to decline or ‘flat-line’ rather than exhibit any signs [3]

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SCOTLAND, EMPIRE AND DECOLONISATION

of dynamic increase, a situation destined to continue until 2001. But however ambivalent Scots were about empire, we can be absolutely sure that they were neither indifferent nor absent-minded. Historians often view the long nineteenth century as running from 1815 or even 1789 to 1914. But although the First World War clearly did produce a major earthquake in so many aspects of life in Britain, it does sometimes seem as though many of the characteristics of the nineteenth century continued until the 1950s. This would be true of the Scottish economy with the two world wars of the twentieth century actually putting the brakes on change by providing fresh stimulus to the heavy industries that were the bread and butter of so many Scottish workers. It would also be true of the religiosity of the Scots, of participation in the military, of certain cultural forms, and of educational organisation and attainments. The first half of the twentieth century, while producing some major changes, notably in the growth of state controls and intervention, as well as in the creation of the Welfare State following the Second World War, also seemed to produce inhibitions to change, inhibitions that were bound up with both war and empire. While it is true in the case of Dundee that the jute industry was in steep decline as Bengal began to bring together the production of raw jute with its processing,15 other sectors of the Scottish economy seemed to survive within the old relationships even as import substitution became significant in so many places, such as the British dominions which had formerly been the protected markets of Scottish heavy industries. Dramatic change was only to take place after the 1950s, accelerating in the final decades of the century. Thus, to take Glasgow as an example once more, the Clyde continued to look like the imperial artery it had become in the nineteenth century – with shipbuilding, whatever its weaknesses in the face of Far Eastern competition, continuing much as before. This was also true of the docks and imperial communications, like the Anchor Line services to India and some trans-Atlantic links. Glasgow’s newspapers still recorded the arrival and departure of ships, the export of railway engines and much else, almost weekly ship launches, with vessels undergoing their trials on the ‘measured mile’ on the Clyde. The sound of riveting was to be heard anywhere near the river. Dixon’s Blazes, the great iron blast furnaces founded in Govanhill by William Dixon in 1837, continued to light up the Glasgow night sky until as late as 1958, consuming vast quantities of coal in the process. Great rivers of workers emerged from shipyards and factories to board ferries and trams, as in the past. The very survival of the Glasgow trams until the 1960s seemed to epitomise the continuation of the nineteenth century.16 All of this obscured deep underlying weaknesses which would produce collapse in the near [4]

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INTRODUCTION

future, but still in some respects the nineteenth century seemed to be alive and well, a proposition apparently confirmed by the number of Scots leaving for overseas well into the 1960s. Moreover, the celebration of distinctive Scottish heroes was still rooted in Scots’ activities within the empire, formal and informal. David Livingstone and Mary Slessor in Africa, Alexander Mackenzie in Canada, General Sir Colin Campbell (Lord Clyde) in India, General Sir Hector Macdonald (‘Fighting Mac’) in Africa and South Asia, and to a lesser extent John Rae in the Arctic, William Spiers Bruce in the Antarctic, Thomas Blake Glover in Japan, as well as such entrepreneurs as Andrew Carnegie in the United States or Donald Smith, Lord Strathcona and George Stephen, Lord Mount Stephen, both so powerful in Canadian railways and banking, seemed to remain the exemplars trotted out to inspire Scottish youth. If the twentieth century produced any heroes at all, they were figures whose Scottishness seemed to be ironed out by a close association with England as well as the empire: John Buchan or Orde Wingate perhaps.17 The defining of Scottishness partly through the supposed characteristics of its heroes is a reminder of other themes that have run through studies of the relationship between Scotland and empire. One is the concept of Scottish civil society, preserved in the reservations of the 1707 Act of Union, those relating to education, law, religion and banking. Religion and education, as we have already seen, were the most obvious of these. But Scots seemed to export aspects of the others to the British Empire (Scots law to a lesser extent, although it did have an influence in the Cape and in Ceylon, Sri Lanka, as well as in legal training).18 In the process they developed specialisms in the economic field, not only in banking, but in insurance and the concept of ‘mutuality’.19 The second is the manner in which an overall Scottish culture paradoxically became inextricably associated with Highland culture (but not its language), through tartan, dancing, singing, the bagpipes, and Highland games. And thirdly the cultural norms of Scotland became inseparably assimilated into the celebration of its iconic literary figures (as it happened, neither of them immediately from the Highlands), Robert Burns and Sir Walter Scott, as well as with the historicism and Romanticism reflected in the work of the latter. To a certain extent this same historicism and Romanticism spread across Europe through not only the setting of Scots songs by mainstream composers, but also the use of Scott novels in so many of the operas of the nineteenth century. Continuing aspects of historicism and Romanticism went on to infuse the work of later writers such as Robert Louis Stevenson, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and John Buchan, Lord Tweedsmuir, all of them with connections with the British Empire. It has [5]

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SCOTLAND, EMPIRE AND DECOLONISATION

been suggested that all these aspects of Scottish civil and literary society ensured that Scots’ identity survived and prospered within the British Empire, ultimately to be transmitted back towards Scotland in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Scotland thus survived as a wholly separate entity within the ‘four empires’ which were constituted by the four nations of the British and Hibernian Isles.20 But what we have so far lacked is any study of the ways in which the lineaments of Scottish civil society were transformed or overlaid in the twentieth century, or of the manner in which Scottish culture was similarly rebuilt in that century. And how far was such remodelling associated with and influenced by the decline and ultimate collapse of empire in the twentieth century? This is a large and important area which still requires close study. Moreover, despite the almost continuous commentary by politicians, trade union leaders, journalists and literary figures about the continuing and highly controversial connections between Scotland and empire in the twentieth century, there has been surprising little interest on the part of modern historians, with the clear exception of those involved in migration studies and in some aspects of economic history. Even the most significant Scottish historian of modern times, not least in connecting domestic history to its wider imperial and global contexts, Tom Devine, has been relatively silent on the key issues of the twentieth century.21 As a result, only very recently have historians begun to take an interest in such important questions as whether the Scots had a highly specific and distinctive reaction to or contribution to the sequence of events now commonly referred to as decolonisation. After all, the ‘wind of change’ that blew through the empire was heralded by a prime minister called Sir Harold Macmillan, grandson of a ‘tacksman’ (often billed as a crofter) from Arran and the whole sequence of retreats from empire was pushed forward by a colonial secretary called Iain Norman Macleod, only one generation removed from the Isle of Lewis where he spent most of his holidays.22 Similarly, we have had few close studies of the strand of Scottish anti-imperialism running through Scottish life. Nor have we moved on from anecdotal approaches to the analysis of truly hard evidence, insofar as it is available, for the influence of imperial issues upon Scottish politics. The alleged connections between the end of empire and the rise of Scottish nationalism have often been suggested, but never before examined in close detail. The digitisation and availability online of some at least of the Scottish press have rendered studies of newspapers’ treatment of the decline and end of empire more open to access and consequently perhaps easier to assess.23 Many other significant studies suggest themselves. To what extent has the emergence of Edinburgh as a major financial [6]

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INTRODUCTION

services centre been based on earlier foundations at least partly rooted in empire? How far can we chart developments in ‘municipal imperialism’ for a variety of different cities and towns, including changing relationships with empire – as, for example, in the case of Dundee? Can we survey the role of the Scottish universities in these processes as well as the ways in which geo-political changes were influenced by or reflected in developments in scientific, environmental and medical disciplines? And then there is the highly significant field of popular culture. How was both the continuation of the imperial ethos and the end of empire reflected in popular cultural forms? And what influence, if any, did these tectonic changes in colonial and imperial affairs have upon gender relationships within Scotland? Or upon the Scottish churches and religiosity in general? Moreover, we need to know more about the reciprocal influences of Scottish culture in, for example, Canada, Australia and New Zealand upon Scotland itself. The maintenance of Gaelic and musical traditions in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, and their ultimate reverse influences upon Scotland is a well-known example, but are there others? How were Scottish communities – or at least communities that claimed close connections with Scotland – themselves changed by these developments in Scotland itself? And indeed, is there any further evidence for the notion that Scottish identity, preserved at the so-called periphery, actually ‘looped back’ to promote a separate sense of identity within Scotland itself? It is an intriguing fact that it was in the later twentieth century that Scottish connections with empire, both formal and informal, came to be re-emphasised. Various Scottish cultural institutions became interested in these connections in the 1980s. The National Portrait Gallery mounted a display on Scottish Empire in 1980.24 The National Library of Scotland held a series of exhibitions about Scots and the British Empire in the 1980s. ‘Scotland and Africa’ was mounted in 1982, ‘Scots in India’ in 1986, and ‘Scots in Australia’ in 1988.25 The Royal Museum of Scotland (now the National Museum) published a book entitled The Enterprising Scot, based on its collections, in 1986.26 The new National Museum building, opened in 1998, contained a prominent feature on Scots overseas, including a display on Scottish place names around the world and artefacts taken to New Zealand from Scotland by early settlers, though interest in this (with a change of personnel) subsequently waned. ‘Great Scots’ was a sequence of exhibitions inaugurated in the same museum, often featuring Scots particularly famous for their exploits overseas. David Livingstone had been the subject of a massive exhibition on the centennial of his birth in 1913 and was the subject of another (much smaller) one in the National Museum on the bicentennial in 2013. In the same period there was a consider[7]

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SCOTLAND, EMPIRE AND DECOLONISATION

able growth in popular works on Scottish migration (as well as scholarly equivalents) as well as interest in Scottish associations and clan organisations around the world.27 In recent years, there have also been television programmes about Scots in the British Empire and about notable Scots overseas (featuring David Livingstone, Thomas Blake Glover, William Spiers Bruce, and John Muir). A number of questions arise from all this activity. Why did it appear at this time in the first place? Was it associated with the development of a Scottish cultural nationalism, in turn connected with investigations of forms of global identities? Were there stimuli coming from the interests of academics forming at the same time? Was this entirely separate from or did it run in parallel with the development of Scottish political nationalism, albeit hesitatingly at first, in the same era? Did the cultural developments influence the political or vice versa? 2014, the year in which this book is being prepared for publication, is another Year of Homecoming. Indeed the whole question of Scotland’s exploitation of its global ethnic connections also awaits scholarly attention. Clan associations, interestingly, were largely founded in the twentieth century, associated with the greater ease of travel in that century, with the efforts of clan chiefs to raise funds for their often crumbling castles, and with the apparent need of people with the same name to associate with each other in (for example) the United States and Canada, but also recreate connections with their origins in Scotland itself. We know of the large number of Scottish associations still in existence around the world, of both the survival and indeed growth of Highland dancing, clan gatherings, and pipe bands, of the incidence of Burns suppers and of Highland games, but what contribution do all of these make both to Scottish politics and to the Scottish economy? The Scottish National Party’s administration, initially as a coalition from 2007 and then as a majority government from 2011, has been assiduous in emphasising the existence and role of global Scots. In 2007 Alex Salmond, not long after taking over as Scotland’s First Minister, declared a ‘Year of Homecoming’ for 2009, coinciding with the 250th anniversary of the birth of Robert Burns. Event Scotland and Visit Scotland websites declared that ‘for every single Scot in their native land, there were thought to be at least five more overseas who can claim Scots ancestry’. Indeed, 25 million Scots descendants in this category seemed to be a relatively conservative estimate, since, as Graeme Morton shows below, a report commissioned by the Scottish government suggested that the figure might be closer to 28–40 million. Moreover, there is a tendency for people around the world to claim Scots ancestry when they had only one grandparent or one great grandparent who were genuinely Scottish.28 This is a curious but verifi[8]

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INTRODUCTION

able phenomenon, and seems to be related to the, for many, attractive ‘performativity’ of Scottishness in dress and dance, music and song. Indeed, the 2009 exercise was deemed to have been such a success that another was announced for 2014, clearly designed to exploit the fact that the Commonwealth Games would be coming to Glasgow in that year. Both ‘Homecomings’ were clearly designed to enhance tourism as a major component of the Scottish economy, as well as promote the export of distinctively Scottish products, now more likely to be in the areas of dress, food and drink. This book is designed to be a first shot in this scholarly campaign. Here are collected some nine essays, dealing with both Scotland and the empire itself, that begin the process of dealing with some of the issues laid out above. It is divided into two sections: Part I deals with migration, diasporas, issues of identity, and related questions of opposition to empire itself. Since emigration inevitably stands at the centre of the relationship between Scotland, empire and a wider world, the first chapter deals with various aspects of migration during the twentieth century. Marjory Harper points out that no fewer than two million Scots migrated out of Scotland in the eight decades after the First World War, thereby matching the numbers who left during the ‘long nineteenth century’. Yet the more modern migration has received a great deal less attention than the earlier one. In her chapter she goes some way to rectifying this, analysing the different motives for such migration, the range of forms that it took, the variety of expectations reposed in the receiving societies, and the greater propensity to return when things failed to work out. Twentieth-century conditions were of course different in a number of respects from those of the previous hundred years. Expectations were, perhaps, higher, not only of the conditions to be encountered in the new territory of settlement, but also of the comforts of travel, the opportunities for swift communication with people at home, and the possibility of a rapid return. The dramatic cycle of booms and busts of both the Scottish and the world economies of the period ensured that ‘boomerang’ migration was both more likely and more easily achieved. But as Harper has demonstrated in all her work, migration has to be seen as essentially a personal experience, involving individuals with both aspirations and disappointments. Migrations should never be viewed as an entirely impersonal statistical phenomenon. The ways in which it happened to real people must always be kept in sight – as indeed should the fact that it then impacted upon other real people, namely the indigenous populations of empire. And we should also note that for various economic and social reasons – as well as the unquantifiable factor of personal ambition – the Scots continued to contribute a high proportion of their [9]

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SCOTLAND, EMPIRE AND DECOLONISATION

population to these movements in the twentieth century, even if their emotional and other responses to the processes of migration were no different from those of people from elsewhere in the United Kingdom. Closely related to such issues of migration and the reciprocity of influences, Graeme Morton examines the ‘diasporic’ dimensions of identity formation. He reveals the apparent means used to assess, seldom successfully, the complexities of linking places of birth to migration and to various modern attempts to appeal to ethnic diasporas, from the Imperial Census of 1901 to the Book of Scottish Connections in the early twenty-first century. He points out the extent to which so many Scottish literary figures and nationalists had connections with the diaspora both geographically distant in formal and informal empire and also rather nearer in England or in Europe. He reveals just how important the military was in the creation of such diasporic relationships while identities were curiously both overlaid and confirmed by the major wars of the twentieth century. Once again, in some respects, the vista remains rather misty and hard to discern, but some features do emerge that point to conscious efforts to link Scottish, British and Imperial identities during the twentieth century. One of the distinguishing characteristics of modern Scottish nationalism has been the effort to look in two directions at once – towards Europe as a means of outflanking the English (formerly perhaps the Auld Alliance with France and the British Empire itself performed the same function) and towards a more global Scottish ethnicity as a means of apparently compensating for a relatively small domestic population.29 Among Harper’s categories of Scottish migrants are sojourners, those who migrate for a season with every intention of returning. Yet they too formed diasporic identities which looped back to Scotland itself. Such a group were the jute wallahs in Calcutta, most of them recruited from Dundee. Gordon Stewart refers to the ‘law of unintended consequences’, and it is indeed a thread which runs through the relationship between Scotland and formal and informal empire. When Thomas Blake Glover in Nagasaki, one of the major treaty ports of the Far East, became involved in the founding of the future Mitsubishi company, he did not foresee that the shipbuilding yards of his native Scotland would ultimately be destroyed by the equivalent industries of the Far East. Similarly, the Dundee jute men who carried their expertise (and eventually also their machinery) to Calcutta took some time to recognise that they were the means by which the jute industry of their home city of Dundee would in the fullness of time be destroyed. Whereas it was possible to start out by proudly declaring that Calcutta was India’s Dundee, they would have been less inclined to recognise that Dundee had become Scotland’s Calcutta later in the twentieth century. But [ 10 ]

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INTRODUCTION

Stewart goes further in analysing the social hierarchies the jute men encountered in Calcutta while back in Scotland the existence of empire, its free trading principles and the cross-currents of imperial politics ensured that no government was prepared to protect the interests of Dundonian jute workers. Perhaps no city in Scotland more reflects the tight economic connections with empire than Dundee, as reflected in the city’s rise to pre-eminence in the trade in the nineteenth century and its dramatic decline during the twentieth century. Scots received a great deal of information and propaganda about the territories of settlement in the British Empire from emigration literature, lectures and press reports as well as from the letters of those who had gone before. It may well be that the anti-colonial arguments of some writers and politicians had a less extensive circulation, but still such material was produced throughout the twentieth century and, at the very least, had an effect upon some of the ‘movers and shakers’ of the Scottish political and intellectual scene. Early in the century both James Keir Hardie and James Ramsay MacDonald travelled extensively in the British Empire and both published works on India. Of these Hardie was both the more controversial and, perhaps, the more influential. He visited Canada, India, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa in 1907–08. In 1909, he published a short book about India which demonstrated support for Indian nationalism as well as delivering a powerful, if brief, critique of the manner of British rule – he was highly critical of British racism, discrimination against Indians, treatment of Indian political classes, distant summer rule from Simla, and of the incidence of famine.30 His visit to Australia included an encounter with the leader of the Labor Party and future prime minister (ministries in 1908–09, 1910–13 and 1914–15) Andrew Fisher, whom he had earlier known as an Ayrshire miner and trade unionist.31 In South Africa he got himself into severe trouble with whites for his criticism of imperial handling of the Zulu Bambatha rebellion and his insistence that trade unionism should be extended to African workers. Jonathan Hyslop has argued that Hardie’s journey, his speeches and the controversies he aroused indicate the extent to which labour movements and associated political action should be placed within a single empire-wide discursive field.32 MacDonald was much more on the ‘soft Left’ than Hardie. He also travelled to Canada, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand and India, and similarly confined his publications to India. His book perhaps confirms his reputations for ‘woolliness’ and indicates that he essentially promoted ethical imperialism rather than anti-imperialism.33 Both of them had some influence upon Labour thinking thereafter, although we need a more refined assessment of just how significant they were in Scottish, as opposed to [ 11 ]

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British, thinking about empire, particularly on the Left of the political spectrum. The chapter by Michael Vance offers a fascinating insight into the role of Scottish migrants in left-wing activity, in the maintenance and development of identities, as well as in gender and racial politics, in a specific province of Canada, British Columbia (BC). This territory had been portrayed as an ideal location for the settlement of gentlemen who would find there all the sporting and other characteristics of Scotland, together with opportunities for business and other forms of employment, transplanted to North America. But further down the social scale, BC was also a setting for the arrival of migrants from Scotland who carried in their ‘baggage’ something of the radical traditions of home. These were worked out in trade union activity in respect of familiar sectors like mining and fishing. When strikes broke out, even left-wing organs in Britain, like Forward in Glasgow and Clarion in Manchester, took notice, and on some occasions such radicalism merged with notions of anti-imperialism. Ironically, on at least one occasion, it was a local ‘Scottish’ regiment which was turned out to deal with the strikers. But trade union activism – as it did elsewhere in South Africa for example – also became embroiled in racist ideas relating to attitudes towards First Nations people, formerly known as Indians, within Canada, ideas which were conveyed into the federal legislature. There were one or two Scots who were sympathetic towards First Nations people, in one case even marrying an Indian woman and becoming linguistically expert in their languages, but racist attitudes were much more common. Such notions of racial exclusiveness were also directed against Asian immigrants, notably the Japanese and the Chinese. In the latter case, Vance reveals the manner in which this came to be bound up with gender politics. The migration of female domestic servants to Canada was a common phenomenon, but some of these women transcended the expected drudgery of their situations to become radical leaders. Thus an undoubted strand of radical, as well as sometimes racist, activity can be identified as having Scottish roots, as can female radicalism in respect of domestic service. In the course of the twentieth century, these constituted just as much a significant input into the overlaying of Scottish, Canadian and imperial identities (even if sometimes in a negative form) as the notion of gentlemanly or bourgeois Scots pursuing their cultural and sporting pastimes. Vance’s work can clearly be developed in at least two or three directions. It would be interesting to know, first, whether the experience of BC was replicated in other Canadian provinces and, second, how far similar phenomena were occurring in other territories of settlement in the British Empire. There has been some exploration of these themes in [ 12 ]

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INTRODUCTION

the case of South Africa, notably by Jonathan Hyslop, but such studies could be further developed, including the investigation of whether similar phenomena occurred in Australia and New Zealand. Part II of the book opens with Stephen Howe’s carefully nuanced assessment of anti-colonial ideas within Scotland, which argues that a great deal of material and the attitudes of its originators remain to be surveyed. This includes the use of statistical analyses – of which he reveals one suggestive example. As he remarks, electoral behaviour offers no guide at all to Scottish anti-imperialism nor, in many respects, do party affiliations except for a few minority groups. A fundamental fact is that Scottish Home Rule, far from being seen as an anti-imperial formation, was invariably put into the context of the British Empire, often discussed – as by the nationalist poet Hugh MacDiarmid – as a political benefit to be secured from parallel Home Rule developments across the British World. Thus, it was invariably a case of Home Rule All Round rather than Home Rule for us regardless of the rest. That was very much the position of so many of the early leaders of Scottish nationalism in the inter-war years. By contrast there was a tendency for those on the left of Scottish politics to focus on conditions and discontents at home, remaining largely silent about imperial contexts. They seem to confirm Howe’s view that there almost certainly was a distinctive set of attitudes in Scotland both to empire and to antiimperialism, but a great deal more work is required to tease out both the characteristics and scale of this distinctiveness. There is perhaps one area that was more closely and emblematically associated with empire than any other – the Scottish military. From the foundation of so many regiments in the eighteenth century, Scots soldiers have been prominent in many colonial campaigns, even if their numbers in the British army, proportionate to population, were not actually as high as those of Ireland.34 Visit any regimental museum or any castle or country estate with military connections and the evidence of imperial campaigning seems to be everywhere. Moreover, the Scottish military was a means whereby the social hierarchy of Scotland was at least exhibited, if not maintained. The officer corps was invariably drawn from scions of the lesser aristocracy or the landed gentry while the men had a mix of rural, estate and urban origins. The officers were sometimes educated in England or came from families of mixed ancestry. It would be interesting to analyse such social distinctions and posit the notion that the officers would have been more clear about their ‘Britishness’ while the men, in background, accent and education, would have been more obviously Scottish. But perhaps all tended to highlight the regions of their origins, connecting empire to localities throughout the country. [ 13 ]

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This connection of the Scottish military to the empire continued right through to the era of decolonisation itself. The dilemmas associated with the end of empire have been characterised as offering a decision between the strategy of ‘flight’ or of ‘fight’.35 The British invariably indulged in flight, perhaps more so than the other western European empires, notably those of France or of Portugal. When they did fight, as in Malaya, Aden or Kenya, Scottish regiments were invariably, and sometimes controversially, present. The exploits of such troops were closely followed in the Scottish press and therefore presumably by the readership of those newspapers. Press editors and executives are keen to offer news and views that will stir that readership, that will sell papers rather than induce boredom, and which will also bring campaigns being fiercely fought out on the political, as well as on the campaigning, front into every voter’s home. One of the most notable characteristics of the end of empire was that political and military withdrawal also involved the contraction of budgets. Indeed, the necessity for such Treasury cuts was the inevitable concomitant of the decline of British economic power. It produced the end of national service in Britain in 1959 – and therefore the possibilities of the deployment of a cheap and youthful conscript army – and also crucially the laying down of Scottish regiments, a process which was to be a continuing feature of cuts in defence spending through successive decades. This decolonisation process has been described as a succession of ‘implosions of empire’, mainly concentrated in the late 1940s, the late 1950s and the 1960s.36 Stuart Allan charts the ways in which each of these implosions produced inevitable cutbacks in the British army, a process to which Scottish regiments were not immune. He describes public reactions as being made of a disbelief, dismay and even grief, in one case stimulating a petition allegedly containing a million signatures. But he sees these emotional reactions as being more connected with the end of historical military traditions than with the demise of empire itself. On the other hand, Bryan Glass’s examination of the treatment of imperial issues in the Scottish press, in this case the so-called Mau Mau campaign in Kenya and the Suez crisis in the Middle East, demonstrates the manner in which the editorial staffs of Scottish newspapers believed that their readership wished to be informed about these major imperial events. His analysis demonstrates that this was true both of newspapers that were primarily read by the bourgeoisie and the Scottish business community, like the Glasgow Herald and the Scotsman, both of which inclined towards a Tory political allegiance, but also of a popular paper whose staple readership was the Scottish working class, the Daily Record, where the politics were essentially [ 14 ]

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INTRODUCTION

those of Labour. It was also true of the significant regional papers in Dundee and Aberdeen. In this connection, we should remember the involvement of Scottish regiments in these campaigns, as well as the fact that this was the last decade of national service, such that a fair number of the troops sucked into these events were conscripts, not least from the industrial cities of Scotland. His conclusion is that the Scottish reading public clearly invested a good deal of interest in these rites of a dying empire (as we now know them to have been). In fact, Glass’s approach is one that could be applied to many of the other acts in the ‘flight or fight’ dilemmas facing the British in this period. It is now possible to survey a large number of newspapers and examine the extent to which lesser coverage was provided (just as an example of a key question that might be asked) for events in which the Scottish military was not involved as opposed to those in which it was – or did it matter? The methodology could also be applied to a variety of other media in the same period. It all boils down to the age-old problem relating to such studies, namely whether the media lead public opinion or follow it, frame public opinion or have their interests formed by it. But whichever is the case, we can be clear of one thing. Just as the theatre and cinema box office never lies – popularity of certain productions or of particular films tells its own story – so too do newspapers never concentrate on stories to which its public is entirely indifferent. It may indeed be the case that the newspaper readership was influenced by a sense of personal involvement, individual connections fostered by the knowledge that relatives and friends were in the military, were doing national service, or were settled in various regions of the empire. ‘Iconic’ may have become a grossly over-used word in modern times, but if it can truly be used of one individual, that one would be David Livingstone. A society is perhaps known by its heroes: they are vital for the constructions of identity, for the formulation of national ideologies, sometimes for the socialisation of the young, and for the argumentative mediation of contemporary issues. If medieval heroes like William Wallace and Robert the Bruce have fed strongly into a sense of Scottish resistance to the overweening power of England and have spoken to an allegedly distinctive Scottishness,37 Livingstone embodied all the qualities supposedly inherent in the Scot – upward social mobility through education and personal achievement, self-reliance and ambition, indomitable courage and refusal to give up even in the face of insuperable difficulties, perhaps also a capacity for stubbornness and a yearning for self-publicity. He brought together medical training with religiosity, a yearning for exploration in an age which valued such geographical unveiling almost above all other activities, a capacity to [ 15 ]

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apply his successes to political and missionary ambitions, as well as a fascination with all forms of natural science. If his failings were overlaid to a certain extent by the hero-worship, the fact was that he became the subject of a myth which was, like all myths, more important for its very existence and its repeated manipulation than for the truth or otherwise of its constituent elements.38 MacKenzie demonstrates in his chapter the ways in which the invocation of the name of Livingstone, as an appeal to a highly instrumental ancestor figure, became vital in so many political causes in the twentieth century, not least the formation and the ultimate breakdown of the Central African Federation, a political unit in which Scots, particularly perhaps the Scots churches, took a particularly keen interest. Livingstone’s name was bandied about in an extraordinary variety of ways, but, perhaps astonishingly, his reputation survived to be honoured even by African nationalists and post-colonial Africans, particularly those attached to the Christian church. If the Scots were active in encouraging, or at least supporting, the Central African nationalisms that ultimately destroyed the Federation, what of the development of nationalism at home? One of the standard warnings for all apprentice historians is that if two major historical phenomena happen to take place at the same time, it is a mistake to make the automatic leap that they must somehow be connected. Perhaps the end of the British Empire and the rise of regional nationalisms in the United Kingdom is a classic case. And it may well be that, in the case of decolonisation and nationalism, some historians whose careers were well beyond the apprenticeship stage fell into the trap. Since it has become a matter of historical orthodoxy to suggest that the formation of the British state – and even perhaps the very notion of a British identity – was inseparably bound up with empire, it seemed to many highly likely that the end of empire would remove the raison d’être for that state, loosening the glue that had held it together since 1707. The ‘back story’ for such an idea is a lengthy one. Roland Muirhead, a defector from the Independent Labour Party to the National Party of Scotland, proposed that nationalism would constitute a liberation from imperialism as early as the period of the First World War, although at that time this idea was as likely to be expressed in terms of ‘Home Rule All Round’.39 The link to decolonisation inevitably came later, originally from the imperial historian Sir Reginald Coupland. In a posthumously published book in 1954, he argued that the Union had represented ‘a great political and psychological achievement’, no less than a harmonious and multinational state.40 Coupland, who had been instrumental in constitutional discussions relating to decolonisation, was now concerned that Ireland might not be the last [ 16 ]

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INTRODUCTION

piece of internal decolonisation. It should not act, he hoped, as a precedent for Scotland and Wales. As Nielsen and Ward demonstrate in the closing chapter of this book, this idea had a long and active rhetorical life. They analyse the regular references to empire and to decolonisation that turn up in the speeches, books and press accounts of Scottish nationalists and proponents of the Union, as well as of historians. They focus particularly on the period of the Hamilton by-election of 1967 and the three referenda of 1979, 1997 and 2014. They consider that the frequently repeated notion of the connection between the end of empire, the cycles of support for Scottish nationalism, and referenda on devolution and independence should be subjected to the cold light of empirical research. Just how glib was the assumption that there is some connection? How far does the rhetoric of politicians and of the so-called ‘chattering classes’ match reality when it comes to hard-headed political decisions or indeed voting intentions? Perhaps we can add that, in the 2014 campaign, the argument of the ‘Yes’ camp highlighted the Scottish opportunity to create a fairer society, but did this necessarily connect with the idea that empire served to confirm and re-emphasise the British class system? It may well be that Scottish nationalism has complex and multiple origins not entirely associated with the end of empire, origins that can be seen as cultural, political and economic. Nielsen and Ward also subject some developing orthodoxies to closer scrutiny – for example, how far can it be said that Margaret Thatcher was the godmother of modern Scottish nationalism? After all, the Scottish National Party (SNP) actually experienced a trough in their fortunes for most of the Thatcher years, only reviving towards the end of her reign, perhaps when her deindustrialisation of Scotland (more rapid and severe than any experienced in Europe), her lack of sympathy and impatience with Scotland, her imposition of the poll tax, and her intransigence with regard to the boycott of the 1986 Edinburgh Commonwealth games (by no fewer than thirty-two Commonwealth countries) had become all too apparent. Perhaps we should note that if the decolonisation of the British Empire was a strikingly rapid process, a succession of implosions taking place in under twenty years after the Second World War, the rise of Scottish nationalism was all together slower. It was embroiled in the twists and turns of Westminster politics as well as in the electoral hurdles that were placed in its way. It may thus have been the case that when Scottish voters turned out on 18 September 2014, the former British Empire was a fairly remote phenomenon in their minds. Yet, when that has been said, the referendum turned up some intriguing results. There were just four areas that voted yes: Dundee [ 17 ]

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(57.35 per cent Yes), West Dunbartonshire (53.96 per cent), Glasgow (53.49 per cent), and North Lanarkshire (51.07 per cent). It comes, perhaps, as no surprise to discover that they were precisely the areas which had the closest connections with empire through the heavy industries of shipbuilding, locomotive manufacture, steel production, and jute. They were therefore the regions which were most devastated by the deindustrialisation of the 1980s and the unemployment and social deprivation which followed. As Jim Tomlinson has convincingly shown, well over half of the Dundee work force was historically connected with jute production whether directly or indirectly, although it must be said that the decline of the industry was long and harrowing, with the last spasms only occurring in 1999.41 West Dunbartonshire includes Clydebank and the town of Dumbarton, where the end of shipbuilding and other industries produced considerable distress. The Glaswegian economy was inseparably connected with empire.42 Lanarkshire was a centre of the steel industry and of coal mining. As it happens, it can also be said that those four areas were the ones which most fiercely opposed the poll tax. They have also been largely the bedrock of the Labour vote in Scotland. They therefore represented the revolt against Labour symbolised by the rise of the SNP and the referendum results. While there are suggestive connections here, it remains problematic whether voters would actually connect unemployment and deprivation to the end of empire, while such unrelated issues as the poll tax might be most significant in the desire to escape Westminster. It can also be said that one of the effects of the Thatcher era was to destroy the class commonalities of, for example, miners in Scotland, England and Wales, and industrial workers throughout the United Kingdom, as well as the opportunities afforded by empire, for example in migration. These nine chapters, then, are designed to move forward the currently under-worked area of the Scottish relationship with the British Empire and with decolonisation in the twentieth century. Much work remains to be done and it may be that this introduction, in common with the chapters in the book, has raised many more questions than it has answered. But raising questions is always a stimulus to further research and publication. It is to be hoped that this will collectively constitute a landmark in these studies, albeit a landmark at a relatively early stage of this particular route of historical research. At least it offers some direction indicators for the future course of such work.

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Notes   1 See, for example, The Glasgow Herald, 21 May 1900. The Herald reported that ‘business and household arrangements were forgotten in the general joy’, in which ‘everyone was anxious to have a share’. There was also a round-up of celebrations in 107 Scottish towns ranging from Alyth to Wick. Further reports appeared in succeeding days.   2 See Marjory Harper’s contribution to this book; also Harper, Scotland No More?: The Scots who Left Scotland in the Twentieth Century (Edinburgh, 2012); for return migration Harper (ed.), Emigrant Homecomings: The Return Movement of Emigrants 1600–2000 (Manchester, 2005); Harper, ‘Enticing the Emigrant: Canadian Agents in Ireland and Scotland, c. 1870–1920’, Scottish Historical Review (SHR), Vol. 83 (April 2004), pp. 41–58; and Angela McCarthy, ‘Personal Accounts of Leaving Scotland, 1921–1954’, SHR, Vol. 84 (October 2004), pp. 196–215.   3 Richard J. Finlay, ‘Continuity and Change: Scottish Politics 1900–1945’ in T. M. Devine and R. J. Finlay (eds.), Scotland in the Twentieth Century (Edinburgh, 1996), pp. 64 ff.   4 Esther Breitenbach, ‘Scots Missions and Churches’ in John M. MacKenzie and T. M. Devine (eds.), Scotland and the British Empire (Oxford, 2011), pp. 222–225; Philip Constable, ‘Scottish Missionaries, “Protestant Hinduism” and the Scottish Sense of Empire in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries’, SHR, Vol. 86 (October 2007), pp. 278–313.   5 There are some stimulating allusions to this phenomenon in Christopher Harvie, Scotland and Nationalism: Scottish Society and Politics 1707–1994, 2nd edition (London and New York, 1994), particularly in chapters 2 and 3.   6 See, for example, Paul Maloney, Scotland and the Music Hall 1859–1914 (Manchester, 2003); Callum G. Brown, ‘Popular Culture and the Continuing Struggle for Rational Recreation’ in Devine and Finlay (eds.), Scotland in the Twentieth Century, pp. 210–229.   7 For a useful summary of these events, see Peter L. Payne, ‘The Economy’ in Devine and Finlay (eds.), Scotland in the Twentieth Century, pp. 13–45; see also Jim Phillips, ‘Oceanspan: Deindustrialisation and Devolution in Scotland, 1960–1974’, SHR, Vol. 84 (April 2005), pp. 63–84.   8 Iain G. C. Hutchison, ‘Government’ and James Mitchell, ‘Scotland in the Union, 1945–95’ in Devine and Finlay (eds.), Scotland in the Twentieth Century, pp. 46–63 and 85–101.   9 Graham Walker, ‘Varieties of Scottish Protestant Identity’ in Devine and Finlay (eds.), Scotland in the Twentieth Century, pp. 250–268. See also the articles in Graham Walker and Tom Gallagher (eds.), Sermons and Battle Hymns: Protestant Popular Culture in Modern Scotland (Edinburgh, 1990). 10 Eric Richards, Britannia’s Children: Emigration from England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland since 1600 (London, 2004), p. 266 and passim. In the 1950s and 1960s Scotland lost half a million people from its population. 11 Among a growing literature, see Ian Donnachie and Christopher Whatley (eds.), The Manufacture of Scottish History (Edinburgh, 1992). In this, see particularly Donnachie’s chapter on ‘The Enterprising Scot’, pp. 90–105 and John Foster’s on ‘Red Clyde, Red Scotland’, pp. 106–124. See also Colin Kidd, Subverting Scotland’s Past: Scottish Whig Historians and the Creation of an Anglo-British Identity, 1689–c.1830 (Cambridge, 1993) and Murray G. H. Pittock, Celtic Identity and the British Image (Manchester, 1999). 12 Harvie, Scotland and Nationalism, pp. 26–27 and 70. See in particular the arguments of Roland Muirhead. 13 This surge in the use of ‘British’ can be verified using Google Ngram, based on large numbers of books published in the English language: books.google.com/ngrams (accessed 17 April 2014). 14 In Boswell’s Life, Johnson denigrates Scottish scenery and adds ‘Sir, let me tell you, the noblest prospect which a Scotchman ever sees is the high road to England’.

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SCOTLAND, EMPIRE AND DECOLONISATION 15 Jim Tomlinson, ‘Managing Decline: The Case of Jute’, SHR, Vol. 90 (October 2011), pp. 257–279. 16 These memories of Glasgow are based on the clear recollections of one of the editors, MacKenzie, based on a childhood attending a primary school close to the docks in Overnewton on the north side of the river. See also John M. MacKenzie, ‘“The Second City of the Empire”: Glasgow, Imperial Municipality’ in Felix Driver and David Gilbert (eds.), Imperial Cities (Manchester, 1999), pp. 215–237. For a deeper background, see W. Hamish Fraser and Irene Maver (eds.), Glasgow. Vol. II: 1830–1912 (Manchester, 1996), particularly chapters 2–5. 17 For Buchan’s formation as an ‘intense patriot of the narrowest school’ (meaning for Scotland) and his sense of alienation from England, later replaced by patriotic fervour, see John Buchan, Memory Hold the Door (London, 1940), pp. 45–47. See also Andrew Lownie, John Buchan: The Presbyterian Cavalier (London, 1995). For Orde Wingate’s ambivalent relationship with Scotland, see Trevor Royle, Orde Wingate: Irregular Soldier (London, 1995). 18 John M. MacKenzie, ‘Essay and Reflection: On Scotland and the Empire’, International History Review, Vol. 15, issue 4 (1993), pp. 714–739. 19 For examples of these economic activities, see John M. MacKenzie with Nigel R. Dalziel, The Scots in South Africa: Ethnicity, Identity, Gender and Race (Manchester, 2005). 20 John M. MacKenzie, ‘Irish, Scottish, Welsh and English Worlds? The Historiography of a Four-Nations Approach to the History of the British Empire’ in Catherine Hall and Keith McClelland (eds.), Race, Nation and Empire: Making Histories, 1750 to the Present (Manchester, 2010), pp. 133–153 and MacKenzie, ‘Irish, Scottish, Welsh and English Worlds? A Four-Nation Approach to the History of the British Empire’, History Compass, Vol. 6, issue 5 (2008), pp. 1244–1263. 21 Perhaps understandably, given the state of research at the time, Devine’s references to empire in The Scottish Nation 1700–2000 (London, 1999) become lighter in the twentieth century, although the twentieth century is more prominent in his justly celebrated To the Ends of the Earth: Scotland’s Global Diaspora (London, 2011). Nevertheless, Devine’s contribution to this field more generally has been outstanding, not least in securing a wider audience for serious research on Scotland’s connections with empire. 22 Macleod’s father, Dr Norman Alexander Macleod, was a typical Scots doctor who bought part of the Leverhulme estate on Lewis in 1917. 23 Among an increasing number of studies, see Bryan S. Glass, The Scottish Nation at Empire’s End (Basingstoke and New York, 2014). 24 Helen Smailes, Scottish Empire (Edinburgh: Scottish National Portrait Gallery, 1981). 25 Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Scotland and Africa (Edinburgh, 1982); Alex M. Cain, The Cornchest for Scotland: Scots in India (Edinburgh, 1986); That Land of Exiles: Scots in Australia (Edinburgh, 1988). See also Susan Leiper, Precious Cargo: Scots and the China Trade (Edinburgh, 1997). 26 Jenni Calder (ed.), The Enterprising Scot (Edinburgh, 1986). 27 For associations, see Michael Brander, The World Directory of Scottish Associations (Glasgow, 1996). Among a vast literature of works on migration, examples with twentieth-century content include Michael Brander, The Emigrant Scots (London, 1982); James Hunter, Scottish Exodus: Travels Among a Worldwide Clan (Edinburgh, 2007); Jeanette M. Brock, The Mobile Scot: A Study of Emigration and Migration 1861–1911 (Edinburgh, 1999); Marjory Harper and Michael E. Vance (eds.), Myth, Migration and the Making of Memory: Scotia and Nova Scotia c. 1700–1990 (Edinburgh, 1999) and the justly admired Colin G. Calloway, White People, Indians and Highlanders: Tribal Peoples and Colonial Encounters in Scotland and America (Oxford, 2008). 28 This has emerged in interviews on television programmes about Caledonian Society activities in the diaspora. It can be called the Alexandra Fuller effect. In her Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight (London, 2002), pp. 9–10, Fuller’s mother, drinking

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whisky, proclaims her hatred of England and her love of Scotland. Twitted as to her tenuous genetic connection with Scotland, her mother says that ‘Scottish blood cancels English blood’. These connections are discussed in MacKenzie, ‘Essay and Reflection’, pp. 738–739. James Keir Hardie, India, Impressions and Suggestions (London, 1909). It was published by the Independent Labour Party. For a sympathetic view of the career of Fisher, see Peter Bastian, Andrew Fisher: An Underestimated Man (Sydney, 2009). Jonathan Hyslop, ‘The World Voyage of James Keir Hardie: Indian Nationalism, Zulu Insurgency and the British Labour Diaspora 1907–1908’, Journal of Global History, Vol. 1 (2006), pp. 343–362. James Ramsay MacDonald, The Awakening of India (London, 1910). T. M. Devine, ‘Soldiers of Empire, 1750–1914’ in MacKenzie and Devine (eds.), Scotland and Empire, pp. 176–195. See also Edward M. Spiers, The Scottish Soldier and Empire, 1854–1902 (Edinburgh, 2006) and Stuart Allan and Allan Carswell, The Thin Red Lion: War, Empire and Visions of Scotland (Edinburgh, 2004) and Ian S. Wood, ‘Protestantism and Scottish Military Tradition’ in Walker and Gallagher (eds.), Sermons and Battle Hymns, pp. 112–136. Martin Thomas, Fight or Flight: Britain, France and their Roads from Empire (Oxford, 2014). John M. MacKenzie, ‘The Persistence of Empire in British Popular Culture’ in Stuart Ward (ed.), British Culture and the End of Empire (Manchester 2001), pp. 21–22. For an extended discussion of Scottish culture, intellectual life, education, culture and ‘othering’, see Cairns Craig, Intending Scotland: Explorations in Scottish Culture since the Enlightenment (Edinburgh, 2009). For a lively, individual and agreeably eccentric version, see Angus Calder, Revolving Culture: Notes from the Scottish Republic (London, 1994). Justin Livingstone has now explored all the ramifications of this myth in the many biographies and cultural depictions of Livingstone over the past 150 years and more: Justin D. Livingstone, Livingstone’s ‘Lives’: A Metabiography of a Victorian Icon (Manchester, 2014). Quoted in Christopher Harvie, Scotland and Nationalism: Scottish Society and Politics 1707–1994, 2nd edition (London, 1994), p. 27. In passing it may be noted that Harvie’s career is interesting, combining a period as a professor at the University of Tübingen in Germany with (after retirement) his role as SNP Member of the Scottish Parliament between 2007 and 2011. Sir Reginald Coupland, Welsh and Scottish Nationalism (London, 1954), pp. xv, 12, 113. See John M. MacKenzie’s discussion of the significance of this in ‘Essay and Reflection: On Scotland and the Empire’, pp. 714–739, particularly p. 715. Also MacKenzie’s ‘Empire and National Identities: The Case of Scotland’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, Sixth Series, Vol. 8 (1993), pp. 215–231. Jim Tomlinson, Dundee and the Empire: ‘Juteopolis’ 1850–1939 (Edinburgh, 2014), p. 9 and passim. MacKenzie, ‘The Second City of the Empire’.

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PART I

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Migration, diaspora and identities

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CHA P T E R TWO

Initiatives, impediments and identities: Scottish emigration in the twentieth century Marjory Harper For multiple generations of Scots, the imperial opportunities ushered in by the parliamentary union, and solidified over the two succeeding centuries, were synonymous with overseas migration and settlement. That long-standing and deeply rooted national wanderlust showed no sign of wilting with the end of the Victorian era, and the two million Scottish emigrants in the eight decades after the First World War matched the numbers who had left between 1815 and 1914. But the contours of intercontinental migration were significantly redrawn during the twentieth century as a consequence of two world wars, ongoing developments in communications technology, and the phenomenon of globalisation, with significant implications for perceptions and experiences of empire. While the Scottish reservoir continued to supply permanent settlers, temporary sojourners and serial migrants to all corners of the world, the persistent outflow therefore has to be analysed with reference to change as well as continuity in motives, attitudes, mechanisms, reverse movements and outcomes.

Statistics, strategies and attitudes During the nineteenth century Scotland had come to occupy third place in a European league table of people-exporting countries. Between the death of Queen Victoria and the outbreak of war, emigration from the British Isles as a whole was 64 per cent higher than in the previous fourteen years, but from Scotland the increase was 139 per cent. From 1907 (with the exception of one year), Canada was also reinstated as the favourite destination of Scottish emigrants after six decades of American dominance. While the senior dominion attracted 42 per cent of Scottish migrants between 1901 and 1914 (a rise of over 30 per cent on the previous fourteen years), the wider exodus was still directed emphatically towards the United States, which received almost 52 per [ 25 ]

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cent of emigrants from the British Isles, with just over 27 per cent going to Canada.1 Scottish enthusiasm for emigration soon revived after the war, although throughout the twentieth century statistical precision remained elusive in the face of patchy and ambiguous data, frequent changes in classification criteria, and the absorption of separate Scottish returns into UK figures. The most remarkable decade was the 1920s, when the outflow of almost 500,000 Scots exceeded the natural increase of population, reinforcing the diaspora to such an extent that by 1931 up to 25 per cent of all Scots were not living in their country of birth.2 North America’s dominance remained unrivalled. Alongside the re-emergence of Canada’s pre-war popularity – albeit with a dilution to 36.2 per cent of inter-war departures – the United States officially accounted for 32.7 per cent of Scottish migrants, but in practice for many more who crossed the porous border from the north. Reverse migration during the Great Depression, and its complete cessation during the Second World War, was subsequently eclipsed by a revival of interest in traditional Commonwealth destinations during the 1950s and 1960s, and by a more European and global outlook from the 1970s. The direction of movement was dictated primarily by perceived opportunities and personal networks, operating within an official policy framework that from the 1920s offered half a century of unprecedented government subsidisation of dominion settlement. The spotlight was turned on the empire partly as a result of the American Quota Acts of 1921 and 1924, although the restrictive legislation was more damaging to eastern and southern Europeans than to those from the British Isles or northern and western Europe. Nevertheless, would-be emigrants who had missed the quota deadline, were impatient to leave, or were confused about the American regulations, might well opt for Canada, from where some of them subsequently entered the United States illegally. At the same time as America was putting selective bolts on its golden door, the British government was liaising with the dominions to offer significant sponsorship to migrants, initially to war veterans and their dependents through the Soldier Settlement Scheme of 1919–22 and then to an expanded nationwide civilian constituency through the Empire Settlement Act of 1922 (ESA). The imperial strategy articulated in the legislation constituted a remarkable departure from the politicians’ traditional reluctance to fund emigration, escaping the savage public expenditure cuts of the Geddes Axe because it promised to address public and political fears about the future cohesion of the empire in an uncertain post-war world. It failed to live up to its promise during the inter-war years, when the annual allocation of up to £3 [ 26 ]

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million for assisted passages, shared land settlement schemes and training courses was rarely used up. None of Australia’s group settlement experiments was deemed a success, while Canada was concerned about an influx of militant Scottish trades unionists, particularly after the mismanaged importation of prairie harvesters in 1923 and 1928 led to several deportations and soured British–Canadian relations. When the ESA was renewed for the first time in 1937, the maximum annual allowance was halved, reflecting the poor response and the impact of the Depression. Many emigrants preferred to preserve their independence by making their own arrangements, and the Stornoway Gazette suggested in 1926 that cautious Highlanders in particular shunned the government schemes for fear of hidden financial strings.3 The fundamental problem, however, was that the legislation was designed primarily for farmers in an age when most emigrants came from urbanindustrial backgrounds and were ineligible for assistance. On the other hand, state subsidies offered the only imperial escape route for the impoverished. Funding for collaborative ventures was also an attractive incentive to established private sponsors – including the Salvation Army and child migration societies – as well as new participants such as the Scottish Immigrant Aid Society. After the Second World War the initiative shifted to Commonwealth governments, particularly in the Antipodes, which dictated the recruitment agendas and supplied most of the funding. The resurrection of free passages to ex-service personnel brought a trickle of Scots to Australia and New Zealand for a decade,4 but better known and more popular was the reinstatement of civilian schemes, which persisted for a quarter of a century from 1947 and brought around 1.5 million Britons to Australia and over 77,000 to New Zealand. Scottish participation in these Empire/Commonwealth-funded schemes is just as difficult to quantify as in the inter-war years, since records always related to destinations rather than places of origin, but although they were well publicised in Scotland, antipodean officials occasionally suggested that the potential of the nation’s legendary restlessness was not being exploited to best effect.5 Canada, for long the dominant destination within the empire, did not share either Australia’s conviction that the post-war alternative was to ‘populate or perish’ or its aggressive, well-funded and enduring state recruitment drive. Canadian memories of the Depression, coupled with fears among young professionals that their prospects would be jeopardised by competition from immigrants, resulted in a much more cautious and reactive federal recruitment strategy after 1945. That lukewarm welcome was compounded by the devaluation of the pound in 1948 and a reduction in the amount of capital that migrants could [ 27 ]

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transfer to non-sterling area countries like Canada. It was therefore no surprise that they began to direct their attention elsewhere, both in the immediate post-war years and after the introduction of the points system in 1967, although federal cutbacks were tempered by provincial initiatives and various employer-sponsored schemes. The politics of empire settlement in donor and host nations was reflected in the waxing and waning of government subsidies. But migration was never uncontested territory in any constituency. Sponsored settlement schemes may have been embraced by the Dominions Office, but not without considerable internal debate, and many politicians and pundits painted a picture of a debilitating and youthful human haemorrhage, whose terms were dictated unfairly by the recipients.6 Scottish dissent was voiced across the political and social spectrum, but was given distinctive ethnic clothing by socialists and nationalists: while both attributed Scotland’s disproportionately large and sustained exodus to domestic economic neglect that had fostered chronic unemployment, nationalists blamed those economic ills primarily on the lack of self-government.7 It is hardly surprising that throughout the twentieth century the most vociferous and unequivocal opponents of emigration were advocates of Scottish independence, whose scathing charges of disloyalty, irresponsibility and lack of vision were laid against sponsors and participants alike. The combative tone was set by Lewis Spence, President of the Scottish National Movement, who in 1927 deplored the ‘continuous and disastrous stream of emigration from Scottish soil’.8 Nine years later, veteran Highland Land Leaguer and former National Party of Scotland member Angus Clark raised the temperature further when he claimed that emigration was ‘a poisonous fallacy, which none but Scotland’s enemies will support, a policy of despair, which every friend of Scotland will oppose’.9 By the time of Clark’s intervention, the Scottish demographic landscape was dominated by returners, but in the 1950s nationalists reloaded their artillery and trained it particularly on the Antipodes, which perhaps explains why sustained promotion yielded less fruit than recruiters had expected. Douglas Henderson, President of the Edinburgh University Nationalist Club in 1956, left New Zealand’s Prime Minister in no doubt that he should withdraw the country’s recruitment officers from Scotland. Suggesting that these agents turn their attention instead to ‘our grossly over-populated neighbour’, Henderson alleged that ‘the English government is actively and deliberately fostering a large-scale clearance of our people’ which ‘we can only regard as a threat to the survival of our country’ and echoed Lewis Spence’s claim that emigration constituted a ‘disastrous drain’ of human capital.10 In the same era Wendy Wood and the Scottish [ 28 ]

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Patriots danced an eightsome reel on the ashes of assisted emigration forms which they had burned outside the Australian consulate in Edinburgh.11 And in 1959, as Australia intensified its efforts, a former agent recalled that the steps of the newly opened recruitment office in the capital were daubed with abusive slogans, while travel agencies in Edinburgh and Glasgow which displayed emigration posters had their windows smashed.12 Since the 1860s most Scottish emigrants had come from the urban Lowlands, but for much of the twentieth century the spectre of the clearances still rendered criticism of depopulation particularly potent when it was applied to the Highlands. Following the Stornoway Gazette’s repeated complaints in the 1920s that subsidies should have been applied to infrastructural developments rather than empire settlement, the cudgels were taken up in the following decade by Dr Lachlan Grant, Ballachulish GP, journalist and co-founder of the Highland Development League. An activist in the early days of the Scottish National Party (SNP), who later espoused Liberal politics and counted Ramsay Macdonald among his friends, Grant argued not only that essential land reform was impossible while emigration continued, but – more controversially – that the departure of the cream of the population had burdened the Highlands with a disproportionate remnant of pauper lunatics and degenerates.13 Post-war political criticism of Highland policy focused on the ‘counsel of despair’ that regarded emigration as a remedy for unemployment, and on the misapplication of £1,500,000 a year which was being channelled into emigration schemes instead of invested ‘in getting some of the Scots back into Scotland’, particularly the Highlands.14

Motives and mechanisms Most emigrants were oblivious to political arguments, and only partially aware of government strategies. The multiple narratives that had always characterised the Scottish diaspora, and which continued to define the twentieth-century exodus, were developed against the backdrop of public policy, but dictated by individual and family agendas. Emigrants left for broadly the same reasons as their predecessors: varying degrees of restlessness, disillusionment or pessimism about opportunities in Scotland, harnessed to a quest for personal independence or family betterment, an ascent of the career ladder, or a spirit of adventure. Alongside those clear continuities there was, however, a subtle – and often subconscious – shift of perspective, as emigration became increasingly an individual undertaking rather than a corporate enterprise. As the imperial sun began to set, long-standing [ 29 ]

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paternalism gave way to non-intrusive facilitation, and the subsidies which opened the antipodean door so widely after 1945 did not circumscribe the emigrants’ freedom of choice in the ways that public and private sponsors had dictated locations and terms of settlement in the 1920s. In terms of triggers, however, there were clear similarities between the two post-war generations of emigrants whose decisions attracted particular public interest. War brides were a feature of both conflicts, though the much-studied 100,000 women who emigrated during and after the Second World War dwarfed their 1,000 First World War predecessors. For many more without such a specific reason to emigrate, the cataclysmic conflicts of 1914–18 and 1939–45 each brought in their wake a search for new and better beginnings, in golden lands where the promise of high wages and living standards offered access to amenities that would never have come within their reach in Scotland. The remarkable exodus of the 1920s was greatest from the central belt, where war-driven demand had disguised the fundamental erosion of Scotland’s heavy industrial base. The removal of that temporary prop after 1918 left Scotland in an economic wilderness, as the coal, steel and shipbuilding industries were plunged into terminal decline and unemployment rates soared to 50 per cent above the British average.15 Urban tradesmen and labourers were joined on the emigrant ships by Lowland farmers, domestic servants and Highland crofters, all of whom had a long – and sometimes contentious – heritage of migration. In the Outer Hebrides especially, the economic downturn after 1918 brought alarming echoes of the destitution and famine that had followed the end of the Napoleonic wars a century earlier. With wartime protection removed, livestock prices plummeted; the fishing industry was in crisis as a consequence of poor catches and the loss of the Russian herring market; potato blight, accompanied by poor summers, prevented the gathering of peats and hay; and the stalling of eagerly anticipated land reform rendered Lloyd George’s promise of ‘homes fit for heroes’ particularly hollow. The bleak outlook was exacerbated in Lewis by the tragedy that devastated the island in the early hours of 1 January 1919, when the MV Iolaire, laden with returning servicemen, foundered on rocks just outside Stornoway. The death toll of 205 included 175 Lewismen. Murdo Macleod from Bayble was one of the survivors who emigrated to Canada shortly afterwards, a decision triggered – according to his niece – by haunting memories of that night and his constant encounters in the island with the families of those who had not survived. Although he kept in touch with his relatives in Lewis, Murdo never spoke about the Iolaire to his Canadian family, and his twin daughters learned about the tragedy only after his death.16 [ 30 ]

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But Hebrideans, like their compatriots throughout Scotland, were also lured overseas during the 1920s by the promise of land or work, held out to them by professional agents or personal contacts. As crofting legislation (despite its limitations) and state pensions brought a measure of security to the older generation, younger people were l­iberated to pursue the opportunities which had been described to many of them by imperial servicemen with whom they had rubbed shoulders during the war. In a single week in April 1923, the interacting triggers of chronic and acute problems, long-established ethnic networks of communication and support, and new openings for advancement, coalesced in the remarkable embarkation of over 600 Canada-bound emigrants at Lochboisdale and Stornoway, on the Marloch and the Metagama respectively.17 Others continued to follow well-trodden tracks to the Falkland Islands and Patagonia, where Hebridean sheep farmers had been making their mark since the mid-to-late nineteenth century.18 A new generation of emigrants after 1945 was preoccupied with the same concerns as those who had left in the 1920s. Britain as a whole was a land of economic austerity, punishing winters, housing shortages and lingering war-weariness. Rationing did not end until July 1954, and the Suez Crisis in 1956 hammered another nail into the coffin of national disgruntlement. Yet pessimism was tempered – and eventually eclipsed – by the promise of satisfying work, good wages and comfortable lifestyles, particularly in Commonwealth countries that had not been so directly ravaged by the war. Scottish commentators echoed inter-war charges of political inertia or insensitivity in attributing disproportionate emigration to the familiar curses of high unemployment, low wages, poor housing, and extensive deindustrialisation without parallel investment in new enterprises. Some of these grievances – and others – were articulated in participants’ testimony, though emigrants did not generally play an explicit political card. When Easton Vance left his engineering job at Colville’s steel works in Motherwell to settle in British Columbia in 1956, his decision was triggered partly by a blocked promotion, coupled with ‘the fact that I couldn’t get decent housing’.19 Three Dunedin Scots who arrived in New Zealand as young children in the 1950s recalled parental ambitions to give their children a better start in life, as well as the desire to escape from a bleak economic environment and a debilitating climate.20 Limited professional opportunities were reflected in high levels of graduate emigration and in the experiences of men like Edward Stewart and Roddy Campbell. Stewart, a forester from Craigellachie, was in charge of Dallas Forest in Morayshire in the early 1950s, when he realised that promotion could only be achieved by ‘waiting for dead men’s shoes’. Having initially [ 31 ]

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accepted and then withdrawn from a post in Northern Rhodesia, in 1953 he answered an advertisement in The Scotsman for a job near Umtali in Southern Rhodesia, and, with his wife and two children, spent twelve years in various locations in that country.21 A decade later Dr Roddy Campbell from South Uist discovered, after graduating from Edinburgh University and becoming a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons, that ‘it was very hard to become a consultant surgeon’, and so in 1966 he and his family sought better opportunities in British Columbia.22 Most personal testimony puts the emphasis, not surprisingly, on positive catalysts, mediated through a mixture of personal contacts and professional lobbyists. After serving his apprenticeship in the shipyards, twenty-year-old Charlie Law from Aberdeen emigrated to the remote pulp and paper town of Ocean Falls in northern British Columbia in 1953, to work as a maintenance engineer. His parents were already there, having arrived three years earlier – along with several other Aberdonians – following a recruitment seminar at the city’s Music Hall.23 In 1959 Ronnie Gillies relinquished the lease of his father’s sheep farm in the Sidlaw Hills and relocated to Alberta with his family. His long-standing ‘hankering to go to Canada’ had been thwarted by parental discouragement, but brucellosis among the cattle, combined with persuasive advertising, tipped the balance, and while paying the transatlantic passages himself, he used the agency of the Canadian National Railway to secure farm work and a furnished house.24 A lecture in Aberdeen’s Music Hall featured again in the decision made by John and Joan Noble to emigrate to Vancouver Island with their two young sons in 1966. A native of Lewis, Joan was familiar with ‘the literature of exile’ and with the Canadian sojourning experiences of her own recent forbears. Her grandfather had spent twenty years running a store for the Hudson’s Bay Company before working briefly for Pinkerton’s Detective Agency in the United States. After marrying in Lewis, he brought his wife to Manitoba, where they farmed and ran a hotel before returning to Lewis after three years. As a baker on oceangoing liners, Joan’s father was accustomed to visiting ‘the network of expatriate Gaels’ across the world. For a short period in the early 1930s, he himself became part of that network, working for a lumber company in Vancouver, while her mother had emigrated ‘with cousins and a sense of adventure’ to work as a cook in Winnipeg.25 When the Nobles began to think about emigrating, Joan therefore steered her husband away from Australia and towards Canada.

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We came not because we needed to – John was deputy of a school in Aberdeen, and we had a lovely life in Aberdeen, but, I don’t know, there was some kind of restlessness in the air in the sixties. A lot of people came to Canada in the middle sixties. And the weather had become absolutely abysmal. We could never get a nice summer, my children were never outside playing the way I wanted them to be.26

‘Serendipity’ then played its part, for ‘just as we were talking about that in November of 1965, the Canadian government sent i­ mmigration officers to Britain, advertised in every city across the country, that they would have immigration officers giving talks, and there were going to be three nights of talks in Aberdeen’. The first presentation, on tobacco farming and manufacturing in Ontario, did not impress Joan, since ‘it was not my idea of Canada’, but John was captivated by the next evening’s presentation on British Columbia, not least because it fulfilled his environmental criteria of proximity to mountains and ocean. Through Thomas Cook, the Nobles arranged to sail from Greenock in April 1966, with onward travel by train from Montreal to Vancouver. The part played by recruitment agents loomed large in the experiences of the Nobles and many other emigrants. Competitive lobbying by different destinations had been a prominent thread in the tapestry of emigration since the 1870s, with the most persistent campaigns being mounted by Canada. Federal agents were stationed in strategic cities across the British Isles, supported by a constantly changing cast of itinerant lecturers representing the federal government, the provinces and the railway companies, and underpinned by the booking agents who sold the actual tickets. The Australian states and New Zealand provinces preferred a centralised structure, liaising with employment exchanges and sending out visiting lecturers from their London headquarters. These structures were generally maintained during the twentieth century, along with the emphasis on verbal, visual and written promotion, through public illustrated lectures, face-to-face interviews, posters, press advertisements and pamphlets. Budgetary restrictions and falling demand in the 1930s led to office closures, some of which were reversed after the war, and by the 1960s recruiters were coming under intense pressure as a result of demand from both sides. When Ronnie and Margaret Gillies went to Glasgow to make formal application to go to Canada, she recalled that ‘they weren’t too fussy with our medicals or anything then, because they were wanting people to go’.27 In 1965, when Rob and Cathie Tulloch from Morayshire answered an advertisement in the Sunday Post for farm workers for New Zealand, they had to wait a year before they were called for interview in Aberdeen.28 And Gordon Ashley, whom the Australian government sent to run its Glasgow emigration office in 1969, noted [ 33 ]

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that many would-be emigrants were discouraged by a delay of up to a year between interview and sailing date. He added that the relentless workload could cause recruiters to become slapdash and make mistakes, remembering how on one occasion he had conducted fortyfour consecutive interviews without a break.29 The agents’ messages may have been familiar, but the twentieth century brought significant changes in their methods of communication, as technology enabled them to add a number of new weapons to their arsenal. Lantern slides, which from the 1890s to the 1920s helped to attract audiences of up to 1,200 people to promotional lectures, were supplemented, and then supplanted, by newsreels and films. The Scots were particularly avid film-goers: in 1929 there were 113 cinemas in Glasgow, and during the 1930s the city had the most picture-houses per head of population in Europe.30 Those who did not venture out to the cinema could be reached in their own homes, through the medium of radio, and later television, both of which functioned as ‘tools of empire’ until the 1960s.31 The BBC was – as Simon Potter has demonstrated – a capacious conduit of information and advice about empire settlement, at least in the dominions. The corporation’s imperial mission to unite audiences in Britain with the diaspora was a defensive reaction to encroaching Americanisation as well as an attempt to stem imperial decline and simultaneously build up its own broadcasting empire. But although the BBC promoted opportunities in Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, encouragement was not unequivocal: policy-makers in the 1940s, aware of significant levels of disappointment among migrants, ordered programmers to adopt a balanced and realistic approach. Audiences were therefore warned of shipping and housing shortages and were exhorted to adapt, pull their weight and ‘work with your hands as well as your head’.32 Only through mutual understanding and collaboration could the imperial family recover its own strength and ‘help to bring back stability and prosperity to the world’.33 Occasionally, however, warnings were counterproductive, and after a pessimistic feature about the experiences of the first Scottish airlift to Canada, one BBC programme assistant in Scotland predicted that ‘many intending emigrants will possibly have cancelled their bookings because of the black picture painted of conditions in Canada’.34 It was not only the transmission of information that was affected by the twentieth-century communications revolution: new mechanisms of relocation altered migrants’ perceptions of distance and difference. Just as the steamship had transformed intercontinental travel for the Victorians, so for the post-war generation, mass air travel eventually replaced the ocean passage. George Drew, Premier of Ontario, arranged [ 34 ]

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an airlift of 7,000 Britons to the province as early as 1947–48, an initiative which was then taken up by the federal government. For almost two decades, when emigrants had the choice of travelling by sea or air, some deliberately opted for a slow transition. Joan and John Noble believed that the Atlantic crossing, followed by the trans-Canada train journey, emphasised the total separation from their old life and provided a better psychological and physical preparation for settlement than the experiences of instantaneous immigrants, who arrived jet-lagged and disorientated.35 Their views were echoed by Alison Gibson from Dumfries, who arrived in Canada in 1967, a year after the Nobles, when she and a friend took up posts as computer programmers in Halifax, Nova Scotia. They chose to sail from Greenock to Montreal, on the grounds that ‘it was such a huge change in our life, flying seemed too simple, just to leave one whole life behind and start fresh overnight’.36

Leaving and returning The communications revolution, embracing radio, mass air travel, and – at the end of the twentieth century – the development of the internet, introduced new terms into the lexicon of diaspora. This vocabulary highlighted the significance of constant mobility, serial and step migration, and reverse movement, within a context of increasing globalisation. Of course, homecoming was not a twentieth-century innovation, nor was it confined to Scots. Between 1870 and 1914 it is estimated that as many as 40 per cent of outward emigrants from the British Isles to all extra-European destinations may have returned to their country of origin, but sojourning was a long-established Scottish tradition, which had always affected the country and communities to which the migrants returned.37 Those influences were maintained and enhanced throughout the twentieth century, as individuals and families came back to Scotland from all parts of the diaspora. For some, the decision was an integral part of a carefully planned migration strategy that involved playing the international labour market, making money overseas, and returning to retire or capitalise on new opportunities. Others came back because their aspirations were frustrated rather than fulfilled, particularly in the depressed 1930s, and a handful of deportees had no choice in the matter. There was always a steady influx of individuals whose return was dictated by personal circumstances such as illness, bereavement, homesickness, or – more positively – inheritance, while the ten-pound passage allowed many young Scots to come home after enjoying a heavily subsidised two-year working holiday in the Antip[ 35 ]

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odes. Flexible job opportunities and ease of travel created a scenario of multiple departures and returns, long-distance commuting or lifelong itinerancy, across a wide spectrum of occupations, incomes, origins and destinations. Nor should we forget the ‘tartan tourists’ who began to be disgorged from transatlantic liners on the Clyde in the 1920s, and who were joined – after the war – by a rising tide of genealogical pilgrims, in pursuit of their ancestral identity. The mentality of mobility and the reverse migration that characterised the Scottish diaspora are both evident in some of the individuals whom we have already met. At the very beginning of the century, it was his wife’s homesickness for her native island that brought Joan Noble’s grandfather, Donald Morrison, back to Lewis only three years after their marriage and settlement in Manitoba.38 Roddy Campbell’s return from British Columbia to Scotland in 1977 was triggered by a similar conviction that – despite stimulating work and having just taken out Canadian citizenship to permit possible remigration – ‘it wasn’t really home for us … we didn’t want to grow old there’.39 Further east, Ronnie and Margaret Gillies left Canada in 1961 when the opportunity to take over the family farm in the Carse of Gowrie was combined with Ronnie’s redundancy from his job as a real estate salesman in Calgary.40 Meanwhile, on another continent, illness forced Edward Stewart to relinquish his forestry career in Southern Rhodesia and bring his family back to Scotland in 1965.41 It was also in 1965 that Charlie and Molly Law, along with their four children, left British Columbia after Molly’s mother had sent them newspaper cuttings about the pulp and paper mill which Wiggins Teape was then constructing at Corpach, near Fort William. Their speculative return was based partly on the belief that Scotland ‘was beginning to boom a little bit, so we kind of fancied that’, but Molly had also been unsettled by a recent mudslide in Ocean Falls which had killed seven people. Charlie secured a job and a company house at Corpach, where the family stayed for fifteen years until the closure of the mill brought them back to British Columbia in 1981, this time to a job in Kitimat, another pulp and paper town. Since they had ‘never got round’ to taking out Canadian citizenship during their first sojourn, they had to be sponsored by their oldest son, John, who had emigrated to Kitimat five years earlier, after completing his apprenticeship in the Corpach mill.42 To what extent were decisions to move back or move on shaped by imperial policy, or an engagement with the concept of the imperial family promulgated by the BBC and the Dominions Office? As the sun set on the empire, and as immigration from the New Commonwealth became a politically hot potato, did Scotland open its doors to [ 36 ]

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British subjects, whatever their birthplace, colour and creed, simply on the grounds of their imperial credentials? The influx in the 1930s was primarily from traditional areas of settlement: of the 62,308 Scots who arrived between 1931 and 1938, just over 44 per cent came from Canada, 39.5 per cent from the USA and 16.4 per cent from Australia and New Zealand, constituting just over 22 per cent of the inward movement to Britain and Ireland from those places.43 Immigration to Scotland after the war continued to be dominated by Scots-born returners, and as late as 2001, 25 per cent of overseas migrants entering the country fell into that category.44 Throughout the 1950s and 1960s disillusioned war brides taking the ‘thousand dollar cure’ and ten-pound antipodean ‘holidaymakers’ were joined by a trickle of Scots who were prompted to leave Africa because of anxieties about the implications of decolonisation.45 At the time of Kenyan independence, the Ladies Section of the Caledonian Society of Kenya, as well as expressing regret that ‘so many members were leaving the country’, made contingency plans for how to dispose of funds ‘in the event of the Society having to close down’.46 In the same era, much of Scotland spectated as unprecedented immigration from the New Commonwealth fuelled overt discrimination and the politicisation of race relations in England. It was not that Scots were less xenophobic than their southern neighbours: the earlier experiences of Irish, Lithuanian and (during the war) Italian immigrants challenge any such claims. But serious antagonism was kept at bay partly because ‘nobody wanted to come to Scotland’: in 1966 England and Wales absorbed twelve times as many New Commonwealth immigrants as Scotland.47 West Indians regarded it as a country of high unemployment, poor opportunities and bad weather, and while arrivals from the Indian subcontinent were more substantial, those who came in the late 1950s and 1960s (including some from England) tended to take jobs in public transport which were shunned by Scots. Most settled in Glasgow, and by 1960 the Asian community in Scotland numbered about 4,000.48

Transitions and identities ‘It’s not the journey that is difficult, but overcoming the inertia of a safe rut’, wrote Ronnie Gillies to his mother-in-law from the family’s second placement in Alberta.49 Twentieth-century migrants and sojourners, like their predecessors, measured success not just by the practical markers of remunerative employment, higher living standards, better prospects for their children, or the ability to repatriate capital. Social, cultural and psychological adjustment was equally [ 37 ]

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important, and emigrants often coped with the transition to unknown new worlds by importing or attaching themselves to formal, institutional pillars of Scottish identity, as well as by seeking out compatriots. Such strategies helped them to overcome the inertia – or fear – of leaving the ‘safe rut’. Samuel Johnson’s observations of Scottish emigrants in the 1770s had led him to conclude that ‘they change nothing but the place of their abode, and of that change they perceive the benefit’.50 Their reputation for clannishness and the manipulation of ethnic patronage as a means of climbing the occupational and social ladder did not always endear them to host communities, but by the twentieth century associational culture – manifested in churches, schools, and sporting, literary and charitable societies – was much more benign and cosmetic than in pioneering days, when it had often been regarded as a prerequisite for successful settlement. The ESA-sponsored colony of southern Hebrideans established in northern Alberta in the 1920s marked the swansong of distinctively Scottish settlements, and the ‘privatisation’ of emigration further loosened the grip of corporate ethnic identifiers. Rigid, exclusive identities gave way to a more flexible menu of multiple or hybrid identifications, particularly in cosmopolitan cultures, where migrants from different countries commonly attended each other’s national celebrations. There is no evidence that Scots favoured the dominions because they believed there was any psychological or cultural benefit to be gained by remaining within the fold of the imperial family. The standard agenda of Scottish associations across the global diaspora was to celebrate an expatriate brand of Scottish culture, assist Scots in distress, and remit charitable donations to deserving causes in Scotland. There was no discernible difference, for example, between the response of the Vancouver St Andrew’s and Caledonian Society and the Lewis Society of Detroit to Scots who had fallen on hard times during the 1930s: both gave local aid or subsidised the repatriation of several individuals who had requested assistance.51 Recent research has highlighted Scottish associationalism in North America, the Antipodes and the UK.52 But the net can be cast further afield. The recent deposit of the records of the Caledonian Societies of Kenya and Zanzibar in the Highland Council Archives has opened an unexpected window onto institutional Scottish ethnicity in East Africa. The two societies were founded in 1903 and 1907 respectively, with almost identical objectives to their counterparts in the dominions.53 Members of the Kenyan society – at least in the 1950s and 1960s – were drawn mainly from the civil service, police, industry, banking and the armed forces, and the much fuller (though still patchy) records [ 38 ]

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INITIATIVES, IMPEDIMENTS AND IDENTITIES

of that organisation reflect its policies and practices.54 While considerable attention was paid to social events, charitable objectives were not forgotten. In 1924, after a press appeal, the Kenyan society sent £130 to the Highland Association of Glasgow ‘for the alleviation of distress in the Western Highlands and Islands’.55 Unsolicited local petitions generally fell on deaf ears and when the Reverend James Soutter proposed that the Society should subsidise an individual’s repatriation in 1914, the bid was rejected after ‘a great amount of discussion in view of the man’s past life’.56 But in the same year a fund was created to assist with the education of ‘indigent children of Scottish nationality’ in Kenya, and from 1917 until 1928 regular donations were made to support the education and maintenance of the late J. McKenzie’s four children in Nairobi and South Africa.57 In 1924, in a clear example of associational networking, the Society promised to ‘do all in its power’ to find situations for the three girls in the dominions, by approaching sister Caledonian societies in Canada and the Highland Association of Australia. Four years later the Secretary corresponded with his counterpart in Salisbury with a view to finding a post for Henry McKenzie in Rhodesia, but he went instead to a Presbyterian orphanage in Adelaide, Australia, from where he was placed in a ‘good situation’.58 The waters were not totally untroubled. In his report to the 1925 AGM, the Secretary cited the McKenzie subsidy in challenging an anonymous charge that the Society’s main objective was an ‘annual binge’. He pointed out that 73 per cent of the year’s revenue had been allocated to charitable causes and reminded members that the Nairobi association worked in close collaboration with the Salvation Army and the League of Mercy.59 From time to time officials also expressed frustration about the ‘peculiarly East African disease’ of apathy. Sometimes this related to lapsed subscriptions, unanswered letters and reluctance to attend committee meetings, but in 1918 the Secretary launched a stinging attack on the ‘lackadaisical attitude’ of officebearers, whose failure to advance plans for premises for the Society was ‘beyond excuse’ and reflected an ‘uninterested and uncaring’ attitude.60 The Kenya Caledonian Society had close links with St Andrew’s Church of Scotland in Nairobi, whose ministers developed their own imperial networks. James Soutter, who returned to Scotland after demitting his charge in 1916, was followed by James Youngson. Born in India of missionary parents, Youngson had – like Soutter – been educated at Aberdeen Grammar School and the University of Aberdeen, after which he spent four years (1911–15) with the Church of Scotland Mission at Kikuyu. His translation to Nairobi was (after discussion) not endorsed by the Caledonian Society, but he was appointed to St [ 39 ]

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Andrew’s in 1917. Four years later he moved to Canada, where in 1925 he became minister of the Presbyterian Church in Grand Forks, British Columbia.61 By that time, however, secularisation was already eroding the relationship between religion and migrant identity across the empire, although Scottish churches overseas continued to function as cultural hubs and employment exchanges for much of the century. Adaptation, integration, assimilation and alienation were all part of the migrant experience. Sojourners, whose identities remained rooted in their homelands, adapted to their temporary environment in order to capitalise on its opportunities, often without becoming part of it in any way. Integration involved the cultivation of a hybridised identity, while assimilated migrants assumed, unequivocally, the culture and identity of the host land. Alienation – manifested in homesickness, social dysfunction or the constant articulation of negative comparisons with the homeland – was the consequence of a failure to adopt or mix any of those strategies. Paradoxically, rootlessness and loss of identity could be aggravated rather than alleviated by advances in communications technology such as jet travel, the telephone and the internet, since instantaneous physical transitions and the ability to reconnect with their old surroundings at the press of a button inhibited them from embracing fully the opportunities of the new world. Back in Scotland, identity issues could also be controversial for reverse migrants, not least for genealogical tourists who ‘returned’ in order to engage with an imaginary country which they had never left, and whose citizens were sceptical about the invented ethnicity espoused by visitors who regarded themselves as ancestral pilgrims.62 But identities were often enhanced by the migrant experience. Margaret Gillies returned to Scotland with a new confidence that she attributed unambiguously to her Canadian sojourn. I did not know whether we would come back to this land that I had learned to love. I knew now that I could be happy in either country. I also knew that if we did come back, the pull of the place where I was born and raised would always be strong. I was going back home a different person. Canada had taught me a great deal about myself and what were really the most important things in life … I had learned a lot about humanity … I was going back to Scotland a much more confident person – one who would find it less difficult to hold her head up and speak in public … Going back also with much more appreciation of the British way of life and the Scottish in particular. It was perhaps we who had been in the doldrums and not the country. But not any more – after Canada anything seemed possible.63

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Diversity and distinctiveness Scottish migration – not least to and from the British Empire – has been extensively scrutinised in recent years, but its history since the First World War is only beginning to be explored.64 Familiar patterns of motives and experiences shaped the twentieth-century diaspora, which comprised individuals and families whose objectives and outcomes were just as diverse as those of their forbears. But diversity was not synonymous with exceptionalism. The Scots’ narratives mirrored – to a greater or lesser degree – those of emigrants from other parts of the British Isles. Nor was empire deliberately privileged, for settlers and sojourners alike sought out locations which offered the most promising opportunities for betterment. Twentiethcentury Scottish migrants absorbed the effects of political and technological change into a well-established and wide-reaching tradition of wanderlust which shows no signs of diminishing.

Notes   1 N. H. Carrier and J. R. Jeffrey, External Migration: A Study of the Available Statistics (London, 1953), pp. 93, 96.   2 R. J. Finlay, Modern Scotland 1914–2000 (London, 2004), pp. 101–102.   3 Stornoway Gazette, 11 February 1926.   4 For advertising of the ex-service personnel scheme, see ‘Free Passages to New Zealand’, Glasgow Herald, 28 May 1947, 5, column 4.   5 M. Harper, Scotland No More? The Scots who Left Scotland in the Twentieth Century (Edinburgh, 2013), pp. 137–138.   6 See, for example, disagreements between the Home Office and the Foreign and Commonwealth Relations Office over child migration to Australia after the Second World War. S. Constantine, ‘The British Government, Child Welfare, and Child Migration to Australia after 1945’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, Vol. 30, issue 1 (January 2010), pp. 99–132.   7 Harper, Scotland No More?, pp. 166–169.   8 National Records of Scotland, AF51/178, Lewis Spence to Sir John Gilmour, Secretary of State for Scotland, 2 July 1927.   9 Angus Clark, ‘Must the Scot Emigrate?’, Weekly Herald, 25 April 1936. Clark had been expelled from the National Party of Scotland in 1933 for opposing a merger with the Scottish Party. B. Purdie, ‘“Crossing Swords with W. B. Yeats”: Twentieth Century Scottish Nationalist Encounters with Ireland’, Journal of Irish and Scottish Studies, Vol. 1, issue 1 (September 2007), pp. 191–210. 10 Archives New Zealand, L1, 22/1/28, Suggestions and Criticisms, Pt 2, Douglas Henderson to Sidney Holland, 18 December 1956. 11 Purdie, ‘Crossing Swords’, p. 204. 12 H. Martin, Angels and Arrogant Gods: Migration Officers and Migrants Reminisce, 1945–85 (Canberra, 1989), p. 53. 13 Stornoway Gazette, 26 April 1923; 3 April, 22 May 1924; National Library of Scotland, Acc. 12187/8-13, 1935–40, Lachlan Grant, copy of letter to J. Ramsay Macdonald, 3 March 1934; Grant, ‘Lunacy and Population’, Caledonian Medical Journal, Vol. 16, issue 3 (July 1937), p. 35. 14 M. MacMillan, MP, and W. Ross, MP, House of Commons Parliamentary Debates, 21 April 1952, cols 148, 155. http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1952/ apr/21/empire-settlement-bill (accessed on 11 November 2014).

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MIGRATION, DIASPORA AND IDENTITIES 15 R. J. Finlay, ‘National Identity in Crisis: Politicians, Intellectuals and the “End of Scotland”, 1920–1939’, History, Vol. 79, issue 256 (June 1994), p. 244. 16 Author’s conversation with Donna Macleod, Bayble, Isle of Lewis, 18 November 2009. For details of the disaster, see J. MacLeod, When I Heard the Bell: The Loss of the ‘Iolaire’ (Edinburgh, 2010). 17 J. Wilkie, Metagama: A Journey from Lewis to the New World, 2nd edition (Edinburgh, 2001); M. Harper, ‘Enigmas in Hebridean Emigration: Crofter Colonists in Western Canada’ in P. Buckner and R. D. Francis (eds.), Canada and the British World: Culture, Migration and Identity (Vancouver, 2006), pp. 198–214. 18 M. Harper, Emigration from Scotland between the Wars: Opportunity or Exile? (Manchester, 1998), p. 93. 19 Author’s telephone interview with Easton Vance, Thetis Island, British Columbia, 9 July 2008. 20 Author’s interviews with Jim Wilson, Brian Coutts and Cathy Timperley (née Donald), all conducted in Dunedin, 26 and 30 November 2010. 21 Author’s interview with Carrol and Brian Stewart, Craigellachie, 9 April 2012. 22 Author’s interview with Roddy Campbell, Inverness, 8 October 2010. 23 Author’s interview with Charlie and Molly Law, Banavie, Fort William, 13 October 2012. 24 M. Gillies Brown, Far from the Rowan Tree (Glendaruel, Argyll, 1998), foreword; author’s interview with Margaret Gillies Brown, East Inchmichael, Errol, 21 December 2012. 25 Email from Joan Noble to author, 22 July 2013. 26 Simon Fraser University, Centre of Scottish Studies, Oral History Project. Joan Noble interviewed by Ron Sutherland, 12 May 2012. 27 Author’s interview with Margaret Gillies Brown, 21 December 2012. 28 Author’s telephone interview with Rob and Cathie Tulloch, Whangerei, New Zealand, 2 November 2010. 29 Author’s interview with Gordon Ashley, Carnoustie, 10 July 2008. 30 ‘Early Film and The Local Topical’, Scotland on Screen, http://scotlandonscreen.org. uk/database/record.php?usi=007-000-000-428-C (accessed on 11 November 2014). 31 S. J. Potter, Broadcasting Empire: The BBC and the British World, 1922–1970 (Oxford, 2012), p. 1. 32 BBC Written Archives Centre, Home Service, Enterprise and Achievement, Lands in Search of People, Programme 7, 3 January 1949. 33 Quoted in Potter, Broadcasting Empire, p. 186. 34 Quoted in ibid., p. 187. 35 Email from Joan Noble to author, 22 July 2013. 36 Author’s interview with Alison McNair (née Gibson), Aberdeen, 12 September 2005. 37 The statistics are found in D. Baines, Migration in a Mature Economy: Emigration and Internal Migration in England and Wales, 1861–1900 (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 126–140; and Baines, Emigration from Europe 1815–1930 (Basingstoke, 1991), pp. 39–41. For aspects of return migration, see M. Harper (ed.), Emigrant Homecomings: The Return Movement of Emigrants, 1600–2000 (Manchester, 2011). 38 Ron Sutherland, interview with Joan Noble, 12 May 2012. 39 Author’s interview with Roddy Campbell. See also Harper, Scotland No More?, p. 217. 40 Gillies Brown, Far from the Rowan Tree, pp. 229, 234. 41 Author’s interview with Carrol and Brian Stewart. 42 Author’s interview with Charlie and Molly Law. 43 Carrier and Jeffery, External Migration, pp. 96–97. 44 Scotland’s Census 2001: Statistics on Migration. Occasional Paper 11. www. gro-scotland.gov.uk/statistics/theme/migration/census2001-migration-stats/index. html (accessed on 14 November 2014). 45 Harper, Scotland No More?, pp. 130, 153, 216–217. 46 Highland Council Archives [hereafter HCA], D1356/1/1/11, Minutes of the Ladies Section of the Caledonian Society of Kenya, 1950–1954, 1 May 1961, 14 May 1963.

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47 48 49 50

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51 52 53

54 55 56 57 58 59 60

61 62 63 64

Similar sentiments may have been voiced by the parent society, but the minute book for 1951–60 is too fragile for consultation, and the subsequent volume is missing. Finlay, Modern Scotland, p. 305. Bashir Maan, The New Scots: The Story of Asians in Scotland (Edinburgh, 1992), pp. 202–203; T. M. Devine, The Scottish Nation (London, 2006), p. 564. Ronald Gillies to his mother-in-law, undated letter, quoted in Gillies Brown, Far from the Rowan Tree, p. 121. S. Johnson, A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, edited by R. W. Chapman (Oxford, 1984), p. 87. City of Vancouver Archives, Add MSS 453, The St Andrew’s and Caledonian Society, Minute Book. volume 2, 1918–33; Stornoway Public Library, Minute books of the Lewis Society of Detroit, Vol. 1. T. Bueltmann, A. Hinson and G. Morton (eds.), Ties of Bluid, Kin and Countrie: Scottish Associational Culture in the Diaspora (Guelph, 2009). HCA, D1356/1/1, Preface to Minutes of the Caledonian Society of British East Africa, Vol. 1 (1913–21); D1356/2/1, Preface to Minutes of the Caledonian Society of Zanzibar, 1907–56. Until 1922 the Zanzibar association called itself ‘a meeting of Scotsmen at the English Club’. HCA, D1356/1/31/1, Kenya Caledonian Society membership forms 1950s-60s. Membership lists do not survive for the earlier period, or for the Zanzibar Society. HCA, D1356/1/1/2, Caledonian Society of Kenya, AGM, 29 August 1924. HCA, D1356/1/1/1, Caledonian Society of East Africa, Special General Meeting, 29 June 1914. Ibid., Special General Meeting, 30 November 1914; Committee meeting, 5 November 1917; D1356/1/1/2, AGM, 25 August 1922. HCA, D1356/1/1/2, Caledonian Society of Kenya, Committee meeting, 6 August 1924; ibid., 19 September 1928; 18 July 1929; AGM, 30 August 1929. Ibid., AGM, 28 August 1925. HCA, D1356/1/1/1, Caledonian Society of East Africa, Committee meeting, 26 July 1918; D1356/1/1/2, Caledonian Society of Kenya, AGM, 29 August 1924; ibid., Committee meeting, 1 August 1930; D1356/2/1, Caledonian Society of Zanzibar, Extraordinary General Meeting, 14 October 1932. H. Scott, Fasti Ecclesiase Scoticanae: The Succession of Ministers in the Church of Scotland from the Reformation, Vol. 7, 558; HCA, D1356/1/1/1, Caledonian Society of Kenya, Special General Meeting, 14 June 1916. Paul Basu, Highland Homecomings: Genealogy and Heritage Tourism in the Scottish Diaspora (London, 2007) offers a full analysis of these issues. Gillies Brown, Far from the Rowan Tree, p. 239. Recent overviews include M. Fry, The Scottish Empire (Edinburgh, 2001); T. M. Devine, Scotland’s Empire, 1600–1815: The Origins of the Global Diaspora (London, 2012) and Devine, To the Ends of the Earth: Scotland’s Global Diaspora 1750–2010 (London, 2012).

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C HAP T E R TH REE

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Applying the diasporic lens to identity and empire in twentieth-century Scotland Graeme Morton

For the scholar estimating the magnitude of Scots-born migrants populating the territories of empire in order to better conceptualise transnational identities, the 1901 census of the British Empire makes for an unsatisfying compendium.1 With summary data culled from several national censuses taken between 1900 and 1905, its tabulations result from no single survey. Without internal uniformity the data represent inconsistent responses to professed ethnicity and claimed place of birth. Nor in the short digest of a total imperial population estimated to be 400 million is space given to teasing out the nationality claims of second-generation and subsequent migrants.2 One century on from the imperial census, a report commissioned by the Scottish government looked to determine how many people claimed an ancestral relationship to Scotland. With the end of empire the focus had shifted beyond Britain’s former or remaining overseas territories, and the investigators surveyed worldwide to estimate anything between 28 million and 40 million people choose to name their descent from the Scottish homeland.3 What precisely this blood claim might mean, and the relationship of that claim to national identity, is not straightforward, for just as the professed ethnicity and declared place of birth were inconsistent in 1901, so the modern conceptualisation of ancestral descent lacks standardisation across ethnicities and jurisdictions.4 Further clouding understanding of transnational identities are those who (only) state their Scottish identity when visiting the nation. Conceived as ‘ancestral tourists’ or ‘roots tourists’, these self-assigned identity petitioners may or may not base their claim on a generational link and may or may not retain their Scottish identity upon returning to their place of permanent residence.5 Nor are these identities the most problematic. The diasporic identity most removed from a direct blood or citizenship qualification is the ‘affinity Scot’, whose birthplace and [ 44 ]

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IDENTITY AND EMPIRE IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY SCOTLAND

ancestral descent lies elsewhere yet who displays perceived markers of Scottishness in order to sustain a preferred national culture. When performing this identity claim, affinity Scots have been seen to adopt the kilt as symbolic dress and to participate in pipe bands, Highland games and clan gatherings at events throughout north-western Europe. Within a range of possible explanations for a phenomenon that has grown since the 1990s, this search for Scottishness as a superior identity has developed out of marked disaffection and even hostility to the European historical past re-cast in the aftermath of the Second World War.6 These efforts to count the numbers outside the nation who claim affiliation with Scotland and the challenge then of conceptualising the transnational, ethnic or preferred identity of these people underline both the complexity and global reach of contemporary identity formation, yet what is common to all these subjects is that they are marked by migratory or residential absence from the homeland.7 In identity terms, migrants (including sojourners and visitors) live outside ‘their’ nation, and by the act of migration inhabit a world of hybrid national, imperial or ex-colonial identities. Yet by moving from one nation to another nation, emigrants leave neither identity claim undermined, with few migrants breaking decisively from their natal identity to become straightforwardly and overwhelmingly assimilated.8 Our knowledge of Scottish communities outside of the homeland shows this range of identity claims to be the norm.9 These empirical studies unearth Scots who attempt to integrate into their new surroundings and those who carry their natal culture around as if it were luggage or an heirloom to pass down to their kin, alongside those who step adroitly between both positions.10 Conceptually, a diaspora is maintained not in the number of emigrants but in these migrants’ orientation to homeland and represents their transnational identities being informed, negotiated and presented.11 Emigration is the first part of this process – not the act in itself, but in how national identity is carried across national borders and how the institutions and cultural markers of that identity are perpetuated. From these conceptual reflections, this chapter examines examples of the Scots’ diasporic transnational identity as it was channelled through the British Empire in the twentieth century, first by where those migrants chose to establish their new lives, and then by the experience of imperial lives, and of empire, flowing back into Scotland’s domestic national identity.

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Imperial movement Harper explained in the previous chapter that the distribution of Scots around the world is known with some level of confidence: the majority of Scottish emigrants (and their descendants) who reside outside the British and Irish Isles are to be found in the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.12 Averaging the data for the first three decades of the twentieth century find some 88 per cent of Scottish migrants confirm this choice by settling in non-European destinations, their selections recorded in Table 3.1. Indeed this preference for imperial and former imperial locations marks out the twentieth-century experience. Destinations within the Empire were the choice of less than one-third of British emigrants prior to 1900; in 1910 this figure had risen to 68 per cent and in 1913 to 78 per cent.13 Covering the years 1948 to 1975, polling evidence from those who wished to migrate stated on ­seventeen occasions a clear preference for relocation to Commonwealth countries.14 Table 3.1 Emigration from Scotland to non-European destinations, 1901–30 USA

000s

%

British North America 000s

%

Australasia

All Other non-European non-European destinations destinations

000s

%

000s

%

000s

%

1901–10 187.6 41.0 169.6 37.1

31.1

6.8

69.2

15.1

457.5

100

1911–20

91.1 26.0 169.9 48.6

48.1 13.7

40.8

11.7

349.9

100

1921–30 157.4 35.3 161.6 36.2

85.8 19.2

41.5

9.3

446.3

100

1901–30 436.1 34.8 501.1 40.0

165 13.2 151.5

12.1

1253.7

100

Source: Dudley Baines, Migration in a Mature Economy: Emigration and Internal Migra­­­tion in England and Wales, 1861–1900 (Cambridge, 1985), p. 64 (Table 3.4).

When the diasporic lens is reversed, and migrants into Britain are scrutinised, in 1901 less than one-third of the half a million people recorded as born overseas had been born in the British Empire, with the bulk made up of those native to the USA and to Europe. A century later, the figures for 2001 cast the imperial legacy in a different light, with large numbers from Australia (106,404), Canada (70,145), New Zealand (57,916) and South Africa (140,201) alongside greater numbers from India (466,416), Pakistan (320,767) and Bangladesh (154,201).15 Commonwealth citizens’ right of entry into the UK was guaranteed by the British Nationality Act (1948) until restrictions were imposed in 1962 and the Immigration Act of 1971 removed entitlement to settle [ 46 ]

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in the UK based on Commonwealth origins alone.16 These population movements suggest that, with the whole world to choose from, imperial and former imperial territories have sequenced migration patterns. The speed, cost and reach of transportation methods were generic determinants of migrant movement alongside the availability of information and capital flows. Such factors could operate outside an imperial orbit, but most often for British and imperial migrants did not. In other ways, too, it was clear that Imperial Britain’s political space shaped action. As Harper and Constantine observe: ‘similar political assumptions about property rights and usage, about contracts, and about the authority and responsibility of employers were transferred overseas from the UK to provide the legal underpinnings of much that happened in empire’.17 Through government subsidies and convict transportation the state directed migration, and by maintaining and sustaining transnational regulation – managing on-board conditions, or the military and Crown agencies overseeing the control and access to settler lands – eased migration towards places of empire. Knowing that these migrants followed a long-established imperial pathway is suggestive of a structure that informs the diasporic experience. Applying this observation to an investigation of national identity offers the opportunity for insight distinct from politics, propaganda, jingoism, military endeavour and narratives of racial superiority, important as these carriers were to the Scots’ imperial identities. Still, it is not straightforward to propose an epistemological link to a single shared national identity between overseas descendants (conventionally defined by blood of the parent or grandfather and more controversially by affinity), and the natal born and resident. However much national identity is common and interdependent, it is never singular and can only be regarded as an amalgam of inconsistent claims. Place of residence and ancestry are generally fluid markers, not easily discernible to others without enquiry and observable only when contested or problematised.18 For obvious reasons, the granularity of these claims and other identity markers are difficult to merge across geographic boundaries, generally flowing with circularity and intermittent strength, just as British imperial identity was common ground for subjects of the Crown and that identity fed into each natal nation.19 Studies of British migrant encounters with the indigenous cultures of empire have shown the relevance of those encounters to the metropolis as much as to those of the settled territories20 and confirm the cultural influence of empire on the home nations.21 For some, the imperial and diasporic experience could not be separated, and the ideological construction of the ‘white colonies’ reflected these beliefs. During a debate in Edinburgh in 1911, Melbourne-born Scottish nationalist [ 47 ]

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Theodore Napier feared a ‘mongrel Australia’ if the Asiatic races were allowed to flood in to that country. Others suggested ironically that if such restrictions were adopted then Britain should withdraw from India, South Africa, New Zealand and Australia since these were ‘clearly once countries of coloured people’.22 Australia operated a ‘whites-only’ immigration policy in the years from the Immigration Restriction Act 1901 until the 1970s, with Australian Prime Minister John Curtin responding to Japan’s entry into the Second World War with the declaration that ‘[t]his country shall remain forever the home of the descendants of those people who came here in peace in order to establish in the South Seas an outpost of the British race’.23 Leaving aside the important issue of land and power-sharing with indigenous peoples, policies and popular identity-making of this kind sustained the precedency of the white colonies as migrant destinations for Scots. As with the circulation of ideas, ideologies, goods and material culture, the ongoing movement of people was part of a wider Scotland within empire, with flows going in both directions. When sufficient means were available it was not unusual for children of Scots resident abroad to be sent home to study, particularly when it came to vocational training in medicine and theology. Here the reputation of the Scottish education system provided a strong pull factor.24 Fitting this pattern, the formative imperial experience of some of Scotland’s most vociferous nationalist voices in the twentieth century appears significant. Leader of the Scottish National Party (SNP) between 1942 and 1945, Douglas Young (1913–73), was born in Tayport in Fife but was a child of empire owing to his father’s work taking him to India. Douglas Young’s mother made the trip home for the child’s birth, one of twenty-six crossings she undertook between the two countries. Young grew up in Jagatdal near Calcutta but was sent aged nine to Edinburgh’s Merchiston Castle School to further his education.25 Nationalist firebrand Wendy Wood (Gwendoline Meacham, 1892–1981) was another child of empire: she was born in Kent, but her parents removed to South Africa when she was only a toddler. Wood, too, returned home for her education, but home was Kent and then London before she relocated as an adult to a Highland croft and latterly to Edinburgh.26 Nor need empire be too distant from home to convey a transnational perspective to Scotland’s twentieth-century nationalists. Perhaps two of the most well-known voices of the period, Compton Mackenzie (1883–1978) and Christopher Murray Grieve (1892–1978), were also returnees. Mackenzie was born outside of Scotland, in his case on the English side of the border in County Durham; his written version of Scottish identity reflected elements of his English education and Great War military experiences, which took him to Athens and [ 48 ]

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Syria, and afterwards he settled on the island of Capri, where he joined a group of expatriate artists and intellectuals.27 Grieve, by contrast, was born on the northern side of the Scottish border, at Langholm in Dumfriesshire. Educated locally and in Edinburgh, he headed to South Wales to begin his writing career, returning to Scotland in 1919 after spells in England, Greece and France following enlistment in the Royal Army Medical Corps. Having adopted the pseudonym Hugh MacDiarmid, Grieve produced some of the most stinging critiques of those Scots, and those outside the nation, who failed to understand the country in terms of modernity and internationalism.28 It is notable how many nationalist leaders led diasporic lives before taking up Scotland’s cause: the flamboyant R. B. Cunninghame Graham (1852–1936), born and educated in London, further schooled in Brussels, made his financial reputation in South America before returning to the role of president of both the Scottish Home Rule Association and its successor the National Party of Scotland; he was a founding member of the latter alongside Mackenzie and Grieve.29 Roland Muirhead (1868– 1964) was another who emigrated to South America to seek his fortune. Born in Renfrewshire and educated in Glasgow, Muirhead emigrated when aged nineteen to work as a cattlehand before living for a period within an Owenite colony in Washington state; he became the first chairman of the National Party of Scotland in 1928 and was elected honorary president of the Scottish National Party in 1936.30 Another leader, Arthur Donaldson (1901–93), first worked for the Dundee Courier in the town of his birth but emigrated to the USA to work for Chrysler. It was as a US resident that he joined the SNP in 1928, and not until 1937 did he return to Scotland. Donaldson supported Scotland’s neutrality during the war and like Douglas Young opposed the compulsory conscription of Scots to the extent that it led to his imprisonment. From 1960 to 1969 Donaldson held the Chairmanship of the Scottish National Party,31 a post filled for the next ten years by William Wolfe (1924–2010), a man whose service in the Scottish Horse Regiment of the British Army had taken him to Normandy, the Low Countries, Germany, Indonesia and Malaya.32 The formative migratory and imperial experience of those who rose to the top of the nationalist movement in twentieth-century Scotland confirms a personal nationalism rooted within a circularity of host and sending nation interactions operating through a casual imperial context. The currency of their voices and leadership within nationalist campaigning would suggest the normalcy of transnational identities within domestic national identity. To test this conceptualisation further, and to expose any alignment with the tenets of wider Scottish society, three carriers of national identity will be examined: the first [ 49 ]

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comprises strands of pacifism within the nationalist movement that accompanied the Scots’ significant role in British military endeavours; the second emphasises the connections inside and outside the nation of symbolic culture, colonial empowerment and interwoven matters of race; the third, to take the discussion beyond the end of empire, concludes on the political importance of diaspora and a national future re-cast within the European Union.

Patriotism and pacifism On 25 January 1900, the anniversary of Robert Burns’ birth, a detachment of volunteers were honoured on their return to Dundee from fighting on the plains of South Africa; in April, a second detachment was invited to process, again to great acclaim. Welcomed by the leaders of civic life, given the freedom of the city, the combatants were assured their imperial endeavours were followed closely by their comrades at home.33 It was a scene replicated in many towns and villages throughout Scotland, but knowledge of the fighting was invariably partial and the wider public feasted upon overconfident intelligence issued by the War Office. Sustaining a patriotic fervour longer than was justified, the newspaper reporters were licensed by the army and their dispatches edited by the British censors. The Times might have been the newspaper of record, but its editor George Buckle offered little but uncritical support of Cecil Rhodes, and only as the war neared its unhappy conclusion did the newspaper offer a more balanced view.34 Reports critical of the high death rate on both sides, the debilitating effects of disease, and the cruelty inflicted on the Boers and their families were similarly unread until hostilities were nearing their end, although the Daily Mail had offered such evidence to its readers. Even the celebrated and well-connected Arthur Conan Doyle was forced to wait until 1902 before his publisher would issue his exposé of conditions in the African field hospitals.35 This control and filtering of knowledge shaped contemporary understanding of the Anglo-Boer war within the Scots’ mix of Scottish, British and imperial identities. Whatever success the censors had, though, the Scottish people were not denied some first-hand accounts of the fighting since it was the first imperial conflict to involve all of Scotland’s regiments in Africa, including around 5,000 volunteers whose participation gave the conflict a more personal connection for many. The particular significance to Scottish life and electoral politics of the war sustained a degree of familiarity that spurred on future migrants.36 The cessation of hostilities was followed by increased migration as demand soared for skilled mining and civil engineers in [ 50 ]

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the newly opened gold mines of the Rand. As indicated by a growth from 3 per cent of the colonial population of the Cape in 1903 to 14.3 per cent in 1911, the post-war period marked a much more extensive engagement by Scots than hitherto. Accompanying this presence in the region came the creation of a Scottish associational and information nexus to cater to their needs.37 Still deeper foundations to national identity were built by the British government’s imperial agenda throughout the First World War, a conflict and its immediate aftermath that can be tagged for bringing the empire into people’s everyday lives in a way not seen previously. Recruitment was premised on established regimental loyalties and volunteers coming forth based on local and networked relationships. Glasgow was the UK’s strongest recruitment ground for the Territorial Army before and after its reforms by Haldane.38 Regiments of friends, colleagues and industries were called upon to bring the coherence of the local community to the battles of Loos and the Somme where nation met nation. If not literally true, but seeming so, every Scottish town of any size built their own memorial to the fallen – alongside those consecrated in the universities, train stations, and in schools up and down the land, connecting Scots to foreign fields.39 Above all, the National War Memorial at Edinburgh Castle forms the capstone to this commemoration, where ‘Their name liveth … To the glory of God, and to the Undying memory’, and ‘If England’s mourning is local; little Scotland’s is national’.40 Little Scotland could also influence the world in this commemoration, and along with the unity of local imperialism and British patriotism came pleasure in the centrality of the nation’s foremost comedic export, Sir Harry Lauder (1870–1950). Because he was one of the greatest entertainers of his day, as well as one of the most sympathetic supporters of the war effort, Lauder’s fame was quickly exploited for imperial ends. Over his career he would tour the USA on twenty-five occasions, as well give headline performances in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and the Far East. He lost his own son to the conflict in 1916, but still he kept up an active role entertaining the troops at home and on the western front.41 Lauder headed a campaign to deter wasting food, and in 1917 launched the ambitious ‘Harry Lauder’s Million Pound Fund’ for the injured – promoted by a special double-sided recording for HMV records – an undertaking for which he was knighted two years later.42 Remembered today for personifying parochial national tropes, although his act that did not take on its renowned character until his career was launched on the London stage, Lauder’s popularity lubricated Scottish participation in subsequent conflicts, including that of future nationalist leaders.43 [ 51 ]

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Inevitably, given the circularity of movement be it to England or to further afield, similar examples of identity statements filtered through the local–imperial axis are to be found from the Scots’ war effort in the diaspora. When the Australian military looked to establish its own martial identity separate from that of the British imperial forces, the people of Victoria stood up to preserve the kilted regiment they had previously sponsored and kitted out. Over thirty Scottish ethnic associations petitioned the Ministry of Defence between 1911 and 1913 on the matter, ultimately gaining a reprieve. The regiment survived into the Second World War to then form part of an impressive roll call of Commonwealth regiments, including the Black Watch of Canada, the Cameron Highlanders of Canada, the Transvaal Scottish and the Cape Town Highlanders.44 The means by which these imperial soldiers cemented British militarism into Scottish national identity was given added cultural significance by the annual military tattoo held since 1950 on the Esplanade of Edinburgh’s medieval castle. Before long the tattoo encompassed regiments from all over the Commonwealth, with the event later replicated on a lesser scale in those countries. The Scottish contribution to the British army has remained one of the firmest ties to empire and the Commonwealth. Vehement o ­ pposition to amalgamation and disbandment of the Scottish regiments in the final quarter of the century has been framed by a history of over-representative recruitment, where regiments have clan- and ­regional-based ties that are supported by popular memories of a distinct martial identity.45 Scholars have stressed the role of the Scottish soldier in forcing the reach and stability of the British Empire, sometimes with bloody brutality.46 Soldiering has been tightly tied to identity formation, yet, as Kumar correctly notes, along with uncritical support came a line of pacifist argument promoted by the Celtic nationalists.47 Presbyterian sympathies for the non-conformist Boer farmers marked one strand of opposition to the conflict in Africa. Another came from Theodore Napier, who presided over the Edinburgh ‘Stop the War’ Committee on 5 March 1900, with around thirty men and women in attendance: minor compared to the military engagement, but of some significance considering the peace rally was addressed by pacifist Cape attorneygeneral William Schreiner and socialist leader Keir Hardie.48 In the shadow of later imperial conflicts, members of the Scottish national movement lent support for the No-Conscription Fellowship (& League), 1918–41, and the Scottish Secretariat’s Anti-Conscription Correspondence and Literature (1946–48). Douglas Young was explicit in his condemnation of the Second World War as a British imperial war, challenging the constitutional right of the state under the terms of the 1707 union to impose conscription upon the Scottish people, [ 52 ]

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declaring ‘William Wallace would never have believed that a day could come when Scotsmen would be hauled off like sheep to defend far-flung tracts of the London profiteer’s empire, while the defence of the Scottish homeland was committed to the polyglot and heterogeneous influx of Poles, Czechs, Anglo-Saxons, Negroes and other species’.49 Young linked the betrayal of Wallace to mass movement of refugees around mainland Europe, and the same analogy was made to criticise the power of state propaganda, not against Nazi Germany, but against Scotland where ‘[t]hey take the guts, and the wits, out of modern so-called Scots, more correctly North Britons, by continued intensive propaganda through the schools, the radio, cinema, Press, Kirks and numerous other ways’.50 Young was twice imprisoned for his refusal to be conscripted, and the Scottish sense of difference within the British army has produced at least two culturally significant stage plays.51 The 7:84 company in the 1970s, with The Cheviot, the Stag, and the Black Black Oil, tied clearance to the discovery of oil off Scotland’s north-east coast and the Highlanders’ recruitment to the British army and dispersal to settlements around empire.52 Then, in the early 2000s, the play The Black Watch offered a commentary on the Tayside regiment’s role alongside the American military in Iraq. The multi-award-winning production played to great success in North America and the Antipodes, bringing out the complexity of patriotism and pacifism that encompassed many Scots’ attitude to war. Opinion poll data shows support for the Falklands War was less fervent in Scotland than south of the border,53 and that the greatest British opposition to the second Iraqi invasion under the leadership of Tony Blair was recorded in Scotland. Perhaps, indeed, the most significant divergence from the British government of any stripe, the SNP has maintained opposition to the Trident nuclear facility at Faslane in Argyll and Bute, committing to its closure once independence is secured.

Emulation Differently from the pacifist hostility of Scotland’s imperial and military endeavours, scholars have argued that displays of colonial self-determination gave favourable impetus to nationalist debate in the Celtic countries, and there is some evidence of this for the Scottish example.54 As the terms of the Treaty of Versailles were being crafted, the Scottish nationalists petitioned American President Woodrow Wilson with the demand for international recognition.55 The nation was then seen to fall further behind the constitutional and trading freedoms of others when the Statute of Westminster (1931) granted the [ 53 ]

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Dominions autonomy and equality within the British Empire and the Ottawa agreement (1932) linked the constituent territories of empire through preferential trading agreements.56 With the inter-war period also marking Ireland’s departure from imperial rule, the Scottish national movement’s sometime ally in petitioning parliament for Home Rule, but more often its rival, had achieved through strife what Scots had unsuccessfully advocated through argument and pressure politics. In his 1921 address commemorating William Wallace at the birthplace of the patriot, the Rev. James Barr condemned the British government for promoting self-determination within other nations but, other than for Ireland, not for the nations of the British and Irish Isles: ‘They had even organised plebiscites to know the mind of the people. Can we do less for the people at our own doors? Can we claim less for ourselves?’57 Whereas Barr looked to the loosening of imperial bonds elsewhere as a future path for Scotland, socialist James Maxton regarded the very attempt by the British government to slow the process of self-determination as the rationale for taking the nationalist path. Maxton used the occasion of the commemoration of Wallace in 1923 to castigate English people for the arrogance of their domination of the Scots ‘as they had dominated India and Ireland’.58 Culturally, and with some occasional political overtones, the national and literary icons of Scotland were emulated by diasporic and domestic clubs and associations. Burns, Caledonian and St Andrew’s societies existed around familial lineage, blood and kin, as well as being sustained more widely within a transnational matrix of religiosity and civil society.59 The transformation of cultural patterns into easily understood symbols was correspondingly achieved through religion, music, food, and all manner of consumption, where rituals and ceremonies were enacted alongside prosaic procedures, policies and subscriber democracies transplanted from home.60 The members and guests present at these gatherings could engage in some understanding of collective history, regenerating themselves as Scots with a consciousness that existed outside the geo-political boundaries of the nation, yet their organising principle remained the ‘home nation’.61 As was seen in the earlier example of the kilted regiment protest in Victoria (Australia), and can also be indicated by the impact of Burns’ writings on American and Russian society, diasporic clubs and societies made a Scottish contribution that extended the global reach of the homeland.62 The circularity of a symbolic Scotland in the mirror of empire was no more clearly seen than during the great trade and culture exhibitions of the century. One reporter described the Overseas Settlement exhibit at the 1924 British Empire Exhibition held at Wembley as being of ‘melancholy interest’ to the Scots because of the focus on [ 54 ]

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their departing population.63 With a similar theme of dispersal, the 1938 British Empire Exhibition held in Glasgow transported visitors to a (created on site) Highland Clachan where they were encouraged to visualise ‘The Highlands and the Highlanders: the past and future of a race’. This was a narrative predicated on an analysis that the earlier imperial land settlement schemes continued to be advantageous to contemporary Highland society. The response from the nationalists was to turn that premise on its head, claiming empire had ‘drained Scotland of its youth’, pointedly suggesting Scots should instead ask ‘what they could do for Scotland rather than what they could do for the Dominions’.64 Nevertheless their accusations had to stand against the tens of thousands who attended the site and read the illustrated programme, where the great and good of Scotland’s industrial leadership made up the General Committee, and whose names were given prominence opposite the aims and objectives of the imperial exhibition: 1. To illustrate the progress of the British Empire at home and overseas. 2. To show the resources and potentialities of the United Kingdom and the Empire overseas to the new generation. 3. To stimulate Scottish work and production and to direct attention to Scotland’s historical and scenic attractions. 4. To foster Empire trade and a closer friendship among the people of the British Commonwealth of Nations. 5. To emphasize to the world the peaceful aspirations of the peoples of the British Empire.65 Nor would it be lost on the Scottish visitors to these exhibits – and visitors from elsewhere in the UK and Ireland who came to Scotland – that the centrality of empire to the Scottish people was endorsed by the patronage of the prime ministers of Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Southern Rhodesia, each cast as Honorary Overseas Presidents, alongside the Imperial King as Patron of the exhibition and the Queen as Patron of the Women’s Section. Despite the attention drawn to such celebrations and with imperial politics dominating the agenda during wartime, the Scots, like their English counterparts, had little more than imperfect, and in some cases straightforwardly mistaken, knowledge of their empire in the first post-1945 decade.66 For many ordinary Scots imperial politics were of little day-to-day concern to their lives, yet the empire remained a backdrop to nationalist attacks on Scotland’s monarchical and political union with England. In 1950 Wendy Wood was implicated in an abortive attempt to steal the English coronation stone with the plan [ 55 ]

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of using it to bargain for the return of the Stone of Scone, a scheme disrupted by the infiltration of her group by police officers from Special Branch.67 Yet less than twelve months later, the theft of the Stone of Scone itself led to ‘reverberations around the Empire’ being heard through the Pathé News’s censorious tones, lamenting that ‘Westminster Abbey – Spiritual Heart of the Commonwealth lost one of its most precious relics’.68 When the new monarch was anointed upon the Coronation Chair in 1953, the returned Stone of Scone beneath her, the tone had returned to more celebratory norms. Elizabeth promptly undertook the most extensive ever tour of the C ­ ommonwealth and Empire by a reigning British monarch,69 while in Scotland any remaining post boxes that displayed Elizabeth II – there she was Elizabeth I – were removed before their contents were set ablaze by Wendy Wood and her supporters.70

Empire, Europe and transnational Scots In the years following the Second World War, Labour campaigned as the party of British centralism, promoting the newly created Welfare State as the pathway to reducing personal as well as regional inequalities. In part this explains why the party dropped its demands for Home Rule. The post-imperial state contracted abroad but expanded in its reach at home, with nationalists talking in terms of local-national parliaments and devolution. The Scottish Office had begun late-Victorian life with little responsibility other than administrative negotiation between the Scottish local authorities and Westminster, but with its Secretary taking a seat in the Cabinet in 1892 and promoted to the rank of Secretary of State in 1926, and with its offices relocated to Edinburgh (1934–39), this administrative devolution is credited with leading to significant changes in governance.71 The Secretary of State for Scotland and his civil servants acted as a hub around which a managerial class developed north of the border without the need for career advancement in London or in empire.72 By its centenary the Scottish Office had grown to a staff of 9,700 and was the fifth largest spending department in the UK (£6.9 billion).73 To most observers the Scottish Office was acting as a semi-autonomous administrative body with the remit to question all aspects of government, while for some proponents and critics alike it was emulating the commanding heights of state governance. This maturing of devolved administration out of the 1930s and throughout the post-war decades ties in with MacKenzie’s observation that not in the 1940s and 1950s but during the early 1960s the final moment came when the British people faced up to a global reality [ 56 ]

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that imperial power was at an end. This was not only the loss of previously influential economic and political transnational structures, but the expiration of empire’s symbolic hold.74 Within the new postimperial milieu and the increasingly important European economic context, the SNP came to political prominence. In 1967 Winnie Ewing snatched the Hamilton constituency from Labour – enabling the nationalists to look at a new electoral trajectory having been stuck at around 10 per cent of the vote since the 1950s. Ewing’s breakthrough prompted the creation of a Royal Commission on the Constitution. Taking evidence from 1969 through to 1973, the Commission recommended a Scottish Assembly to enhance democratic accountability, in part to offset increasing public expenditure from London, but also the growing influence of Brussels as the UK negotiated its entry into the European Economic Community (EEC).75 By the October 1974 election the SNP took 30 per cent of the vote – their highest share at a UK general election to date. They did proportionately well among all social classes, but particularly among those who were socially and geographically mobile members of the lower-middle and working classes.76 The party’s recruitment was strongest among Scots living in the newly established and growing new towns such as East Kilbride, Irvine, Livingston and Glenrothes. These upwardly mobile workingclass Scots constituted the sections of society who previously would have populated the empire in disproportionate numbers. Furthermore, because the SNP was effectively free from the electoral heartlands that sustained the Unionist Labour and Conservative parties, it could more easily capture the ‘Scottish agenda’. By the 1970s this campaign was reinforced by the commercial development of North Sea oil and the cry of ‘It’s Scotland’s oil!’ The UK’s contested ownership of these resources alongside the growing importance of European membership was the campaigning backcloth to the failed 1979 referendum on devolution, the democratic engagement with civil society in the 1980s, and the SNP’s victory in the Glasgow Govan by-election in November 1988, securing a 38 per cent rise in the vote. That victory prompted the SNP’s Jim Sillars to declare ‘Scotland Free by 1993’,77 but with the party unable to go beyond 30 per cent in the polls, a new slogan, ‘Independence in Europe’ was coined.78 The European Union (as it became known) was now foregrounded as the transnational context to structure Scotland’s nation-state ambitions. When Edinburgh hosted a summit meeting of European leaders on 12 December 1992, contemporary political commentators observed that the 25,000 people who attended a rally that day were brought together ‘by dint of their national identity’.79 In various ways the relationship of Scotland to the EU has remained core to the national question, and in return it can be speculated that by [ 57 ]

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embracing the European dimension, the pathway trod by the affinity Scots has been made easier. By re-connecting Scotland to its trade across the Baltic, the Low Countries and to the member states of the EU, the commercial activity that so dominated the nation’s pre-1707 diasporic experience was touted as the route through which Scotland might recapture the international capital and trading networks it had enjoyed previously. What this rhetoric masks, however, is how closely European transnationalism mirrors Scotland’s imperial experience of the twentieth century.

Postscript If decolonisation was no trigger of Scottish nationalism, and the decline of empire was treated more with diffidence than outcry, then it is context rather than transformative moments that should be stressed.80 As the backdrop to Scotland’s modern history, transnational emigration and the creation of a diaspora have been given added significance as the nation’s population growth became moribund. In 1951 four times as many people lived in Scotland as were recorded in Webster’s estimate of 1755. Yet the bulk of that growth – some 3.2 million people – had happened by 1901, and was fastest through the first half of the nineteenth century. To put the flatness of Scotland’s twentieth-century growth in comparison, the nation’s highest ever population return on 27 March 2011, recorded at 5,295,000, was a relatively modest 624,000 people more than in 1901. Indeed, of the members of the EEC, only Scotland experienced population decline during the period 1961 to 1988 – the lowest growth was that of Belgium, at 7.7 per cent.81 Despite such stand-out statistics, still it has taken scholars and policy-makers until recent decades to re-examine the nation’s twentieth-century demographic context with a diasporic lens.82 At the start of the twenty-first century, the General Register for Scotland created ‘The Book of Scottish Connections’ (BSC) with the objective of allowing anyone from anywhere in the world with a Scottish connection to voluntarily have a birth, death, marriage or civil partnership recorded. The event had to have first been registered with the civil authorities in the country concerned, but the aim was to create a genealogical record open to scrutiny just as the births recorded in the individual censuses that composed the 1901 Imperial Census are now open after a hundred years of closure. Eligibility to be recorded in the BSC is extended back to the natal connection of a grandparent, but the birth of any entrant had to have taken place outside of Scotland. It can never be more than a partial record, but the registration data of diasporic and imperial Scots can now be sat alongside the S ­ cots-born, [ 58 ]

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giving some amount of official recognition to ‘being Scottish’ not wedded to the land of one’s birth, and the BSC goes some way to meeting the legacy of Scots’ movement around the British Empire and the wider world. Yet the BSC is a record much less comprehensive than the 1901 Imperial Census, and fails to take us much further in investigating national identity from a numeric perspective. Nor can it be said that the high profile and heavily trailed Homecoming events held in 2009 and 2014 engaged with the epistemological challenge of operationalising a transnational identity. These government-sponsored events were designed to engage with generational Scots and to encourage them as well as future generations to ‘return home’, even if the return marked a first visit to Scotland. As the 2009 diaspora strategy made clear, the link between non-territorial Scots and the territory of Scotland was based on an assumed ‘common ethnicity’ and ‘cultural similarity’ of sufficient strength to match the ancestral connection and to overcome the economic cost of return.83 This all-encompassing transnational connection was confirmed when First Minister Alex Salmond stated in 2013 that ‘the maximum entitlement to citizenship’ was his government’s goal, deploying Scotland’s ‘global reach in the most effective way’ to build up the nation’s prosperity.84 Yet he has remained unable to reconcile his diaspora strategy with his independence strategy. Within three months of the Homecoming gathering of 2014, Scotland decided by means of referendum on the question of independence, yet one group of identity-claiming Scots had not been enfranchised. The Homecoming Scots left their homeland to make the nation’s most important political decision in over three hundred years. By determining that the guiding principle for the referendum was that ‘Sovereignty lies with the people of Scotland’, the Scottish parliament chose a territorial not a diasporic definition. Eligibility lay with British citizens resident in Scotland, Commonwealth citizens resident in Scotland, citizens of the Republic of Ireland and other EU countries resident in Scotland, Members of the House of Lords resident in Scotland, and with Scottish-registered Service/Crown personnel serving in the UK. Non-domestic voters were confined to those overseas in the Armed Forces or with Her Majesty’s Government who were also registered to vote in Scotland.85 While the rhetoric of the Scottish government in the first two decades of the twenty-first century is engagement with the diaspora, the 2014 independence referendum marked a significant break with the imperial past.

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Notes   1 Census of the British Empire. 1901. Report with Summary and Detailed Tables For The Several Colonies, etc (London, 1906). Cmnd. 2660.   2 A. J. Christopher, ‘The Quest for a Census of the British Empire, c1840–1940’, Journal of Historical Geography, Vol. 34, issue 2 (April 2008), pp. 268–285.   3 D. Ancien, M. Boyle and R. Kitchin, The Scottish Diaspora and Diaspora Strategy: Insights and Lessons from Ireland (Edinburgh, 2009), p. 23 (Table 2).   4 In one British comparison, reported in Dhananjayan Sriskandarajah and Catherine Drew, Brits Abroad: Mapping the Scale and Nature of British Emigration (www. ippr.org/publicationsandreports), p. viii, around 58 million people worldwide are thought to claim British ancestry. If that is the case, then the figure of 40 million Scots leads one to pause and check the methodology of each study.   5 Tanja Bueltmann has begun this process by exploring the historical lineage of roots tourism in ‘“Gentlemen, I am going to the old country”: Scottish Roots-Tourists in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries’ in M. Varricchio (ed.), Back to Caledonia: Scottish Homecomings from the Seventeenth Century to the Present (Edinburgh, 2012).   6 D. Hesse, ‘Finding Neverland: Homecoming Scotland and the Affinity Scots’ in Varricchio, Back to Caledonia, pp. 226–227; Richard Zumkhawala-Cook, ‘The Mark of Scottish America: Heritage Identity and the Tartan Monster’, Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies, Vol. 14, No. 1 (Spring 2005).   7 R. Brubaker, ‘The “Diaspora” Diaspora’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Vol. 28, issue 1 (2005), pp. 1–19; J. E. Braziel and A. Mannur, ‘Nation, Migration, Globalization: Points of Connection in Diaspora Studies’ in J. E. Braziel and A. Mannur (eds.), Theorizing Diaspora (Oxford, 2003), p. 8.   8 Braziel and Mannur, ‘Nation, Migration, Globalization’, p. 8.   9 Brubaker, ‘The “Diaspora” Diaspora’, p. 7, confirms that assimilation is often resisted, while recent doctoral work has provided some of the most detailed evidence for the Scottish case study: Catherine Bourbeau, ‘The Scots in Montreal: The Development and Perpetuation of Scottish Memories, Identities and Culture in a PostMigratory Urban Context’, unpublished PhD thesis (University of Aberdeen, 2010); Andrew Hinson, ‘Migrant Scots in a British City: Toronto’s Scottish Community, 1881–1911’, unpublished PhD thesis (University of Guelph, 2010); Kyle Hughes, ‘The Scottish-Born Community of Victorian and Edwardian Belfast’, unpublished PhD thesis (Northumbria University, 2010); Gillian Leitch, ‘The Importance of Being English: Identity and Social Organisation in Montreal, 1800–1850’, unpublished PhD thesis (University of Montreal, 2007); Rebecca Lenihan, ‘From Alba to Aotearoa: Profiling New Zealand’s Scots Migrants, 1840–1920’, unpublished PhD thesis (Victoria University of Wellington, 2010); Kim Sullivan, ‘Scots by Association: Scottish Diasporic Identities and Ethnic Associationism in the Nineteenth-Early Twentieth Centuries and the Present Day’, unpublished PhD thesis (University of Otago, 2011); David Hesse, ‘Warrior Dreams: Playing Scotsmen in mainland Europe, 1945–2010’, unpublished PhD thesis (University of Edinburgh, 2011); Jill Harland, ‘The Orcadian Odyssey: The Migration of Orkney Islanders to New Zealand 1848–1914 with Particular Reference to the South Island’, unpublished PhD thesis (University of Otago, 2014). 10 Marjory Harper and Stephen Constantine, Migration and Empire (Oxford, 2010), pp. 36–38. 11 A more detailed examination of the concept of diaspora in the Scottish context is found in Tanja Bueltmann, Andrew Hinson and Graeme Morton, The Scottish Diaspora (Edinburgh, 2013), pp. 25–49. See also, Leonard Tennenhouse, The Importance of Feeling English: American Literature and the British Diaspora, 1750–1850 (Princeton, 2007), pp. 5–6, 16–17; Edward Larkin, ‘Diaspora and Empire: Towards a New Synthesis’, Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies, Vol. 15, issue 1 (Spring 2006), p. 177; Graeme Morton, Ourselves and Others: Scotland, 1832–1914 (Edinburgh, 2012), pp. 5–7, 271–289.

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IDENTITY AND EMPIRE IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY SCOTLAND 12 Harper, ‘Initiatives, Impediments and Identities’, in this volume, pp. 25–43; Ancien, Boyle and Kitchin, The Scottish Diaspora and Diaspora Strategy, p. 23 (Table 2). 13 Colin Newbury, ‘The March of Everyman: Mobility and the Imperial Census of 1901’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, Vol. 2, issue 2 (1984), p. 80. 14 Harper and Constantine, Migration and Empire, p. 347. Sriskandarajah and Drew confirm that Australia, USA, Canada, and New Zealand remain in the top ten locations for British residents abroad, alongside Spain, Ireland, South Africa, France, Germany and Cyprus, Brits Abroad, p. viii. 15 Harper and Constantine, Migration and Empire, p. 340. 16 Ibid., pp. 181, 187, 345. 17 Ibid., p. 343. 18 Richard Kiely, Frank Bechhofer, Robert Stewart and David McCrone, ‘The Markers and Rules of Scottish National Identity’, The Sociological Review, Vol. 49, issue 1 (February 2001), pp. 37, 52. The diffidence with which Scots encounter Tartan Day and Homecoming is an example of contexts undermining common identity markers; Michael Rosie, ‘Who Are You? National Identity and Contemporary Return Migration’ in Varricchio (ed.), Back to Caledonia. 19 Krishan Kumar, ‘Empire, Nation, and National Identities’ in Andrew Thompson (ed.), Britain’s Experience of Empire in the Twentieth Century (Oxford, 2012), p. 301; John M. MacKenzie, ‘Empire and Identities: The Case of Scotland’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, Sixth Series, Vol. 8 (1998), pp. 215–231; D. S. Forsyth, ‘Empire and Union: Imperial and National Identity in Nineteenth-Century Scotland’, Scottish Geographical Magazine, 113 (1997); Richard J. Finlay, ‘The Rise and Fall of Popular Imperialism in Scotland, 1850–1950’, Scottish Geographical Magazine, 113 (1997); Richard J. Finlay, ‘National Identity, Union, and Empire, c.1850–c.1970’ in John M. MacKenzie and T. M. Devine (eds.), Scotland and the British Empire (Oxford, 2012). 20 Martin Daunton and Rick Halpern, ‘Introduction’ in Daunton and Halpern (eds.), Empire and Others: British Encounters with Indigenous Peoples, 1600–1850 (Philadelphia, 1999); Margaret Szasz, Scottish Highlanders and Native Americans: Indigenous Education in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (Norman, 2007); Colin Calloway, White People, Indians and Highlanders: Tribal Peoples and Colonial Encounters in Scotland and America (Oxford, 2008); Graeme Morton and David A. Wilson (eds.), Irish and Scottish Encounters with Indigenous Peoples: Canada, the United States, New Zealand and Australia (Montreal and Kingston, 2013). 21 Measuring the timing, extent and influence of the empire upon everyday consciousness (both real and imagined) has been the subject of scholarly debate. See, for example, Andrew Thompson, The Empire Strikes Back? The Impact of Imperialism upon Britain since the Mid-Nineteenth Century (Harlow, 2005). Focused investigations of imperial connections include: Tamson Peitsch, Empire of Scholars: Universities, Networks and the British Academic World 1850–1939 (Manchester and New York, 2013); Martin Daunton and Rick Halpern, ‘Introduction’ in Daunton and Halpern (eds.), Empire and Others; Kevin Hutchings, ‘“Teller of tales”: John Buchan, First Baron Tweedsmuir of Elsfield, and Canada’s Aboriginal Peoples’ in Morton and Wilson (eds.), Irish and Scottish Encounters with Indigenous Peoples; Shurlee Swain and Margot Hillel, Child, Nation, Race and Empire: Child Rescue Discourse, England, Canada and Australia, 1850–1915 (Manchester and New York, 2010); Sarah Longair and John McAleer (eds.), Curing Empire: Museums and the British Experience (Manchester and New York, 2012); Brad Beaven, Visions of Empire: Patriotism, Popular Culture and the City, 1870–1939 (Manchester and New York, 2012). 22 The debate was held under the auspices of the Seventh Annual Peace Congress of Great Britain and Ireland; The Scotsman, 16 June 1911, p. 9. 23 Fact Sheet 8: Abolition of the ‘White Australia’ policy, www.immi.gov.au/media/ fact-sheets/08abolition.htm (accessed 12 November 2012). 24 Bueltmann, Hinson and Morton, The Scottish Diaspora, p. 139; Bueltmann, ‘Gentle-

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men, I’m going to the Old Country’, and Graeme Morton, ‘Returning Nationalists, Returning Scotland: James Grant and Theodore Napier’, both in Varricchio (ed.), Back to Caledonia. C. Young and D. Murison (eds.), A Clear Voice. Douglas Young: Poet and Polymath. A Selection of His Writings with a Memoir (Loanhead, 1977), pp. 9–10, 24; Derick S. Thomson, ‘Young, Douglas Cuthbert Colquhoun (1913–1973)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, September 2004; online edition, October 2006, www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/40382 (accessed 13 April 2010). Murray G. H. Pittock, ‘Meacham, Gwendoline Emily [Wendy Wood] (1892–1981)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, September 2004; online edition, May 2008, www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/40380 (accessed 13 April 2010). Gavin Wallace, ‘Mackenzie, Sir (Edward Montague Anthony) Compton (1883– 1972)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edition, January 2011, www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/31392 (accessed 1 September 2014). Roderick Watson, ‘Grieve, Christopher Murray [Hugh MacDiarmid] (1892–1978)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004, www. oxforddnb.com/view/article/31174 (accessed 3 September 2014). Cedric Watts, ‘Graham, Robert Bontine Cunninghame (1852–1936)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004, www.oxforddnb. com/view/article/33504 (accessed 9 October 2013). Richard J. Finlay, ‘Muirhead, Roland Eugene (1868–1964)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edition, May 2010, www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/40350 (accessed 9 October 2013). James Halliday and Gordon Wilson, ‘Donaldson, Arthur William (1901–1993)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004, www. oxforddnb.com/view/article/51840 (accessed 10 October 2013). William Wolfe (obituary), www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/politics-obituaries/7494353/William-Wolfe.html (accessed 10 October 2013). The Dundee Directory, 1901–1902 (Dundee, 1901), pp. 15–16. Kenneth O. Morgan, ‘The Boer War and the Media (1899–1902)’, Twentieth Century British History, Vol. 13, No. 1 (2002), pp. 2–3. Arthur Conan Doyle, The Great Boer War (London, 1902); Morgan, ‘The Boer War and the Media’, pp. 3–5, 11; www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/pathways/census/events/ britain6.htm (accessed 1 September 2014). S. J. Brown, ‘“Echoes of Mid Lothian”: Scottish Liberalism and the South African War, 1899–1902’, Scottish Historical Review, Vol. 71 (1992); T. M. Devine, ‘Soldiers of Empire, 1750–1914’ in MacKenzie and Devine (eds.), Scotland and the British Empire, p. 195. John M. MacKenzie and Nigel R. Dalziel, The Scots in South Africa: Ethnicity, Identity, Gender and Race (Manchester, 2007), pp. 65–66. Kris Gies, ‘Amateur Soldiering in Industrial Britain: The Early Territorial Force in Glasgow, 1908–1914’, unpublished PhD thesis (University of Guelph, 2010). Elaine W. McFarland, ‘Scottish Military Monuments’ in Edward M. Spiers, Jeremy A. Crang and Matthew J. Strickland (eds.), A Military History of Scotland (Edinburgh, 2012), pp. 760–769. Ian Hay, Their Name Liveth: The Book of the Scottish National War Memorial (London, 1931). University of Glasgow, Special Collections, Scottish Theatre Archive Collections, ‘Sir Harry Lauder, 1870–1950’; Dave Russell, ‘Lauder, Sir Henry [Harry] (1870– 1950)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edition, January 2011, www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/34419 (accessed 14 October 2013). D. Baker and L. F. Kiner, The Sir Harry Lauder Discography (Metuchen and London, 1990); W. Wallace, Harry Lauder in the Limelight (Hove, 1988), p. 50. My thanks to Jason Wilson for sharing this information.

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IDENTITY AND EMPIRE IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY SCOTLAND 43 Morton, Ourselves and Others, pp. 199–200. 44 Tanja Bueltmann, Scottish Ethnicity and the Making of New Zealand Society, 1850 to 1930 (Edinburgh, 2011); Wendy Ugolini, ‘Scottish Commonwealth Regiments’ in Spiers, Crang and Strickland (eds.), A Military History of Scotland, pp. 497–498. 45 John C. R. Childs, ‘Marlborough’s Wars and the Act of Union, 1702–14’, Christopher Duffy, ‘The Jacobite Wars, 1708–46’, and Stephen Brumwell, ‘The Scottish Military Experience in North America’, all in Spiers, Crang and Strickland (eds.), A Military History of Scotland; Edward M. Spiers, The Scottish Soldier and Empire, 1854–1902 (Edinburgh, 2006), pp. 2–17. Devine, ‘Soldiers of Empire, 1750–1914’, pp. 179–185. 46 Richard J. Finlay, A Partnership for Good? Scottish Politics and the Union since 1800 (Edinburgh, 1997), p. 27. 47 Kumar, ‘Empire, Nation, and National Identities’, pp. 307–308, 311–312. 48 The Scotsman, 6 March 1900, p. 6. 49 Young, William Wallace and this War, p. 3. 50 Ibid, p. 8; Glasgow Herald, 10 July 1942, and Glasgow Herald, 27 July 1942. The SNP insisted on Young’s behalf that he was not in prison as a conscientious objector, but ‘as a Scotsman who refuses to acknowledge the validity in Scotland of the present military conscription Acts’, Glasgow Herald, 1 August 1942. 51 Young and Murison (eds.), A Clear Voice, p. 17. 52 The first performance of the play was at Aberdeen Arts Centre, 24 April 1973, filmed as a ninety-minute BBC Play for Today the next year. That the topic may have been ‘too close to home’ for some might explain why the play was produced in London and not by BBC Scotland, an absence John McGragh also notes about his later work: The Glasgow Herald, 18 September 1984. 53 Michael Keating, ‘Scotland in the UK: A Dissolving Union?’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Vol. 2, issue 2 (1996), pp. 232–257. 54 The argument on emulation is rehearsed in Kumar, ‘Empire, Nation, and National Identities’, p. 311. 55 James Mitchell, Strategies for Self-Government: The Campaign for a Scottish Parliament (Edinburgh, 1996) p. 74; Finlay, A Partnership for Good?, pp. 70–72. 56 Kumar, ‘Empire, Nation, and National Identities’, p. 314. 57 Scotland Yet! An Address Delivered by the Rev. James Barr, B.D., at the Wallace Monument, at Elderslie, on 27th August, 1921; and now re-printed from the ‘Forward’ of 3rd September, 1921 (Glasgow, 1921), p. 15. 58 Quoted in Mitchell, Strategies for Self-Government, p. 78. 59 Graeme Morton, ‘Identity out of Place’ in Trevor Griffiths and Graeme Morton (eds.), A History of Everyday Life in Scotland, 1800 to 1900 (Edinburgh, 2010), p.  259. 60 R. J. Morris, ‘The Enlightenment and the Thistle: The Scottish Contribution to Associational Culture in Canada’ in Tanja Bueltmann, Andrew Hinson and Graeme Morton (eds.), Ties of Bluid, Kin and Countrie: Scottish Associational Culture in the Diaspora (Guelph, 2009). 61 Graeme Morton, ‘Ethnic Identity in the Civic World of Scottish Associational Culture’ in Bueltmann, Hinson and Morton (eds.), Ties of Bluid, Kin and Countrie, pp. 40–45; Angela McCarthy, ‘Scottish Migrant Ethnic Identities in the British Empire since the Nineteenth Century’ in MacKenzie and Devine (eds.), Scotland and the British Empire, pp. 123–32. 62 Douglas Young notes Russian, Polish and Esperanto editions of Burns in the 1950s, and the pull of the latter language continued with William Power (1873–1951), Young’s predecessor, who was President of the Glasgow Esperanto Society; Young and Murison (eds.), A Clear Voice, pp. 98–99. 63 Deborah Hughes, Contesting Whiteness: Race, Nationalism and British Empire Exhibitions (Proquest, Umi Dissertation Publishing, 2012), p. 223. 64 Ibid., pp. 25–27. 65 Empire Exhibition Scotland – 1938. Official Catalogue (Glasgow, 1938), p. 34. 66 John M. MacKenzie, ‘The Persistence of Empire in Metropolitan Culture’ in S. Ward (ed.), British Culture and the End of Empire (Manchester, 2001), pp. 27–28.

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MIGRATION, DIASPORA AND IDENTITIES 67 Scotland on Sunday, 5 August 2007. 68 British Pathé, ‘Coronation Stone Mystery’ (01 January 1951), ‘The Stone Returns’ (16 April 1951), www.britishpathe.com (accessed 1 October 2013). 69 MacKenzie, ‘The Persistence of Empire in Metropolitan Culture’, p. 30. 70 Alan Clements, Keith Farquharson and Kirsty Wark, Restless Nation (Edinburgh, 1996), p. 28; Wendy Wood, Yours Sincerely for Scotland (London, 1970), pp. 121–122. 71 Ian Levitt, ‘The Scottish Secretary, the Scottish Grant Equivalent and the Treasury, 1885–1970’, Scottish Affairs, 28 (Summer 1999); Ian Levitt, The Scottish Office, 1919–59 (Edinburgh, 1995). 72 Alice Brown, David McCrone and Lindsay Paterson, Politics and Society in Scotland (Houndmills and New York, 1996), pp. 12–16. 73 The Scotsman, 15 December 1984. 74 MacKenzie, ‘The Persistence of Empire in Metropolitan Culture’, p. 32. 75 Royal Commission on the Constitution, 1969–1973, Vol. 1, Report, Cmnd. 5460 (Chairmen, Lord Crowther, Lord Kilbrandon) (London, 1973), p. 150. Royal Commission on the Constitution 1969–1973, Vol. 2: Memorandum of Dissent by Lord Crowther-Hunt and Professor A. T. Peacock (London, 1973), pp. xii–xiv. 76 David McCrone, Understanding Scotland: The Sociology of a Stateless Nation (London, 1992), pp. 164–169. 77 The Guardian, 12 November 1988. 78 The Labour Party responded with their own slogan, ‘independence within the UK’, to stress the advantages of devolution over independence. What Scotland’s status would be within the European Union after independence was a major political debate in the two years leading up to the 2014 referendum vote. 79 The importance, or not, of this turnout was the subject of an open letter debate between writer William McIlvanney and Shadow Scottish Secretary George Robertson, published in Scotland on Sunday, 10 January 1993. 80 John M. MacKenzie and T. M. Devine, ‘Introduction’ in MacKenzie and Devine (eds.), Scotland and the British Empire, pp. 28–29. 81 Michael Anderson, ‘Population and Family Life’ in A. Dickson and J. H. Treble (eds.), People and Society in Scotland, Vol. 3: 1914–1990 (Edinburgh, 1992), pp. 12–16; Michael Anderson and Donald J. Morse, ‘High Fertility, High Emigration, Low Nuptiality: Adjustment Processes in Scotland’s Demographic Experience. Part I’, Population Studies, Vol. 47, issue 1 (1993), pp. 8–9. 82 The major intervention from T. M. Devine came with the final volume of his Scotland Trilogy: T. M. Devine, To the Ends of the Earth: Scotland’s’ Global Diaspora (London, 2011); Ancien, Boyle and Kitchin, The Scottish Diaspora and Diaspora Strategy. 83 Bueltmann, Hinson and Morton, The Scottish Diaspora, p. 29. Research indicates that Scottish emigrants would be economically worse off by returning to Scotland, but other diasporans would be better off by returning to their respective homelands: Takeyuki Tsuda, ‘Why Does the Diaspora Return Home? The Causes of Ethnic Return Migration’ in Takeyuki Tsuda (ed.), Diasporic Homecomings: Ethnic Return Migration in Comparative Perspective (Stanford, 2009), pp. 22–23. 84 The Herald, 17 January 2013. 85 Scottish Independence Referendum (Franchise) Act 2013 (2013 asp 13). The Act also made those aged 16 and over eligible to vote, providing they satisfy the territorial requirements.

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C HAP T E R FO U R

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Gordon T. Stewart

The debate generated by the 2014 referendum on Scottish independence forced many Scots to think about Scotland’s relationship with the now-defunct British Empire. The leader of the independence campaign, and then First Minister, Alex Salmond, was insistently critical of Scotland’s treatment by the regime in London, but did not think that historically Scotland has suffered from English imperialism. Pressed on this matter in an interview with The Economist magazine, Salmond chose to answer by comparing Scotland with Ireland. ‘Scotland is not Ireland,’ he explained. ‘Scotland was never an oppressed country.’1 Most would agree with that distinction. In contrast to Ireland, Scotland flourished within the British Empire. Gaining access to English colonies was a principal inducement for the Scots to enter the Union in 1707. Although the benefits came slowly at first, by the later decades of the eighteenth century most Scots agreed that the gamble had paid off. Walter Scott, taking note of how many Scots were making careers and money in India as merchants, soldiers and administrators, described India as ‘the corn chest of Scotland’.2 In this bountiful setting, pride in being Scottish sat alongside pride in the British Empire. Even political Scottish nationalism became intertwined with imperial ideology. When Eric Linklater ran as a Scottish Nationalist candidate in the East Fife Parliamentary election in 1933, he explained to the voters that he ‘still believed in the vast importance to us, and to the world, of the British Empire to whose creation the Scots had so lavishly contributed’.3 When it was founded in 1934, the Scottish National Party had no problem whatsoever in describing the future self-governing Scotland ‘as a partner in the British Empire’.4 The nationalists who claim there has been an English colonial exploitation of Scotland since 1707 have had to argue against the historical evidence. The interesting attempt made by Michael Hechter to argue there was an internal colonialism within the United Kingdom [ 65 ]

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(perpetrated by England against a ‘Celtic fringe’) has not gained much scholarly support.5 That is why Alex Salmond, in order to retain any credibility on the vexed subject of Scotland’s relationship to England, thought it prudent to distinguish Scotland from Ireland. From the founding of the Union to the middle decades of the twentieth century, most Scots have been enthusiastic participants in the empire. In her seminal account of the origins of modern Britain, Linda Colley argued that ‘trade and Empire, war and military service’ were two bases of an emerging British identity in the 1707–1837 era (along with Protestantism, and the intermarriage of Scottish and English landed classes).6 Christopher Bryant in The Nations of Britain agrees with this linking of Scotland to the empire: ‘Great Britain was basically an imperial project … and Scots were disproportionately well-represented in imperial service in India and elsewhere, and in the officer corps in the British Army.’7 Colley even offered as a title to one of the sections in her book ‘A Scottish Empire?’ The question mark was dropped and the theme richly developed in such well-received books as Tom Devine’s Scotland’s Empire 1600–1815 and Michael Fry’s The Scottish Empire. Devine has no doubt that ‘the imperial project in the long run massively increased the nation’s sense of self-esteem’.8 This empire-fuelled British identity did not extinguish a Scottish identity. Throughout her analysis, Colley treats Britishness as a superimposition upon the other identities co-existing within the United Kingdom. There was layering and intertwining of identities. The Scots did not forget they were Scottish while they enjoyed the fruits of empire. John MacKenzie has gone one step further by proposing that the empire, rather than helping to forge a British national identity ‘gave the Scots the means to sustain and strengthen their own distinctive national identity’.9 Graeme Morton, in his analysis of the early Victorian era, attempts to reconcile Colley and MacKenzie by suggesting both patterns took hold – a willing acceptance of a new British identity alongside a reinvigorated sense of pride in being Scottish.10 While there are different perspectives among scholars who have written on the empire and Scotland, all agree that Scotland thrived within the empire. This view is not confined to academic writers. In his columns for Glasgow’s biggest (and generally pro-Union) newspaper, the Herald, Norman Macwhirter has reminded his thousands of readers of Scotland’s debt to empire: [In 1707] Scottish merchants and money-lenders got what they wanted: access to the lucrative markets created by the British Empire. By the 1750s, they had started to make good money out of tobacco, the slave plantations of Jamaica and the cotton trade, which helped fuel Scotland’s mills in the early industrial revolution. Meanwhile, many lower-class

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Scots, some of whom had fought for Bonnie Prince Charlie against Cumberland’s redcoats in the ’45, were enlisted into the British army and became the shock troops of the empire.11

Given the historical salience of the British Empire for Scots, the end of empire in the middle decades of the twentieth century had a profound impact. In 1977 Tom Nairn drew attention to the significance of this historical moment in his pioneering book The Break Up of Britain. ‘Maintenance of the Union’, he argued, ‘always relied overwhelmingly upon an external reach and policy – imperialism, and its long-running aftermath.’12 Christopher Bryant, and many other scholars, have since agreed with Nairn that the end of empire raised basic questions about Scotland’s place in the United Kingdom: ‘in the second half of the twentieth century the Union ceased to offer economic advantage, leading many to conclude that it was time for Scotland to withdraw and make a different future.’13 The same point was made in more personal terms by Steve Bruce in the collection of narratives edited by Tom Devine and Paddy Logue on Being Scottish: ‘We have lost our empire, and with it one of the reasons for the Union.’14 In short, if the British Empire were still a flourishing global enterprise it is unlikely there would be much support in Scotland for breaking up the Union. The case of jute provides some unexpected insights into the impact of the end of empire on Scotland. The story of Dundee’s role in helping to establish, and then run, the jute industry in Calcutta seems to fit with the classic case that the empire was beneficial for Scotland. However, it turns out that being part of the empire was not always helpful to the economic well-being of Scotland’s jute industry. The jute story also provides examples of condescending English attitudes towards Scots, even when the empire was still a going concern. The strange case of jute brings out some paradoxical dimensions to Scotland’s relationship with England and the empire in the twentieth century. John MacKenzie and Tom Devine, in their overview of ‘Scots in the Imperial Economy’, point out that ‘few regions of the United Kingdom developed such a strikingly symbiotic relationship with imperial territories’.15 Dundee’s relationship with Calcutta seems a prime example of that symbiosis at work. The ingenuity and energy of Scottish engineers and entrepreneurs got the industry started in the 1830s, and for twenty years or so Dundee mills and factories enjoyed a monopoly in world jute production. Dundee’s expertise began to be transferred to Calcutta, and eventually helped to create the world’s largest jute manufacturing centre. When Dundee’s Liberal Member of Parliament, John Leng, made a fact-finding visit to India in 1896 he reflected this Dundee sense of pride and primacy by describing Calcutta as ‘the [ 67 ]

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Indian Dundee’.16 From the time the first jute mill was established in Calcutta in 1855, Dundee expertise played a significant role in building and sustaining the Calcutta industry. When the British Association held its annual meeting in Dundee in 1912, a brochure produced to mark the occasion noted that ‘the overseers, managers, and mechanics in the Indian jute mills were almost wholly recruited from Dundee’.17 British travellers who went to India and commented on the jute industry invariably referred to the hardworking Dundonians who were running the factories. In 1926 Tom Johnston, the current Labour MP for Dundee, and John Sime, the Secretary of the Jute and Flax Workers Union, led a delegation to Calcutta to enquire into working conditions. They reminded their readers that most of the European assistants and managers in the Calcutta mills were Dundonians – ‘about 900 hail from Dundee!’ they declared with evident pride.18 As the Indian Industrial Commission Report for 1918 observed, ‘the association of the Calcutta jute industry with the East Coast of Scotland has throughout remained intimate. The majority of the European staffs are of Dundee extraction, and most of the experts in the managing firms are Scottish.’19 A thick network of social, business and engineering connections linked the two cities. In 1909, at a meeting of the Indian Jute Mills Association, representatives of the Calcutta mills agreed to take up a special collection to support the extension of the Dundee Technical College in recognition of its role as the main provider of a skilled work force for the Calcutta mills. They ‘very gladly endorsed the appeal’ and urged all the Calcutta mills ‘to come forward to help an Institute which has meant so much to Calcutta in the past, and will mean much more in years to come. For the jute industry owes its inception to Dundee, and for those capitalists engaged in Bengal to make possible, by their subscription, the completion of the Institution where jute workers are trained would be a peculiarly graceful and appropriate act.’20 This close relationship remained in place right down to the Second World War and Indian independence. A report of the Indian Central Jute Committee, written as late as 1941, confirmed that mill clerks and assistants ‘are recruited either from mills or offices of Dundee jute merchants … Most of them hold the certificates of the Dundee Technical College and have a sound working knowledge of mill procedure.’21 The Scottish workers who went out to the Calcutta mills were enmeshed in the empire. Like all Scots who ventured to India they wanted to make their fortunes – or at least earn much more money than they could have made had they stayed in Britain. As Eugenie Fraser, wife of a mill manager, candidly admitted, the chief goal for all the Dundee men who went to work in India ‘was simply to improve [ 68 ]

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their lot and make some money’.22 But the status of ordinary British people was enhanced by the empire setting as soon as they set sail from Tilbury docks. Malcolm Muggeridge, on his way out to take up a teaching post at a Christian College in South India, noticed how passengers behaved once the P&O liner, the SS Morea, got past Gibraltar: As the voyage proceeded, I noticed a strange transformation in my fellow-passengers. They had come aboard as more or less ordinary middle- or lower-middle class English … Now they were changing, the men becoming more assertive, the ladies more la-di-da … moving nearer and nearer to Memsahib status and invitations to Government House. Luncheon was tiffin, a whisky and soda a chota peg, and instead of calling for a steward, the cry was ‘Boy!’. By Port Said the change was complete … Wherever our ship put in now, we were met by a launch flying the Union Jack, with British Officers aboard … For the first time I became aware of the British Empire, not just as a lot of red on the map … but as a geographical entity. In this part of the world, it was clear, we were the lords of creation.23

This was similar to the transformation experienced by many of the jute men and women in Calcutta. When Eugenie Fraser arrived with her husband at the Lawrence mills she discovered to her delight that the ‘whole compound [where they were to live], including gardens, tennis courts and the swimming pool by the backdoor of our bungalow, was looked after by an army of gardeners and servants’. On her first evening, she took quiet pleasure in being salaamed ‘by the bearer and the cook who were standing on the veranda waiting to welcome me’.24 Another telling example of the status that could be achieved by ordinary Scots in Calcutta was on display in 1938 when James Patterson retired after thirty-three years working at the Gourepore Jute Mills. In a series of testimonials, the Indian staff praised Patterson in reverential terms: ‘We are all assembled here today on the eve of your retirement to express our feelings of affection and gratitude and regret for one we have learnt to respect and honour for 33 years. We are immensely grateful to you for what you have done for us.’ They worried what would happen to them now that Patterson was returning to Scotland – ‘who will guide us in our hazardous situation, and who will behave like a father, brother, friend, and Master at a time?’ A letter from the workers in the weaving department expressed their ‘love and gratitude towards our Master’. As Patterson sailed back to London yet another message of appreciation reached him. This was a letter from Shrindranath Das and the other Indian clerical assistants at Gourepore: ‘We recall with deep delight your manifold acts of kindness you extended over us, and the love with which you captivated our hearts. We always looked upon you more as a real friend and guide than as [ 69 ]

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the Taskmaster.’ The letter was printed on silk cloth (still carefully preserved in the University of Dundee Archives) and was addressed to ‘James D. Patterson Esq., Homeward Bound, 1st. Saloon Passenger per S.S. Mulbera, c/o Agents British India Steam Navigation Company Ltd., Port Said, Egypt’.25 Patterson had made money in Calcutta, but he had also, because of the colonial context, earned a higher social status than he could have achieved working in the Dundee mills. The empire had given him prestige. In this setting, pride in being Scottish was joined to pride in the empire. This uplifting view of Scotland’s place in the empire was on display in Calcutta at the annual St Andrew’s Day Dinner. The celebration of Scotland’s patron saint marked the opening of the cold season, with its horse racing, fancy-dress balls, official receptions, and the Christmas and New Year parties. It was the grandest civic ritual of the year for the European community. It was, noted the Statesman newspaper, ‘the most important non-official forum in India’.26 These St Andrew’s Day celebrations took place throughout British India with Scottish contributions to empire celebrated in formulaic, whiskyeased speeches.27 At these tribal celebrations of Britishness the jute wallahs were given an honourable historical pedigree stretching back to the eighteenth century. The burra sahib at James Finlay’s, J. A. Tassie, asserted that ‘we merchants of Calcutta are the descendants of those merchant adventurers [of the East India Company]’.28 When Lord Linlithgow, head of the Royal Commission on Agriculture that was then touring India, stopped off in Calcutta, he was invited to be the principal speaker at the 1926 St Andrew’s Day Dinner. This future Viceroy of India delighted his audience by reminding them that if Dr Johnson were alive he would say ‘the noblest prospect the Scotsman ever sees is the high road that leads to India’. The conventional praise of Scottish empire-builders was always inflected by jute references. At his first appearance at the dinner in 1919 Lord Ronaldshay, then the Governor of Bengal, endeared himself to the assembly by referring to the Calcutta Scotsman who ‘has made jute grow to fifteen feet where it only grew to twelve before’. The following year he played to this familiar theme when he told his audience that ‘I have heard it said that if one closes one’s eyes when walking down Clive Street, or when strolling over a jute mill, it is quite easy to imagine oneself in Aberdeen or Glasgow’. In a 1925 editorial the Statesman pointed out that it was impossible ‘to think of Calcutta without its jute … and without its St Andrew’s Day Dinner’.29 The Scots who worked in the jute mills were well aware that there was a hierarchy within the European community. At the top were [ 70 ]

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the men who ran India – the Viceroy, the Governor of Bengal, and the mandarins of the Indian Civil Service; then came the Army officers, followed by the executive-level businessmen in the head-offices on Clive Street. Eugenie Fraser described the social structure as akin ‘to some high ladder stretching away to the skies, at the top of which was the heaven-born body of the Indian Civil Service, followed by the Army – guardians of the realm. Far down the social ladder were the box wallahs, the businessmen, Indian and European, residing in Calcutta, that great Metropolis and centre of trade and commerce.’30 While aware of their lowly position in this hierarchy, the staff from Dundee still felt part of the empire. The ornamental aspects of empire were one obvious aspect which enabled Scots in Calcutta to feel that they were part of a grand project. This sense of the theatre of empire struck Fraser when she arrived in Calcutta. As she and her husband drove from the docks into the city they ‘passed Belvedere, the imposing residence of the Viceroy when visiting Calcutta, during which time could be seen the handsome Bengal Lancers on horseback guarding the gates’.31 The jute wallahs were near the bottom of this imperial show but they still saw themselves as an integral part of it. As Fraser sat with her husband on the veranda of their bungalow watching the brightly lit P&O steamers slipping down the Hooghly on the long voyage back to Britain, she ruminated about the place of the humble jute wallahs in the empire: It is my belief that great as the achievements of the Indian Civil Service and the Army [were], trade and commerce also gave an equal measure of themselves to India, and if it had not been for the box-wallahs of Calcutta, and the great industrial forces, from the men at the top to the most junior assistants sweating in the mills, the jewel in the crown would not have been so bright.32

For Eugenie and Ronald Fraser, and for all those speakers at St. Andrews Days Dinners in Calcutta, the jute expatriates from Dundee were part of a great imperial enterprise that had its origins in the eighteenthcentury and, in the hands of capable Scots like James Patterson, was still flourishing. It was a story of British success in which Scottish men and women were playing a humble but essential role in burnishing the jewel in the crown. Empires, however, are not exempt from the law of unintended consequences. In the case of jute, the unintended outcome was that Calcutta began producing far more jute than Dundee. By 1900 the Calcutta industry dwarfed its Dundee counterpart. In 1911, the peak year for employment in the Dundee jute mills, the total labour force reached 37,000 workers. When Calcutta achieved its peak in 1928 there were [ 71 ]

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339,000 workers, almost twice as numerous as the entire population of Dundee.33 In 1919 Ernest Cox, owner of the Cox mills in Lochee, warned of ‘the probability of the home market being swamped by cheap Calcutta made goods’.34 In 1936, Florence Horsbrugh, the Conservative MP for Dundee, spoke in apocalyptic terms of ‘a new terror’ for Dundee workers as imports from India surged 125 per cent higher than they had been in 1935. ‘If something is not done, and done quickly,’ she starkly warned, ‘the jute trade of the United Kingdom will cease to exist.’35 The Scottish jute industry was now threatened by a rival from within the empire. The opening battle in the rhetorical war between the two cities began in the last decade of the nineteenth century when the Dundee Advertiser wrote an editorial drawing attention to the multiple shift system and use of electric lighting in the Calcutta factories which kept the machines working for more hours than the Dundee mills. The editorial demanded an investigation into working conditions in Calcutta to bring the Indian industry into line with the Factory Acts in the United Kingdom. The Calcutta mill-owners immediately accused their Dundee counterparts of hypocrisy in claiming to be concerned about the plight of the Indian workers. At the Indian Jute Mills Association annual meeting in 1895 George Lyall declared that ‘the Dundee Chamber of Commerce has told us quite frankly that their object is to put a stop to a competition which threatens serious danger to them, and that to effect their purpose they will go direct to the British Government, and demand that we shall be under the same Factory Act as they have in Dundee.’36 Dundee did ‘go direct to the British Government’. They pleaded their case time and time again, but London always refused to help. Dundee’s case ran into two obstacles. The more obdurate of these in the early years of the century was the prevailing free-trade orthodoxy which made it anathema to attempt to shape and regulate trade through targeted tariffs and other protective mechanisms. The second obstacle was imperial politics. Any policy by the British government to rein in Calcutta was viewed as an attempt to curtail economic growth in India. This was a particularly sensitive matter as the campaign for Indian independence heated up in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s. Limiting manufacturing output in Calcutta would undermine British claims that they were ruling India for the benefit of Indians. These two views were made abundantly evident when the Dundee manufacturers asked the Associated Chambers of Commerce of the United Kingdom to back their demands. The British Chamber refused to join the protest against Calcutta, and proceeded to warn Dundee of ‘the dangers of inter-meddling with the interests of the largest popula[ 72 ]

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tion subject to the British Crown’. In a patronising tone, the British Chamber then lectured their Dundee counterparts on lessons they should have learned from earlier imperial history – ‘the policy which inspired the Dundee resolutions was the same policy that lost England the North American colonies’.37 This dismaying dynamic from Dundee’s viewpoint was demonstrated in 1919 when the newly formed Dundee Association of Jute Spinners and Manufacturers made its plea to the British government. Ernest Cox, the first Chairman of the Association, feared that higher wages and other production costs in Dundee raised ‘the probability of the home market being swamped by cheap Calcutta made goods’. The only option left was to appeal to London for quotas, or import duties, or even outright prohibition of the importation of certain classes of jute goods. The India Office rebuffed Dundee’s pleas in blunt terms: the prohibition of Indian imports was inconceivable ‘on the grounds that India had put all her strength behind Great Britain and her allies during the war, and that such an act against her biggest industry would be a peculiar way of repaying India for her services’.38 The Dundee delegates had no more luck with Winston Churchill, the city’s Liberal MP from 1908 to 1922. Churchill met the Dundee jute men in his rooms at the War Office on 15 April 1919. His reply was as comprehensively dismissive as that of the India Office. ‘It was a problem of extreme difficulty’ Churchill explained to his Dundee constituents, ‘as any prohibition in this case would be against one of the Dependencies of the Empire, and further, any form of protection would be against the Free Trade principles of the Government.’39 Dundee returned to the fray in the crisis years of the 1930s. The twin impact of the Depression and increased output in Calcutta put enormous pressure on the Scottish manufacturers. On 30 August 1935, H. A. F. Lindsay, Director of the Imperial Institute and former Indian Trade Commissioner in Britain, met with James Robertson, Chairman of the Dundee Chamber of Commerce, and Ernest Cox, at that time chairman of the Fiscal Committee of the Association of Jute Spinners and Manufacturers, to discuss the intensifying crisis. In a letter to the Department of Overseas Trade, Lindsay had already sketched out how dire the situation had become: ‘Dundee mill owners fear that if this policy is adopted [ending the short-time agreement in Calcutta and increasing production], the Calcutta manufacturers will be able to undersell Dundee in the U.K. market even more effectively than they do at present.’ Robertson forlornly told his colleagues that ‘if we go to the Board of Trade, they will have to do something’.40 In their desperate search for help from the British government, the Dundee Chamber of Commerce wrote to the Board of Trade in January [ 73 ]

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1936, and followed up by sending yet another delegation to London in March of that year. They employed a London barrister, Archibald Crawford, who specialised in lobbying government departments, to assist them in making their case. Crawford sought some guidance on the gravity of the crisis. ‘Had the trade made up its mind’, he asked Cox, ‘that the case was a grave one? If nothing was done, would the Trade go to the wall? Was the Indian position a real threat? Was it a fight for life or was it not?’ Cox replied with appropriate gravity to this series of questions on Dundee’s plight that ‘the outlook at the present time appeared to be more serious than anything the Trade had ever had to face before’.41 This time Dundee had energetic help from one of its MPs. Florence Horsbrugh, the Conservative MP, encouraged by the turn to tariffs in the 1930s and by the efforts to organise intra-empire trade, threw her weight behind Dundee’s complaints. Dundee finally had an MP down in London who would fight for the jute industry. Horsbrugh’s persistent efforts led to the Dundee–Calcutta matter being aired in a Parliamentary debate for the first time. She made no bones about it in her opening speech to the Commons in July 1936 – Dundee’s dire condition was due to unfair Calcutta competition. The expanded production in Calcutta, following the decision of the Calcutta mills to end their short-time agreement and open sealed looms, was the root problem ‘During the last few years we have watched the great increase in the imports of manufactured goods from India’, she explained to the House. ‘The policy of restriction which was undertaken there has failed, and this year we have seen the last of the sealed looms unsealed, and the hours of work increased.’ In dramatic language she declared that ‘if something is not done, and done quickly, the jute trade of the United Kingdom will cease to exist’.42 But even at this critical juncture Dundee’s case suffered from lack of support. Labour members, like Emanuel Shinwell, who participated in the debate, found themselves in an awkward position. Shinwell was sympathetic to the terrible poverty of workers in Dundee but his Marxist ideology made him critical of imperialism, and sympathetic to workers round the world. He could not argue in favour of placing any burdens on Calcutta because that policy would hurt Indian workers, and was an example of imperial exploitation in India. All that Shinwell could suggest was an international conference to set global standards for wages and working conditions.43 There was no help either from Dingle Foot, the city’s Liberal MP, who complacently declared his faith in the traditional free-trade policies that had stood Britain in such good stead over the past hundred years. He thought Shinwell’s proposal for an international conference [ 74 ]

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to be ‘utterly fantastic’. The only solution he could suggest was for an agreement between the two industries themselves, or for the British and Indian governments to rule that certain classes of goods would not be made in Calcutta. He concluded with the pious hope that in the current trade negotiations between Britain and India, the British negotiators would ‘consistently have regard to the peculiar position of the community of Dundee and the surrounding district, and their dependence in such a singular degree upon one industry’.44 A more thoughtful contribution to the debate was made by James Alexander Duncan, who sat as a Conservative and Unionist for North Kensington but who had close ties with Dundee (he later represented South Angus from 1950 to 1964). Duncan, whose family estate was in Perthshire, was a founder and life-governor of the Dundee Institute of Arts, and had witnessed for himself the distress in Dundee. He agreed with Foot that tariffs or quotas would not work because India could simply ‘raise the existing tax on raw materials to a point at which it would meet any tariffs we put on’. Duncan reflected a common view in Dundee by speaking in somewhat bewildered language about the relationship with India. ‘In a way, this is a new problem’, he told the House, ‘Our old conception of the Dominions and Colonies was that they were mainly raw material producers, and that we, and other Continental countries, were the manufacturing nations. But this is one of the few cases where a Dominion product competes with European products.’ The core issue at stake was ‘the whole question of Asiatic competition with European standards’.45 Hope for intervention was revived in Dundee with the election of the Labour government in 1945. These hopes were raised when no less a figure than Sir Stafford Cripps came to Dundee to discuss the future of the jute industry. Cripps, serving as President of the Board of Trade in the new government, had been a significant figure in the war years – above all, when he was sent by Churchill to India in 1942 to discuss possible political solutions with Jawaharlal Nehru, Mohandas Gandhi, Mohammed Ali Jinnah and other leaders of India’s campaign for independence. Now Cripps was on a mission to explore ways of saving Dundee. There was ‘a very large attendance’ at the meeting held in the Royal Exchange Building. The room was filled with representatives from sixty-eight firms involved in jute, along with the wartime Jute Controller, and delegates from the trade unions. This momentous meeting turned out to be a bleak reminder of how little Dundee could expect from any British government. The briefing papers prepared by the experts at the Board of Trade made it clear to Cripps that he should on no account promise any actions against Calcutta. ‘There is no doubt that the Indian competition is a serious [ 75 ]

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challenge to the Dundee industry’, the Board of Trade experts warned, but they pointed out that Bengal ‘has the advantage of not only of growing the raw jute but also had cheap labour’. The intra-empire trade arrangements made at Ottawa in 1932 prevented Britain from placing any discriminatory tariffs against other parts of the empire. Cripps was advised to steer the Dundee negotiators away from any discussion of anti-Calcutta measures. The Dundee representatives stubbornly refused to be brushed aside. The Chairman of the Association of Jute Spinners and Manufacturers, P. Ewart Jack, welcomed Cripps with flattering remarks about his 1942 mission ‘to settle the very difficult Indian problem’, and then told Cripps about Dundee’s ‘Indian problem’. Jack summarised Dundee petitioning in the 1930s, and reminded Cripps that a Post-War Planning Committee had warned of the need to protect the industry ‘with regard to these abnormal importations [from India]’.46 Cripps declined to be drawn. The situation had not changed since 1900. No government in London was prepared to act against India by restraining Calcutta jute exports. Once India did become independent, Dundee finally achieved some of the relief it had been seeking since the 1890s. During the 1950s and 1960s the British government continued the Jute Control system, put in place during the war, which regulated prices and gave some shelter to Dundee in the home market.47 While these policies helped sustain jute manufacturing down to the 1960s, it was too late to save the industry. Dundee’s jute industry gradually but inexorably wound down. In 1950 there were still 19,000 workers employed in jute; by the 1980s the number had dwindled to less than 1,000. On 19 October 1998 the Banglar Urmi from Chittagong docked in Dundee with the final shipment of 310 tons of raw jute. The last bale was processed in May 1999, and in August a ship sailed back to Bengal taking Taybank mill’s power looms with it, sold to the jute magnate G. J. Wardwha of Champdany Industries in Kolkata. The jute era in Dundee came to an end in the last year of the twentieth century. Throughout the twentieth century there had been a sense of impending doom surrounding Dundee’s jute industry. Successive governments in London – whether Liberal, Conservative or Labour – did nothing to help because of imperial policy imperatives. In contrast to the other textile industry regions of Britain, Dundee had only a puny political clout at Westminster. The cotton industry could count on from sixty to eighty MPs representing textile towns in Lancashire and Yorkshire while Dundee could muster a mere two. And the jute industry could not even count on those two. Dundee’s MPs were always stumped about what could be done. Even in the depths of the Depression, Horsbrugh and Foot could not mount a united campaign. [ 76 ]

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And Winston Churchill, the most influential MP Dundee had in the twentieth century, explicitly declined to fight for the city’s industry. In these circumstances the Dundee jute community often felt abandoned by the London government. At the large meeting of owners and workers held in 1945 they told Cripps that Dundee jute was ‘the Cinderella of the Textile Industries’.48 The empire had been a problem for Dundee throughout the entire course of the twentieth century. Some Scots in Calcutta had a different kind of problem. Even when the empire seemed to be working well for the Dundee jute men and women, there were warning signs that this particular Scottish sector within the British community was viewed as subordinate. This feature of British life in Calcutta is captured in the memoirs of Monica Clough whose husband, as she phrased it, was ‘the No.1 of the Calcutta branch of James Finlay’. She described the Scots jute people as ‘by definition, narrower in their interests than any others in the British community … as they never left their comfortable compounds except to visit other compounds and their Scots inhabitants’. Clough has provided us with a thick description (from her vantage point) of British society in Calcutta prior to the outbreak of war in 1939. ‘The pre-war years were in the sunset tradition of empire, and the mem-sahibs were very conscious of their place in an invisible hierarchy of their husbands’ firms’ importance. The pecking order, unlike the Official Gazette of the ICS, and associated services, was never formalised or written down, but was just as socially binding.’ According to Clough, the wives at the upper levels made minute enquiries into the social and educational credentials of all new arrivals to gauge their place in the hierarchy of British society in Calcutta: Sitting round and reading the latest Tatlers and Bystanders, and occasionally, the Illustrated London News (for the highbrows), and Punch of course, was a much less taxing ploy than tennis or croquet on the noble lawns of Ballygunge or Alipore. Burra mem-sahibs were apt to inquire exhaustively into the family connections and the schooling of new additions to the firm, male or female. Had the Home directors sent out One of Us to join the circle or not?49

The Frasers from Dundee soon discovered they were not ‘One of Us’. Upon Ronald Fraser’s promotion to the position of mill manager, they received ‘an invitation from the directors to a cocktail party’. Such invitations were sent out, as part of the cold season social calendar, to all senior members in the various departments of the managing agency companies – jute, coal, paper and so on. Fraser described the small talk that took place, including expressions of delight by one of the directors or a director’s wife – ‘How nice to meet you Mrs. Fraser’ or ‘Glad you [ 77 ]

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were able to come along’. Fraser learned not to take this at face value. The morning after one of these affairs, during which the hostess ‘had gushed over me with great warmth as we stood together in her garden’, Fraser spied her hostess on Chowringee. ‘Good morning Lady ____, I greeted her in a friendly tone. She raised her head and stared coldly straight into my eyes and turned away without the slightest sign of recognition.’ The Scottish men who worked in the mills, and their wives, referred to these cocktail parties as ‘the Menial’s Ball’.50 There were many signs in Calcutta of these class tensions within the British community. They can be seen in the notes of Edward Benthall when he came back to Britain on a recruiting trip in 1935. Benthall was a director at Bird and Company, and he owned a country house near Teignmouth in Devon. He was looking for staff for a range of positions in Calcutta, from an assistant editor of Capital, the business paper financed by Bird’s and other managing agency companies, to accountants for the head-offices on Clive Street, as well as assistants for the jute mills. For the higher-level positions Benthall interviewed public schoolboys who had gone to Oxford or Cambridge (as long as they took safe Seconds or Thirds for their degrees). Benthall was very pleased with a prospect he found for an assistant in the Titighur Paper Mill: G. K. Young struck Benthall ‘as one of the best young men that I have seen lately … His age is 21 or 22, and he has just taken a degree – A Second in Chemistry and a Third in Geology … He seems just the type we want in the firm – appears to be ambitious and manly.’ Young had an additional appeal because he had ties to the Indian Civil Service: ‘I think that he is the brother of Mrs. Russell whose Husband is the Financial Secretary in Bihar and Orissa.’ When Benthall took the train up to Dundee to recruit for the jute mills he set his sights lower. He was looking for ‘a good class of Scotch boy from the Dundee district.’ He interviewed one promising prospect whom he did ‘not consider outstanding … but a good average type of boy with a good deal of commonsense.’ He subsequently interviewed several applicants at a friend’s home in Dundee. A typical example was William Ure, who had been educated at Harris Academy (a state school), worked in jute since the age of sixteen, and was now with the Victoria Spinning Company. Benthall noted that ‘he plays tennis for the Lockie [Lochee] Tennis club and is Secretary of the Belmont Swimming club … He does not read, except in the winter when he reads chiefly thrillers.’ Ure knew several Dundonians already out in Calcutta and, added Benthall, ‘he always wanted to go to India as does every young man in Dundee, as trade there is not good and there are no prospects’. Benthall summed him up as ‘just the normal type that we take on in Calcutta’.51 [ 78 ]

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The cultural and class distinctions that ran through Benthall’s interviewing in 1935 were reflected, as we have seen in Clough’s vivid commentaries, within the British community in Calcutta. David Cannadine has argued that the empire was ‘the vehicle for the extension of British social structures, and the setting for the projection of British social perceptions’.52 Denizens in many colonial settings produced ‘the vernacular image of the domestic, ranked social hierarchy’ that they imagined to be the essence of Britishness. In communities like Calcutta the ranking was particularly intense because the entire range of British class categories was present – from the Governor of Bengal to the assistant in the jute mill. Leonard Woolf found the same social pathologies in the British community when he arrived as a civil service cadet in Colombo, Ceylon. ‘It is all “sets” and exclusiveness’, he wrote savagely to Lytton Strachey.53 Ann Stoler has described a similar phenomenon within the Dutch colonial community in Java. Stoler argues that these ‘internal tensions’ within the expatriate communities helped Europeans to maintain the distinction between themselves and the local peoples. Putting their own social markers on display was one element in ‘the quotidian assertion of European dominance’.54 Back in Calcutta Sir Anthony Howard, ‘the last British No.1 at Shaw Wallace’, described how recruits for the Managing Agency Houses in the 1940s and 1950s were still appraised in explicit class terms: ‘Standards were not necessarily as high as those demanded by firms like Burmah Shell, where a Blue or a First Class Honours degree were a prerequisite to promotion, but generally graduates of the older universities with a penchant for sports, and connections in the East, were preferred.’55 Members of the expatriate community in Calcutta might all be British, they might mix at cocktail parties, they might share feelings of empire solidarity at the St Andrew’s Day festivities, but they were all aware of that ladder of status which Eugenie Fraser noted soon after her arrival. The Dundee jute men were pretty low down on the ladder. Monica Clough waspishly summed up their predicament when she described the annual Caledonian Ball at the Tollygunge Club. ‘This was great fun because of the reels danced with skill and enthusiasm, but it was considered by the real snobs to be a bit down market because of the prevalence of jute wallahs and jute walli – not good news socially.’56 The Dundee jute industry was like the canary in the coal mine – its death showed what would happen when British manufacturers were faced with Asian competition. The decline of Dundee’s jute industry in the face of competition from its intra-imperial rival in Calcutta was an early example of what was to happen to many industries in Europe and North America in the second half of the twentieth century. Dundee [ 79 ]

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mills and factories disappeared because jute goods could be produced more cheaply and efficiently in India and Pakistan, and then, after 1970, in Bangladesh. Niall Ferguson and John Darwin, among other historians, have argued that the British Empire was a precursor to the economic globalisation that is now shaping the world economy.57 The decline of jute in Dundee confirms that within the empire system the forces of economic globalisation were already at work. For Dundonians the impact of the empire was at best ambiguous. The empire did provide opportunities in India, and there was an inertial pull even after 1947 as Dundee jute men continued to find jobs in independent India (and other places round the world where jute was manufactured). But since 1900 the empire had presented a problem for Dundee because Britain’s imperial responsibilities in India prevented any mitigating action against Calcutta competition. As Benthall noticed during his 1935 visit to the city, ordinary Dundonians still looked to India for opportunities, but those who ran the jute industry knew that Calcutta production doomed the home jute industry to extinction. The empire economic and political systems run from London had not worked well for Dundee for most of the twentieth century. But empires have complex dynamics and it is not possible to accept the simple indictment of the Calcutta mills on behalf of Dundee. Calcutta’s sharp retort was that the Calcutta mills’ system of shorttime working agreements helped to keep a floor under world jute prices and so actually sustained the Dundee industry. Moreover, back in Scotland and England there were companies that benefited from industrial expansion in India. Companies even in the Dundee region – such as William Low and Company of Monifieth – which manufactured jute-mill machinery were opposed to any checks on the expansion of Bengal factories. Back in 1896 Leng had noticed boilers in the Calcutta mills made by Pearce Brothers of Dundee, Beely of Manchester, and Fairbairn of Leeds. By the 1930s the Scottish companies in Glasgow and Paisley that manufactured bobbins and shuttles for textile mills sold about 90 per cent of their output to India. The Dundee jute manufacturers themselves sometimes worked at crosspurposes with each other. In the same year as a Dundee delegation was complaining vociferously to the India Office about Calcutta competition, the owners of the Angus Jute Works sold their entire plant to Marwari businessmen. It is not surprising that Dundee manufacturers and union leaders never found any allies anywhere else in Scotland during the entire course of their campaigns against Calcutta.58 The playing out of the jute story also showed that there were fissures beneath the carapace of British identity. The distancing and disdain expressed by some upper-class English people in Calcutta, from [ 80 ]

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THE STRANGE CASE OF JUTE

Monica Clough’s snobbish comments on the Scottish jute community to Edward Benthall’s patrician assumptions about the kind of men he hired in Dundee, were signs of this latent fault-line. It was as if a small alarm-bell had sounded in these twilight years of empire. The empire-influenced British identity that had been constructed since 1707 was fully on display across India in all those St Andrew’s Day speeches celebrating joint Scottish and English contributions to the building and maintaining of the Indian empire. Scots and English in India could also share a sense of racial superiority measured against the Indian ‘other’. But beneath the surface show of empire, some older currents of Scottish–English tensions were still working their effects. The layering and intertwining of Scottish and British identities was beginning to come apart. There is no direct connection between that feature of the Dundee– Calcutta jute story and the emergence of a more successful political expression of Scottish nationalism from the 1970s onwards. But as the shared enterprise of empire disintegrated, some of the traditional tensions between Scots and English began to find more space to express themselves in British political culture. As he collected material from people throughout Scotland on the theme of ‘being Scottish’, Tom Devine noticed how many defined themselves with reference to the English. He was struck by the remarkable number of participants who ‘refer to the English … in delineating the sense of identity’.59 As long as the empire was flourishing in India, as long as wars were being fought, as long as money was being made, as long as colonial bureaucracies were being expanded, there had been a sense that Scots and English were in it together. As the empire disintegrated, the sense of British solidarity began to fray. The snobbish put-downs of the Scottish jute men and women in Calcutta validated some old Scottish resentments about being on the receiving end of displays of an assumed English superiority. Similar resentments emerged in the 1980s as Margaret Thatcher appeared to treat Scottish people with contempt. ‘Here at least,’ Christopher Bryant remarks, ‘Scottish complaints about English arrogance were well founded.’60 When the government of David Cameron took power Scots found themselves living in a United Kingdom where ‘Downing Street has become again an annex to the playing fields of Eton.’61 With no economic gain from empire any more, it became easier for many Scots to point the finger at London, experiment with devolution and debate the prospects of independence. It is not as simple as that of course. The Scottish community was, and is, as fissured by class as the English. Notwithstanding the frequent comparisons made between Scotland and Norway in this era of North [ 81 ]

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Sea oil, Tom Nairn has pointed out that Scotland is not as homogeneous socially as the Scandinavian countries. Scotland ‘has always been remarkable for dizzying contrasts of wealth and power’.62 Christopher Bryant has extended this point by reminding us that ‘Scots can easily agree they are not English, but talk of “we Scottish people” can quickly expose divisions of class, ethnic origin (Scottish, Irish, English, Other), religion, and occasional residues of the once significant division between the Highlands and the Lowlands.’63 In Bengal in the 1930s, while the Scottish jute community was kept in its lowly place by some of the local English upper-crust, Bengal was ruled by two Scotsmen. Sir John Anderson, the Governor of Bengal, and R. N. Gilchrist, a Chief Secretary, were both Scots. During the 1932 jute crisis when the Indian Jute Mills Association was pleading for government intervention, Gilchrist excoriated the jute companies for their greed, and described their request for help as ‘a filthy proposal’.64 These two mandarins were Scots who had been educated at public schools and ‘the older universities’. They both held some of the then conventional prejudices of that class against men in trade. For this upper class of anglicised Scotsmen the United Kingdom continued to offer opportunities even after the end of empire. They were latterday examples of the mingling of the Scottish and English elites so well described by Linda Colley. But for many ordinary Scots, once the romance and rewards of empire had disappeared, it became convenient once more to think about the perceived condescension of the English, and the alleged mistreatment by London. The shared enterprise of empire had ended, which left the field clear for insular perceptions and resentments to shape the future of the United Kingdom. When Eugenie Fraser first arrived in Calcutta she and her husband dined at Firpos on Chowringee. This restaurant, she had been informed, ‘was the meeting place for jute wallahs, tea planters, burra sahibs, and even at times, Maharajas’. She and her husband sat with friends at a veranda table looking out over the maidan. As ‘Calcutta’s sultry night was closing in’ they then drove down-river to a Hooghly dock where they would take a launch across the river to the Lawrence mills. As the small boat made its way across the darkening waters, she heard voices drifting into the night air. ‘The singing continued to accompany our crossing, but gradually died away as the launch approached the Lawrence jetty.’ She was being welcomed to India by the other jute managers and assistants with a serenade of Scottish songs, including ‘Far frae my home I wander / but still my heart returns.’65 For Fraser this was a familiar and authentic moment amidst the pomp of the mounted Bengal Lancers outside Government House, and the intimidating [ 82 ]

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social scene at Firpos. Robert McCreadie, in describing the renaissance in Scottish literature, art and music that has taken place since the 1970s, has drawn attention to ‘Scotland’s extraordinary wealth of folk music’, and claims that ‘there is a very direct link between musical nationalism and political nationalism’.66 Fraser’s welcome to Calcutta by other members of the Scottish jute community was an example of a connection between traditional songs and identity. At the opening of the Scottish Parliament on 1 July 1999, the occasion was marked with the communal singing of that most famous of Scottish folk songs, Robert Burns’ ‘A Man’s a Man for a’ That’, with its powerful cry of protest against class distinctions. In spite of the deep social divisions within Scotland, many Scots cleave to that selfimage – especially when contrasting themselves with the English. The experiences of the Scottish jute community in Calcutta, even when the empire was still functioning, had been a small harbinger of what might happen when the empire bond dissolved. At the opening of Parliament, the singing was led by Sheena Wellington, ‘Scotland’s leading traditional singer’, and winner of numerous awards, including recognition from the Heritage Society of Scotland for her outstanding contribution to Scottish culture. Sheena Wellington grew up in a working-class household in Dundee, and was educated at Harris Academy, just like William Ure, Benthall’s typical Dundee recruit for India.

Notes   1 ‘The Independence Debate in Scotland’, www.economist.com/blogs/bagehot/ 2012/01/independence-debate (acessed 20 November 2014).   2 Alex M. Cain, The Corn Chest of Scotland: Scots in India (Edinburgh, 1986), p. 7.   3 Eric Linklater, Fanfare for a Tin Hat A Third Essay in Autobiography (London, 1970), p. 187.   4 Tom M. Devine, Scotland’s Empire 1600–1815 (London, 2003), p. 388; Christopher G. A. Bryant, The Nations of Britain (Oxford, 2006), pp. 89–90.   5 Michael Hechter, Internal Colonialism: The Celtic Fringe in British National Development 1536–1966 (London, 1975); Bryant, The Nations of Britain, pp. 46–47.   6 Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (New Haven, 1992).   7 Bryant, The Nations of Britain, p. 36.   8 Colley, Britons, p. 117; Michael Fry, The Scottish Empire (Edinburgh, 2001); Tom M. Devine, Scotland’s Empire 1600–1815 (London, 2003), p. 388.   9 John M. MacKenzie, ‘Empire and National Identities: The Case of Scotland’, Transactions of the Scottish Historical Society, 6th Series, vol. 8, pp. 215–231. 10 Graeme Morton, Unionist-Nationalism: Governing Urban Scotland (Phantassie, East Lothian, 1999). 11 Ian Macwhirter, ‘Road to Referendum’, heraldscotland, www.heraldscotland.com/ comment/columnists/road to referendum.21228296 (accessed 20 November 2014). 12 Tom Nairn, The Break Up of Britain (Edinburgh, 2003), p. xxx. 13 Bryant, The Nations of Britain, p. 11. 14 Tom M. Devine and Paddy Logue (eds.), Being Scottish: Personal Reflections on Scottish Identity Today (Edinburgh, 2002), p. 41. Bruce is Professor of Sociology at the University of Aberdeen.

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MIGRATION, DIASPORA AND IDENTITIES 15 T. M. Devine and John M. MacKenzie, ‘Scots in the Imperial Economy’, in John M. MacKenzie and T. M. Devine (eds.), Scotland and the British Empire (Oxford, 2011), p. 227. 16 Sir John Leng MP, Letters from India and Ceylon, including the Manchester of India, the Indian Dundee, and the Calcutta Jute Mills 1895–1896 (Dundee, 1896), British Library. 17 British Association Handbook and Guide (London, 1912), quoted in Dipesh Chakrabarty, Re-Thinking Working-Class History: Bengal 1890–1940 (Princeton, 1989), p.  52. 18 Thomas Johnston and John F. Sime, Exploitation in India (Dundee, 1926), p. 3. City of Dundee Archives. 19 Report of the Indian Industrial Commission 1916–1918 (Calcutta, 1918), p. 10. 20 Indian Jute Mills Association: Report of the Committee 1908 (Calcutta, 1909), p.  18. 21 Indian Central Jute Committee, Report on Marketing (Calcutta, 1941), p. 52. Commercial Library, Calcutta. 22 Eugenie Fraser, A Home by the Hooghly (London, 1989), pp. 202–203. 23 Malcolm Muggeridge, Chronicles of Wasted Time (London, 1972), pp. 95–96. 24 Fraser, A Home by the Hooghly, pp. 19–20. 25 Indian Staff of the Gourepore Jute Mills to James Patterson, Gourepore, 4 May 1938; Farewell Address to James Patterson, 28 April 1938; To James Patterson from the Workers of the Weaving Department, n.d., University of Dundee Archives, MS 274/2/1/1, 2 and 3. 26 Editorial, ‘St Andrew’s Dinner’, The Statesman, 1 December 1928. 27 Elizabeth Buettner, ‘Haggis in the Raj: Private and Public Celebrations of Scottishness in Imperial India’, The Scottish Historical Review, Vol. 81 (October 2002), pp. 212–239. 28 ‘St Andrew’s Day: Mr Tassie on Business and Politics’, The Statesman, 1 December 1927. 29 ‘St Andrew’s Day Speeches’, The Statesman, 1 December 1926; ‘Lord Ronaldshay at the St Andrew’s Day Dinner’, The Statesman, 30 November 1919; ‘St Andrew: The Dinner Last Night’, The Statesman, 1 December 1920; ‘A Salute to Scotia’, The Statesman, 1 December 1925. 30 Fraser, A Home by the Hooghly, p. 109. 31 Ibid., p. 17. David Cannadine, Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire (London, 2002), p. 126. 32 Fraser, A Home by the Hooghly, pp. 51, 110. 33 Oliver Graham, ‘The Jute Industry of Dundee 1828–1928’, University of Dundee Archives, MS 15/1, p. 94; Government of India, India in 1929–1930 (Calcutta, 1931), p. 169. 34 Minutes of the Meeting of the Association of Jute Spinners and Manufacturers, 22 April 1919; Report of a Deputation to London in Regard to the Importation of Indian Manufactured Goods, 7 February 1919, AJSM Minutes 1918–1928, University of Dundee Archives, MS 84/3/1/1 (1). 35 Parliamentary Debates, 5th Series, Vol. 314, House of Commons, Session 1935–1936, cols. 2168–2169 (London, 1936). 36 George Lyall Speech, Proceedings of the Annual General Meeting of the IJMA, 4 March 1895, IJMA Report of the Committee 1895 (Calcutta, 1896), pp. 2–11. 37 S. E. J. Clarke to C. E. Buckland, Calcutta, 28 June 1895, IJMA Report 1895, Appendix F, pp. 60–61. 38 Report of a Deputation to London in Regard to the Importation of Indian Manufactured Goods, February 7, 1919, AJSAM Minutes 1918–1928, University of Dundee Archives, MS 84/3/1/1 (1). 39 Winston Churchill to William Henderson et al., ibid. 40 Meeting on Indian Imports with the President and Secretary of the Dundee Chamber of Commerce, October 16, 1935, AJSM Fiscal Sub-Committee, MS 84/5/3, U ­ niversity of Dundee Archives. 41 ‘Mr Crawford’s Publicity Memorandum’, AJSM Minutes, 27 February 1936, ibid.

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THE STRANGE CASE OF JUTE 42 Parliamentary Debates, 5th Series, House of Commons, Vol. 314, cols. 2168–2169, 15 July 1936. 43 Ibid., cols. 2180–2181. 44 Parliamentary Debates, 5th Series, House of Commons, Vol. 331, cols. 278–283. 45 Ibid., cols. 285–287. 46 Report of the Meeting of Producers, Merchants, Jute Brokers, and Trade Unions with the Rt Hon. Sir Stafford Cripps, President of the Board of Trade, Dundee, 14 December 1945, University of Dundee Archives, MS 84/6/1; Board of Trade, Jute Working Party Minutes, 3 January 1946, BT 64/3700, National Archives Kew. 47 Jim Tomlinson, Carlo Morelli and Valerie Wright, The Decline of Jute: Managing Industrial Change (London, 2011), provide the most thorough account, and emphasise the resilience of the industry and its workers. 48 Report of the Meeting of Producers, Merchants, Jute Brokers, and Trade Unions with the Rt Hon. Sir Stafford Cripps, President of the Board of Trade, Dundee, 14 December 1945, University of Dundee Archives, MS 84/6/1. 49 Stephanie Jones, Merchants of the Raj: British Managing Agency Houses in Calcutta Yesterday and Today (London and Basingstoke, 1992), pp. 74–75, 90, 217–218. 50 Fraser, A Home by the Hooghly, pp. 200–201. 51 Edward Benthall to J. A. McKerrow, London, 31 August 1935, 6 September 1935, 18 October 1935; Benthall to H. Morton, London, 2 September 1935, Benthall Papers, Box IX, University of Cambridge, South Asian Studies Centre. 52 Cannadine, Ornamentalism, p. xix. 53 Christopher Ondaatje, Woolf in Ceylon: An Imperial Journey in the Shadow of Leonard Woolf 1904–1911 (Toronto, 2005), p. 39. 54 Ann Stoler, ‘Making Empire Respectable: The Politics of Race and Sexual Morality in Twentieth-Century Colonial Cultures’, American Ethnologist, Vol. 16 (November 1989), pp. 634–660. See too Frederick Cooper and Ann Stoler (eds.), Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley, 1997), pp. 198–238. 55 Jones, Merchants of the Raj, p. 275. 56 Ibid., p. 217. 57 Niall Ferguson, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World (London, 2003); John Darwin, The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World System (Cambridge, 2009). 58 Gordon T. Stewart, Jute and Empire (Manchester, 1998), provides a comprehensive analysis of the Dundee–Calcutta relationship. See too Anthony Cox, Empire, Industry and Class: The Imperial Nexus of Jute 1840–1940 (London, 2013), and Jim Tomlinson, Dundee and the Empire: Juteopolis 1850–1939 (Edinburgh, 2014). 59 Devine and Logue (eds.), Being Scottish, p. xiii. 60 Bryant, The Nations of Britain, p. 95. 61 The phrase is Adam Gopnik’s in The New Yorker, 29 July 2012, p. 72. 62 Nairn, The Break Up of Britain, p. 181. 63 Bryant, The Nations of Britain, p. 63. 64 Stewart, Jute and Empire, pp. 110–113, explains Gilchrist’s animus against the millowners (a view which Anderson endorsed). 65 Fraser, A Home by the Hooghly, pp. 16–17. 66 Robert McCreadie, ‘Scottish Identity and the Constitution’, in Bernard Crick (ed.), National Identities: The Constitution of the United Kingdom (Oxford, 1991), pp. 44–46; Graeme Thomson, ‘Scottish Music: Rock of the North’, The Guardian, www.theguardian.com/music/2012/mar/08/scottish-music-rock-north (accessed 20 November 2014).

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CHA P T ER FIVE

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Scots in early twentieth-century British Columbia: class, race and gender Michael E. Vance

Early in the twentieth century the future lieutenant-governor of British Columbia, Robert Randolph Bruce, wrote to the English sporting magazine the Field, claiming that in his community a prospective settler would find ‘companions who have been at Eton; he will find golfers who have played at St Andrew’s; and in his hunts he will be joined by men who have shot tigers in India and the rhinocerous in South Africa’.1 A Scottish engineer, mine operator and land speculator at Lake Windermere in the interior of British Columbia, Bruce had first arrived as an employee of the Canadian Pacific Railway, but quickly became a leading participant in the effort to present the interior of the province as a ‘gentleman’s paradise’ – a trend first encouraged in the fruit-growing Okanagan Valley by Lady Aberdeen after her husband had served a term as Governor-General of Canada.2 Gentlemen settlers were also attracted to Vancouver Island on the Pacific coast thanks to Esquimalt’s importance as a naval base and the island’s temperate climate. Scots were prominent among the island’s former imperial military and administrative elite and in Victoria, the provincial capital, they were also evident in the membership of imperial groups such as the Overseas League, the Kipling Society and the British Imperial Comrades Society, as well as more specifically Scottish associations such as the Burns Club, which in 1936 boasted the largest membership of any club ‘in the empire’.3 These Scots contributed to the perception found among travellers during the first half of the twentieth century that British Columbia appeared to be the most ‘British’ of all the Canadian provinces. Immigration campaigns in the early decades of the twentieth century, which had doubled British Columbia’s Britishborn population, helped to reinforce these perceptions, but British culture also influenced the aspirations of those who had never set foot in the British Isles.4 Among the elite, symbols of Scottish identity sat easily within the generalised British culture which ­characterised early [ 86 ]

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twentieth-century British Columbia. For example, the Scot Henry O. Bell-Irving, one of the province’s leading industrialists, created the stereotypical ‘Wee Scottie’ brand of tinned salmon for his extensive cannery operations while donating large quantities to the British Army during the First World War, and his involvement in the creation of Vancouver’s militia unit, the Seaforth Highlanders, was a similar exercise that united Scottish symbolism with civic leadership and imperial patriotism.5 Scottish background and settlement conditions in British Columbia, as well as experiences elsewhere in the empire, shaped immigrant responses. Imperial identity would remain a prevalent feature of elite Scots’ self-understanding throughout the inter-war period; however, in this chapter I argue that the Scottish immigrants’ perceptions of class, race and gender were equally important for interpreting the range of their experiences in the early twentieth century. The ‘gentleman’s paradise’ was especially unsettled by the militancy of immigrant Scots, who played a disproportionate role in the leadership of socialist and trade union organisations in British Columbia. In addition, the racial diversity of the province undermined its representation as a ‘British’ outpost, and Scots of all classes were drawn to the public discussions concerning the status of the original First Nations as well as to the anti-Asian debates that characterised the period. These discussions reveal the extent of ‘settler anxiety’ in the immigrant community, an unease that was even more evident in public debates involving Scottish women. In British Columbia perceived threats to the domestic ideal, as well as to single female immigrants working as domestics, were especially troubling; as the controversy over the death of the Vancouver housemaid Janet Smith in 1924 reveals.

Labour leadership in an imperial context Although Scots with claims of elite status tended to incorporate celebrations of their homeland within a broader British, or even English, identity in the province, Scots who played a prominent role in labour leadership tended to subsume their origins in preference for a broader multi-ethnic working-class identity. At the turn of the century Scots were among the organisers of the first socialist political organisations in the province, yet the articles in the Socialist Party of Canada (SPC) publication the Western Clarion did not reflect the Shetland origins of the paper’s first editor, D. Mackenzie (or ‘Mac’).6 Similarly, Frank Rogers, a longshoreman who organised a major Fraser River fisherman and cannery workers strike in 1900 and was murdered three years later while supporting a dockworkers’ strike against the Canadian Pacific [ 87 ]

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Railway, did not refer to his Scottish background, although he spoke with a clear accent. Instead, Rogers, who was influenced by the International Workers of the World and the ‘One Big Union’ movement, argued for the need to unite across ethnic lines and for a time was able to organise workers of Japanese, First Nation and European origin against the employment practices of Henry O. Bell-Irving during the Fraser River strike.7 Although a large number of Vancouver Island’s coalminers had been recruited in Scotland, this was also not evident in their collective actions during a bitter 1913–14 strike organised by the United Mineworkers of America that centred on the communities of Wellington, Nanaimo and Ladysmith. The miners were striking against Canadian Collieries (Dunsmuir) Ltd, a conglomerate established by the Ayrshire miner Robert Dunsmuir and later run by his son, James Dunsmuir, who would serve as both premier and lieutenant governor of British Columbia. Vancouver Island coal mines made both men enormously wealthy and secured them a place in the provincial elite, which was reflected in the family’s Scottish baronial mansion, Craigdarroch Castle, in Victoria.8 While the strike itself was followed closely in the pages of the Independent Labour Party’s Glasgow paper, Forward, only the arrival of the kilted Seaforth Highlanders, charged with establishing order after the rioting at the Extension mine and described by the strikers as ‘half-clad barbarians’, provided any overtly Scottish symbol in the conflict. In Ladysmith, however, two Scottish women reportedly grabbed the lunch pails of two strikebreakers and smeared their faces with jam sandwiches, taunting the ‘blasted ninnies’ to ‘go hame and see if your ane mithers will ken ye’.9 Despite its lack of overt Scottish symbolism, Forward did note the role of former members of the Lanarkshire Miners’ Union in the strike, including a father and son from Airdrie, both Joseph Mairs. The 21-year-old Joseph Jr. died in prison after the Extension riot, apparently from medical neglect. The paper claimed that the younger Mairs had played no role in events and had been effectively murdered by authorities, but despite such protests it is clear that other Lanarkshire natives had played leadership roles in the strike. Sam Guthrie, who emigrated from East Kilbride in 1911, was jailed as a consequence of his involvement in the Ladysmith strike, and later translated this experience into a successful political career as an SPC member of the provincial legislature in the inter-war years.10 Indeed, after the First World War, Scots like Guthrie continued to be prominent in labour agitation, particularly during the Depression. Elizabeth Kerr, who was originally from Glasgow and spoke in a ‘lilting Scottish voice’, was recognised as an effective champion of unemployed women during the thirties, and she pointed out their [ 88 ]

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particular hardships in a column that she contributed to the Federationist, the weekly paper of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF). As a national political alliance, the CCF drew together Christian socialists, trade unionists and co-operative movement farmers in order to promote state economic intervention and the creation of basic welfare provisions. While the party resisted calls to unite with the Canadian Communist Party (CCP), Elizabeth Kerr worked closely with CCP members in the Mothers’ Council of Vancouver – an organisation that sought to close the relief camps established in the interior of the province for unemployed men. In 1937 she would travel to the Soviet Union as a delegate of the CCF Women’s Council, though she did not embrace revolutionary Marxism.11 Nevertheless, several of Kerr’s associates working with the unemployed were committed communists. Aberdeenshire-born Elsie Munro, who had worked as a cook for the British army during the First World War, was among the members of Vancouver’s Women’s Labour League affiliated with the Canadian Communist Party. The WLL supported the unemployed by participating in hunger marches and providing direct support to distressed families through neighbourhood unemployment committees as part of a broader CCP effort, in line with the Communist International’s Third Period (1928–35) policy to organise the unskilled and unemployed. Elsie’s husband, Peter Campbell Munro, from Tarbert, Argyllshire, was also promoting these goals as a leading member of the city’s Street Railwaymen’s Union.12 The effort to organise the unemployed was aided by the Glasgowborn Allan Campbell, a Royal Navy veteran, who, in the early 1920s, had sought to mobilise the unemployed in his native land in order to radicalise the Scottish labour movement. After joining the Vale of Leven branch of the Communist Party, Campbell gave frequent fiery speeches at the foot of the Alexandria fountain and in 1922 was charged with breach of the peace when he organised a march on the home of the chairman of Bonhill parish council. He returned to sea, but lost none of his radicalism and found himself serving eight weeks’ hard labour at the Okalla prison farm south of Vancouver for ‘unlawfully combin[ing] to disobey a lawful command’ while serving on a Canadian vessel that had arrived in Victoria in 1929. After being released, Campbell was found leading many unemployed demonstrations in Vancouver along with fellow communist and ‘Red Clydesider’ Jim Litterick. Campbell was arrested several times for ‘unlawful assembly and rioting’ and after serving another prison term at Okalla in 1931 was apparently deported back to Britain, but not before making a considerable impression on Vancouver’s working-class reformers.13 Maurice Rush, the Toronto-born son of a Jewish shoemaker, recalled [ 89 ]

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as a teenager hearing Allan Campbell speak at the Royal Theatre in Vancouver. He was ‘impressed’ and thought Campbell ‘made a lot of sense’, but he was equally captivated by Elsie and Peter Munro’s nineyear-old daughter Elspeth who, in a ‘Scottish outfit’, recited ‘A Man’s a Man for a’ That.’ Rush claimed that he ‘instantly became a fan of Robbie Burns’.14 Willie Gallacher, the Glasgow-born Communist MP for West Fife, who toured Canada in 1936, also noted the Scottish presence in the British Columbian labour movement, and he later recalled that when he addressed his Vancouver audience ‘it sounded [as] though I was in St Andrews Hall in Glasgow’.15 The prominence of radical Scots was also readily apparent across the country and especially among the Canadian Communists. The CCP’s first leader, John L. MacDonald, was a patternmaker from Falkirk who immigrated to Toronto in 1912, and by the 1930s other prominent Scots in the party included Bill Findlay, the party provincial secretary in Nova Scotia, Peter Hunter, of the Young Communist League, and James Cowan, who was instrumental in the Friends of the Soviet Union. As the later group indicates, while these Scots might have taken pride in their origins and at times employed Scottish symbols to further the worker’s cause, their focus was on international socialism rather than the homeland – despite the fact that empire-oriented immigration policies had provided them with the opportunity to come to Canada. For the Canadian federal government, this raised questions about their loyalty and ensured that they were closely monitored by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP).16 In British Columbia, the RCMP reports reveal that Scottish communists were not only engaged in mobilising the unemployed, they were also working diligently to unionise workers in the mining, forestry and fishing industries. Among them was George Miller, a fisherman from Caithness, who began organising both shore-workers and fishers in a unified Fisherman’s Industrial Union backed by the CCP, under the umbrella of the Workers’ Unity League (WUL), which financed the union newspaper, the Fisherman. Under the direction from the Comintern, the WUL had sought to hasten the worldwide class struggle through ‘red’ unions, but in doing so they organised for the first time workers like those in the fish canneries or in the garment industries who had been neglected by mainstream craft unions. The CCP-backed press, like the Fisherman or the BC Worker’s News, which featured a regular column by ‘Old Bill’ Bennett, a communist barber originally from Greenock, was a key element in the party’s promotion of a common working-class identity.17 Although industrialists like Robert Dunsmuir and Henry O. BellIrving had at times sought to import workers directly from the [ 90 ]

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homeland, and concentrations did develop in some mining and cannery communities, Scots, like ‘Old Bill’ Bennett and George Miller, remained a minority within the provincial work force. Nevertheless, they were disproportionately represented in working-class organisations. For example, Scots only accounted for 6 per cent of the fishing fleet but were heavily represented in the union executive despite the rank and file membership being dominated by individuals from the Dalmatian coast. Similarly, Scots were prominent members of the national CCP executive in the inter-war period, but at least 75 per cent of the 15,000 party members were European immigrants, primarily Ukrainians and Finns.18 Tom Ewen, a blacksmith from Kincardineshire, was one of several Scots who linked the national executive of the communist party with efforts at union organisation in British Columbia. He had been the national secretary of the WUL and became the provincial secretary of the CCP in 1935. In a memoir written late in life, Ewen did recall his Scottish roots, but focused on his parents’ poverty – both to explain his commitment to communism and to critique his homeland. Referring to his birth in the Stonehaven Combination Poorhouse, Ewen described himself as one more member of the ‘million-fold roll of [the] pauper population, sprouting like weeds in the heart of the world’s … greatest empire’. According to his memoir, his landless farm-labourer father, whom he never met, had died in the Transvaal during the Boer War, ‘a piece of cannon-fodder in one of the most shameful wars of aggression ever launched on a peaceful farming people by a ruthless British imperialism’.19 Such anti-imperial sentiment can also be found in Ewen’s inter-war writing. In a 1935 article in the BC Worker’s News, Ewen called on ‘all progressive people in Canada’ to support the ‘Indian people of BC’ in securing the rights promised them by the imperial government. According to Ewen, the First Nations of BC had been ‘contaminated by the Great White Empire builders’ and that ‘our silence’ had aided the ‘despoliation’.20 Similar arguments were also being made by Scottish communists in other parts of the empire during the 1930s. In Australia, Tom Wright, a sheet-metal worker from a coal-mining family in Kinross, played a central role in persuading both the New South Wales Labour Council and the Australian Communist Party to support aboriginal land rights as well as the preservation of native culture. As in Canada, the Communist Party in Australia was founded by Scottish immigrants who maintained their links with the homeland, often through attendance at the Comintern, and, as Ewen sought to do, Australian communists, like Wright, tied the plight of the indigenous people to the wider workers’ struggle. As was briefly the case among [ 91 ]

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communists in the British Isles, both men had been influenced in their positions by the communist-backed League Against Imperialism, and by the Comintern’s renunciation of racism as a tool of capitalism, but by the time Ewen wrote his article for the BC Worker’s News the league was largely a spent force, and it was disbanded in 1937.21 Both Ewen and Wright would continue to advocate for native peoples, but in British Columbia Ewen’s strident anti-imperialism was not readily apparent among other Scots. Indeed, in August 1935 the Comintern abandoned the ‘red’ union policy and instructed party members to co-operate with other trade unionists in forming the ‘Popular Front’ against fascism, and this could in part account for the absence of explicitly anti-imperial statements in remaining years of the decade. Ewen’s appeal for solidarity with the province’s original inhabitants, however, can also be viewed as recognition that efforts to build trade unionism in British Columbia had necessitated reaching out to non-European and indigenous workers. Indeed, Scots communists like George Miller who were involved in organising a series of inter-war strikes in the fishery stressed the importance of building relations with First Nations fishers, who were the largest ethnic group in the fleet.22

Scots and the ‘White Man’s Province’ Tom Ewen had written his article after attending a First Nations meeting in Kamloops called to draw up an open petition to ‘all our friends of the Indian people’ requesting support for their claims for redress. Prior to the First World War, the ‘Interior Tribes of British Columbia’ had relied on another Scot, James Alexander Teit, to help draft such petitions and act as an intermediary with the dominion government. The Lerwickborn Teit had close contact with fellow Shetlanders in the SPC branch in Vancouver, but his involvement in native issues appears to have developed out of more personal relationships. Teit had come to British Columbia to work as a clerk at his uncle’s store in Spences Bridge and soon developed expertise as a hunter and guide. Working both in John Murray’s store and as a guide in the northern and interior parts of the province, Teit regularly encountered indigenous people and in 1892 he married Antko – a young Nlaka´pamux (Thompson) woman.23 Teit, a self-taught linguist, was able to converse in numerous native languages and in 1894 began working with the German-American anthropologist Franz Boas recording the culture of the interior First Nations. As a consequence of that ethnographic work, Teit developed close relationships with native leaders and in 1909 a group of interior chiefs asked him to attend their meetings and help ‘with their writing’. Teit’s role as advocate and lobbyist would be expanded to include the [ 92 ]

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Indian Rights Association, an organisation of coastal and Vancouver Island aboriginal groups, and would last until his death in 1922.24 As well as communicating indigenous objections to the reduction of reserve lands recommended by the McKenna–McBride Royal Commission, Teit had criticised the government attacks on indigenous cultural practices, such as the banning of the Potlatch.25 In contrast, Allan Webster Neill, a native of Montrose and from 1904 to 1912 the Indian Agent on the west coast of Vancouver Island, wholeheartedly supported government policies aimed at assimilating indigenous peoples into the norms of the settler society. Neill, who had settled in Alberni, first as a farmer and then local merchant, was active in municipal and provincial politics before serving as Indian Agent, and, in the inter-war years, he would also serve as MP for Comox-Alberni. His reports to the Department of Indian Affairs tended to denigrate both the native seasonal lifestyle and the accomplishments of their culture. Neill claimed that their former cedar lodges were probably the ‘product of slave labour’ and that native handicrafts were only useful as ‘curios’ for tourists. From the start of his term as Indian Agent, charged with the responsibility of policing the reserves and providing relief when required, Neill criticised unscrupulous ‘white men’ who enticed native people with alcohol and gambling, but wholeheartedly endorsed the residential schools established in his district. He believed that while ‘Indians’ could not ‘be made farmers’, indigenous boys and girls were particularly suited to mechanics’ trades taught in the schools. He claimed that the pupils were ‘the product evolved by centuries upon centuries of ignorance, degradation, superstitions, and lack of ethical standards’, but that over the course of several generations the schools could succeed in civilising and Christianising the indigenous society.26 In Neill’s view, the progress of settlement in British Columbia made this inevitable. In his final report as Indian Agent, he claimed that ‘the Indian will have to change his habits if he is to survive’. He will no longer be able to build a fish trap in the fall and in a few week’s work, most of it being performed by his wife, get enough salmon to keep him all winter. He will have to acquire the habit, whether he likes it or not, of working regularly and faithfully for wages in accordance with his abilities as compared to other classes of labour and recognize the fact that he and his fellows are but a very small and insignificant factor in the world’s affairs and to realize the futility of attempting to obstruct the tide of commercial progress.27

Neill’s assessment reflected the underlying intent of the reduction in reserve lands and the establishment of residential schools. Both were designed to undermine the traditional native economy and culture – [ 93 ]

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forcing First Nations people to seek work in settler industries.28 As a Member of Parliament, Neill would continue to support residential schools, although his statements also made it clear that native people were expected to enter the work force at the lowest levels. Like his contemporaries, Neill failed to acknowledge the physical and sexual abuses that occurred in such institutions, including the Alberni Boarding School in his own constituency, preferring instead to laud the work of their staff who devoted their lives to the work of ­assimilation.29 From the moment he took his seat in the House of Commons, however, Neill argued that unlike the First Nations, Japanese immi­­ grants and their children working in the province’s fishing industry were an unassimilable ‘alien race’. In 1921 he had campaigned as an independent candidate with the slogan ‘A White B.C. and a home-made MP’ and made the ‘absolute exclusion of Asiatics’ a central plank in his platform. In his maiden speech, Neill announced that Japanese immigrants, in particular, threatened to overrun the province and that their continued allegiance to the home country threatened the ‘white man’s’ control of the coast. Neill would return to this theme on countless occasions during his twenty-three-year parliamentary career – at times highlighting Japanese concentrations in the fishing, fruit and market garden industries, and on other occasions, the lack of intermarriage with white settlers, ‘They do not marry us and we do not want to marry them.’30 Neill claimed that his anti-Asian position had popular support among the farmers, fishermen and ‘mostly Scotch miners’ of his constituency, and there is some evidence that early in the century many labouring Scottish immigrants shared his anti-Japanese and antiChinese attitudes. In 1902, William McAllan, a Scottish miner who had worked in Australia and New Zealand before settling in Nanaimo, argued before the Royal Commission on Japanese and Chinese Immigration that Canada should follow Australia, where ‘no cheap labor is employed’, and exclude Chinese workers from the mines. Earlier, New Westminster fisherman John McLashan, who had arrived from Scotland in 1889, told a British Columbia Fisheries Commission that ‘Chinamen are spoiling this country’ by depressing wages and dominating cannery work.31 Travel within the British Empire, and attendant competition with non-European workers, encouraged such ‘white labourism’ among Scottish workers as far afield as South Africa and Australia, but by the time of Neill’s election the most vocal voice for exclusions of Asians from the fishing industry came from the BC Fisherman’s Protective Association led by the Englishborn editor William E. Maiden, a war veteran, who had first come to New Westminster via the United States.32 Maiden’s American sojourn [ 94 ]

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reflects the fact that Neill’s racial views, and those of his supporters, were part of a broader development, recently identified as the creation of a ‘global colour line’ that had emerged throughout the Englishspeaking world and not just within the British Empire.33 Neill himself indicated that he had formed his own views after spending ‘a number of years in New Zealand’ as a young man. When it came to drafting legislation aimed at restricting Asian immigration, Neill cited New Zealand debates and legislative measures, as well as the Imperial government’s acquiescence, in order to encourage his parliamentary colleagues to do likewise.34 While unfair competition and the ‘peaceful conquest’ of British Columbia by Japan were provided as rationales for restrictions along the New Zealand model, it was the poet of empire, Rudyard Kipling, who Neill quoted as the ultimate justification for an immigration policy based on race – ‘You cannot breed a white man in a brown or yellow hide.’ In applauding British efforts in Burma to check Japanese imperial expansion in the winter of 1941, Neill made clear the full extent of his racist views. The white man must be dominant; his word should go. If you adopt an attitude of complaisance or anything that is suggestive of subservience to the brown man, he thinks you are afraid of him. The countries of the world have not been won for the white race by adopting an attitude like that. I still think that we should have taken a firm hand with the Japanese and all native races, and as a consequence, they respect you.35

By way of establishing his ‘white’ credentials Neill emphasised his own origins and frequently used Scottish tales to illustrate his speeches in the House of Commons. On one occasion he reminded Quebec MPs of the ‘Auld Alliance’ in a bid to gain support for joint action on immigration legislation, while at the same time claiming that ‘the beautiful Scotch language’ was ‘used in the Garden of Eden’.36 Such self-conscious ‘Scottishness’, as well as his racist views, was apparently widely shared by individuals with Scottish origins including Neill’s strongest supporters in the House of Commons, Ian Mackenzie, MP for Vancouver Centre and Tom Reid, MP for New Westminster.37 It was said of his parliamentary colleague Ian Mackenzie, originally from Assynt, that his accent was so strong that he did not speak either of the founding languages of Canada, but neither he nor Neill saw any contradiction in their conspicuous Scottishness and their claims to represent all ‘white’ British Columbians. Mackenzie, like Neill, had been first elected MP in 1930 on a strident anti-Asian platform, but as Minister of Immigration and then later as Minister of Defence in the Mackenzie King administrations he worked quietly behind the scenes to forward the cause of Asian exclusion and was the principal architect [ 95 ]

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of the legislation that resulted in the internment of the entire Japanese community after war was declared in 1941.38 Thomas Reid, who had left Cambuslang for Canada in 1909 and managed the Pacific Car and Foundry Company in Surrey, BC, before entering federal politics in 1930, also saw no contradiction in opposing the franchise for Canadian-born residents of Asian origin, despite himself being an immigrant. He justified this position with an oblique reference to empire, claiming that Canada needed to preserve its ‘Anglo-Saxon stock’ and needed ‘to conserve our heritage for our own people’.39 The CCF member for Vancouver South, Angus Macinnis, himself a descendant of Scottish settlers in Prince Edward Island, challenged this untroubled identification of the Scots MPs with ‘white’ Canada by responding to Alan Neill’s statement ‘Once a Japanese always a Japanese’ with the retort ‘Once a Scotsman always a Scotsman’, and further suggested that such essentialist arguments were akin to those employed by the Nazis in their persecution of Jews in Europe. In responding to comparable pronouncements of ‘oriental’ incompatibility made by her colleagues in the BC legislature, CCF member Laura Jamieson similarly claimed that it was the Scots who were ‘not yet being assimilated’ – provoking protests from Scottishborn Members of the Legislative Assembly and MPs alike, who insisted that their first loyalty was to Canada. The North Uist native and Conservative MLA for Dewdney, R. C. ‘Claymore’ MacDonald, demonstrated his own ‘loyalty’ by appearing in full Highland dress and piping himself in to the provincial legislature.40 The stridency of such reactions is perhaps best understood as a reflection of ‘settler anxiety’ among these Scottish political leaders, who were aware that their position in British Columbia was predicated on the dispossession of indigenous peoples. The need both to legitimate the displacement of First Nations people and to insist on the unsuitability of Asian immigrants produced these overt displays of ‘Scottishness’ and racist pronouncements as a means of associating Canada with the ‘white’ empire.41

Scotswomen and the domestication of British Columbia While Scots in the Victoria legislature had a long history of advocating anti-Asian measures – both Allan Neill and Ian Mackenzie had first served as MLAs before entering federal politics42 – in the inter-war period it was the Janet Smith case that resulted in the highest-profile political mobilisation of Scots in the province. On Saturday morning, 26 July 1924, Smith’s body was found in the laundry room of the Shaughnessy Heights home where she had worked as a nanny for the prominent [ 96 ]

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Vancouver couple Richard and Blanche Baker. The 22-year-old domestic servant had died from a bullet wound through the head, and a gun was found near her hand leading the local Point Grey Police to conclude that the Scottish-born Smith had committed suicide.43 Her friend and fellow nanny Mary Jones rejected this assertion and in a meeting with her minister, Rev. Duncan McDougall of the ‘Highland’ Presbyterian Church, implicated instead the Baker’s Chinese houseboy, Wong Foo Sing. McDougall, whose own racist views were reflected in his circulation of Ku Klux Klan literature, successfully lobbied the newly formed United Council of Scottish Societies to get involved in the case.44 The United Council served as an umbrella organisation for several groups in Vancouver, ranging from the St Andrew’s and Caledonian Society to the Daughters of Scotland, and the new coroner’s inquest that they had demanded found that Smith had been murdered. Sing was arrested for the crime but the case was dismissed for lack of evidence. The press coverage produced several other theories about Smith’s death, ranging from the actions of a jealous rival over a male companion to a police-enabled cover-up of her employer’s alleged involvement in drug trafficking, but the persistent theme was the presumed danger single ‘white’ women experienced while working with ‘Asiatic’ men.45 Two years before Smith’s death, Allan Neill alluded to these concerns in Ottawa when he warned prospective immigrants that in British Columbia their daughters might have to work in Chinese restaurants ‘under conditions which I will leave to your imagination rather than describe’.46 Others were less reticent, alleging that the Chinese were responsible for corrupting ‘white’ women, leading them to drug addiction and prostitution.47 As early as 1919 the BC legislature had passed legislation designed to prohibit Chinese-owned businesses from hiring ‘white’ women or girls. After protests from the Chinese consul and community, the 1923 Women and Girls Protection Act was introduced to allow the police to identify ‘immoral’ workplaces where it would be unlawful for white women to be employed, rather than have a blanket ban on Chinese businesses.48 For some, the Janet Smith case illustrated that this paternalistic legislation had not gone far enough, leading a few Scotsmen to take matters into their own hands. Convinced that Woo Fong Sing was guilty of murder, a group of Scots encouraged a private detective to kidnap Sing on two occasions in an effort to try to obtain a confession. Only the private detective was found guilty of kidnapping, but several Scots were implicated and arrested for the crime. These included the former Glasgow policeman and Point Grey Police Chief John Murdoch, the Point Grey City Councillor and Police Commissioner H. O. MacDonald, and the retired police officer and St Andrew’s [ 97 ]

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and Caledonian Society member Alex S. Matthew. All either had their cases dismissed for lack of evidence or were found not guilty by the juries in their trials.49 Jessie Victoria Stratton, the secretary of the United Council, was also arrested for the Sing kidnapping only to have the charges dismissed, but before her case was heard she had already come to public attention as a leading voice in the demand for further legislative protections for ‘white’ domestic servants. She headed a fivewoman committee drawn from the United Council of Scottish Societies to petition the BC legislature for what would become known as the ‘Janet Smith Bill’, and in November of 1924 she led a group of forty ‘Scottish Society’ women to Victoria to support the measure, which sought to ‘eliminate working girls being compelled to work with Orientals in private homes’.50 The ‘Janet Smith Bill’ failed to gain sufficient support in the BC legislature, but Jessie Stratton’s lobbying efforts provide some insight into gender roles in the immigrant Scottish community. Stratton had emigrated from Scotland with her family as a young girl and while in Winnipeg she met her husband, Ferguson Hunter Stratton, who had arrived as a boy with his family from County Down. In both Winnipeg and Vancouver, Ferguson Stratton worked as a ‘laundryman’ and, since this placed his family in direct competition with Chinese firms who dominated the trade, his wife’s strident anti-Asianism may been seen as part of a broader working-class ‘white labourism’.51 Newspaper notices of Jessie Stratton’s activities, however, emphasised that she was the mother of six children, and it was this maternal role, rather than her husband’s employment, that gave her authority to speak publically. According to Stratton, work in private homes created conditions of ‘intimacy’ and, as a consequence, the state needed to offer domestic servant girls protection. Stratton and the United Council women’s committee had looked to Mary Ellen Smith, BC’s first female MLA, who was herself from an English working-class background, to introduce the legislation. Smith’s sponsorship of the ‘Janet Smith Bill’ can be viewed as an extension of the ‘maternal feminism’ she had previously espoused during the pre-war provincial women’s suffrage campaign.52 As in Scotland, the demand for votes for women had been led in British Columbia by middle-class women, like the Perth native Elizabeth Ida Bramwell, but the focus on ‘maternal’ concerns had provided the basis for co-operation across class lines, and issues surrounding domestic employment continued this alliance.53 By the time of Janet Smith’s murder, middle-class women had already established the Queen Mary’s Coronation Hostel in Vancouver to house and find suitable domestic employment for emigrant ‘gentle-women’ from the British Isles, including Scotland, while in inter-war Glasgow [ 98 ]

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middle-class women previously involved with the suffrage campaign supported domestic service training schemes for unemployed single women, who were also encouraged to settle in the Dominions.54 As a consequence, the campaign led by Jessie Stratton and the United Council women to improve the working conditions of female domestic servants was an extension of the ‘maternal feminism’ found in both the homeland and in the colony, as well as a reflection of the racism that accompanied and enabled imperial settlement.55 Janet Smith had been recruited in London by the Baker family, but her migration to Vancouver was part of a much larger movement of Scottish domestics within the empire. From 1919 this migration was assisted by a branch of the Overseas Settlement Board, which was itself following the pre-war lead of charitable organisations in the British Isles and the governments of Canada, New Zealand, Australia and South Africa. Scotswomen went to all of these colonial destinations, but were particularly well represented in Canada, where in 1929 they constituted 1,355 of the 1,763 domestic servants recruited in that year. This pattern reflected a more general inter-war trend, as one recent sample, taken from Scottish port records in 1923, suggests that nearly half of the female emigrants were headed for some form of domestic work.56 Domestic training schemes designed to meet imperial needs, however, did encourage class antagonism in Scotland since many working-class women resented being forced into the role and through domestic service became acutely aware of the disparity between their material conditions and those of their employers.57 These antagonisms could also migrate to the colonies. For example, Euphemia Neish, the Dundee native who worked as a cleaner in the Dominion Bank Building in Vancouver between the wars, actively encouraged her sons to become involved in the effort to organise the fishing industry. That industry also employed some Scotswomen as cannery workers, providing them with direct knowledge of industrial working ­conditions in the province. Many consequently became actively involved in the trade union movement; nevertheless, the prevailing notions of appropriate gender roles often relegated these women to supporting activities.58 Even women who took on working-class leadership roles would employ conventional gender expectations as part of their activities. In the summer of 1932, in the midst of the Depression, Flora Hutton, the daughter of a Lanarkshire coal miner and member of the Women’s Labour League in Burnaby, attended the Worker’s Economic Conference in Ottawa. The conference had been organised by the communistbacked ‘National Committee of Unemployed Councils’ to counter the Imperial Economic Conference hosted by the Conservative government of R. B. Bennett, and Hutton was chosen by the delegates to be on [ 99 ]

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the committee that sought a meeting with the prime minister. When Bennett skipped the meeting, Hutton told his deputy that the prime minister, who was a millionaire, had ‘been away living in luxury’ while the unemployed starved, and reinforced the point with a highly gendered illustration. In making reference to a recent speech made by Bennett, Hutton asked if ‘law, order and good government means girls walking the streets, selling their bodies for a meal’.59 Given the contemporary constraints on acceptable public discourse for women, Hutton framed her criticism in an allusion to the domestic ideal. It would be up to her male counterparts to provide a direct critique of the Imperial Economic Conference’s attempt to combat the worldwide collapse through closer imperial ties.

Gender, class and race: a Scottish empire? Despite the prominence of women in labour radicalism, the influence of the domestic ideal led contemporaries and later historians to undervalue the contribution of Scottish women to radical politics in the inter-war period – both at home and in the empire. Flora Hutton’s progression from working with unemployed young women in Vancouver to a national spokesperson was paralleled by female Communist Party members in Scotland. Arguably, it was Helen Crawfurd’s successful work with the Glasgow Women’s Housing Association during the 1915 rent strike that brought her to national prominence, rather than her suffrage and anti-war activities. Crawfurd would focus on international issues in the inter-war years through organising events such as the Peace and Empire Congress in Glasgow in 1938, which was designed to link together peace movements across the commonwealth. As with the 1932 Worker’s Economic Conference in Ottawa, where Hutton first came to prominence, Crawfurd’s Congress was designed as a counter to a high-profile international event, in this case the Glasgow Empire Exhibition, but it had been domestic issues which had first engaged her interest. Fellow socialist Red Clydesiders Agnes Dollan and Mary Barbour also began their public careers by calling for improved working and living conditions for labouring women.60 Dollan and Barbour elected to support Labour rather than follow Crawfurd into the Communist Party in the inter-war period, but the co-operation of all three women during the rent strike was echoed in the co-operative work supporting unemployed women in British Columbia undertaken by the socialist Elizabeth Kerr and the communists Elsie Munro and Flora Hutton. In Scotland, the Socialist Sunday Schools, with their emphasis on full equality, as well as the provision of a socialist education, were attractive to many working[ 100 ]

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class Scottish girls, and it is quite possible that Elsie Munro and Flora Hutton could have been exposed to the movement before they left the homeland. It has been suggested that the schools were particularly attractive to women because of their focus on practical matters of daily life and, as a consequence, they nurtured life-long commitments to left-wing politics and ensured that women would provide the core support for organisations such as the Communist Party.61 That imperial struggles mattered to Scottish socialists in the opening decades of the century is suggested by the attention given to the Lanarkshire miners involved in Ladysmith strike by the Independent Labour Party’s organ Forward.62 Indeed, the fact that the conflict in the British Columbia coal field was contemporaneous with the Rand strikes in the Transvaal gold mines, which resulted in the deportation of five Scottish union organisers, led the miners’ leader Bob Smillie to suggest, at a meeting welcoming home the deportees, that events in South Africa and British Columbia demonstrated that employers were engaged in a ‘class war’. The Manchester socialist paper the Clarion went even further, arguing that trade unionists in the colonies were the ‘true defenders of the Imperial enterprise against self-interested capitalists who were betraying it’.63 In the 1920s, Forward’s editor and Red Clydesider Thomas Johnston, as a Labour politician, came to view the empire as having the potential to improve workers’ conditions both at home and abroad. In this regard he was preceded by Keir Hardie and followed by Ramsay MacDonald, who both toured the dominions looking to improve working-class co-operation across the empire.64 Nevertheless, it has been noted that by the 1930s Labour in Scotland had very little to say about the empire, perhaps reflecting an increased concern with domestic matters during the Depression. Willie Gallacher’s arrival in British Columbia in 1936, however, illustrates that even the anti-imperial communists found that workingclass support in the empire’s dominions continued to be useful as they struggled to fight fascism.65 While socialist interest in empire waxed and waned in the inter-war period, Unionist support remained steadfast in Scotland and was supplemented by nationalist celebrations of Scottish contributions to imperial development, such as Andrew Dewar Gibb’s Scottish Empire (1937).66 The dual national and imperial identities that can be observed among conservatives and the elite in Scotland were also reflected in the pronouncements of BC’s Scottish politicians. A great deal of recent scholarship has argued that imperial and Canadian identities were also mutually compatible in the inter-war period, and A. W. Neill’s speeches in Ottawa provide further corroborating evidence for these claims.67 The public activities of Neill and his colleagues, however, also reveal that self-conscious [ 101 ]

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stereotypical Scottish display was also seen as entirely appropriate for political leaders in the dominion.68 The prominent role of immigrant Scots like Allan Neill and Jessie Stratton in promoting racist policies in British Columbia can be partly explained by the influence of ‘white labourism’. Neill was exposed to the New Zealand version before arriving in British Columbia, and Stratton’s husband was in direct competition with Asian labour in Vancouver. The South African experience of some Scots, such as the syndicalist and deportee James Thompson Bain, had encouraged demands for restrictions on non-white labour in the Transvaal, and this was echoed by some trade unionists in Scotland, particularly over the employment of ‘Lascar’ labourers on Glasgow docks prior to the First World War. ‘White labourism’, however, was not universally embraced by Scottish labour leaders in either the colonies or the homeland, and several, such as the South African Aberdeen-born mason Robert Cruickshank Graham, strongly resisted racial discrimination.69 In British Columbia, the anti-racist views of high-profile Scottish socialists and communists – like Frank Rogers, James Teit and Tom Ewen – reinforces the point that there was no singular view on race among Scottish labour leaders and that competition with non-white labour in the colonies does not alone account for the depth of racism among Scottish immigrants. In Scotland, it is apparent that the widespread publication of the activities of Scottish missionaries had served to reinforce notions of racial superiority and several intellectuals with Scottish connections further justified racial inequality. For example, the Glasgow University trained historian and Liberal Scottish MP James Bryce, the author of The Relations of the Advanced and Backward Races of Mankind (1902),70 provided highly influential arguments against the possibility of racial equality that were widely disseminated in the early twentieth century. Similarly, in Canada, a daughter of Scottish immigrants and director of the Immigration Division of the Canadian National Committee for Mental Hygiene, Helen R. Y. Reid, questioned the assimilability of British Columbia’s Japanese community in her co-authored ­sociological analysis The Japanese Canadians (1938).71 Scholarly writings such as these provided intellectual cover for the more nakedly racist views of individuals like Allan Neill, and by insisting on racial inferiority and irreconcilable difference they also served to normalise and legitimise the Scottish presence in British Columbia as they did elsewhere in the empire. Although this chapter has highlighted immigrant Scots in British Columbia who played a role in challenging the inequities created by the colonisation of native territory, unfettered industrial capitalism [ 102 ]

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and the discriminatory treatment of women, Scots clearly had a disproportionate influence on the profound racism that characterised the province in the early twentieth century. These attitudes helped to justify both the dispossession of native peoples and the claiming of British Columbia for ‘white’ settlers. Nevertheless, much more research on the popular understandings of race in the homeland remains to be done before we can develop a full understanding of the impact of Scotland on the empire and the empire on Scotland in the early twentieth century.

Notes   1 Reprinted in Windermere, British Columbia (Invermere, BC, 1912) cited in Jean Barman, ‘Ethnicity in the Pursuit of Status: British Middle and Upper Class Emigration to British Columbia in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries’, Canadian Ethnic Studies, Vol. 18, issue 1 (1986), pp. 39–40. See also ‘Robert Randolph Bruce Fonds’, Glenbow Archives, Calgary, Alberta. For the importance of hunting for gentleman migrants in the empire, see John M. MacKenzie, The Empire of Nature: Hunting, Conservation and British Imperialism (Manchester, 1988).   2 Paul M. Korocil, ‘The Making of the Orchard Landscape: Visionary Scots, Englishmen and One Irish-Canadian’ in The British Garden of Eden: Settlement History of the Okanagan Valley, British Columbia (Burnaby, BC, 2003), pp. 55–66, 106–124; Jason Patrick Bennet, ‘Apple of the Empire: Landscape and Imperial Identity in Turn-of-the-Century British Columbia’, Journal of the CHA, New Series, Vol. 9 (1998), p. 82.   3 Veterans of the Cameron Highlanders, in Victoria, also raised ‘the flag of St Andrew’, to commemorate the 1898 Battle of Atbara in Sudan on 8 April 1929. F. Bosher, ‘Vancouver Island in the Empire’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, Vol. 33, issue 3 (September 2005), pp. 356–358, 364. These expatriate communities are analogous to those discussed in Robert Bickers (ed.), Settlers and Expatriates: Britons over the Seas (Oxford, 2010).   4 Jean Barman, The West Beyond the West: A History of British Columbia (Toronto, 1996), pp. 138–141, 243, and Growing Up British in British Columbia: Boys in Private School (Vancouver, 1984). Barman estimates that between 1891 and 1914 approximately 170,000 British emigrants entered the province, 40,000 of whom were Scots. In 1921, Britons accounted for 60.9 per cent of the immigrant population and 31.6 per cent of the non-native population. On Vancouver Island the percentage of British-born was even greater, while in 1921 people of Scottish descent accounted for 20 per cent of the non-native population in the province as a whole. By 1951 there were 202,158 people of Scottish origin residing in British Columbia. Jean Barman, ‘Unpacking English Gentlemen Emigrants’ Cultural Baggage: Apple Orchards and Private Schools in British Columbia’s Okanagan Valley’, British Journal of Canadian Studies, Vol. 16, issue 1 (2003), p. 137; Bosher, ‘Vancouver Island’, pp. 362–363; J. M. Bumsted, The Scots in Canada (Ottawa, 1982), p. 17; Aya Fujiwara, Ethnic Elites and Canadian Identity: Japanese, Ukrainians, and Scots (Winnipeg, 2012), p. 23.   5 R. Cole Harris, The Resettlement of British Columbia: Essays on Colonialism and Geographical Change (Vancouver, 1997), pp. 263–264; Michael E. Vance, ‘“Mon – He’s a Gran’ Fish”: Scots in British Columbia’s Interwar Fishing Industry’, BC Studies, Vol. 158 (Summer 2008), pp. 33–36; Robert A. J. McDonald, ‘“He thought he was the boss of everything”: Masculinity and Power in a Vancouver Family’, BC Studies, Vol. 132 (2001–02), p. 17.   6 Wendy Wickwire, ‘“We Shall Drink from the Stream and So Shall You”: James A. Teit and Native Resistance in British Columbia, 1908–22’, Canadian Historical Review, Vol. 79, issue 2 (June 1998), p. 213.

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MIGRATION, DIASPORA AND IDENTITIES   7 Rogers was also a founding member of the Vancouver branch of the Socialist Labour Party when it was established in 1899, but co-founded a splinter group, the United Socialist Labour Party, in 1900 when the SLP renounced trade unionism. Jeremy Mouat, ‘Frank Rogers’, Dictionary of Canadian Biography [hereafter DCB], 1901–1910, Vol. 13. See also Vance, ‘Mon – He’s a Gran’ Fish’, p. 52; Geoff Meggs, Salmon: The Decline of the BC Fishery (Vancouver, 1991), pp. 61–70; Rolf Knight, Indians at Work: An Informal History of Native Labour in British Columbia, 1858–1930 (Vancouver: New Star Books, 1996), pp. 203–206; Harold Griffin, Radical Roots: The Shaping of British Columbia (Vancouver, 1999), pp. 175–176, 183–186.   8 For the Dunsmuirs see Daniel T. Gallacher, ‘Robert Dunsmuir’, DCB, 1881–1890, Vol. 11; Clarence Karr, ‘James Dunsmuir’, DCB, 1911–1920, Vol. 13. By 1913 Canadian Collieries had been sold to a partnership led by the railway contractor William Mackenzie, who was himself was the son of a Scottish emigrant farming family that had settled in Ontario. Theodore D. Regehr, ‘Sir William Mackenzie’, DCB, 1921–30, Vol. 15.   9 John R. Hinde, ‘“Stout Ladies and Amazons”: Women in the British Columbia Coal-Mining Community of Ladysmith, 1912–14’, BC Studies, Vol. 114 (Summer 1997), p. 50, and When Coal Was King: Ladysmith and the Coal-Mining Industry on Vancouver Island (Vancouver, 2003), pp. 148–206; William Kenefick, ‘Confronting White Labourism: Socialism, Syndicalism, and the Role of the Scottish Radical Left in South Africa before 1914’, International Review of Social History, 55 (2010), p.  62. 10 Forward, 28 February 1913, cited in Marjory Harper, Scotland No More? The Scots who Left Scotland in the Twentieth Century (Edinburgh, 2012), p. 176; Hinde, When Coal Was King, p. 173; For Sam Guthrie (1885–1960), who was a Socialist Party member of the provincial legislature from 1920 to 1928 and a CCF member from 1937 to 1945, see Daisy de Jong Webster, Growth of the NDP in BC, 1900–1970: 81 Political Biographies (Vancouver, 1970). For the nineteenth-century Scottish presence in the Vancouver Island coal fields, see John Douglas Belshaw, Colonization and Community: The Vancouver Island Coalfield and the Making of the British Columbian Working Class (Vancouver, 2002) esp. pp. 35–74. 11 Elizabeth ‘Betty’ Kerr [nee Walker Ingram] (1887–1978) was elected to the provincial executive of the CCF in 1938. Kerr worked for newspapers in Calgary, Montreal and Vancouver and Canadian magazines under the pseudonym ‘Constance Errol’. She appears to have rejected her Glasgow upbringing, writing later that Scotland ‘was a grim land’ although she was a devotee of Robert Burns. Irene Howard, ‘The Mother’s Council of Vancouver: Holding the Fort for the Unemployed, 1935–1938’, BC Studies, Vol. 69/70 (1986), pp. 260–261, 282, and The Struggle for Social Justice in British Columbia: Helen Gutteridge, the Unknown Reformer (Vancouver, 1992), pp. 157, 162, 164–165, 172, 184. 12 Elsie Munro [nee Meldrum] (1887–1964) and Peter Campbell Munro (1887–1971) were married in South Vancouver in 1920. (Records of births, marriages and deaths in British Columbia can be found online at: http://royalbcmuseum.bc.ca/bcarchives.) See also Howard, ‘Mother’s Council’, p. 267. For the Communist International’s (Comintern) Third Period, see Matthew Worley (ed.), In Search of Revolution: International Communist Parties in the Third Period (London, 2004) and John Manley, ‘“Starve, Be Damned!” Communists and Canada’s Urban Unemployed’, Canadian Historical Review Vol. 79, issue 3 (1998), pp. 466–491. 13 Andrew Parnaby, Citizen Docker: Making A New Deal on the Vancouver Waterfront, 1919–1939 (Toronto, 2008), pp. 114–115; Stuart Macintyre, Little Moscows: Communism and Working-Class Militancy in Inter-War Britain (London, 1980), pp. 95–97, 157; Manley, ‘Starve, Be Damned!’ p. 468, claims that Campbell and Litterick organised over a hundred demonstrations in 1930. The Glasgow-born Jim Litterick, a former miner, had joined the Communist Party after participating in the 1920 Rent Strike in his native city, and he would become the first communist parliamentarian in Canada when he was elected MLA for Winnipeg in 1936. ‘Elected

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Communist Joined Socialists when only 16’, The Leader-Post (Winnipeg), 30 July 1936. For the federal government use of deportation to disrupt communist activity, see Barbara Roberts, Whence They Came: Deportation from Canada 1900–1935 (Ottawa, 1988). Burns also inspired Mine-Mill Worker Union poets in Trail, BC, who contributed to the Commentator, published by the union in the interior smelter town. Ron Verzuh, ‘The Smelter Poets: The Inspiring Role of Worker Poetry in a BC Labour Newspaper during the “Age of CIO”’, BC Studies, Vol. 177 (Spring 2013), p. 97. Maurice Rush reprinted the entire text of ‘A Man’s a Man for a’ That’ in his memoir, We Have a Glowing Dream: Recollections of Working-Class and People’s Struggles in BC, 1935–1995 (Vancouver, 1996), pp. 2–4, Appendix I. In the mid-1930s Rush would become a leader in the Young Communist League in BC, the national paper of which, the Young Worker, ran a regular comic strip in 1934 that featured a Scottish working-class immigrant hero entitled ‘Red Haggis’. The author is grateful to John Manley for pointing this out. William Gallacher, The Last Memoirs of William Gallacher (London, 1966), p. 252. During his tour, Gallacher focused on building the alliance against fascism rather than the workers’ struggle against capital. John Manly, ‘A British Communist MP in Canada: Willie Gallacher Builds the Popular Front, 1936’, Communist History Network Newsletter, Vol. 6 (1998), pp. 5–10. John Manley was the first to note that Scots were heavily represented in the Canadian Communist Party executive during the 1930s. See his ‘Introduction’, to Gregory S. Kealey and Reg Whitaker (eds.), RCMP Security Bulletins: The Depression Years, Part II, 1935 (St John’s, 1993), pp. 14–15, and ‘A British Communist’, p. 6; for John MacDonald, see William Rodney, Soldiers of the International: A History of the Communist Party in Canada 1919–1929 (Toronto, 1968), pp. 166–167. The most overt use of Scottish popular culture in the mobilisation of union support was found in Nova Scotia, where J. B. McLachlan, a miner from Dumfrieshire, was a key communist union organiser in Cape Breton: see David Frank, ‘Tradition and Culture in the Cape Breton Mining Community in the Early Twentieth Century’ in K. Donovan (ed.), Cape Breton at 200: Historical Essays in Honour of the Island’s Bicentennial, 1785–1985 (Sydney, 1985), pp. 205–206, and J. B. McLachlan: A Biography (Toronto, 1999). The significance of Scottish working-class leadership has also been noted elsewhere in the British Empire: see for example Jonathan Hyslop, The Notorious Syndicalist, J. T. Bain: A Scottish Rebel in Colonial South Africa (Johannesburg, 2004); Stuart MacIntyre, ‘Blood Wattle or Red Heather? The Scottish Strain in the Australian Labour Movement’, Australian Studies, Vol. 12, issue 2 (1997), pp. 99–103; and Harper, Scotland No More?, pp. 176–180. Vance, ‘Mon – He’s a Gran’ Fish’, pp. 46–50; Stephen L. Endicott, Raising the Workers’ Flag: The Workers’ Unity League in Canada, 1930–1936 (Toronto, 2012). Belshaw, Colonization and Community, 35–74; Labour Gazette (August 1913), p. 152; Vance, ‘Mon – He’s a Gran’ Fish’, pp. 39, 47–55; Manly, ‘A British Communist’, p. 6. Tom McEwan, The Forge Glows Red: From Blacksmith to Revolutionary (Toronto, 1974), pp. 1–2. Ewen was an illegitimate child and appears earlier in life to have used his father’s surname, Ewen, and later on his mother’s surname, McEwen. Criticism of the Boer War was also widespread among east-coast Scottish Liberal MPs. W. Hamish Fraser, Scottish Popular Politics: From Radicalism to Labour (Edinburgh, 2000), p. 136. ‘A White Man’s Appeal for the Canadian Indian’, BC Worker’s News, 25 December 1935, p. 2. For Thomas Wright and Scottish communists in Australia generally, see John Shields, ‘Wright, Thomas (Tom) (1902–1981)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, Vol. 18 (Canberra, 2012) and Stuart MacIntyre, The Reds (Sydney, 1998), pp. 16, 19, 64, 69, 83–85, 114–115, 206, 230, 265–266, 318, 333. For the League Against Imperialism in Britain, see Stephen Howe, Anticolonialism in British Politics: The Left and the End of Empire, 1918–1964 (Oxford, 1993), pp. 71–77.

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MIGRATION, DIASPORA AND IDENTITIES 22 John Manley, ‘“Communists Love Canada!”: The Communist Party of Canada, the “People” and the Popular Front, 1933–1939’, Journal of Canadian Studies, Vol. 36, issue 4 (2002), pp. 59–86; Vance, ‘“Mon – He’s a Gran’ Fish’, p. 40. 23 Antko died in 1899. Five years later, Teit married Leonie Josephine Morens, a daughter of colonists from the Savoie region in France. Wendy Wickwire, ‘Teit, James Alexander’, DCB, 1921–1930, vol. 15. 24 Wickwire, ‘We Shall Drink’, pp. 213, 224–225. 25 Ibid., pp. 217–223. See also Peter Campbell, ‘“Not as a White Man, Not as a Sojourner”: James A. Teit and the Fight for Native Rights in British Columbia, 1884–1922’, Left History, Vol. 2, issue 2 (1994), p. 38. For the McKenna–McBride Commission see Cole Harris, Making Native Space: Colonialism, Resistance, and Reserves in British Columbia (Vancouver, 2002), pp. 228–248. 26 Dominion of Canada, Annual Report of the Department of Indian Affairs … 1908 (Ottawa, 1908), p. 309; Annual Report of the Department of Indian Affairs … 1905 (Ottawa, 1905), p. 302, and Annual Report of the Department of Indian Affairs … 1910 (Ottawa, 1910), p. 366. Full text of all the reports can be found online at: www.bac-lac.gc.ca/eng/discover/aboriginal-heritage/first-nations/indian-affairsannual-reports/Pages/introduction.aspx (accessed 10 December 2014). The role and responsibility of Indian Agents in British Columbia at the time is outlined in Trefor Smith, ‘John Freemont Smith and Indian Administration in the Kamloops Agency, 1912–1923’, Native Studies Review, Vol. 10, issue 2 (1995), pp. 1–34. Smith, a prominent Black citizen, served as Indian Agent in Kamloops in part to gain further acceptance in white settler society. 27 Allan Webster Neill (1868–1960), Annual Report of the Department of Indian Affairs … 1912 (Ottawa, 1912), p. 297. 28 J. R. Miller, Shingwauk’s Vision: A History of Native Residential Schools (Toronto, 1996), pp. 151–182. Despite the intention of educational and reserve policies, in the long term, racist hiring practices along with the collapse of the inter-war economy contributed to the creation of a ‘welfare’, rather than industrial, economy among the First Nations of the province. John Sutton Lutz, Makúk: A New History of Aboriginal-White Relations (Vancouver, 2008), pp. 233–274. 29 Hansard, 13 May 1936, p. 2777; Annual Report of the Department of Indian Affairs … 1905 (Ottawa, 1905), p. 301. Neill noted continuing native objections to residential schools, but put this down to superstition and ignorance. He believed that once the advantages of acquiring English were understood objections were overcome. For abuse in residential schools, see Miller, Shingwauk’s Vision, pp. 317–342. 30 Patricia Roy, The Oriental Question: Consolidating a White Man’s Province, 1914–41 (Vancouver, 2003), p. 67. 31 Kornel Chang, Pacific Connections: The Making of the U.S.-Canadian Borderlands (Berkeley, 2012), p. 98; McLashan is quoted in Renisa Mawani, Colonial Proximities: Crossracial Encounters and Juridical Truths in British Columbia, 1871–1921 (Vancouver, 2009), p. 49. His immigration date appears on the 1901 Canadian Census. 32 For contrasting views of ‘White Labourism’ in the Scottish labour movement before the First World War, see William Kenefick, ‘Confronting White Labourism’, and Jonathan Hyslop, ‘Scottish Labour, Race, and Southern African Empire c.1880–1922: A Reply to Kenefick’, International Review of Social History, Vol. 55 (2010), pp. 29–81. William Ellis Maiden’s attestation paper for the Canadian Army can be found at: www.bac-lac.gc.ca/eng/discover/military-heritage/first-world-war/firstworld-war-1914-1918-cef (accessed 10 December 2014). Exclusion of the Japanese, in particular, had long been a demand of many white fishermen and was a central demand of the Fraser River Fisherman’s Protective and Benevolent Association when it was formed in 1893 under the leadership of Alex Anderson, an Ontarioborn fisherman of Scottish origin. Meggs, Salmon, pp. 40, 121. 33 Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality (Cambridge, 2008), p. 317; Prior to the First World War one of the most strident voices behind British

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Columbia’s Asian Exclusion League was the New Zealand-born printer John E. Wilton who had also sojourned in Australia and South Africa before arriving in Vancouver in 1907. Chang, Pacific Connections, pp. 89–116. Neill arrived in British Columbia from New Zealand in 1891. Hansard, 17 March 1922, p. 181; Hansard, 21 February 1923, pp. 497–503; Neill also applauded the measures taken in California. Hansard, 8 May 1922, pp. 1541–1542. Hansard, 25 February 1941, p. 1019. Neill’s free use of derogatory terms like ‘Jap’ and ‘nigger’ in the House of Commons reveals the depth of his racism. See for example Hansard, 17 March 1922, p. 178, and 8 May 1922, p. 1544. Hansard, 21 February 1923, pp. 501–502. Ken Adachi was the first to draw attention to the Scottish background of the most strident proponents of anti-Asian legislation; see The Enemy That Never Was: A History of the Japanese Canadians (Toronto, 1991), p. 400. Ian Alistair Mackenzie (1890–1949) had studied classics and law at Edinburgh University before emigrating to BC in 1914. He joined the Seaforth Highlanders upon arrival and served on the western front with the Canadian Expeditionary Force. Ann Gomer Sunahara, The Politics of Racism: The Uprooting of Japanese Canadians during the Second World War (Toronto, 1981), pp. 16–19, 45–47. Like Allan Neill, Thomas Reid (1886–1968) acted on these views by supporting legislation that aimed at restricting Japanese immigration and reducing their numbers in the BC fishing fleet. Roy, The Oriental Question, pp. 150, 169, 203–205. ‘Senator Thomas Reid Fonds’, City of Surrey Archives. Hansard, 25 February 1941, pp. 1017–1023; Vancouver Sun, 8 March 1945 cited in Adachi, The Enemy That Never Was, p. 400; Roderick Charles MacDonald (1885– 1978) emigrated to BC in 1907. He would later serve as BC Minister of Mines and Minister of Municipal Affairs from 1945 to 1952. James K McDonell and Robert B. Campbell, Lords of the North (Burnstown, 1997), p. 256. This theme is further explored in Bill Schwarz, Memories of Empire, Vol. 1: The White Man’s World (Oxford, 2011). W. Peter Ward, White Canada Forever: Popular Attitudes and Public Policy Towards Orientals in British Columbia, 3rd edition (Montreal, 2002), p. 144. As early as 1938 the Glasgow native and Conservative MLA MacGregor Fullerton MacIntosh (1896–1954) had advocated the ‘deportation’ of all residents of Japanese origin as a response to their homeland’s invasion of China. MacIntosh had first settled in Selkirk, Manitoba with his family in 1903. He fought on western front with the Canadian Expeditionary Force during World War I and served as MLA for the Islands from 1930 to 1941. The Smith case is examined in detail in Edward Starkins, Who Killed Janet Smith? (Toronto, 1986) and Ian MacDonald and Betty O’Keefe, Canadian Holy War: A Story of Clans, Tongs, Murder and Bigotry (Surrey, BC, 2000). Although she was born in Perth, Janet Smith’s mother was Norwegian and her father had a mixed Irish, English and Scottish background. This did not prevent the press from dubbing her the ‘Scottish Nightingale’ – an allusion to her habit of singing while working and also a means of highlighting both her presumed innocence and vulnerability. In Canada, the Ku Klux Klan modified its American racist message in order to present itself as both a Christian organisation and a defender of the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ empire. The organisation appears to have enjoyed considerable support among evangelical protestant clergymen. See James M. Pitsula, Keeping Canada British: The Ku Klux Klan in 1920s Saskatchewan (Vancouver, 2013). Scott Kerwin, ‘The Janet Smith Bill of 1924 and the Language of Race and Nation in British Columbia’, BC Studies, number 121 (Spring 1999), pp. 85–86. Hansard, 17 March 1922. Kerwin, ‘The Janet Smith Bill’, p. 94. See also Kay J. Anderson, Vancouver’s Chinatown: Racial Discourse in Canada (Montreal, 1991), pp. 97–99, 158–164, and Mawani, Colonial Proximities, pp. 105–121. Intriguingly, the act, not repealed until 1968, also made it illegal to employ ‘Indian’ women or girls in the same businesses. Kerwin, ‘The Janet Smith Bill’, pp. 93–94.

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MIGRATION, DIASPORA AND IDENTITIES 49 Starkins, Who Killed Janet Smith?, pp. 117, 132–134, 216, 219–221. Other Scots arrested for the kidnapping of Sing were Sergeant Percy Kirkham of the Point Grey Police and H. P. McRaney of the Point Grey Police Commission. David Paterson, the President of the United Council, was also arrested but, to date, it has not been possible to determine his origins. The Vancouver Scottish Societies included those who identified themselves as Scots as well as those born in Scotland. Their memberships have yet to be studied in detail. 50 Kerwin, ‘The Janet Smith Bill’, pp. 90, 95. 51 Records relating to Jessie Victoria Stratton (née Martin; 1883–?) and Ferguson Hunter Stratton (1877–1950) can be found at the BC Archives website and in the 1911 Census of Canada, which can be searched by family name with the genealogical web page – Automated Genealogy http://automatedgenealogy.com (accessed 20 November 2014). Jessie Stratton’s birthplace is given variously as Dunfermline or Edinburgh on the marriage records of two of her children. 52 Kerwin, ‘The Janet Smith Bill’, pp. 90–96; Michael H. Cramer, ‘Public and Political: Documents of the Woman’s Suffrage Campaign in British Columbia, 1871–1917: The View from Victoria’, Barbara Latham and Cathy Kess (eds.), In Her Own Right: Selected Essays on Women’s History in B.C. (Victoria, 1980), pp. 79–100. 53 English women dominated the leadership of the provincial suffrage movement: see Linda Louise Hale, ‘Appendix: Votes for Women: Profiles of Prominent British Columbia Suffragists’ in Latham and Kess (eds.) In Her Own Right, pp. 287–302. Elizabeth Ida Bramwell (1858–?) was the daughter of James Paton Bramwell, the chief consulting surgeon at the Perth Royal Infirmary. She had trained as a nurse before marrying Samuel Fearn, an English soldier in the Grenadier Guards, and emigrating to BC some time before the 1890s. Howard, ‘Mother’s Council’, pp. 71–75; For the Scottish movement, see Leah Leneman, A Guid Cause: The Women’s Suffrage Movement in Scotland (Aberdeen, 1991). 54 Marilyn Barber, ‘The Gentlewomen of Queen Mary’s Coronation Hostel’ in Barbara K. Latham and Roberta J. Pazdro (eds.), Not Just Pin Money (Victoria, 1984), pp. 141–158; Annmarie Hughes, Gender and Political Identities in Scotland, 1919–1939 (Edinburgh, 2010), pp. 115–116. See also Lisa Chilton, Agents of Empire: British Female Migration to Canada and Australia, 1860–1930 (Toronto, 2007), pp. 66–96. 55 ‘Maternalism’ was also employed in justifying aboriginal child abduction in Australia. See Margaret Jacobs, White Mother to a Dark Race: Settler Colonialism, Maternalism, and the Removal of Indigenous Children in the American West and Australia, 1880–1940 (Lincoln, 2009). 56 Marjory Harper, Emigration from Scotland between the Wars (Manchester, 1998), pp. 146–151, and Scotland No More?, pp. 68–69, 238 fn.36. 57 Hughes, Gender and Political Identities, pp. 58, 84, 116. 58 Alan Haig-Brown, Fishing For a Living (Maderia Park, BC, 1993), pp. 100–101; Vance, ‘Gran Fish’, pp. 53–54. 59 Flora MacDonald Hutton (nee Storrie) [1893–1982] was born in Bellshill. BC Archives. She would become a member of the WUL executive and visit the deputy prime minister once again in 1933 as part of the National Congress on Unemployment delegation. Endicott, Raising the Workers’ Flag, pp. 168–171, 210. 60 Helen Corr, ‘Crawfurd, Helen (1877–1954)’ & ‘Dollan, Agnes Johnson (1887–1966)’, Dictionary of National Biography [hereafter DNB]; Audrey Canning, ‘Barbour, Mary (1875–1958)’, DNB. 61 Neil C. Rafeek, Communist women in Scotland: Red Clydeside from the Russian Revolution to the end of the Soviet Union (London, 2008), pp. 25–54. Mary Barbour was a key supporter of the Socialist Sunday Schools which continued to enjoy support from both socialists and communists throughout inter-war period. See also Endicott, Raising the Workers’ Flag, pp. 157–176; Hughes, Gender and Political Identities, pp. 38–59. 62 As late as February 1914, the paper published an article written by striking Lanarkshire miners on Vancouver Island urging fellow Scots not to emigrate to Canada, where they might be used as scab labour. Forward, 8 February 1914, cited in William

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Kenefick, Red Scotland!: The Rise and Fall of the Radical Left, c. 1872 to 1932 (Edinburgh, 2007), p. 210. Kenefick, ‘Confronting White Labourism’, pp. 50, 55. See Graham Walker, ‘Johnston, Thomas (1881–1965)’, DNB; Gerald Douds, ‘Tom Johnston in India’, Scottish Labour History, Vol. 19 (1984), pp. 6–21. Andrew Thompson, The Empire Strikes Back? The Impact of Imperialism on Britain from the Mid-Nineteenth Century (London, 2005), p. 146. Richard J. Finlay, ‘National Identity, Union, and Empire’ in John M. MacKenzie and T. M. Devine (eds.), Scotland and the British Empire (Oxford, 2011), p. 310. As Susan D. Pennybacker puts it, inside the Communist Party during the 1930s, ‘the opponents of empire … lost the weight of the argument in the face of fascism’. From Scottsboro to Munich: Race and Political Culture in 1930s Britain (Princeton, 2009), p. 274. Andrew Dewar Gibbs, Scottish Empire (London, 1937). For Scotland see Finlay, ‘National Identity’, pp. 301–308. For Canada see, for example, Philip Buckner (ed.), Canada and the British Empire (Oxford, 2008), pp. 1–21, and Philip Buckner and R. Douglas Francis (eds.), Canada and the British World: Culture, Migration, and Identity (Vancouver, 2006). This was in part a reflection of the greater proportion of Scots in the Canadian immigrant population than in the British Isles, but also the easy manner in which they moved into the dominant society. See Buckner and Francis (eds.), Canada and the British World, p. 7; Fujiwara, Ethnic Elites, pp. 36–37. Kenefick, ‘Confronting White Labourism’, p. 48; Hyslop, ‘Scottish Labour’, pp. 76–77; John M. MacKenzie with Nigel R. Dalziel, The Scots in South Africa: Ethnicity, Identity, Gender and Race, 1772–1914 (Manchester, 2007), pp. 228–233. Intriguingly, Robert Graham (1869–1950) first worked in the United States and Canada before moving to South Africa in 1901. James Bryce, Relations of the Advanced and Backward Races of Mankind (Oxford, 1902). Helen R. Y. Reid, Charles H. Young and W. A. Carrothers, The Japanese Canadians (Toronto, 1938); Esther Breitenbach, Empire and Scottish Society: The Impact of Foreign Missions at Home c. 1780–c. 1914 (Edinburgh, 2009), pp. 90–118. James Bryce (1838–1922) was born in Belfast but spent most of his early years in Glasgow. His book The American Commonwealth (1888), which claimed to illustrate the failure of black enfranchisement after the American Civil War, was taken up as ‘a bible by white-nation builders’: Lake and Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line, pp. 7, 71–74; see also Douglas A. Lorimer, Science, Race Relations and Resistance: Britain, 1870–1914 (Manchester, 2013), pp. 215–229; Robert Reid, the father of social worker and educator Helen Richmond Young Reid (1869–1941), was a Scottish sculptor who ran the successful Robert R. Marble Works in Montreal. The Canadian Who’s Who 1938–1939, Vol. 3 (Toronto, 1939); Canadian Men & Women of the Time 1912 (Toronto, 1912), Fujiwara, Ethnic Elites, pp. 49–50.

[ 109 ]

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PA RT II

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Anti-colonialism, the military, ­decolonisation and nationalism

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C HAP T ER SIX

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Anti-colonialism in twentieth-century Scotland Stephen Howe

Few spots in Scotland carry such an emotional and historical charge as does the Lake of Menteith in Perthshire. On an island in the lake (which is reportedly the only place in the country to bear that name, rather than ‘loch’) stand the evocative ruins of the thirteenth-century Augustinian Inchmahome Priory. Robert the Bruce knew this place, as did Mary Queen of Scots, Sir Walter Scott and many another notable figure in the national story. For this visitor, though, the lake’s and island’s presiding spirit is another, more recent historical figure: here lie the graves of Robert Bontine Cunninghame Graham (1852–1936) and his wife Gabriella. First president of the National Party of Scotland, Cunninghame Graham can be seen as a pioneer equally of modern Scottish Nationalism, of British socialism and of Scots anti-colonialism. Not ‘only’ a politician, he was also a writer of some repute, and a traveller of infinite resource, whose interests and engagements embraced the whole British-imperial world and far beyond. Very few people – arguably, nobody in Britain up to that time – assailed the pretensions and the spurious legitimations of empire with such ferocious scorn as did Cunninghame Graham, most famously in his essay ‘Niggers’ (1899), but also in multiple other impassioned i­nterventions.1 These graves and their associations open the way to a view of Scotland’s past which embraces the global, and specifically the postcolonial, while seeing them as fully intertwined with Inchmahome’s local and national associations. Cunninghame Graham’s life offers, moreover, fuel for the view of Scotland as having a radically different, dissenting experience of and reaction to empire, quite sharply astray from that dominant in England. But if we move beyond the individual and the anecdotal, how much evidence is there for a truly distinctive Scottish experience or view of empire? Historians, including contributors to the present volume, have differed widely on this. Certainly we cannot easily extrapolate from so gargantuan and idiosyncratic [ 113 ]

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a figure as Cunninghame Graham to any broader picture. Studies of him seem routinely to reach for such words as ‘eccentric’, ‘fantastic’, ‘quixotic’, ‘larger than life’ and so on. As Michael Taussig says, he was ‘fearsomely, eccentrically of both the third and the first worlds’.2 And as Brian McKenna suggests, Cunninghame Graham’s anti-imperialism was motivated not so much by the socialism or radical-liberalism which fired most later critics of empire both in Scotland and more widely, as by a romantic anti-capitalism which led him, for instance, to view early Spanish conquests in the Americas surprisingly indulgently when compared with later Anglo-world ones, and rather uncritically to praise the ‘proto-communist’ dream-schemes of Jesuit missions in Paraguay.3 In particular, it is hard if not impossible to extract ‘hard’, statistical evidence on the extent of opposition to empire, in Scotland or elsewhere: as scholars have long noted, before the era of mass publicopinion polling, we have no really reliable means of ascertaining and quantifying British – or Scottish – attitudes to empire. We cannot use electoral behaviour as evidence, for there was never an occasion when voters were invited to choose between clear-cut alternative imperial policies, nor an election campaign in which colonial questions were decisive. Recent debates – sometimes heated ones – over how pervasive or intense popular British imperialist enthusiasm might have been have drawn much attention, but perhaps unsurprisingly have produced no agreement.4 Some historians have also pursued the mirror-image question of anti-colonialism’s strength or popularity; but their findings have not taken shape in so explicit or large-scale – and certainly not so polarised – a discussion. Nor have many, if any, scholars yet looked closely at regional, national or other differentiations in the character or strength of opposition to empire within the UK. We must thus seek our answers, if any, in broader but inescapably more impressionistic kinds of sources. Sweeping, and sharply opposed, claims have abounded in the literature. For instance South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu, introducing Ian Whyte’s book on Scotland and abolition, enthused: ‘The passion of the Scots for freedom and individuality is legendary. We enjoyed wonderful support from the Scottish people in our struggle against apartheid, for which we are deeply grateful.’5 At the opposite extreme, though in more academic vein and probably reflecting a more widely held stereotype, among the very few Scottish references in Bernard Porter’s much-debated Absent-Minded Imperialists is the almost throwaway passing remark that ‘Scotland was always keener on the imperial enterprise than her southern neighbour.’6 Andrew Thompson too suggests that the Scots were, ‘the first peoples of the British Isles to take on an imperial mentality, and possibly the longest to sustain one’.7 [ 114 ]

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So, how distinct was the profile, extent or character of anti-colonial critique in Scotland, and was it on balance stronger or weaker than in England and Wales? We shall pursue this theme through each in turn of several worlds which the multifaceted Cunninghame Graham inhabited: those of socialist and labour politics, of nationalism, of cultural and especially literary circles, and of Scotland’s diaspora. None of them, however, can be given their full due here. The mainstay of organised anti-colonialist critique and mobilisation, in Scotland as almost everywhere among Europe’s colony-owning powers, lay in socialist and social democratic groups – even though, as substantial literatures have traced for most of these, all such groups had (insofar as they addressed the issue at all) complex, ever-changing, often ambivalent attitudes to empire.8 Significant configurations of belief included those who opposed what they called ‘aggressive imperialism’ and new acts of expansion while holding that the existing empire required reform rather than destruction; those who felt that empire might, if placed under socialist rather than capitalist direction, become a vehicle for global progress; those who held positive views about the white-settler colonies while disliking British rule over non-white subject populations; and those (often still called ‘Little Englanders’, despite the label’s evident absurdity when applied to the Scots among them) who contested all extra-insular involvements for essentially domestic reasons. Principled, generalised rejection of every part of the ‘imperial mission’ was very much the preserve of a minority even within British Labour’s ranks, albeit one which grew as empire itself declined across the decades. Some historians believe that this latter minority was still smaller in Scotland than elsewhere. Richard Finlay claims starkly that ‘Antiimperialists had little impact north of the border.’9 Noting a few exceptions, with pride of place for John MacLean, he suggests these had influence only in restricted circles, and ‘Even then, criticism of the empire tended to be incidental and did not travel much beyond the confines of the British Isles, though reference was made from time to time to colonial nationalism.’ Mainstream Labour, he says, barely engaged at all with imperial questions: ‘While Unionists waxed lyrical about the empire, socialists tended not to talk about it, but instead focused on matters closer to home, presumably because that is what they believed their voters thought was more important.’10 Those who would qualify or overturn this picture tend to point to a handful of individuals, like Cunninghame Graham or, a little later, that archetypal-but-maverick tribune of ‘Red Clydeside’, MacLean, or to very small groups on the far left.11 As we shall see, the relationship in such circles’ thought between a ‘local’ Scottish nationalism and a ‘global’ [ 115 ]

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anti-imperialism has also been much debated. Yet it is clear that most early agitation against empire took place not in specifically Scottish or politically nationalist milieux (despite the counter-instances of individuals like Cunninghame Graham and MacLean) but in pan-British ones. These included the Social Democratic Foundation (SDF), the British Socialist Party (BSP) and Independent Labour Party (ILP) – though the last of these, which became by far the biggest, included within its ranks and its leadership a wide range of attitudes towards empire. Perhaps the most interesting and vigorous recent airing of these issues has been conducted in relation to the role of Scots anti-imperialists abroad, and especially in southern Africa. In 2010 William Kenefick argued that the birth of radical-socialist and anti-racist politics there ‘was disproportionately influenced by radical-left Scottish migrants who firmly adhered to the colour-blind principles of international socialism, industrial unionism, and revolutionary syndicalism’.12 In particular, the roots of South African syndicalism lay firmly in Scotland, especially in the small but influential Socialist Labour Party, formed there in 1903, and among the engineers of Clydeside and railway workers of Edinburgh.13 Figures from those milieux like Andrew Dunbar and Jock Campbell were crucial, pioneering forces in South Africa – and their politico-cultural world remained a distinctively Scottish one even in ‘exile’, as they always remained closely in touch with left-wing politics and writings ‘at home’.14 John MacKenzie too has (alongside his explorations of emigrant Scots’ roles in fields like business, religion and medicine) noted how widely Scottish socialism travelled; wherever its adherents went ‘they exported their discontents, their rage at capitalism and big business, and their sense that something needed to be done in South Africa’.15 Responding to Kenefick, Jonathan Hyslop – who has also undertaken important research on Scots-diasporic radicalism, though also exploring the export of other worldviews including militaristic and poetic ones,16 while developing a more global argument about the salience of imperial ‘white labourism’ – was rather more sceptical. While he accepted that some Scottish labour leaders, both ‘at home’ and in South Africa, were principled anti-racists, he doubted the extent of their wider influence, and whether Scots migrants were really more predisposed to inter-racial solidarity than others.17 While Kenefick sees a Scots national identification as at odds with (if not necessarily explicitly opposed to) an imperialist one, Hyslop affirms that ‘Scots national identity was primarily aligned with the pan-British and imperial political projects from at least the time of the Napoleonic wars to the start of World War I.’18 He further suggests that Kenefick’s view depends on a false assumption – in part following the work of [ 116 ]

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Neville Kirk – that the admittedly pervasive racism within Britishdiasporic labour movements, as in southern Africa and Australasia, was not replicated in the ranks of metropolitan British (or Scottish) labour.19 Indeed, in Hyslop’s eyes Kenefick is practising a form of ‘imperial denialism’: refusal to see the extent to which all aspects of Scottish life were permeated and reshaped by empire. The echoes of recent historiographical disputes conducted on a UK-wide level, such as that between Porter and MacKenzie, will be evident to most readers. How, if at all, does the picture change across the twentieth century? Certainly we see, after 1918 and still more after 1945, a substantial increase in the presence of overt critique of empire as a whole in leftist and Labour movement circles within Scotland, as elsewhere in the UK and indeed generally among the peoples of Europe’s colonial powers. Yet, as for earlier periods, agitation or organisation for anti-colonial causes remained heavily London-centred, while the limited research which has been undertaken on more localised activities does not allow us to offer firm judgements on how the salience or intensity in Scotland of this compares to that in England and Wales. One Aberdeen-based activist in the Movement for Colonial Freedom, which was from its foundation in 1954 probably the most important relevant left-wing pressure group, offered a gloomy but intriguing view for what she saw as the cause’s limited local appeal: ‘The Scots have no conscience about the colonies – they think the English are solely to blame.’20 Looking at a different level, the role of Scots members in left-wing parliamentary critique of late-colonial abuses, the present author found that of the thirty-seven Labour MPs who in three sample years – 1951, 1954 and 1957 – were the most actively involved in colonial questions, just five were Scots born, but three of these represented English constituencies. They were John Hynd (of Perth origin but a Sheffield MP), Harry Hynd (also Perth born, but representing Hackney, then Accrington), Jennie Lee (from Fife, but a Staffordshire MP; married to the prominent and fiery Welsh Labour leader Nye Bevan, Lee later took as the title of her peerage not some Fifeshire spot but the couple’s Buckinghamshire home of Asheridge), Malcolm MacPherson (who sat for Stirling) and John Rankin (both born in and representing Glasgow).21 Clearly the two most important political formations in Scotland outside and to the left of the Labour Party, across much of the lateimperial era, were the Communist Party and (during its era of separate existence after disaffiliation from Labour) the Independent Labour Party. Although Scottish and Scots-born activists always played a disproportionately important role in British communism, as so many commentators have noted, this prominence seems rather less strongly reflected in the party’s engagement with colonial affairs, while a [ 117 ]

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major study of Scots communist ‘grass-roots’ and especially female activists barely registers anti-colonial involvements, certainly when compared with some other patterns of internationalism, especially and ­unsurprisingly pro-Soviet ones.22 Somewhat similarly the ILP – despite the party’s image, above all on Clydeside, as embodying a very distinctively Scots strain of socialist politics – seems to offer little evidence for its Scottish structures, activists or leaders taking different views on empire from its English ones. If anything, the former may have been proportionately rather less likely to be engaged with this issue – though that is an impressionistic rather than statistically based suggestion.23 It has occasionally been suggested that critics of empire from various colonised places found, when visiting Scotland, an especially warm welcome and much evidence of fellow-feeling and political support from their hosts. Thus, for instance, James D. Young’s study of C. L. R. James – drawing on the memories of acquaintances of James from Scottish socialist circles, like Nan MacLean Milton and Willie Tait – offers a series of fascinating, if frustratingly brief and episodic, vignettes on how the great West Indian radical thinker was received in Scotland, and how he saw it. The picture is one of personal affection and strong, positive engagement.24 Yet insofar as this was indeed so, it may have owed something to the sheer novelty and rarity of such non-white presences as James’ in Scottish socialist circles, by comparison with the larger numbers of such people to be encountered in London and other major English cities – a matter to which we shall return. Indeed, this is suggested in the naïve-sounding (at best) terms with which Tait described James’ reception in Edinburgh: ‘the workers … thought it was great that a Black man could talk to them about socialism’.25 Moreover, in Young’s view, naturally, James should have recognised not only Scottish national distinctiveness (as he apparently did only partially and belatedly, after moving to the USA) but the Scots’ position as fellow colonised subjects. Yet James, and many other globally anticolonialist thinkers, notably disappointed such expectations.26 As this suggests, throughout the century – but with especial strength at the start and then again near the end – there was a close if never simple association between left-wing or labourist politics and political nationalism in Scotland. The figure with whom we began, Cunninghame Graham, pioneered and symbolised this link. The infant Scottish Labour Party had campaigned for Home Rule, while both Hardie and MacDonald had been youthful supporters of the Scottish Home Rule Association. And even though Labour of course thereafter became and long remained identified as a ‘unionist’ party, neither Scots socialists’ attraction to nationalist politics nor its converse ever disappeared. [ 118 ]

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What, though, did this imply for the salience or character of opposition to empire in Scotland? The picture here is unsurprisingly complex – and, we must once more note, in part obscured both by gaps in existing research on the subject and by some sharp disagreements among the handful of historians who have studied it.27 Between the wars, as before and after, there was much diversity and dispute among nationalists over what kind of relationship a future self-governing Scotland might have with empire. As Colin Kidd urges, while some nationalists associated themselves with a generalised anti-imperialism, ‘Much of the discourse of Scottish nationalism between the 1880s and 1930s has as its focus the role of Scotland within the running of the British Empire … Generally, Scottish home rule was envisaged as a pillar of a revitalised British Empire. The consolidation of a far-flung Empire might entail a new distribution of domestic responsibilities within the British mother countries.’28 From 1920 on, the Scottish Home Rule Association, espousing such views, clashed sharply with the more leftist, and avowedly anti-imperialist, Scots National League. The Young Scots Society, founded in 1900 and closely associated with the Radical wing of Liberalism (and even, at its formation, with ‘pro-Boerism’), tended, however, as Kidd says, to view the Scottish Home Rule issue ‘largely as a dimension of a wider vision for reform of the Empire as a whole. “Home Rule”, proclaimed the Young Scots Society, “is true imperialism.” The safeguarding of nationality within the home countries was in fact a necessary step towards a more efficient and resilient Empire.’29 As Richard Finlay too urges, while Scottish nationalists remained sharply divided over imperial questions, most currents of opinion among them favoured some form of Home Rule within the empire, and proclaimed their loyalty to the latter.30 Even Hugh MacDiarmid – to whom, again, we shall return – foresaw in 1927 that a future Scotland would be part of a ‘British Association of Free Peoples’ and believed that ‘The Scottish Home Rule demand is … strictly in accord with the very life-spirit of the Empire’.31 If the SNP has, since 1988, espoused ‘Independence in Europe’, then many of their precursors had called for something like ‘Independence within the empire’. Two further kinds of institution require brief notice, before we shift attention to wider, less formalised spheres of opinion, discourse, culture and emotion. They are those of religion and of education – often seen as being, with the legal system, precisely the ones in which Scotland retained its clearest distinctiveness after the Union. Some strong claims have been made for the Church of Scotland as a focus for anti-colonialist sentiment, especially in empire’s last stages [ 119 ]

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and in relation to central and southern Africa (which were among the colonial places where Scots missionaries had the strongest presence). Certainly in that context the Church’s General Assembly became a fierce critic of British policy and was widely seen as a supporter of African nationalism. And as Devine remarks: The position of the Church on this issue was deeply significant. To a much greater extent than today it was a national church with a membership which historically reached an all-time high in the late 1950s. Traditionally, in this stateless nation, the Church of Scotland was regarded as a kind of surrogate parliament which spoke for the country on matters of contemporary political and social importance as well as religious issues through its General Assembly.32

Yet although this is evidently true, and although some other parts of the record of Scottish churches and their missions in Africa and elsewhere also fit well with the recently growing historiographical trend which stresses missionaries as critics of empire rather than as agents of cultural imperialism, the point should not be overstated nor over-generalised. As numerous studies have shown, at earlier times and in other places there is no good reason to suppose that Scottish church bodies were overall less supportive of the ‘empire project’ than were others. Indeed, it has recently been argued to some effect that they were crucial agents in helping create an identification with empire among many Scots ‘at home’.33 As for the education system: Bryan Glass has shown how important empire was in Scottish school curricula and educational publishing, as in other communicative spheres, but does not seek systematically to compare this with the theme’s profile in English, Welsh or (Northern) Irish schools.34 In the universities, as Robert Anderson shows, Scotland became by the later nineteenth century integrated into an imperial as well as pan-British network of academic interchange and migration. A significant number of Scots-born scholars took up posts in Australasia, Canada and southern Africa. Meanwhile, however, there was surprisingly little teaching or study of empire in Scotland’s universities. ‘Imperial episodes were prominent in British history courses, and constitutional history celebrated the extension of liberty to British communities overseas, but only Edinburgh established a post in “colonial and Indian history”, in 1912.’35 Perhaps somewhat similarly today, criticism of the new Scottish school history curriculum centres not on its celebrating or denigrating the empire, but on its virtually ignoring it. The history curriculum for Highers certainly seems to focus almost exclusively on emigration, with very scant attention to other aspects of empire’s impact on Scotland. [ 120 ]

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And perhaps there is continuity, rather than dramatic post-imperial or post-devolutionary change, also on wider fronts of popular opinion and discourse. A major survey-based study of how empire is now seen in Scotland has found that ‘spontaneous accounts of Empire were typically formulated in conjunction with nationalist moral metanarratives. Respondents variously inferred heroic national character from Scotland’s role in Empire, or cast Scottish history as an enduring struggle between progressive forces of nationalism and atavistic forces of Anglo-British colonialism. The construct of Britishness was often seen to derive from, and to be synonymous with, the history of Empire.’36 This would appear in essence to reproduce an older structure of feeling on which numerous historians, reflecting on multiple periods from the Union onwards, have remarked. In this, in Nigel Leask’s words, ‘Scottish attitudes to empire have polarised between unionist pride in Scottish enterprise, technological inventiveness and military prowess, and a nationalist jeremiad which casts Scotland as victim, making common cause with other small nations historically subjected to large empires.’37 Yet on general principles, as multinational or multi-ethnic states decompose, one may expect to find that the historical perceptions and collective memories of the constituent parts will increasingly diverge. And if the United Kingdom is indeed thus decomposing (which, at the time of writing in summer 2014, shortly before the scheduled independence referendum, naturally remains much in doubt and dispute) then one would anticipate growing English–Scottish division over imperial memory: comparable perhaps with Belgium’s internal schisms on the subject, where Flemish and Walloon perceptions of the colonial past are now seemingly strong in popular culture and the public sphere, albeit less so in academia. Certainly there already appears to be a growing divergence between English and Scots perceptions of the United Kingdom’s international role and its relation to imperial pasts. For instance, there was clearly more widespread opposition to the Iraq war in Scotland than in England, and the Scottish National Party articulated a more forthright anti-war stance than did any of the ‘pan-British’ opposition parties. Such feelings focused strongly around the role of Scottish army regiments like the Black Watch in Iraq, and the relatively heavy casualties they suffered there. Scottish radical traditions, and ones of militarism and of the Scots role in empire-building (always a disproportionately large role, as many historians have noted), thus entered a complex, unstable new relationship. Some Scottish nationalists had long viewed the Scots soldier as a kind of mercenary, mindlessly fighting and dying in England’s wars. But today Scottish troops come [ 121 ]

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from and cannot help but in some measure reflect a more democratic civil society and culture than England’s. Scots democratic radicalism has taken many forms, by no means always politically nationalist but invariably, distinctively national. It looks back – albeit always with the admixture of myth and sentiment which all national selfimaginings involve – to the Declaration of Arbroath in 1320, to the Covenanters and Cameronians in the seventeenth century, to myriad egalitarian and socialist movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Some of this – certainly not all – included a distinctive legacy of hostility to aggressive imperialism, as with Cunninghame Graham, or with parts of the ILP tradition. As writers like Tom Nairn and Neal Ascherson document, this political and cultural ethos was dramatically renewed in the drive for self-government from the 1970s onward. And this included, so some argued, a hostility to the legacies of empire, well encapsulated in Hamish Henderson’s song ‘Freedom Come All Ye’, which was adopted as an anthem by many nationalists. As Ascherson notes in his great book Stone Voices, its words ‘declare that Scottish soldiers are not glorious, but have drenched the world with innocent blood for the sake of a racialist Empire’.38 The imaginative afterlives of empire in Scotland were, on this view, taking paths ever more distinct from those in England. The evident upshot of all this would be, in many eyes, an evergrowing perception of Scotland as having a distinctively post-colonial – as well as anti-colonial – identity. As elsewhere in the world, and as we might expect, the academic manifestation of that view is especially to be found in literary and cultural studies and histories. Yet post-colonial studies and theory seem thus far to have found few niches in Scottish universities or the country’s wider public culture, by comparison with most other Anglophone places, including even England. Equally, many of the people whom one might have expected to make substantial historical arguments for Scottish (or Welsh) nationalisms as movements of decolonisation – Tom Nairn or Angus Calder, Gwyn Alf Williams or Dai Smith – either have not done so, or have essayed them only in rather attenuated or undeveloped forms. Williams, indeed, explicitly rejected ‘internal colonialism’ as an explanatory category for (imperial) Welsh history.39 Even Nairn does not in fact substantially discuss the British state and its break-up in a specifically imperial context, nor does he analyse Scottish developments as colonial ones. Examination of Scotland or Wales in colonial and post-colonial terms has in the main come only more recently – has followed, rather than preceding and shaping, the revival of political nationalism and (partial) self-government. It is by no means certain that, as and when that argument is more fully articulated in [ 122 ]

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historical terms, it will command widespread conviction.40 Yet there have been several vigorous essays in the application of post-colonialism to Scotland, often linking it to argument for Scotland’s having been subject to English colonial rule – a colonialism seen not now as mainly economic (as earlier analysts of the Union like Michael Hechter and, to a degree, T. C. Smout had done) but primarily as a cultural phenomenon.41 The most forceful exponents of this were Craig Beveridge and Ronald Turnbull, in The Eclipse of Scottish Culture (1989), and Cairns Craig with his Out of History (1996). All three adopted Frantz Fanon’s notion of ‘inferiorisation’ to argue that not only Scottish elites in general but most intellectuals had been trained to see themselves, their culture and their nation as necessarily inferior to the English. (They included in their indictment even such a fervent and widely respected nationalist thinker as Tom Nairn.)42 They have been followed – in their interest in understanding Scottish culture and especially literature through a post-colonial lens, if not necessarily in their more polemical vein – by a growing number of other analysts; though at least as many Scottish literary scholars have expressed considerable scepticism about this endeavour. Some, too, have pursued the idea that it is specifically the Highlands and its culture, rather than (or more than) Scotland as a whole, which may fruitfully be analysed through colonial and post-colonial lenses.43 Part of this ‘post-colonialising’ project has been to seek to trace anti-colonial themes in Scotland’s modern literary history. As we have noted, this can easily be done for some – albeit not conspicuously central – figures like Cunninghame Graham. An intriguing attempt to recuperate Robert Louis Stevenson as anti-imperialist has recently been undertaken by Nigel Leask.44 The occasional invocation of colonial parallels in such contemporary writers as James Kelman and Irvine Welsh has been highlighted,45 as has the (very recent) emergence of a cohort of Scottish-based writers with African, Caribbean or Asian origins or family backgrounds, like Jackie Kay, Laura Fish and Bashabi Fraser.46 The most prominent focus, however, has been on the man generally seen as Scotland’s greatest modern poet, MacDiarmid. Scholars and critics have not only tracked down the scattered allusions to colonial politics and literatures in his work, and in places like his extensive correspondence with fellow poet Sorley McLean,47 and emphasised how his extraordinarily wide-ranging (if, foes charge, often markedly erratic) intellectual curiosity and political engagement embraced many colonial themes. Some have also urged that ‘the political evolution of MacDiarmid’s poetry marks the shift from elitist modernism (indicative of the waning of British imperial control) to the ideal of a postcolonial society’.48 Yet it must surely be [ 123 ]

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added that such colonial and anti-colonial themes feature in only a very small portion of the poet’s writings, while although his interests may have been global his activities were rather less so. Indeed, it is striking how far the literary-political circles in which MacDiarmid moved included rather few non-Scots, still fewer non-Europeans and almost literally no non-whites.49 Such new(ish) emphases have, however, been far from eclipsing the older fascination, both scholarly and popular, with Scots as imperial emigrants.50 It might even be thought that there is still comparatively too much emphasis on this, when measured against other themes amidst Scotland’s multifaceted imperial entanglements, in the recent academic literature as well as in popular memory. Sometimes, ways are found of connecting emigrant histories with anti-colonialism, counterintuitive though such an association must in the main seem. This has been done via claims that Scots emigrants and settlers – perhaps especially Highland ones – very often displayed conspicuous fellow-feeling with indigenes in the places where they went. There was much mutual adoption of folkways, and a striking incidence of intermarriage. This owed much, some suggest, to the Highlands’ own status as a colonised region – though subjected by Lowlanders at least as much as by England.51 As Paul Basu shrewdly comments: Such historical sources are employed tendentiously by present-day cultural revivalists to construct the Highlanders as an indigenous population, akin to other native peoples, in opposition to the dominating colonising culture with its barbarous ethnocentrisms. Through such oppositional logic, Highland settlers thus become excluded from participation in the violence of colonial appropriations and, instead, are typically portrayed as intermarrying and living peaceably with their indigenous ‘kinsfolk’.52

As Basu suggests, the Highland Clearances are in some such rhetorics configured as a foundational historical trauma, depicted not only as (near-)genocidal but as the key motif for identifying Scottish historical experience with that of colonised, anti-colonially resistant indigenous peoples worldwide. He rightly argues that these notions threaten to obscure, or substitute for, a better historically grounded sense of ‘complicated belonging’ among the descendants of Scots emigrants and settlers, in their relations with, say, Australasian or North American indigenous pasts, colonial histories, and with Scotland’s own past. Can we identify and pursue a distinctive Scottish idea, or set of ideas, about the global phenomena of empires and colonialisms? Is there, indeed, a separate, distinguishable Scottish body of thought about the British Empire and its legacies? The answer to both questions, [ 124 ]

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it has here been suggested, is a qualified ‘yes’ – but also a slightly paradoxical one. Across the twentieth century and in multiple spheres from Marxist parties to university seminars or poets’ private letters, one finds both particularly inflected, and in some aspects particularly strong, Scottish manifestations of hostility to empire and (a story at which we have only glanced, but with which other contributors to this volume engage) idiosyncratic and fervent modes of identification with imperialism. Amidst all this complexity – whose dimensions we have been able barely to begin here to register – a few summary conclusions may be offered. First, anti-colonialism in Scotland, both among major radical cultural figures and in left-wing political formations, mainly focused on Scotland itself (with frequent side-glances to Ireland, but not before the 1980s to Wales) plus a critique of English/British imperialism as a global, semi-abstract force. Close attention to particular non-European colonised places was not so different in nature or intensity in Scotland as against England, and indeed most often took place in pan-British political space, in London more than Edinburgh. Second, Scottish anti-colonialism was, simply and bluntly, a white world. In London or Manchester, as in Paris, Brussels or Lisbon, locally born anti-colonial activists and thinkers always, and increasingly over time, interacted with and were influenced by migrants, sojourners and visitors from the colonies themselves. Such influences, such a presence, were far, far more limited (albeit, of course, never quite absent) in Edinburgh or Glasgow, let alone in smaller places. There were no real equivalents to London’s West African Students’ Union or Caribbean Artists Movement, Oxford’s Majlis, Paris’s Présence Africaine.53 Even today, the vast majority of the UK’s migrants, and members of ethnic minorities, live in England, not in Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland.54 Third, we must (for reasons the present author has more fully rehearsed elsewhere)55 doubt the political efficacy or consequentiality of such anti-colonialist thinking and activity as did exist. Jimmi Østergaard Nielsen and Stuart Ward trace the arguments for and against there being a causal connection between external decolonisation and Scotland’s internal political transformations, but apparently no variant of these which they discuss (and indeed almost none of which I am aware) accords a major role to actively anti-imperial – as opposed to disillusioned post-imperial – Scottish sentiment in causing either imperial decline or nationalist resurgence.56 However fascinating and fruitful may have been the ideas of many of those anti-colonialists we have mentioned, their actual political influence was in the main somewhat marginal. [ 125 ]

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Fourth, perhaps most obviously of all, despite the current upsurge of interest in a past anti-colonial or present post-colonial Scotland, in Scots as empire’s victims and resisters, those emphases have not, will not and should not annul all the other figures in the story: Scots as global achievers, as makers of empire; Scots as often rapacious, murderous, oppressive agents of empire; Scots as writers and imaginers of empire; and Scots as historians of empire and forgers of its imaginative afterlives. After all, R. B. Cunninghame Graham had been all these things (even, apparently, briefly one of the second). In that, if in nothing else, he was not at all unique.

Notes   1 R. B. Cunninghame Graham, ‘Niggers’, in The Ipane (1899); republished in Thirty Tales and Sketches (London, 1929), selected and introduced by Edward Garnett. On Cunninghame Graham and empire see A. F. Tschiffely, Don Roberto: Being the Account of the Life and Works of R. B.Cunninghame Graham, 1852–1936 (London, 1937); Cedric Watts and Laurence Davies, Cunninghame Graham: A Critical Biography (Cambridge, 1979); Brian McKenna, ‘Jesuit Commonwealth versus Liberal Empire: R. B. Cunninghame Graham, Primitive Communism, and the British Left at the Turn of the Twentieth Century’, Cultural Critique, Vol. 56 (Winter 2004), pp.  3–32.   2 Michael Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing (Chicago and London, 1987), p. 15.   3 McKenna, ‘Jesuit Commonwealth versus Liberal Empire’.   4 Amidst a large literature, formative works include on one (‘sceptical’) side Bernard Porter, The Absent-Minded Imperialists: Empire, Society, and Culture in Britain (Oxford, 2004), on the other John MacKenzie, Propaganda and Empire: The Manipulation of British Public Opinion 1880–1960 (Manchester, 1984) and Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, 1830–1867 (Cambridge, 2002).   5 Iain Whyte, Scotland and the Abolition of Black Slavery, 1756–1838 (Edinburgh, 2006), Introduction (unpaginated).   6 Porter, Absent-Minded Imperialists, p. 147.   7 Andrew Thompson, ‘Empire and the British State’ in Sarah E. Stockwell (ed.), The British Empire: Themes and Perspectives (Oxford, 2008), p. 51.   8 However, very few of the main works on socialist and Labour attitudes to empire from within the UK engage at all with distinctive Scottish dimensions to this – including this author’s own work. Key works include Gregory Claeys, Imperial Sceptics: British Critics of Empire, 1850–1920 (Cambridge, 2010); David Goldsworthy, Colonial Issues in British Politics, 1945–1961 (Oxford, 1971); Partha Sarathi Gupta, Imperialism & the British Labour Movement, 1914–1964 (London, 1975); Stephen Howe, Anticolonialism in British Politics: The Left and the End of Empire 1918–1964 (Oxford, 1993); Stephen Howe, ‘Labour and International Affairs’ in Duncan Tanner, Pat Thane and Nick Tiratsoo (eds.), Labour’s First Century: A Centenary History (Cambridge, 2000); Nicholas Owen, The British Left and India: Metropolitan Anti-Imperialism, 1885–1947 (Oxford, 2007); and Bernard Porter, Critics of Empire (London, 1968).   9 Richard Finlay, ‘National Identity, Union, and Empire, c.1850–c.1970’ in John M. MacKenzie and T. M. Devine (eds.), Scotland and the British Empire (Oxford, 2011), p. 309. 10 Ibid., p. 310. Finlay says (overstating more than a little) that the ‘one exception’ to Scottish Labour history’s utterly ignoring empire is Gerald Douds, ‘Tom Johnston in India’, Scottish Labour History, Vol. 19 (1984), pp. 6–21.

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ANTI-COLONIALISM IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY SCOTLAND 11 On MacLean see Nan Milton (ed.), In the Rapids of Revolution (London, 1978); Brian Ripley and John McHugh, John MacLean (Manchester, 1989). 12 William Kenefick, ‘Confronting White Labourism: Socialism, Syndicalism, and the Role of the Scottish Radical Left in South Africa before 1914’, International Review of Social History, Vol. 55 (2010), pp. 29–62. 13 Ibid., pp. 38–39. 14 See also on that world William Kenefick, Red Scotland: The Rise and Fall of the Radical Left, c.1872 to 1932 (Edinburgh, 2007); W. Hamish Fraser, Scottish Popular Politics: From Radicalism to Labour (Edinburgh, 2000). 15 John A. MacKenzie with Nigel R. Dalziel, The Scots in South Africa: Ethnicity, Identity, Gender and Race, 1772–1914 (Manchester, 2007), p. 204. 16 Jonathan Hyslop, ‘Cape Town Highlanders, Transvaal Scottish: Military Scottishness and Social Power in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century South Africa’, South African Historical Journal, Vol. 52 (2002), pp. 96–114; Jonathan Hyslop, ‘Making Scotland in South Africa: Charles Murray, the Transvaal’s Aberdeenshire Poet’ in David Lambert and Alan Lester (eds.), Colonial Lives Across the British Empire (Cambridge, 2006), pp. 309–334. 17 Jonathan Hyslop, ‘Scottish Labour, Race, and Southern African Empire c.1880–1922: A Reply to Kenefick’, International Revew of Social History, 55 (2010), pp. 63–81. 18 Ibid., p. 67. See also, amidst Hyslop’s large body of relevant work, his book The Notorious Syndicalist, J. T. Bain: A Scottish Rebel in Colonial South Africa (Johannesburg, 2004); and articles including ‘A Ragged Trousered Philanthropist and the Empire: Robert Tressell in South Africa’, History Workshop Journal, Vol. 51 (2001), pp. 64–86; ‘The World Voyage of James Keir Hardie: Indian Nationalism, Zulu Insurgency and the British Labour Diaspora 1907–1908’, Journal of Global History, Vol. 1 (2006), pp. 343–362. 19 See Neville Kirk, Comrades and Cousins: Globalisation, Workers and Labour Movements in Britain, the USA and Australia from the 1880s to 1914 (London, 2003); Neville Kirk, Labour and the Politics of Empire: Britain and Australia 1900 to the Present (Manchester, 2011). 20 Mary Klopper letter to Lian Eber, 20 November 1962: quoted in Howe, Anticolonialism, p. 261. 21 See Howe, Anticolonialism pp. 246–259. 22 Neil Rafeek, Communist Women in Scotland: Red Clydeside from the Russian Revolution to the End of the Soviet Union (London, 2008). 23 Again one must note a paucity of specialist relevant research. The most detailed account – Gidon Cohen, The Failure of a Dream: The Independent Labour Party from Disaffiliation to World War II (London, 2007) – says disappointingly little about the distinctive place of the ILP in Scotland, and very little too on empire except in relation to the ILP’s schisms over the Italian invasion of Abyssinia. 24 James D. Young, The World of C. L. R. James: His Unfragmented Vision (Glasgow, 1999). 25 Ibid., p. 138. 26 James Young’s own numerous, fascinating writings on nationalism and socialism repeatedly identify Scotland as an ‘internal colony’ of England. 27 Major relevant works include Colin Kidd, Union and Unionisms: Political Thought in Scotland, 1500–2000 (Cambridge, 2008); John M. MacKenzie, ‘Essay and Reflection: On Scotland and Empire’, International History Review, Vol. 15 (1993), pp. 714–739; John M. MacKenzie, ‘Empire and National Identities: The Case of Scotland’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, sixth series, Vol. 8 (1998), pp. 215–232; R. J. Finlay, ‘“For or Against?” Scottish Nationalists and the British Empire, 1919–39’, Scottish Historical Review, Vol. 71 (1992), pp. 184–206; Richard J. Finlay, ‘The Rise and Fall of Popular Imperialism in Scotland, 1850–1950’, Scottish Geographical Magazine, Vol. 113 (1997), pp. 13–21; and, for the origins of the question, Allan I. Macinnes, Union and Empire: The Making of the United Kingdom in 1707 (Cambridge, 2007). 28 Kidd, Union, pp. 262, 275.

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ANTI-COLONIALISM, THE MILITARY AND NATIONALISM 29 Ibid., pp. 283–284. On the Young Scots see also James Kennedy, Liberal Nationalisms: Empire, State, and Civil Society in Scotland and Quebec (Montreal, 2013), which offers a close comparison with the Ligue nationaliste canadienne in Quebec. 30 See Richard Finlay, A Partnership for Good? Scottish Politics and the Union since 1880 (Edinburgh, 1997), esp. pp. 52–61. 31 MacDiarmid, Albyn (1927): Quoted in Kidd, Union, p. 285. 32 T. M. Devine, ‘The Break-Up of Britain? Scotland and the End of Empire’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, sixth series, Vol. 16 (2006), pp. 163–180, p. 167. See also on this Paul Ward, ‘The End of the British Empire and the Break-Up of Britain: Cause and Effect?’, History Teaching Review: The Yearbook of the Scottish Association of History Teachers, Vol. 23 (2009), pp. 48–53; and for a more detailed, local and economic focus, Jim Tomlinson, Dundee and the Empire: ‘Juteopolis’ 1850–1939 (Edinburgh, 2014). 33 See inter alia Philip Constable, ‘Scottish Missionaries, “Protestant Hinduism” and the Scottish Sense of Empire in Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-century India’, The Scottish Historical Review, Vol. 86, issue 2, no. 222 (October 2007), pp. 278–313; John MacKenzie, ‘“Making Black Scotsmen and Scotswomen?” Scottish Missionaries and the Eastern Cape Colony in the Nineteenth Century’ in Hilary M. Carey (ed.), Empires of Religion (Basingstoke, 2008), pp. 113–136; Bryan S. Glass, ‘Protection from the British Empire? Central Africa and the Church of Scotland’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, Vol. 41, issue 3 (2013), pp. 475–495; Angela McCarthy (ed.), A Global Clan: Scottish Migrant Networks and Identities since the Eighteenth Century (London, 2006). 34 Bryan Glass, The Scottish Nation at Empire’s End (Basingstoke and New York, 2014), esp. pp. 115–141. 35 Robert Anderson, ‘The Development of History Teaching in the Scottish Universities, 1894–1939’, Journal of Scottish Historical Studies, Vol. 32, issue 1 (2012), pp. 50–73, p. 68. 36 Susan Condor and Jackie Abell, ‘Romantic Scotland, Tragic England, Ambiguous Britain: Constructions of “the Empire” in Post-Devolution National Accounting’, Nations and Nationalism, Vol. 12, issue 3 (2006), pp. 453–472, p. 453. 37 Nigel Leask, ‘Imperial Scots’, History Workshop Journal, Vol. 59 (2005), pp. 262–270, p. 262. Another way of describing this might be to see Scots imperial globalism as the historic antithesis to the much-derided ‘Kailyard and Tartanry’ syndromes. Cunninghame Graham, incidentally, was a fierce early critic of kailyard literature, and of parochialism in Scottish culture more generally. See Cunninghame Graham’s essay The Imperial Kailyard, a piece originally published in Justice: The Imperial Kailyard: Being a Biting Satire on English Colonisation (London, 1896). 38 Neal Ascherson, Stone Voices: The Search for Scotland (New York, 2002), pp. 167–168. 39 Gwyn A. Williams, ‘The Primitive Rebel and the History of the Welsh’, in his The Welsh in their History (London, 1982). 40 The repeated ambivalence of Murray Pittock, Celtic Identity and the British Image (Manchester, 1999), is interesting and perhaps symptomatic in this regard. For a wide-ranging critique see Jonathan Hearn, ‘The Colony at the Core: Scottish Nationalism and the Rhetoric of Colonialism’ in Anthony Marcus, (ed.), Anthropology for a Small Planet: Culture and Community in a Global Environment (St James, NY, 1996), pp. 50–63. 41 See Michael Hechter, Internal Colonialism: The Celtic Fringe in British National Development, 1536–1966 (London, 1975); T. C. Smout, ‘Scotland and England, 16th–18th Centuries: Is Dependency a Symptom or a Cause of Underdevelopment?’, Review: A Journal of the Fernand Braudel Centre, Vol. 3, issue 4 (1980), pp. 601–630; Smout, ‘Centre and Periphery in History: With Some Thoughts on Scotland as a Case Study’, Journal of Common Market Studies, Vol. 18, issue 3 (1980), pp. 256–271. 42 Craig Beveridge and Ronald Turnbull, The Eclipse of Scottish Culture: Inferiorism and the Intellectuals (Edinburgh, 1989); Cairns Craig, Out of History: Narrative Paradigms in Scottish and British Culture (Edinburgh, 1996). See also inter

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43

44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51

52 53

54

alia Marilyn Reizbaum, ‘Canonical Double Cross: Scottish and Irish Women’s Writing’ in Karen Lawrence (ed.), Decolonizing Tradition: New Views of TwentiethCentury ‘British’ Literary Canons (Chicago, 1992), pp. 165–190; Michael Gardiner, The Cultural Roots of British Devolution (Edinburgh, 2004); Michael Gardiner, Graeme Macdonald and Niall O’Gallagher (eds.), Scottish Literature and Postcolonial Literature: Comparative Texts and Critical Perspectives (Edinburgh, 2011); Graeme Macdonald, ‘Postcolonialism and Scottish Studies’, New Formations, Vol. 59 (2006). For more sceptical views, Eleanor Bell, Questioning Scotland: Literature, Nationalism, Postmodernism (Basingstoke, 2004); Stefanie Lehner, Subaltern Ethics in Contemporary Scottish and Irish Literature: Tracing Counter-Histories (Basingstoke, 2011); Liam Connell, ‘Modes of Marginality: Scottish Literature and the Uses of Postcolonial Theory’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, Vol. 23, issue 1 (2003), pp. 3–18; Liam Connell, ‘Scottish Nationalism and the Colonial Vision of Scotland’, Interventions, Vol. 6, issue 2 (2004), pp. 252–263; Murray Pittock, ‘Colony, County or Co-equal? Scotland and the Union’, Ariel, Vol. 31, issues 1 and 2 (2000), pp. 329–335. For instance Silke Stroh, Uneasy Subjects: Postcolonialism and Scottish Gaelic Poetry (Amsterdam and New York, 2011). Ben Thomas’ research in progress is exploring related ideas, though from an historical rather than literary-studies perspective. Nigel Leask, ‘Scotland’s Literature of Empire and Emigration, 1707–1918’ in Susan Manning et al. (eds.), The Edinburgh History of Scottish Literature. Vol. 2: Enlightenment, Britain and Empire (1707–1918) (Edinburgh, 2007). See for example the strikingly titled Grant Farred, ‘Wankerdom: Trainspotting as a Rejection of the Postcolonial?’, South Atlantic Quarterly Vol. 103, issue 1 (Winter 2004), pp. 215–226. Alastair Niven, ‘New Diversity, Hybridity and Scottishness’ in Ian Brown (ed.), The Edinburgh History of Scottish Literature. Vol. 3: Modern Transformations: New Identities (from 1918) (Edinburgh, 2007). Susan R. Wilson (ed.), The Correspondence Between Hugh MacDiarmid and Sorley MacLean: An Annotated Edition (Edinburgh, 2010). Scott Lyall, Hugh MacDiarmid’s Poetry and Politics of Place: Imagining a Scottish Republic (Edinburgh, 2006), p. 188. Surely the most penetrating study of MacDiarmid’s politics is now Bob Purdie, Hugh MacDiarmid: Black, Green, Red and Tartan (Cardiff, 2012). The pre-eminent study is of course now T. M. Devine, To the Ends of the Earth: Scotland’s Global Diaspora (London, 2011). See Colin C. Calloway, White People, Indians, and Highlanders: Tribal Peoples and Colonial Encounters in Scotland and America (Oxford, 2008); Margaret Szasz, Scottish Highlanders and Native Americans: Indigenous Education in the 18th Century Atlantic World (Norman, OK, 2007), or (in less scholarly style) Michael Newton, We’re Indians Sure Enough: The Legacy of the Scottish Highlanders in the United States (Auburn, NH, 2001). A wider range of views – though tending towards the ‘sceptical’ pole – is presented in David A. Wilson and Graeme Morton (eds.), Irish and Scottish Encounters with Indigenous Peoples: Canada, the United States, New Zealand, and Australia (Montreal, 2013). For another, very different radicaldiasporic idea, see Joseph S. Moore and Jane G. V. McGaughey, ‘The Covenanter Sensibility across the Long Atlantic World’, Journal of Transatlantic Studies, Vol. 11, issue 2 (2013), pp. 125–134. Paul Basu, Highland Homecomings: Genealogy and Heritage Tourism in the Scottish Diaspora (Abingdon, 2007), p. 201. Though for a fascinating presentation of ‘Africa in Edinburgh’ and the distinctively Scottish intellectual and cultural influences on one young student there (in 1949–52) see Thomas Malony, Nyerere: The Early Years (Woodbridge and Rochester, 2014), esp. pp. 100–179. Scottish (political) nationalism, intriguingly, seems barely to feature among these. In their sociological study of ethnic minority Scots, Asifa Hussain and William

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Miller say rather little about possible imperial, post-colonial or anti-colonial dimensions to migrant and minority experience in Scotland, but do note that some have pursued a ‘strategy for establishing relative commonality by identification with Scotland – in contrast to England as the “other” – [which] is to claim a common colonial heritage under English rule. … In our focus groups, ethnic Pakistanis also used this “English colonial metaphor” with regard to Scotland.’ Multicultural Nationalism: Islamaphobia, Anglophobia, and Devolution (Oxford, 2006), p. 16. 55 In Howe, Anticolonialism, and several subsequent articles and essays. 56 Jimmi Østergaard Nielsen and Stuart Ward, ‘“Cramped and Restricted at Home?”: Scottish Separatism at Empire’s End’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, forthcoming.

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C HAP T E R SEVEN

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Beating retreat: the Scottish military ­tradition in decline Stuart Allan

At first inspection, the relationship between military service, Scotland and the British Empire appears to be axiomatic. An entire genre of traditional and popular military history, of literature, works of art, museum collections and monuments testifies to the role of the Scottish soldier as an agent of British imperial power and to his place in the iconography of British popular imperialism. Since the early 1990s, this heritage has been more critically reviewed as Scottish military history has earned a greater degree of scholarly respectability than hitherto, attracting the serious attention of the academy precisely because of heightened interest in the relationship between Scots and the British Empire, and in the implications of that relationship for Scottish society. It would follow therefore that the rapid decline of that empire in the second half of the twentieth century must have wrought profound changes for what we might call the ‘Scottish military establishment’ characterised above all by the Scottish regiments of the British army. And yet an examination of how the Scottish infantry regiments, and their popular and political constituencies, responded to rapidly reducing circumstances in the era of decolonisation raises some questions as to just how closely, for all the history of the previous three centuries, the tenets and status of Scottish military service were entwined with the fate of the British Empire.1 The outward effects were clear enough. With decolonisation came downward revisions in the tasking and resourcing of the British armed forces, pressures which rapidly and repeatedly came to bear on the army, including its Scottish components. In the second half of the twentieth century, successive rationalisations of British foreign policy in the face of post-imperial economic and strategic realities were behind three phases of reckoning, each bringing unwelcome change to the Scottish infantry regiments: the first in 1947–48 accompanying British withdrawal from India and Palestine, the second in the late [ 131 ]

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1950s in the wake of the Suez Crisis of 1956, the third in the late 1960s following the British government’s policy decision to withdraw from ‘east of Suez’. With each round of defence cuts, the number of Scottish battalions was reduced, as was the number of battalions recruited from elsewhere in the United Kingdom. As might be expected of any longstanding institution faced with diminution or extinction, these were occasions for anxiety, indignation and dismay among those directly affected. But what marked Scotland out was the accompanying crowd noise, the manifestations of press coverage, political controversy and organised public protest, which on certain occasions preceded the disbandment and amalgamation of battalions. One of these campaigns of opposition to Scottish regimental cuts was successful, or at least partially so. Another was not. It is possible to divine within them complexities and apparent contradictions of sentiment over institutions whose functions were British but whose forms were distinctively and overtly Scottish. The regiments issue entangled proponents of Scottish cultural nationalism in both of its guises, ‘Unionist’ and ‘Nationalist’. It has therefore become a topic of sufficient interest to have found a place in the writing of Scottish political and social history of the twentieth century, most commonly with reference to the traction of that Scottish media cause célèbre of 1968, the ‘Save the Argylls’ campaign against the proposed disbandment of 1st Battalion Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders (1st Argylls), in consideration of which one leading historian of modern Scotland has observed: ‘In some ways the regimental reorganisations have been the most tangible Scottish manifestation of the withdrawal from Empire.’2 ‘Save the Argylls’ might be a tempting starting point for an examination of this phenomenon, especially because the outcry over the threat to the existence of this famous Scottish regiment in 1967–68 coincided with the first electoral breakthrough for the Scottish National Party, an election victory won on a rhetorical battleground where the major parties vied with one another to show how in touch they were with Scottish concerns and how staunch they were in defence of Scottish interests. But to start in 1967, with 1st Argylls on their way back from an ‘end of empire’ deployment in the Aden Colony and Protectorate in southern Arabia, during which their role and tactics excited a remarkable degree of media coverage and controversy, would be to overlook the fact that the ‘Save the Argylls’ campaign sought to fend off the threat of disbandment from only one Scottish infantry battalion whereas, in the recent past, others had been permitted to fall by the wayside with rather less vocal response. The present chapter will divert its focus instead to consider not only the victories, or the glorious defeats, of Scottish opposition to British military cutbacks, but to look [ 132 ]

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also at occasions where Scottish battalions went down without a fight. The axing of ten Scottish infantry battalions in 1947–48 came in the wake of British withdrawal from partitioned India, surely a seminal moment in the eclipse of British world power which for so long had been based in possession and defence of the Indian subcontinent. The disbandment of 1st Battalion Cameronians (1st Cameronians) was formally enacted in 1968 in the phase of the withdrawal from ‘east of Suez’, and took place more or less concurrently with the convulsions over a similar threat to the Argylls. These episodes offer an interesting contrast, where no demonstrators took to the streets as they did in Glasgow in 1957 in defence of the 1st Battalion Highland Light Infantry (1st HLI), and where no great Scottish public petitions were delivered to Westminster, as one bearing a purported million signatures was delivered in 1968 in support of 1st Argylls. What was it then that distinguished Scottish responses to military cutbacks, and what, if anything, within these rather different responses was really about loss of empire?

‘Hail and Farewell’, India 1947 At the end of the Second World War, the Scottish infantry regiments sat within the organisational context of the British army in the same number and in the same structure as they had done since 1881, and could point to histories and traditions dating back to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The 1881 structure was the culmination of a series of reforms which encompassed a major reshaping of the Victorian army and which set as standard the infantry regiment of two regular battalions, supported by auxiliary battalions of militia and volunteers, all based in, and notionally recruited from, one designated area of the country. This system had been imperial in outlook. Of the two regular battalions of each regiment it was intended that one would serve overseas in imperial garrisons while its counterpart would remain on service at home, providing support and recruits for the overseas deployment. Periodically, the roles would be reversed.3 The system endured into the twentieth century, adapting to the threat and reality of major European war by incorporating part-time volunteers in what was ultimately to become the Territorial Army, and absorbing temporary war service battalions of volunteers and conscripts, all as part of ‘the regiment’ defined by its two regular battalions. Although the imposition of this infantry structure had not been without upset and criticism in 1881, the two-battalion settlement successfully embraced older regimental traditions and reputations and in Scotland had since established a roll call of regiments, ‘Lowland’ or ‘Highland’ in tradi[ 133 ]

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tion, whose names and battlefield deeds were known, respected and celebrated within Scotland and far beyond. 1n 1945, in spite of the many changes these regiments had seen in the preceding sixty years, their existence had come to seem almost immutable in cultural terms. Not so for the British Treasury, in the post-war climate of austerity, seeking economies in defence expenditure, nor for the Ministry of Defence seeking to modernise the infantry structure and anticipate future roles for the army. In the Indian subcontinent itself, as independence approached, there was a Scottish complement in the garrison overseeing the last days of British rule, as there had usually been for a century and more. At Delhi in 1946–47, with one company always present in the Red Fort in Old Delhi, was 1st Battalion Royal Scots Fusiliers (1st RSF), its time divided between the normal run of Indian garrison life in training, sport and guard duties, and a heavy diet of ceremonial. In March 1946, amidst heightened tensions and riots during a police strike, 1st RSF was deployed briefly on internal security operations in support of the civil authorities. The following year, in the midst of the mass migrations and communal violence which accompanied the approach of partition, 1st RSF helped to run refugee camps and formed the escort for two convoys of open-topped buses despatched hundreds of miles from Delhi to evacuate remaining British military personnel and their families, totalling some 600 people with their baggage, from the Himalayan foothills and from the divided Punjab, back to Delhi.4 On what became the Pakistan side of the border was 1st Battalion Royal Scots (1st Royal Scots). Stationed at Karachi, 1st Royal Scots avoided involvement in the worst of the cross-border strife, but was obliged to send one company to support 1st RSF at Delhi. For the remainder of the battalion, their main contribution to the handover of power was ceremonial, providing a Guard of Honour for the last British Viceroy, Lord Mountbatten. Writing in situ at Karachi, the Battalion’s scribe acknowledged its good fortune: ‘We have lived on the doorstep of history without having to play any part in either the building of this new Dominion or in relief of those victims of the tragedies in the Punjab.’5 Also in Pakistan in 1947 was 2nd Battalion King’s Own Scottish Borderers (2nd KOSB), at the end of a continuous seventeen-year presence in India and Burma, and living in Peshawar what one regimental historian described as ‘a strange, paradoxical existence, in which the atmosphere of Kipling’s India seemed changeless while the British Raj drew to an end’.6 The end, when it came, was not the peaceful transition that such an existence seemed to anticipate, and in a volatile and violent situation in the Punjab 2nd KOSB was [ 134 ]

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required to occupy and patrol Peshawar for ten days in March 1947 in support of the police.7 Conditions at Peshawar were calmer three months later when 2nd KOSB handed over to still another Scottish battalion, 2nd Battalion Black Watch (2nd Black Watch), moved up from Karachi, which shortly after arrival at Peshawar was called out to provide security patrols over a wide area to help police the partition referendum in the North-West Frontier Province.8 The referendum passed amidst heightened tension but without major incident. When, in August, communal violence broke out in Peshawar, only the Battalion’s rear party remained, under strict orders not to interfere as murder was done around them. Back in Karachi 2nd Black Watch was to be the last British battalion to leave Pakistan. The Karachi rear party embarked for home in February 1948, saluting the new head of state Mohammed Ali Jinnah as they paraded through the city to the docks.9 These vignettes of the latter days of the British Empire in India were recorded in the matter-of-fact style of the magazines published by each regiment for the information of its wider ‘family’. The impression conveyed in their reports is largely one of business as usual, in spite of the historical significance and finality of the events being witnessed. Yet, by the summer of 1947, the magazine contributions sent by Scottish battalions in India and Pakistan begin to make reference to onerous developments which, from the regimental perspective, were of even greater moment. The planned reorganisation of the British army, and the loss of one battalion to each infantry regiment, had been announced as government policy in October 1946. Word was now coming through as to when and how the execution of that policy was to fall. The terms ‘suspended animation’, ‘reduced to cadre’ and ‘amalgamation’ begin to make their appearance. The first was a sweetener for the pill of what amounted to disbandment, being a state of stand-down which kept a battalion’s title, property and traditions in existence, but little else. It held out the prospect of a review of axed battalions after ten years, with the possibility that some of these might be resuscitated sooner if an emergency should arise, but for those battalions on the critical list this can have been little more than a straw to clutch at. Few among the family of their serving and former soldiers could have had great faith that suspended animation was much more than a euphemism, or that either of these scenarios offered a likely salvation. ‘Reduced to cadre’ was the process whereby, through posting of personnel to other units, a battalion was brought down in strength to its administrative core, the bare minimum required to complete the business of the battalion overseas and return it to the UK for amalgamation with its sister battalion. This notional amalgamation between the first and second battalions of each British infantry regiment was [ 135 ]

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the method adopted to enact the cuts, and what it meant in practice was that one battalion would absorb what little was left of the other, suspended animation or not. Under the British army’s hallowed culture of ‘precedence’, prestige and priority in all matters was accorded to the units with the longest unbroken history. The first battalion of each regiment was invariably older than its second battalion. But in the circumstances of 1947 it did not necessarily follow that it was the second battalion of each regiment which was selected for disbandment. Much depended on where the battalions were located when the music stopped. It made logistical sense to run down battalions in overseas garrisons in those parts of the empire which Britain was about to quit. Precedence demanded that it was the first battalion name and identity which should endure, and so where it was the elder battalion of the regiment which was overseas and selected for disbandment, precedence was maintained by administrative and ceremonial sleight of hand. Thus in India, 1st RSF was slated to return home for absorption by 2nd RSF, which would then adopt the 1st RSF title; 1st Royal Scots, which could claim to be the oldest infantry battalion in the British army, was ordered home to the much-reduced role of a training battalion, which, in 1949, was finally absorbed through amalgamation with the 2nd Battalion, a pooling of resources whereby the former 2nd Royal Scots effectively became the new 1st Royal Scots. In this manner Scottish infantry battalions on internal security duties in the last days of the British Empire in India, and those in the Middle East who had been enduring attacks by Arab and Jewish nationalists in the Palestine mandate, were informed in the midst of these commitments that their services were no longer required. On 25 October 1946, the Glasgow Herald reported the British government’s statement in Parliament about its plans for the reorganisation of the infantry on the same page as a report of a bomb attack in Palestine which injured soldiers of 1st Argylls, two mortally.10 Indeed, as independence and partition approached in India, the seriousness of the situation around Delhi and in the Punjab actually brought a stay of execution for those battalions whose presence in strength was required there for longer than had been anticipated.11 1st RSF required reinforcement from 1st Royal Scots to run its evacuation convoys to Delhi precisely because it was so far down the ‘reduced to cadre’ road towards suspended animation.12 Communal violence in India and Pakistan kept 1st RSF and 2nd KOSB as going concerns for a little longer than they had at first been led to expect, but their existence was not long prolonged. The local reaction to these wholesale cuts to Scottish infantry battalions was one of disbelief, quickly succeeded by dismay, grief even, but [ 136 ]

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these sentiments translated into resigned acceptance rather than into open opposition. Whatever internal lobbying may have been attempted to avert the fate of individual battalions, there were few words of open protest, whether from within the battalions themselves, in the press, or among the home public. There were profound limitations, of course, on the extent to which serving officers and men could comment upon, never mind oppose, orders that they had been given, and disbandment orders were no different in this regard. Regimental magazines would not therefore be the place to find words of defiance against government or army policy, and the comment to be found therein expresses only regret tinged, here and there, with a trace of grievance. In this vein, one amateur bard of the 2nd Black Watch contributed some sardonic verse entitled ‘Suspended Animation?’, commencing: Two centuries the flame has burned, The torch has passed from hand to hand; But now its life is at the word Of those who cannot understand.13

More typical of the recorded response from within the battalions were the closing statements of commanding officers and colonels of regiments. Among these was a ‘Hail and Farewell’ message from the last commanding officer of 2nd KOSB, who commenced his address by recalling the ‘stunning effect’ of receiving from the commander-inchief in India a confidential communication advising that the battalion was to be axed: Of course, one had heard of ‘Suspended Animation’ but the feeling was always, as about most evils, ‘it can’t happen to US.’ I had to read the C-in-C’s message several times to convince myself of the truth of it.

But, once he was over the shock, his response was, inevitably, one of acceptance, expressed through pride in the history and standards of a battalion which, under his command, had upheld traditions established over eighty-eight years of service, many of them in India, and which performed its final Trooping of the Colour ceremony at Peshawar to ‘complimentary remarks passed by everyone from Governor to Sepoy’.14 The CO’s message followed up an earlier notice from the Colonel of the Regiment expressing pride in similar terms and which, in looking forward in hope to the prospect of a revived battalion at some point in the future, expressed no illusion about the state of suspended animation: ‘It will, in fact, cease to exist.’15 This sense of sadness, but pride in the past, was echoed in the rather sparse coverage of the threat to battalions in the Scottish press. The newspapers reported government policy regarding the defence cuts in general terms, and later offered tributes to the army as it departed [ 137 ]

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British India for the last time.16 Little was reported in the interim about the violence and turmoil witnessed by the British army in its last months there.17 Acknowledgement of the fates allotted to individual Scottish battalions tended to emerge in the press only on their return home from overseas, and popped up again in reports of laying-up of Colours ceremonies and the amalgamation parades which reduced each regiment to a single regular battalion. Critical comment, where there was any at all, was left to those dignitaries addressing the parades. In this vein the Scotsman reported the Lord Provost of Perth according a civic welcome to the soon-to-be amalgamated 2nd Black Watch on its return from Pakistan, expressing anger on behalf of the citizens over the fact that, under the new Brigade Group system, which put training and administering of regiments together, Perth would no longer house the regimental depot of the Black Watch, and, a few months later, covered the Princess Royal, Colonel-in Chief of the Royal Scots, presenting new Colours to the regiment’s 2nd Battalion, a battalion which everyone knew would not need them for long, observing that it ‘had been in existence for over 260 years and that it was hard that they should now have to lose their separate identity’.18 This muted response was some way short of the press attention which, a mere ten years later, would accompany the amalgamation throes between 1st RSF and 1st HLI, and quite insignificant in comparison with the media and political storm of 1967–68 which blew around the threat to disband 1st Argylls. Before considering some of the reasons why this state of relative acquiescence might have prevailed, it is worth noting two aspects of the coverage of the 1947–48 cuts which seem particularly relevant to the concerns of the present volume. Firstly, at no point, whether in regimental communications or in media reports, was the unhappy news of battalion disbandment, in whatever form it took, explicitly linked to expressions of anxiety over the idea of a British Empire in decline. Military manpower cuts were accepted as economic realities. The independence of India and Pakistan was articulated as the end of an era, but as an evolutionary process, and military participation in the transitions of power there were regarded and relayed as jobs well done. Despite the violence and suffering which was witnessed, it was the high regard of the Indian and Pakistani civil and military authorities that the battalions chose to remember. Secondly, the good name of Scotland was not invoked. Every Scottish infantry regiment was effectively halved in strength, be it in India, Palestine or elsewhere. As well as the battalions returning from India, the losses included units such as 2nd Battalion Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, inheritors of the name and traditions of the old 93rd Highlanders, Crimean War celebrities of ‘Thin Red Line’ fame, [ 138 ]

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and 2nd Battalion Seaforth Highlanders, descendants of the old 78th Highlanders, a regiment lauded for its part in the Relief of Lucknow during the Indian Mutiny. If Scotland’s battlefield reputation had been forged and tempered over more than two centuries of British imperial endeavour by battalions like these, why was there so little apparent fuss in Scotland over the sudden demise of around half of them? The spirit of the times was a likely factor here. The gentlemen of the press at this point might have been more cautious and deferential in their reporting generally than they would shortly afterwards become but, more than this, there was an emphasis in post-war British politics and culture on notions of modernity and progress. Labour fared less well in Scotland in the 1945 general election than it did in the rest of the UK, but in Scotland, as elsewhere, there was a wider consensus over, at very least, the requirement for active and planned post-war reconstruction. Through the challenges of the Second World War, the armed forces, and indeed the wider public, had grown accustomed to the forces of rapid change and contingency. Little, it seemed, was as it had been before, and there were many who felt it ought not to be. The traditional Scottish military image had proved remarkably resilient in adapting to wartime exigencies; indeed, in certain respects it had come out strongly, most notably through the popular profile and combat reputation of the 51st (Highland) Division. But, by virtue of the hugely varied wartime experiences of the population at home and on overseas service across the globe, with Scottish participation distributed right across the armed forces and civilian services, and thanks to the public reception of a new kind of imagery for the British war effort through official propaganda and news media, the old regiments had ceased to dominate the perception of what war meant in Scotland as once they had. Although the immediate post-war years saw the inception of the Edinburgh Military Tattoo, still going strong today, military tradition was not altogether in fashion during the late 1940s. In a society familiar with a broader and more egalitarian concept of modern warfare, the pre-war mores of the regular army may have seemed regressive and militaristic. Austerity economics, the housing problem, the nationalisation of major industries: these issues generated greater public interest and more newspaper column inches than did the future of military institutions, or indeed did the fate of the empire.19 Familiarity with change was a quality which might furthermore be ascribed specifically to the battalions immediately affected by the cuts. As had been the case for much of the duration of the war, the infantry battalions in post-war India were accustomed to a rapid turnover in personnel. ‘National Service’ conscription, and drafting of manpower between units, as dictated by military requirements, [ 139 ]

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meant that even regular infantry battalions in 1945 looked and felt like very different beasts to the ones they had been in 1939. The post-war demobilisation process, and the extension of National Service into peacetime, kept things in a state of flux thereafter. The commanding officer of 2nd KOSB, quoted above, noted that in its first post-war station in Peshawar, his unit had initially encountered difficulties in reorganising for the familiar patterns of peacetime service. The point he went on to make, however, was that the battalion was well on the way to getting back to normal, as normal it was seen, when news of the impending cuts arrived: ‘by Autumn 1946, the Battalion was back again on a pre-war basis – good and keen Officers, smart and efficient W.O.s and N.C.O.s, excellent men, and above all, the real Borderers’ team spirit throughout’.20 Like others in a similar position, 2nd KOSB was not to be left to maintain activity on its pre-war basis for long, but the axing of the battalions was not carried out in one fell swoop. They were run down gradually, reduced to cadre strength, through natural wastage, and through posting of personnel to units that were short of manpower. The cut of ten infantry battalions did not put thousands of Scottish soldiers out of a job at a stroke. Equally significant, and evidently, the cuts were applied to single battalions of traditional two-battalion regiments, rather than to regiments overall. The post-war cuts did not go so deep as to remove the names of any living regiments from the establishment. Each lost a battalion, but did not in the process lose its regimental identity. All was not lost. With the regiment’s soul, as it were, preserved, the practice of amalgamating first and second battalions into a new first battalion offered the comfort to all concerned that the one would carry forward the traditions of the other. Although there were those who were sensitive to their cultural inheritance from pre-1881 regimental identities, there would be few quibbles at the fitness of this arrangement in the absence of any alternatives. In an open letter to the Royal Scots Fusiliers about the impending loss of one of its two regular battalions, the Colonel of the Regiment observed, ‘All Royal Scots Fusiliers have always had deep feelings for their own battalion, but I know that all of us have even deeper feelings for our Regiment.’21 Here lies the crucial difference between the post-war disbandment of battalions and the further rounds of infantry cuts which fell in the ensuing decades. But there was more to the 1947 infantry cuts than the reduction of each regiment to a single battalion. As these remaining battalions were also allotted into ‘Brigade Groups’, designated ‘Lowland’ and ‘Highland’ in Scotland, the possible future implications for regimental identities were recognised by the more prescient, or by those who could bring themselves to contemplate such things. Field Marshall Lord Wavell, [ 140 ]

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Colonel of the Black Watch, addressed the civic reception in Perth for the 2nd Battalion on its return home from Pakistan:

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Naturally the decision that we should be reduced to one battalion is a hard one for us to accept, but we must accept it and regard ourselves not just as men of the Black Watch, but as men of the Highland Brigade Group, a group of very fine regiments indeed. It is said that old soldiers never die; I don’t know about that, but it is certain that the spirit and tradition of a Battalion like this will never die.22

The upper reaches of the military hierarchy would henceforth be viewing infantry matters in terms of battalions and brigade groups; old soldiers, with their feelings for the regiment, would tend to see things differently.

‘A storm brewing north of the border’, Glasgow 1957 It was the prospect of losing individual Scottish regiments, their titles, cap badges, uniforms and all, and not just numbered battalions thereof, which, in 1957, brought about the first outbreak of opposition to what was happening to the Scottish element of the British army in the post-imperial era. With fingers burned by the recent humiliation of the Suez Crisis, and with conflict in the remaining possessions of the empire proving expensive to manage and placing a strain on the British infantry’s brigade group system, the Conservative government’s defence reforms prioritised spending on European defence based on nuclear deterrence and away from the remaining imperial possessions. Conventional forces suffered in consequence: for the army there was a reduction in size overall, with an end to National Service and further cuts to the number of infantry battalions. The changes stressed further the primacy of the brigade group, not the regiment, as the organisational basis for infantry manpower. The sharing out of the infantry reductions entailed two regimental amalgamations in Scotland. One, within the Highland Brigade, was enacted between 1st Battalion Seaforth Highlanders and 1st Battalion Queen’s Own Cameron Highlanders. The pain this merger caused ought not to be underestimated, but that pain was largely internalised. Opposition to the second amalgamation, that of 1st RSF, of the Lowland Brigade, with 1st HLI, from the Highland Brigade, was not, and it spilled over spectacularly into the public domain. With regiment at stake, and radical policy change in the offing, senior officers were sometimes less ready to acquiesce in this round of cuts than they had been in 1947. It has been suggested that recent experiences of imperial counter-insurgency operations in Malaya and [ 141 ]

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the Middle East provided figures such as Sir Gerald Templar, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, with a rationale within the army for maintaining the battalion, rather than the brigade or any higher formation, as the pivotal element of conventional military organisation, an argument which reinforced cultural predilections for the traditions of the regimental system.23 In this context, the respective Colonels of the Royal Scots Fusiliers and the Highland Light Infantry felt able to set their faces against amalgamation, and to do so publicly, precipitating the first of the popular campaigns in defence of the Scottish regiments. Intemperate meetings, angry letter-writing and private lobbying were not exclusive to Scotland, as English country regiments met similar fates, but a high-profile delegation of MPs, both Labour and Conservative, to meet the Prime Minister seeking a reversal, and a huge demonstration in Glasgow in support of 1st HLI, with a crowd estimated at 20,000 by the Glasgow Herald, 90,000 by the Scottish Daily Express, and 100,000 by the Daily Record, certainly were.24 Popular opposition was heartfelt, and for many in the crowd much of the sentiment rested on the close identification between the HLI and the city of Glasgow, its recruiting and organisational base. The protest march was the work of Glasgow City Councillor John Wingate, who had served in the regiment. As the Daily Record put it, ‘it was Glasgow on the march …, the fit and the feeble … the young and the old … men and women … blind and lame’. But there was more than civic pride in play. What was provoking the ire of HLI supporters as much as anything was the prospect of the regiment losing not just its name, but its ‘Highland’ cultural identity. A letter from the Lord Provost, and an address to the crowd by Scottish peer and former Royal Scots Fusilier Lord Belhaven, insisted that an insult was being visited upon Scottish national pride. The official plan for the new amalgamated regiment was that it was to be placed in the Lowland Brigade, meaning that, in dress uniform, officers and men would wear tartan trews, not the kilt. Such a flight in the face of tradition was taken to be unacceptable to the HLI end of the equation, and the intention to visit this change upon a hallowed Scottish institution was held up by protest organisers as the mark of a government in London which did not understand Scotland. It was in these terms that the protests attracted the attention of the British national media. Even as the government stood resolute in proceeding with the amalgamation, trews and all, and the two Regimental Colonels (who had agreed that the amalgamation might go ahead if the kilt was to be worn) tendered their resignations, British Pathé covered the episode in a newsreel report ‘Kilt v. Trews’ with commentary which began, ‘There’s a storm brewing north of the border and the Highland Light Infantry are in the middle of the storm. [ 142 ]

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It’s all a question of what they should wear…’ and which continued in a tone of respectful bemusement, concluding, ‘And if you are surprised that a mere uniform could cause the resignation of two Generals, you have obviously never been to Scotland.’25 A mere uniform it may have been, but defence reductions had eventually cut down deep enough to touch on the essence of what it was that made many people in Scotland identify with their soldiers, or at least with the idea of what their soldiers represented. The outcry over the amalgamation was not, however, inevitable. A signal of dissent had to be given. The Colonels of the RSF and the HLI took the conscious decision to oppose the measure to the point of their resignations, while keeping the public campaign at a distance from their serving officers.26 The Colonels of the Seaforth Highlanders and Queen’s Own Cameron Highlanders chose otherwise, and the amalgamation of their regiments passed with relative calm.27 It is worth noting also that, although the Scottish press endorsed the validity of Scottish national feeling about traditional regiments, the newspapers did not throw themselves wholeheartedly behind the campaign to save the HLI. The press reported rather than supported. The Scottish Daily Express, which a decade later was to champion the cause of another threatened Scottish battalion with no little gusto, did not accord front-page billing to its first report of the announcement of the two Scottish regimental amalgamations of 1957, leading instead on picketing incidents during a national bus strike.28 Even the Daily Record, recently acquired by the Mirror Group and pro-Labour in its stance, did not wield the amalgamation issue against the Conservative government’s defence policy. Indeed, in an editorial, the Record came out in favour of accepting change: ‘Scotland is proud of her Scottish regiments, and sorry that the splendid history of any of them should suffer interruption. The amalgamations announced yesterday must be accepted as part of the general process of reducing and streamlining the British Army.’29 This kind of reference to the economic and strategic realities of the day was as far as the Scottish newspapers went in linking the travails of the Scottish regiments to the decline in Britain’s military capability and shrinking world role. If the dwindling of the British Empire was an issue in any of this, it was one firmly in the background. Nevertheless, imperial deployments remained a staple in the duties of Scottish infantry battalions at this point. British bases in Cyprus, the Middle East and Aden were still being garrisoned, frequently in the face of political and armed opposition, albeit that their former strategic function in relation to British India was obsolescent. When 1st RSF learned that it was earmarked for amalgamation, it was on service in Cyprus, beset by the EOKA insurgency. 1st HLI [ 143 ]

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received the amalgamation news in Germany serving as part of the British Army of the Rhine, but the battalion had only lately moved there following a spell of imperial duty also in Cyprus. Whatever the long-term intentions of the British government’s foreign and defence policy may have been, the policing of the empire remained, for the time being, a substantial part of what these battalions existed to do.

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‘The Conquerors’, Aden 1967 The campaign to preserve the independent identities of 1st RSF and 1st HLI in 1957 foundered on the unwillingness of the War Office to compromise over any aspect of its planned Army reductions. The government’s post-Suez credibility on foreign policy and defence matters, such as it was, rested on its ability to push through its defence economies and priorities in the face of opposition within the armed forces.30 Ten years later, it was a Labour government, with credibility similarly damaged by its internal crisis over devaluation of the Pound, which reined in British strategic engagement and defence expenditure still further in its policy of withdrawal from east of Suez. Another round of cuts to the size of the regular army was one of the consequences, and on this occasion two Scottish infantry regiments were in the frame. From the Lowland Brigade, the ‘junior’ battalion, 1st Battalion Cameronians, was selected for sacrifice in 1967, more of which shortly. From the Highland Brigade, the disbandment of 1st Battalion Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders was announced in July 1968. Each of these battalions had recently conducted a tour of operations in Aden, the former staging post for British India in the Arabian Peninsula, where attempts to engineer a post-colonial political settlement for the port city and its hinterland had been dogged by armed conflict among rival pro-independence insurgent organisations, and lethal attacks on British forces. The mark of Aden was on all that followed, but each of the two regiments tackled the existential threat from their own government in rather different manner. The aforementioned political storm over 1st Argylls began before the threat to the battalion materialised. It was the service of the battalion in Aden itself, in the context of political and press criticism of the British authorities’ handling of the British withdrawal, that brought ‘the Argylls’ to public notice. The re-occupation of Crater, the old port district of Aden, was carried out by 1st Argylls in July 1967 under the charismatic and media-conscious leadership of its commanding officer Lieutenant-Colonel Colin Mitchell, soon to be dubbed ‘Mad Mitch’ in sections of the press. This briskly successful military operation stood, and was held to stand, in contrast to the de facto British [ 144 ]

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withdrawal from Crater the previous month, which had been forced by mutinies among the colony’s own security forces. British soldiers, including personnel from the Argylls, had lost their lives in the initial withdrawal, heaping pressure on a British government already facing mounting criticism over its early announcement of a deadline for ultimate withdrawal from Aden, a step which appeared only to have heightened the violent factional power struggle for post-independence control and to have increased British casualties with it. Media scrutiny of operations in Aden has been counted as a significant factor in the political and military handling of decolonisation which, on account of the spread of television ownership during the 1960s, played far more heavily there than it ever had before, including in recent episodes in Malaya, Borneo and Cyprus.31 The reoccupation of Crater by 1st Argylls was in the foreground of this development, since the action coincided with the introduction of ITN’s innovative half-hour nightly news bulletin. For a time, the Argylls in Crater were the stars of the show.32 The result was that when the disbandment announcement was made a year later, 1st Argylls still enjoyed an unusually high public profile. The television imagery of tough Scottish soldiers taking no-nonsense offensive action in Crater, advancing indeed to the sound of the bagpipes, had been picked up in the Scottish newspapers, and the Conservative-supporting Scottish Daily Express in particular, relayed as a matter of national pride and presented, tacitly at least, as rebuke to a Labour government whose handling of Aden was construed to be hesitant and craven in comparison.33 The absence of the combative Lieutenant-Colonel Mitchell from the list of officers awarded decorations for their part in the Aden operations had already been noted, amidst emerging accounts of tensions between Mitchell and his superiors over the implied heavy-handedness of his tactics.34 The selection of 1st Argylls as the battalion which was to be cut from the Highland Brigade, albeit that it was, under the custom of precedence, the junior battalion of the Brigade, could be interpreted as an act of folly, or even as an act of spite, by those who chose to see it that way. But, as had been the case with 1st HLI a decade earlier, expressions of dismay and anger did not transfer spontaneously into public protest. Will and organisation was required. A decision to oppose the measure had to come from within the regiment itself, or at least from within its wider family of support. The ‘Save the Argylls’ public campaign which followed was led by retired senior officers, while the serving battalion and constituted regiment maintained the requisite distance. The regimental magazine accordingly was circumspect in its reporting of the campaign, allotting news of its progress to an appropriate position [ 145 ]

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in the ‘Regimental Association’ pages and temporarily adopting a ‘Latest from the Newspapers’ section without offering comment.35 On this occasion, the regimental family found itself playing catch-up, since the first steps of resistance were taken in the form of an Opposition motion against the measure in Parliament, which attracted the support of a number of government MPs and, following the defeat of that motion, with the inception of a petition to Parliament moved by the Conservative MP George Younger, a former officer in the regiment, and furthered by the practical and moral support of the Glasgow Evening Citizen newspaper. But the self-appointed standard-bearer for the battalion’s cause was to be the Scottish Daily Express, which took a strident tone over the issue which, true to its calling, sought to play on Scottish national sentiment. Not only were the Argylls ‘the pride of Scotland’, they were once again, as they had been when in Aden, contrasted with the armchair warriors of Whitehall, and the ‘Colonel Blimps in London’ whose regard for Scotland, and even-handedness, was called into question.36 At its extreme, an anti-English slant to the coverage in the Express extended to an inquisition into the ethnic composition of the politicians and senior officers making up the Army Board, the committee which had formally approved the selection of infantry battalions to be cut: ‘not one of them that you could properly call a Scot’.37 With the Express using the Argylls issue as a stick with which to beat the Labour government, the party political temperature was raised still higher when, in the midst of the disbandment fuss, Scottish Labour MP Tam Dalyell raised questions in the House of Commons about the discipline of the Battalion in Crater and that of LieutenantColonel Mitchell in particular.38 Meanwhile, adopting more measured tones than that of the Express, the rest of the Scottish national and provincial press, plus in London The Times and the Daily Telegraph, were supportive of the campaign to preserve the battalion and prevent what even the usually more placid Sunday Post was moved to call a ‘shoddy slap in the face to Scotland’.39 Support for ‘Save the Argylls’ was not unanimous in Scotland. Dissenting voices were to be found in the letters pages of other Scottish newspapers, querying why this battalion alone was worthy of such fuss, while others across the UK, including indeed 2nd Scots Guards, were being allowed to pass away in the same round of cuts almost without comment.40 The government-supporting Daily Record was also sceptical. One of its columnists dismissed the petition campaign as ‘a cardboard bandwagon which has now reached London on mixture of hot air, cold porridge and the old socks of history’.41 Nevertheless, the delivery to Westminster of more than a million signatures in [ 146 ]

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support of 1st Argylls represented a successful and significant mobilisation of public opinion in Scotland, albeit one which does not appear to have impacted significantly on the distribution of the Scottish vote in the 1970 general election, despite the election of LieutenantColonel Mitchell as MP for West Aberdeenshire following his retirement from the army. With its UK, rather than Scottish, majority, it was a Conservative government which lifted the threat of extinction from 1st Argylls, first by preserving the identity of the battalion at reduced company strength, and then, in light of the growing military commitment in Northern Ireland, returning it to battalion strength in 1972. It has also been noted that the 1967–68 controversy over the disbandment of 1st Argylls was contiguous with a celebrated electoral break-through for the SNP: the election of Winnie Ewing as MP for Hamilton in the November 1967 by-election. Ewing promptly spoke out in support of the Argylls and it was reported, erroneously as it soon transpired, that, with his army career at an end, Lieutenant-Colonel Mitchell might himself stand as an SNP electoral candidate. Although Mitchell and Ewing appeared in public together at a ‘Scot of the Year’ dinner in London in May 1968, increasing speculation that Mitchell would declare for the SNP, there was no natural alliance.42 The pair stood as rival candidates in the Glasgow University rectorial election that October, neither of them successfully, and thereby attracted the monikers of ‘right-Nat’ and ‘left-Nat’ from a gently mocking Economist.43 Mitchell’s ultimate emergence as a Scottish Conservative parliamentary candidate, MP and sometime Daily Express columnist exposed the paradox which the Argylls issue presented to the SNP, no lover of British imperial and military heritage, of course, but keen to defend, and be seen to be defending, sacrosanct and popular Scottish institutions from the hand of Westminster government, not least in SNP-controlled Stirling, the headquarters of the regiment.44 The assumption of a causal relationship between the decline of Great Britain as an imperial power and the rise of the SNP to political prominence in the late 1960s has lately been subjected to scrutiny, including in the present volume, and found to be far from proven. Similar caution must be employed in relating the outpouring of nationalist, or national, sentiment in Scotland over the 1st Argylls to contemporary processes of decolonisation.45 Coverage of the disbandment controversy in Scottish newspapers was about Scotland and London, not about the fate of Aden or the ongoing contraction of the British Empire. When 1st Argylls were still patrolling Crater in July 1967, the Scottish Daily Express carried articles on the government’s defence White Paper including one from its London parent-title in which defence correspondent Chapman Pincher fulminated against [ 147 ]

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‘the impending end of Britain as a military force with world responsibilities and power’. 46 But when the content of that White Paper came to the crunch for 1st Argylls a year later, the imperial dimension was not a prominent part of the discourse. Aden was brought into the equation merely as the pointer to the abilities and tough reputation of this Scottish battalion under threat. Above all, this was a domestic issue. The singularity of the circumstances which brought about organised public protest against the decision to disband 1st Argylls are thrown further into relief by the observation that one other Scottish infantry battalion perished in the same round of defence cuts, and was permitted to do so without anything like the same clamour. Like the Argylls, 1st Cameronians received news of the imminent curtailment of its existence shortly after returning from an operational deployment in Aden. This battalion had also performed well in its internal security role in Aden, and had furthermore featured in a BBC ‘Check-Point’ television documentary, and an STV current affairs programme ‘Time Out with Tennent’ covering the Aden situation. But, although there was one Cameronian fatality from the frequent grenade attacks that British forces in Aden had to contend with, there were no controversial and dramatic developments on a par with the quitting and re-occupation of the Crater district by which 1st Argylls came to media prominence a year later. In response to the news of impending disbandment Scottish newspapers came out in sympathy for the Cameronians, contrasting the battalion’s spirit and conduct to ‘the gnomes of Whitehall’. One or two noted that earlier assurances by Defence Secretary Denis Healey that regiments would not lose their identity in any planned cuts to the infantry had proved empty, but the tone of the coverage was largely one of regret and pride, and not the defiant call to arms that would be heard the following year in similar circumstances.47 Not even the Scottish Daily Express took up cudgels over the threat to 1st Cameronians in the way it chose to do not long afterwards over the threat to 1st Argylls. Instead, its coverage respectfully applauded the dignity of the regiment’s decision to choose disbandment over amalgamation with another battalion of the Lowland Brigade: ‘they asked for no quarter, the proud men of the Cameronians’.48 The decision that the Cameronians would not oppose disbandment, and not even to seek the compromise of amalgamation was taken in conference with the Lowland Brigade Council of Colonels and followed a consultation by questionnaire among serving officers, non-commissioned officers and a sample of other ranks of the battalion.49 In this decision, and in the manner of 1st Cameronians’ departure from the scene the following year, may be found a clue to the nature of the [ 148 ]

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Scottish response to post-imperial contraction in the British army.50 In the regimental magazine the Colonel of the Regiment explained the thinking behind the decision that had been taken, to die rather than adapt, and so to leave the remaining battalions of the Lowland Brigade intact: ‘We, of all people, unlike any other Regiment in Scotland, or the British Army, with our differences in history, customs, dress and drill, seemed most unsuitable for amalgamation.’51 What he was referring to here was the distinctive heritage of the regiment deriving from its origins in the Covenanting religious and dynastic wars of seventeenth-century Scotland, in the thick of which it had been founded in 1689. The formation of the two-battalion Cameronians (Scottish Rifles) regiment in 1881 had created a cultural hybrid whereby the ‘Covenanters’ of the 26th (Cameronians) Regiment were paired with the 90th (Perthshire) Light Infantry, the latter bringing to the mix the dress and drill of a ‘smart’ rifle regiment, a very British strand of military culture. With the regiment reduced to one battalion in 1948, both of these traditions had passed down to the 1st Battalion, but in its death throes in 1968 it reverted tellingly to its pre-Union Scottish cultural roots.52 The 1968 disbandment parade took place on 14 May, the regiment’s founding day, at Douglas, Lanarkshire, close to the place it was first raised, and it took the form of a conventicle, the open-air religious service, with armed picquets posted, which symbolically recalled the persecuted Presbyterian Covenanters of the 1680s, a spectacle the Scottish Daily Mail hailed as ‘an act of sheer poetry, unique to themselves’.53 Among a number of addresses to the parade, that of the Reverend Donald McDonald, the senior clergyman present, best captured the spirit of the occasion: ‘Cameronians! This is a grievous day for you and all of us here. We may well say that it is a grievous day for Scotland, seeing that your roots have been so closely intertwined with the troubled history of Church and State in this land.’ From such a perspective, in light of such a heritage, and with that distinctively Scottish relationship with the Divine, the vicissitudes of British defence spending could be dismissed as petty, venal and transient: You now move out of the Army List because of changes in our Defence Systems coupled with economic duress – and political expediency. But ‘be not disheartened’. The Army List is a document of temporary significance, liable to amendments or excision according to the whim and swing of governments. So put pride in your step Cameronians! As you march out of the Army List, you are marching into History, and from your proud place there, no man can remove your name, and no man can snatch a rose from the chaplet of your honour.54

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For an old lowland regiment like the Cameronians, the fundamentals of its existence had much to do with its place in the heritage of Scotland, less with is relationship to the British Empire, or indeed to the British state, whose existence it pre-dated. Something the same was true of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, whose institutional roots might have dated back only to the British army of 1794, but which, as a highland regiment, implicitly laid claim to cultural antecedents in the warlike clansmen of an earlier, half-imagined era. It is an evident, if little stated, point that the highland traditions of Scotland, the tartan, bagpipes and other trappings, although easily lampooned and cheapened, were and remain thoroughly resilient and culturally powerful, however historically debased, not merely because they are colourful, romantic and distinctive but because they are about aggressive masculinity and identification with an ancestral warrior culture. It was in the highland regiments of the British army that this traditional idea, or ideal, of the manhood of an older Scotland was most visibly preserved, and reinforced, through the British imperial era. It is worth noting that the period of decolonisation under consideration here pre-dated by a decade and more the democratisation of this kind of imagery through Scottish society when rising disposable incomes and the rapid expansion of the highland dress-hire industry during the 1970s allowed Scotsmen of all backgrounds to dress as Scotsmen (arguably, to dress as Scottish soldiers), whether to get married or to support national teams in sporting events.55 Prior to that, the Scottish regiments were unchallenged as the most overtly Scottish institutions in the land, the soldier as, perhaps, the most Scottish of all Scotsmen, ‘a warrior hewn from the land, tough and unyielding because those are also the qualities of so much of Scotland, however beautiful’.56 The point about the Argylls in Aden was not merely that they were construed in certain quarters to have stepped in and sorted matters out where others appeared to have lost control of the situation, but was that in doing so they demonstrated, with the eyes of the home country upon them, a notion of toughness, effectiveness and élan embodying the Scottish warrior spirit. This was a display which, by virtue of environment and history, resonated in the collective psyche and one which, in the right circumstances, could arouse passionate and partisan response. At the very basic level, the Argylls were read as tough – Scottish and tough – and, in the same narrative, were held to have been sacrificed on return from Aden by lesser men, with the lesser men Englishmen at that. Their place in Scottish culture and politics at the time was intimately connected with that much neglected concept in modern conceptions of military history: honour.57 ‘Honour’, indeed, [ 150 ]

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was one potent word used by the Reverend McDonald to comfort and reassure 1st Cameronians on their last day at Douglas, and honour, on this occasion, was satisfied. When, however, the press made hay for their own reasons over the application of ‘Argyll law’ in Crater, over the subsequent treatment of Lieutenant-Colonel Mitchell and the queries about his command raised in Parliament, the subtext to the rallying of support around 1st Argylls was that individual and collective Scottish honour was being impugned. In his assessment of the impact of decolonisation on British society, Robert Holland argued that the equanimity of the home public and of the political establishment could be sustained so long as face was not lost: ‘there was one interest that came to underlie almost everything else. This was the preservation of British dignity in her imperial retreat.’58 Similarly, sympathetic constituencies within Scottish society would absorb, with regret, but with a degree of equanimity, the decline of traditional military institutions so long as their dignity, their honour, was preserved. In the late 1940s, the second battalions went quietly, and with their honour intact, to relatively little public reaction; twenty years later 1st Cameronians stood on their dignity in refusing to compromise over their future, and the air of noble self-sacrifice in the manner of their passing was recognised and applauded. Conversely, where this appeared not to be the case, as in the matter of 1st HLI being forced out of the kilt and into trews in the late 1950s, or, as when, in 1968, 1st Argylls stood their ground and were perceived, whether correctly or not, to have been slated for disbandment in an act of bad faith, then a strong reaction could ensue. In this Scottish context, the loss of the empire did not really come into it. Further manifestations of the same phenomenon would emerge again in the organised opposition to Scottish regimental amalgamations ensuing from the post-Cold War defence cuts of the early 1990s, and echoed more faintly in the merging of the remaining Scottish infantry battalions into the Royal Regiment of Scotland in 2006.59 Although in the former instance one of the two proposed amalgamations was overturned, or at least delayed, in response to a public protest campaign, neither of these episodes reached the level of intensity of ‘Save the Argylls’ in 1968, perhaps because, again, the sense of honour-betrayed was less acute, perhaps also because in the intervening years new versions and distortions of the Scottish military tradition, new icons of warrior culture, had emerged to prominence in popular culture, such as in the Hollywood films Highlander (1986), Rob Roy (1995) and Braveheart (1995). These had an impact in Scotland, and the identity they promulgated required no accommodation with the history and heritage of the British imperial era. Their popularity may even have rendered the regiments less relevant to a new [ 151 ]

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generation of Scottish popular patriotism.60 Making of this an opportunity, from the late 1990s the Scottish regiments actively sought in their recruiting materials to identify themselves with this new genre of martial imagery, with some success. Regimental reorganisations were indeed ‘the most tangible Scottish manifestation of the withdrawal from Empire’, and it was no accident that, while the process of reducing the number of Scottish infantry battalions was to continue beyond the decolonisation era, the three key phases of reduction examined in this chapter broadly coincided with what Robert Holland called the ‘concentrated and sporadic bursts’ in the uneven progress of British imperial withdrawal.61 But if the end of the empire was undoubtedly the immediate cause of the undoing of the Scottish military establishment, the passions which these changes could arouse, in certain circumstances, in a range of people in Scotland, whether with direct military connections or not, cannot to any great extent be ascribed to popular anxiety or complaint about Britain’s retreat from imperial dominion. This phenomenon was about an older and deeper trait in Scottish culture. Scottish people in the past had been proud to see the Scottish regiments wear the laurels of imperial military success, but the demise of the British Empire was not a point of honour in Scotland, or at least no more there than it was anywhere else in the United Kingdom. Any impugnment of the Scottish military reputation was another matter.

Notes   1 For the sake of brevity, this chapter is selective in its focus on certain infantry battalions, and in its omission of comment beyond the infantry, albeit that the Scots Guards (Foot Guards/Guards Division) and Royal Scots Greys (Royal Armoured Corps) were threatened by defence cuts in this period.   2 Ewen A. Cameron, Impaled Upon a Thistle: Scotland Since 1880 (Edinburgh, 2010), p. 284.   3 This necessarily superficial description of the Cardwell–Childers reforms of the 1870–80s as they affected the infantry may readily be improved upon by reference to the early chapters of David French, Military Identities: The Regimental System, the British Army and the British People, c1870–2000 (Oxford, 2005).   4 An eyewitness account by Major A.J. DuSautoy of these October 1947 evacuation operations, ‘Reunion I’ and ‘Reunion II’ appeared in The Journal of the Royal Scots Fusiliers, Vol. 16 (1 January 1949), pp. 22–29.   5 The Thistle, The Quarterly Journal of the Royal Scots (The Royal Regiment), 3rd New Series, Vol. 2, issue 1 (January 1948), p. 5.   6 Robert Woollcombe, All the Blue Bonnets: The History of the King’s Own Scottish Borderers (London, 1980), p. 122.   7 The Borderers’ Chronicle: The Journal of the King’s Own Scottish Borderers, Vol. 22, issue 2 (30 June 1947), pp. 50–69.   8 The Red Hackle, Vol. 82 (October 1947), pp. 14–15.   9 The Red Hackle, Vol. 85 (July 1948), pp. 18–20. 10 ‘Big Post-War Army Changes’; ‘Scots Soldiers Wounded in Jerusalem’, Glasgow Herald, 25 October 1946, p. 5.

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The Red Hackle, Vol. 85 (July 1948), p. 18. The Journal of the Royal Scots Fusiliers, Vol. 15, issue 2 (July 1948), p. 11. The Red Hackle, Vol. 83 (January 1948), p. 25. The Borderers’ Chronicle: The Journal of the King’s Own Scottish Borderers, Vol. 22, issue 2 (30 June 1947), pp. 50–52. The Borderers’ Chronicle, Vol. 22, issue 1 (31 March 1947), pp. 4–5. For example, ‘India’s Debt to British Army. Defence Against All Aggressors: Protection in Civil Strife’, The Scotsman, 15 August 1947, p. 5. Robert Holland, ‘The Decolonising Metropole: British Experience from India to Hong Kong, 1947–1997’, European Review, Vol. 8, issue 1 (February 2000), pp. 65–76. ‘Perth Ceremony: Civic Welcome for 2nd Battalion, Black Watch’, The Scotsman, 24 March 1948, p. 3; ‘Princess Royal at Dreghorn: New Colours Presented to 2nd Battalion, R.S. Pending Amalgamation’, The Scotsman, 30 November 1948, p. 3. T. M. Devine notes the scarcity of press comment over the wider implications of Indian and Pakistani independence for Scottish society: T. M. Devine, To the Ends of the Earth: Scotland’s Global Diaspora 1750–2010 (London, 2011), p. 258. The Borderers’ Chronicle: The Journal of the King’s Own Scottish Borderers, Vol. 22, issue 2 (30 June 1947), p. 50. The Journal of the Royal Scots Fusiliers, Vol. 15, 1, January 1948, p. 1. The Red Hackle, Vol. 85 (July 1948), p. 22. Hew Strachan, The Politics of the British Army (Oxford, 1997), pp. 214–217. ‘Glasgow Protest at HLI Merger’, Glasgow Herald, 30 September 1957, p. 7; ‘90,000 Jam Streets in Protest March to save HLI’, Scottish Daily Express, 30 September 1957; ‘100,000 Shout: “Save the HLI”’, Daily Record, 30 September 1957. ‘Kilt v. Trews’, British Pathé, 1957, www.britishpathe.com/video/kilt-v-trews, accessed 18 June 2013. The Colonel of the HLI, Major-General R.E. Urquhart, gave his account of the amalgamation episode in a contribution to the regimental magazine: ‘History of the Amalgamation of the Highland Light Infantry with the Royal Scots Fusiliers’, The Highland Light Infantry Chronicle, Vol. 54, issue 3 (December 1958), pp. 90–93. The two Colonels issued joint public statements to the Scottish newspapers on 24 July 1957 accepting the decision to amalgamate and stating their commitment to making it work. A further joint statement was placed in the respective regimental magazines: ‘Amalgamation of the Seaforth Highlanders (Ross-shire Buffs, Duke of Albany’s) with the Queen’s Own Cameron Highlanders’, Cabar Feidh: The Regimental Magazine of the Seaforth Highlanders, Vol. 13, issue 100 (September 1957), pp. 259–260; ‘Proposed Amalgamation the Seaforth Highlanders and the Queens Own Cameron Highlanders’, The 79th News, Vol. 280 (September 1957), pp. 253–255. ‘Now the HLI Fades Away’, Scottish Daily Express, 25 July 1957. ‘Scotland’s Pride’, Daily Record, 25 July 1957. French, Military Identities, pp. 242–243. Ian Beckett, Modern Insurgencies and Counter-Insurgencies: Guerrillas and their Opponents since 1750 (London, 2001), p. 58. Geoffrey Cox, See It Happen: The Making of ITN (London, 1983), pp. 209–210. ‘Pipes Play as Argylls storm Crater’, Scottish Daily Express, 4 July 1967, p. 1; ‘The Conquerors’, Scottish Daily Express, 5 July 1967. An account of these frictions, proceeding ultimately to Mitchell’s retirement from the army, is to be found in Aaron Edwards, Mad Mitch’s Tribal Law: Aden and the End of Empire (Edinburgh, 2014), pp. 248–256. See, for example, The Thin Red Line: The Regimental Magazine of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders (Princess Louise’s), Vol. 23, issue 1 (January 1969), pp. 24–25, and Vol. 25, issue 2 (June 1970), p. 57. ‘Hands off the Argylls: Why Whitehall’s Butchers Must not Kill Off the Pride of Scotland’, Scottish Daily Express, 9 July 1968. ‘Ten Men who Decided to Kill off the Argylls’, Scottish Daily Express, 12 July 1968. This mode of criticism was revisited by Lieutenant-Colonel Mitchell in his 1969

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ANTI-COLONIALISM, THE MILITARY AND NATIONALISM memoir: Colin Mitchell, Having Been a Soldier (London, 1969), p. 241. 38 ‘MP’s Amazing Attack on Mad Mitch’, Daily Record, 16 July 1968. 39 ‘Second Opinion’, Daily Record, 16 December 1968; ‘Someone has Blundered’, Sunday Post, 14 July 1968. 40 For example, ‘Too much Fuss about the Argylls’, Letters, The Scotsman, 21 July 1968; Letters, Courier, 23 July 1968. 41 ‘Second Opinion’, Daily Record, 16 December 1968. 42 ‘Mad Mitch, Home in the Hills’, Time and Tide, Vol. 49, issue 20 (16–22 May 1968), p. 14. 43 ‘MacMilitant’, Economist, 26 October 1968, pp. 21–22. 44 Christopher Harvie, Scotland and Nationalism: Scottish Society and Politics 1707 to the Present, 3rd edition (London, 1998), p. 180. 45 For example, I. G. C. Hutchison, Scottish Politics in the Twentieth Century (Basingstoke, 2001), p. 121; T. M. Devine, ‘The Break-Up of Britain? Scotland and the End of Empire’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, Vol. 16 (2006), pp. 163–180. 46 ‘Chapman Pincher’, Scottish Daily Express, 19 July 1967, p. 10. 47 For example, Glasgow Herald columnist Iain Brown regretted the ‘slow strangulation of the proud heritage of the centuries’ as ‘neither necessary nor desirable’, but suggested an organisational accommodation across all the Scottish infantry battalions that would share the requirement for cuts. ‘The Cameronians disbanded’, Glasgow Herald, 29 September 1967, p. 12. 48 ‘Last Halt for Cameronians’, Scottish Daily Express, 10 October 1967, p. 13; ‘Storm over Cuts in Forces: Axe Falls on Cameronians’, Scottish Daily Express, 19 July 1967, p. 1. 49 ‘Commanding Officer’s Questionnaire’, Cameronians Collection, South Lanarkshire Leisure and Culture, 2012/44. 50 Allowing, however, that 1st Battalion York and Lancaster Regiment from the Yorkshire Brigade chose the same fate in similar circumstances that same year. 51 The Covenanter: Regimental Journal of the Cameronians (Scottish Rifles), Vol. 46, issue 3 (September 1967), p. 1. 52 The inheritance from the 2nd Battalion was not entirely forgotten at the end, and a small ceremony in Perth on 8 May 1968 was one of the farewell parades preceding the main disbandment event in Lanarkshire. 53 ‘The Regiment that Voted to Die Today’, Scottish Daily Mail, 14 May 1968. The format was not unique to the occasion. The custom of holding 14th May regimental conventicles began in 1922. 54 The Covenanter, Vol. 47, issue 2 (June 1968), p. 72. 55 Ian Maitland Hume, ‘Tartanry into Tartan: Heritage, Tourism and Material Culture’ in Ian Brown (ed.) From Tartan to Tartanry: Scottish Culture, History and Myth (Edinburgh, 2010), pp. 82–92. Hugh O’Donnell dates the appearance of the kilt as the uniform of Scotland football supporters to the 1980s. Hugh O’Donnell, ‘Class Warriors or Generous Men in Skirts? The Tartan Army in the Scottish and Foreign Press’ in Brown (ed.), From Tartan to Tartanry, pp. 212–231. 56 Hew Strachan, ‘Foreword’ in Edward Spiers, Jeremy Crang and Matthew Strickland (eds.), A Military History of Scotland (Edinburgh, 2012), p. xx. 57 A recent examination of the continuing relevance of this elusive but pertinent factor in military affairs is given by Paul Robinson, Military Honour and the Conduct of War (Abingdon, 2006). 58 Holland, ‘The Decolonising Metropole’. 59 An insider account of the 1991–93 protest campaign against the amalgamation of 1st KOSB with 1st Royal Scots is given by Donald Fairgrieve, A Regiment Saved: An Account of Operation Borderer (Edinburgh, 1993). 60 For an introduction to this contested and well-populated area of Scottish cultural history see various contributions in Brown (ed.), From Tartan to Tartanry; and Colin MacArthur, Brigadoon, Braveheart and the Scots: Distortions of Scotland in Hollywood Cinema (London, 2003). 61 Holland, ‘The Decolonising Metropole’.

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C HAP T E R EIG H T

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Newspapers and empire: bringing Africa to  the Scottish public Bryan S. Glass

Today’s world is dominated by bulletins constantly streaming across the internet. Newspapers, the source of everyman’s information for the better part of three hundred years, do not carry the same i­ nfluence they did even sixty years ago. The first intruder was television, supplemented by cable networks in the 1980s. The mid- to late 1990s then brought the internet, where news stories are just a Google search away, to the masses. In the early to mid-1950s, however, newspapers remained the ready source of information on world events for the Scottish populace. This chapter focuses on Scottish newspaper coverage of the outbreak of the Mau Mau insurgency in late 1952 and Britain’s reaction towards the Suez Crisis after Colonel Nasser’s nationalisation of the canal in July 1956. Both events represented major international emergencies on the African continent for Britain during tough economic times, which attracted the attention of the leading Scottish newspapers. The suppression of Mau Mau in the Kenya colony and the intervention of Franco-British forces in the Canal Zone during the Suez Crisis have both been portrayed by historians as imperial events.1 While there is no doubt that Britain’s suppression of Mau Mau was an action by a colonial power over its colonised subjects to maintain control, Suez is not as clear cut. The Suez Canal was the ‘swing-door of the British Empire’, and keeping it open to Britain and the Commonwealth meant that the actions taken by the Franco-British forces constituted an imperial manoeuvre.2 But among the three leading Scottish newspapers, The Glasgow Herald and The Scotsman were adamant that Suez was not an imperial land-grab. For them, Suez represented a dangerous international situation where economics and national prestige were at stake. Only the Daily Record believed that the actions of the British government constituted an extension of Britain’s power through force. Mau Mau, on the other hand, was depicted as an act of colonial policing against Kikuyu terrorists meant to restore law and order. This order [ 155 ]

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was necessary if steps could be taken to progress all Kenyans towards independence. No matter what the Scots thought about these events, and opinion was especially divided on the Suez issue, the vast quantity of space devoted to Mau Mau from October through December 1952 and Suez from August through December 1956 is a testament to the Scottish appetite for all things imperial. This chapter compares coverage of these two major imperial events by three of Scotland’s largest and most respected newspapers in the 1950s, The Scotsman, The Glasgow Herald and the Daily Record.3 The Scotsman and The Glasgow Herald were the two most popular national broadsheets in Scotland. The Daily Record, a tabloid, was the best-selling Scottish newspaper in the early to mid-1950s and was popular with the working classes, especially around Glasgow: the second city and workshop of the British Empire.4 Circulation numbers bear out the large readerships enjoyed by these three news mainstays. During the latter half of 1956, at the heart of the Suez Crisis, the daily circulations for the three papers were as follows: The Scotsman: 54,564 The Glasgow Herald: 74,157 Daily Record: 381,8025 With a total Scottish population of 5,096,000 at the time of the 1951 census and 510,523 copies of these three being sold each day, more than 10 per cent of the people were, prima facie, reading one of these newspapers. When it is considered that some of these copies were purchased by pubs, train stations, hotels and clubs, not to mention the concept of individual subscribers sharing the paper with family members and friends, the readership had the opportunity to increase rapidly beyond the raw numbers sold. Nonetheless, 10 per cent of the news market share means that these newspapers possessed substantial influence over the Scottish public in the 1950s.6 It is difficult to know exactly what the Scottish newspaper-reading public thought about the coverage, other than the glimpses provided through selected letters to the editor. Nonetheless, the consistency of the position taken by the newspaper editors probably indicates that along with influencing the opinions of their readers on these two hot topics, they were also representing the views of their subscribers.

Newspapers in Scotland Although their influence is not what it was during the era of decolonisation, newspapers remain a conduit of information today. For instance, the daily circulation for these three Scottish newspapers in [ 156 ]

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2014 was: The Scotsman: 27,208; The Herald (formerly The Glasgow Herald): 38,939; the Daily Record: 212,182. With a larger population of 5,222,100 as of 2010, the percentage of people possibly subscribing to one of these papers has decreased to 5.3 per cent.7 Perhaps as a result of this, many historians have neglected the role newspapers played in the history of the British Empire. At best, newspaper coverage is used as supplementary material for archives. Accordingly, comparisons of the ways various phenomena have been handled from newspaper to newspaper are almost completely absent from the historiography.8 But newspapers played a major role in either moulding or reflecting Scottish opinion on the British Empire. The vast coverage of imperial events in all three of the leading Scottish dailies accordingly demonstrates that the Scots desired to read about them. Whether that was the independence of India, the debate over the Central African Federation and the Nyasaland Emergency, the Malayan Emergency or the problems facing South Africa, the Scots wanted to know about the empire and newspapers brought this information directly to them. As main suppliers of information on the empire, the editors of these three papers were in a position to determine what the people read and even to help sway the way they thought about the empire and Scotland’s place in it. The three newspapers under review all included, as most do, editorial columns, or leaders, written by the editors and representing the paper’s official view. They also featured letters to the editor, which provided the opinions of their readers. The editorial columns remained very consistent over the course of these two events, with the one exception being The Scotsman coverage of Mau Mau. As historians of the media, and newspapers in particular, have contended, these editorial columns represent attempts to influence the opinions of readers.9 It may be the case, however, that these newspapers were simultaneously feeding their readers what they wanted to hear. In the 1950s, Scottish readers would have been very aware that The Scotsman and The Glasgow Herald were papers of the business and professional middle classes and consistently endorsed the Unionist Party (the name for the Scottish Conservative Party until the mid-1960s). The Daily Record, on the other hand, was a paper read mainly by the working classes.10 Whether each of these papers was either trying to sway its readers or reflect their opinions within editorial columns is not of critical importance. The high level of coverage of imperial events shows that no matter where a Scot was on the social scale, he or she took an active interest in the British Empire. Letters to the editor, on the other hand, are viewed as being written by a small, self-selecting cadre of readers, which go through a process of editorial selection that obscures their representativeness.11 While [ 157 ]

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certain individuals appear in the letters column on a few occasions, overall the three Scottish newspapers under review appeared to do a very competent job of balancing the views on display. For instance, in the case of the Suez Crisis the number of letters both for and against the government’s actions is fairly well balanced over the course of the period studied (Table 8.1). The Daily Record printed far fewer letters to the editor on a daily basis than the two broadsheets. However, these numbers are further reduced because the Daily Record decided on 15 November 1956 to cease printing letters about the government’s policy in Egypt. They claimed that time would determine who was right and who was wrong.12 Another unsurprising point to note here is that the two newspapers supporting the government’s actions in Egypt, The Scotsman and The Glasgow Herald, printed more letters in favour of the government and the one newspaper opposed to the action, the Daily Record, printed more letters critical of the policy. Overall, though, the numbers are quite balanced even though the editorial columns are anything but. Table 8.1. Letters to the editor (August–December 1956) The Scotsman For government policy

70

Against government policy

57

Neutral

4

The Glasgow Herald For government policy

37

Against government policy

26

Daily Record For government policy

10

Against government policy

12

Neutral

1

As stated above, the three papers featured here were chosen because they were the premier Scottish national newspapers at the time. In the 1950s, as remains the case today, The Glasgow Herald and The Scotsman were well-respected papers in Scotland. These newspapers were read mainly by members of the middle and upper classes, and they took a staunchly pro-imperial stance in their editorials from the nineteenth century through most of the 1950s.13 They also supported the Unionist Party. The Daily Record, on the other hand, took a more [ 158 ]

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populist tone, was read mainly by the working classes around Glasgow, and supported the Unionist Party until 1956 and then switched to backing the Labour Party after being purchased by the Mirror Group. But being a paper for the working classes does not mean the Daily Record turned its back on the empire. Instead, as its coverage of Mau Mau demonstrates, it was just as much in favour of the continuance of the British Empire as its competitors. The Scottish Labour Party and the Unionist Party dominated general elections in the nation in the twenty-year period following the Second World War. For instance, in the 1950 General Election, Labour won 46.2 per cent of the Scottish vote while the Unionists took 44.8 per cent. In 1955, the General Election standing between the two imperial events analysed here, Labour secured 46.7 per cent and the Unionists won 50.1 per cent, helping to lead the Conservatives to a comfortable victory.14 The Liberals, who advocated Scottish Home Rule, found minuscule support at this time.15 In fact, their percentage of the Scottish vote stood at 6.6 per cent in the 1950 General Election and fell to a pathetic 1.9 per cent by the time of the 1955 General Election.16 The SNP did far worse with a platform that called for Scotland’s independence from the United Kingdom. The SNP’s percentage of the vote never rose above 0.5 during the four General Elections of the 1950s. The number of votes received doubtless correlated to the popularity of these parties’ respective messages, indicating that neither a Home Rule platform nor a demand for independence secured the support of many Scots at Westminster elections.17 The Scots were still closely tied to the imperial opportunities that Britain offered throughout the 1950s. Scots took an active interest in the empire and the newspapers of imperial Scotland covered it accordingly. The Scots had gained much from their involvement in the empire from the eighteenth century. This involvement remained high as the British Empire rapidly decolonised following the Second World War. In the aftermath of that conflict, the Scots continued to emigrate in huge numbers. Their preferred destinations were Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa, otherwise known as the Old Dominions. Australia and Canada utilised enticing advertising to lure Scots and other Britons to their countries in droves.18 This was supported by many British policy makers who believed it was beneficial to export indigenous Britons to member states of the Commonwealth.19 Such a policy would maintain British influence in these former colonial possessions, especially as the influence of the United States challenged their cultural supremacy in the white settler Dominions.20 The large numbers of Scots who migrated abroad were looking for better opportunities than what was offered to them at home. This reason for leaving [ 159 ]

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had remained throughout modern Scottish history. In fact, during the 1950s alone, some 142,000 Scots left for opportunities overseas.21 Moreover, the high levels of emigration from Scotland, predominantly to the Old Dominions between 1945 and 1965, meant that the Scots were very aware of friends or family members who were living, in all likelihood, in current or former parts of the British Empire. This close connection kept the opportunities of empire firmly before the Scots. The empire was never far from home. Yet another factor that kept the Scots at home engaged with the empire was the experience of their regiments. Peacetime conscription was instituted in Britain following the Second World War and this made service mandatory for young male school leavers until 1963.22 For many young Scots this meant exposure to the empire. Their families, if unaware of the empire before, in most cases would have been very keen to know the destination of their sons. In the case of the Black Watch, their battalions were involved in numerous colonial manoeuvres. The 2nd battalion had been assigned to maintain the internal security of the North-West Frontier on the Indian subcontinent and, following independence in 1947, it was the last British regiment to leave the newly formed state of Pakistan in early 1948.23 The 1st Battalion Black Watch were involved in Kenya during Mau Mau between 1953 and 1955 and found themselves in Cyprus in 1958 during the last stages of the Cyprus Emergency.24 Beyond the Black Watch, the 1st Battalion Royal Scots were actively involved in Suez.25 Young Scottish men were fighting for and policing the empire in the 1950s as it began to rapidly unravel. This was well understood by the newspapers as they gave their reading public extensive coverage of these military engagements. Overall, the Scots were heavily bound to the British Empire and they followed parties and papers that placed a premium on Scottish incorporation in Britain and involvement in its empire. While the Unionists may have been more closely associated with the British Empire, Labour did not want to lose this symbol of global power for the country, especially before the Suez Crisis. In fact, neither party held a monopoly on imperialism. According to Paul Ward: Elements of the British and Scottish left also embraced imperialism. Lord Rosebery, Liberal Prime Minister in the 1890s, led the Liberal Imperialist wing of the party and saw the Empire as the mission of the British, enabling Scottishness to survive within the greater whole. Among the Clydesiders, John Wheatley and Tom Johnston saw the Empire providing benefits for the Scottish working class. Even where imperialism was not fully embraced the context of politics and culture in all parts of the United Kingdom was imperial. The meanings of Empire and imperialism

[ 160 ]

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were often disputed, but this was as variants of the fact of Empire rather than as significant opposition to that fact.26

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The Scots were still thinking heavily about the British Empire through­ o ­ut the era of decolonisation (1945–65), even if actions like Suez soured the support of many, especially within the working classes. The empire had played too large a role in the lives of Scots for two centuries. The coverage of Mau Mau and the Suez Crisis by Scottish newspapers demonstrates the ongoing connection to all things imperial for the Scottish population in the 1950s.

Coverage of Mau Mau The Mau Mau campaign of violence began in the Kenya Colony in 1952 by members of the Kikuyu tribe with the intention of ejecting the British colonists. Mau Mau had been simmering for many years as a result of Kikuyu displacement from land in the two areas known as the White Highlands and the Rift Valley. Once removed, these men, women and children were ‘repatriated’ to the Kikuyu Reserves. To make matters worse, the colonial government had banned the Kikuyu Central Association in 1940, which had served as the voice for those members of the tribe opposed to British settlement and government. These ‘agitators’, as the British referred to them, therefore, lost the ability to air their grievances before the colonial government. Only those Kikuyu loyal to the British government, who were also closely associated with the Church missionary societies and schools, maintained a voice through the Local Natives Council.27 A group of several thousand squatters who had been evicted from the White Highlands and settled in Olenguruone radicalised the Kikuyu practice of oathing in 1943 as they were being threatened with another eviction by the colonial government. From this point on, Mau Mau grew into a collective effort among many disenchanted Kikuyu to fight British rule and the injustices it perpetrated on their people.28 The Mau Mau, as the movement would come to be known by 1948, had, by 1951, created the following oath, which sent chills down the collective spine of Europeans in Kenya and the British reading about it at home: 1. If I am sent to bring in the head of my enemy and I fail to do so, may this oath kill me. 2. If I fail to steal anything I can from the European may this oath kill me. 3. If I know of an enemy to our organisation and I fail to report him to my leader, may this oath kill me. [ 161 ]

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4. If I ever receive any money from a European as a bribe for information may this oath kill me. 5. If I am ever sent by a leader to do something big for the house of Kikuyu, and I refuse, may this oath kill me. 6. If I refuse to help in driving the Europeans from this country, may this oath kill me. 7. If I worship any leader but Jomo, may this oath kill me.29 This general oath was supplemented by six more oaths for those dedicated to fighting British colonial control in Kenya. Although the Mau Mau first began to obey these oaths in 1949 by destroying farm property and using violent intimidation against other Africans who voluntarily served on British-owned estates, the first killings would not occur until May 1952. But the first high-profile killing, and the point of departure for this section, was the assassination of Chief Waruhiu wa Kungu, the government’s Paramount Chief for Central Province and the senior African official under Kenya’s colonial administration. An outspoken British loyalist, he was brazenly gunned down on the morning of 7 October 1952.30 Soon, a state of emergency (20 October 1952) would be declared in Kenya by the newly arrived Governor Sir Evelyn Baring. Kenya had Scotland’s attention. This section investigates coverage of the Mau Mau uprising in the Scottish press from the murder of Chief Waruhiu on 7 October through to December 1952. While all three newspapers under consideration here constantly ran stories about Mau Mau following the murder of Chief Waruhiu, the first editorial columns appeared after the State of Emergency was declared by Governor Baring on 20 October 1952. Three themes resonate from the editorials of The Scotsman, The Glasgow Herald, and the Daily Record. These themes are: 1. The maintenance of law and order is paramount 2. Land Problems are the root cause of the violence 3. Mau Mau is a barbaric and backward-looking movement. Through these themes it becomes evident that the most pro-imperial of the newspapers is the Daily Record, followed by The Glasgow Herald and The Scotsman. This indicates that pro-imperial sentiment was not the domain solely of newspapers with middle- and upper-class readerships. As a working-class newspaper, the Daily Record excelled in the vitriol with which it portrayed the Mau Mau rebels and the unqualified support it showed for the British government’s actions in crushing this anti-imperial uprising. Newspaper coverage placed utmost importance on the maintenance of law and order in Kenya. In one of the first editorials to appear after [ 162 ]

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the declaration of a State of Emergency, the Daily Record stated that a firm hand was needed if the safety and security of the entire population was to be assured. This was only possible if the terrorism of Mau Mau was crushed.31 Similarly, The Scotsman commented on 21 October that ‘whatever grievances may underlie the unrest in Kenya, it is clear that the first duty of the Government is to ensure public safety, and they should not be hampered in the discharge of their task by factious criticism’.32 The following day, The Scotsman criticised Labour politicians Fenner Brockway and Leslie Hale for their ill-timed arrival in the colony, because their presence might encourage rather than deter the troublemakers. This was counterproductive when the first essential duty was to restore law and order.33 The Glasgow Herald showed concern in the immediate aftermath of the State of Emergency being declared and stated that the extent of Mau Mau’s activities, with forty murders already having been committed, ‘proves the hold their use of black magic can obtain on the African mind’.34 Accordingly, if government officials wanted to prevent the crisis from spreading and infecting more Africans with the poison of Mau Mau unrest, they needed to put down the uprising quickly.35 The declaration of the State of Emergency was just the beginning of a conflict that would last until 1960. As the violence of the insurrection increased, so did the attention paid to it by the Scottish press. In early November, all three papers, with differing degrees of enthusiasm, called for more police powers to deal with the situation. The Glasgow Herald proclaimed that ‘full support must be given to the local officials in their effort to stamp out this barbarous lawlessness’.36 The Scotsman provided a more temperate endorsement of the use of increased force. Its editorial argued that due to the seriousness of the situation in Kenya, the government needed to be given the chance to solve the problem before anyone offered criticism. But The Scotsman also carefully stated that the government should maintain links with the Africans or risk being viewed as a front for white-settler opinion.37 For its part, the Daily Record thought it was an encouraging development that the Kenya Police were getting more power ‘in a further attempt to crush the Mau Mau’.38 Thus all three papers hailed an increase in police powers in early November as a positive step in the fight against Mau Mau. One of the most imperial statements made by any newspaper during this 85-day period came from the Daily Record on 26 November 1952. In this particular leader, with a title ‘Evil v. Good’ that is very revealing about the newspaper’s attitude towards the insurrection, the newspaper stated that the new powers invested in the government to deal with Mau Mau terror were about salvation, not repression. [ 163 ]

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Mau Mau was an evil force that threatened the lives of all law-abiding citizens in the colony. But, most importantly, ending the Mau Mau terror would restore law and order, which was essential to launching full economic development and advancing the political aspirations of ‘African elements which are still not antagonistic to British rule’.39 According to the newspaper, this was exactly what all political parties in Britain wanted. This editorial was in response to a statement in the House of Commons by the Colonial Secretary, Oliver Lyttelton, which explained to the British public that the level of violence gripping the colony was quite substantial. The Glasgow Herald also weighed in on this statement with a similar take, although not charged with the same overt paternalism displayed by the Daily Record. The editor wanted to ensure peace through force, because this would allow ‘moderate African opinion the chance to assert itself’.40 By late November and into December, The Scotsman displayed concern about the methods being implemented by the government to try to ensure law and order. The Scotsman still believed that it was of critical importance to restore law and order in the colony, but it did not agree with the implementation of collective punishment as one of the preferred methods for securing it.41 Collective punishment was a risky plan because the innocent could be punished as well as the guilty.42 Re-establishing relations with the wider Kikuyu community would prove very difficult in its wake. The Daily Record and The Glasgow Herald took a different line on this issue. The Daily Record claimed that it was necessary to prevent a race war from breaking out in the colony since Mau Mau intended to push all non-Africans, both Europeans and Asians, out of the territory and these groups would fight to stay.43 The Glasgow Herald stated that there was a need ‘for stern action to restore peace and order in Kenya’ and that collective punishment constituted illiberal measures that were needed to end ‘a brutal and barbarous campaign of terror’.44 This disagreement over the issue of collective punishment constitutes only one of the differences between the Scottish papers on how best to handle the uprising and foster good relations between coloniser and colonised. Why would a Unionist Party-supporting paper like The Scotsman begin to question the methods used by the government to restore law and order in Kenya, an end it strongly supported? The answer may lie with an independent columnist who was publishing in The Scotsman immediately following the declaration of a State of Emergency. Colin Legum was a journalist and politician from South Africa who went into political exile in Britain for his stance against the apartheid regime. He flew out to Kenya as soon as the State of Emergency was declared to provide first-hand reports on the situation. His first article from Kenya [ 164 ]

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in The Scotsman appeared on 30 October 1952 and claimed that the British were utilising strong-arm tactics in their effort to end the Mau Mau rebellion.45 In a follow-up column on 13 November, Legum stated that the repressive measures being implemented were not working and the opinions of moderate Africans were being ignored.46 He claimed that the restoration of law and order would only be successful in the long term if the British worked closely with moderate Kikuyu who opposed Mau Mau. If this type of collaboration did not occur, Legum feared that another South Africa might develop in the colony. While there is no reference to Legum’s columns in the editorials, the newspaper’s calls for the government to tread carefully when trying to restore law and order may mean that the South African exile was having an effect on the editors. Or, perhaps, The Scotsman was thinking about the long-term implications for British influence in the region following the end of empire. Whatever the motivation, readers of this national newspaper were being provided with a more critical appraisal of the government’s application of force in Kenya than was the case for those following The Glasgow Herald or the Daily Record. The second theme to emerge from the editorials was that land problems constituted the root cause of the Mau Mau violence. The first of the newspapers to bring up the land issue was The Scotsman, immediately following the declaration of an Emergency. The Scotsman claimed that, by looking at Elspeth Huxley and Margery Perham’s Race and Politics in Kenya (1946), it was clear that since Africans were being treated as a source of cheap labour on land taken by white settlers, bitterness would eventually ensue.47 This is exactly what happened. Though the Kikuyu never occupied the area known as the White Highlands, the fact of the matter was that their land was vastly overpopulated. If a solution to this Kikuyu land hunger was not found, it would prove impossible to eliminate unrest long term.48 This did not mean, however, that the paper advocated the end of the British Empire in the colony: quite the opposite, as reflected in the column written by Colin Legum. Legum declared that the land hunger of the Kikuyu must be addressed if ‘peaceful development for this important British colony in Africa’ was to be ensured.49 The Scotsman, rather than condemning or avoiding the difficulties facing the empire, was offering solutions to a government that seemed oblivious to the causes of the trouble. The Colonial Secretary, Oliver Lyttelton, was singled out by two of the newspapers for failing to see the problems caused by land shortage. The Glasgow Herald complained that Lyttelton did not seem interested in examining the land problems that contributed to the violence perpetrated by Mau Mau.50 The Scotsman attacked Lyttelton for claiming that missionaries were responsible for stoking unrest by discouraging [ 165 ]

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tribal dances because they were un-Christian.51 It was the lack of land, and the fact that the white settlers were hoarding vast tracts of it while the Kikuyu suffered a massive shortage, that underlay Mau Mau violence. If the colony sought peace and prosperity, the government needed to build strong links with the Africans instead of appearing to submit to the wishes of the European settlers.52 The Daily Record, conversely, was quick to come to the Colonial Secretary’s defence. When providing an overview to its readers about Lyttelton’s statement in the House of Commons following his visit to Kenya, the paper claimed: He dismisses, forthrightly, the mistaken theory that the Mau Mau secret society is the expression of economic discontent.   It is something far more sinister and no people can progress as Kenya plans to progress if it is shackled by powers of barbarism and evil.53

Mau Mau, for the Daily Record, came down to a simple case of a return to barbarism against the enlightenment of western ideas and ideals. Land had nothing to do with the problem. This leads to the third and final theme of the Mau Mau coverage in the mainstream Scottish press: that Mau Mau was a barbaric and backward-looking movement. There were a number of editorials that touched on the barbarity of Mau Mau, with some even calling it a case of evil versus the goodness of the Christian values inherent in British society.54 According to a column in The Scotsman, ‘Viewed very generally these Kikuyu troubles can be regarded as a result of the “impact of civilisation” on a people whose roots are still in touch with savagery.’55 This language, which demeaned the Kikuyu engaged in perpetrating Mau Mau, had a dehumanising effect. The more careful editorials stated that the British had the responsibility of making the Kikuyu come to terms with the world or they would be left behind. Kenya was viewed as a colony with a bright future, but Mau Mau and its desire to look backwards rather than forwards was dangerous because it held the country back from its potential.56 The Mau Mau movement, with its penchant for killing or beating Kenyans who refused to take the oath, made the accusations of barbarism easy to digest for the public in Scotland.57 The Scottish press, in its coverage of debates in the House of Lords, quoted well-respected members of this chamber discussing the barbarity and primitivism of the Kikuyu, laced with racist invective. The second Lord Tweedsmuir, son of the famed author John Buchan, claimed in a Lords’ debate on Kenya that Mau Mau lifted the curtain on the old days of savagery before the white man came. The Earl of Munster, the Under Secretary at the Colonial Office went even further by claiming: [ 166 ]

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It is sometimes said that Mau Mau is a demonstration of African Nationalism, but it does not seem to me that a return to the law of the jungle by an organisation whose background is associated with many of the evils of tribal witchcraft, is the kind of nationalism which would commend itself to any of those seeking political advancement of the African.58

In other words, Mau Mau had nothing to do with African ­advancement towards self-government. It was simply a barbaric reaction by an uncivilised people desperate for a return to the primitive state the British found them in. It is impossible to know how the Scottish public responded to such claims, but they were printed for all to see and digest. Overall, these three major Scottish dailies did not mince words when discussing the problems facing Kenya in light of the Mau Mau insurrection. While the Daily Record was the most consistently pro-empire, both The Glasgow Herald and The Scotsman lent their support to the maintenance of Kenya as a colony. The broadsheets, however, understood the more complex problems at the heart of Mau Mau and its grievances and knew that it was necessary to tackle these endemic issues if Kenya was to remain an important component of the British Empire.

Coverage of Suez The Suez Crisis developed following Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s decision to nationalise the Suez Canal on 26 July 1956. The Canal had been jointly owned by Britain and France since 1875, when the Egyptian government was forced to sell their shares to the British for £4,000,000 as a result of external debts.59 As mentioned above, the importance of the Canal to Britain as a connection to the British Empire cannot be overestimated. As the ‘swing-door of the British Empire’, it allowed oil to flow rapidly from the Middle East to Britain and the rest of western Europe.60 Communications and goods also took advantage of the short-cut through the Canal when the other option remained the slow, and much more expensive, trek around South Africa. Nasser had wanted to build the Aswan High Dam with money from the United States and Britain, but when this was pulled on 19 July 1956 the old tensions between Egyptian nationalism, which had developed following the British occupation of Egypt in 1882, and the British government came to a head rapidly with nationalisation of the Canal.61 This act, viewed as revenge by many in the British government, was forecast by a Treasury official almost two months before. Michael Johnston claimed that Nasser ‘will undoubtedly be appalled by the apparent breach of faith by the two governments and will seek an occasion to revenge himself. There is not much he can do against [ 167 ]

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the US but a lot he can do against us. Obvious examples are renewed pressure on the Suez Canal Company or stirring up trouble in the Gulf.’62 Nasser did take revenge through nationalisation as a means to use proceeds from the Canal to finance the building of the Aswan High Dam. From the British perspective, the Suez Crisis had begun. This section investigates coverage of the Suez Crisis by the three major Scottish dailies from August through December 1956. As the abundance of newspaper coverage testifies, Suez captivated the Scottish press and people during the final months of 1956. Although many historians and journalists consider the Suez Crisis to be a lastgasp attempt at British imperial muscle-flexing to protect the ‘swingdoor of the British Empire’, only the Daily Record agreed that the use of force constituted an act of imperialism. The Daily Record could not support the government’s actions because of the negative international implications it had for Britain. This must not, however, be conflated with a rejection of the British Empire. On the other hand, The Glasgow Herald and The Scotsman claimed that the entire Suez Crisis was nothing more than an international situation with strong economic and Cold War implications. Despite the perception of The Glasgow Herald and The Scotsman, it appears clear that the Suez intervention by Franco-British forces at the end of October 1956 constituted an act of imperialism as defined above and should be discussed as such. The editorial columns covering the Suez Crisis among the three Scottish newspapers revolved around five major questions and concerns: 1. Was the Suez Crisis an imperial event or an international situation? 2. Should force be used? 3. What were the economic implications of Suez? 4. Did the use of force at Suez have a direct impact on Soviet policy towards the Hungarian rebellion? 5. Was there collusion? When combined, the answers to these five questions provide a comprehensive overview of how national newspapers presented the Suez Crisis to the Scottish public. If Suez really was the beginning of the end of the British Empire, the newspaper-reading public in Scotland had a front-row seat to the details of its nascent disintegration. The first question attempted by the three dailies was whether the Suez Crisis constituted an imperial event or an international situation. The Daily Record was no friend of Colonel Nasser, referring to him in the aftermath of nationalisation as ‘Grabber Nasser’.63 But their editorials always pushed for an international, diplomatic solution to the seizure of the Canal. In their first editorial following the seizure, the [ 168 ]

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Daily Record stated that the future of the Canal was an international concern and Britain should not attempt to go it alone and reclaim the waterway by force.64 In the overheating climate of the Cold War this seemed like sound advice, especially following the warning by the Soviets in mid-August that any use of force on Nasser could erupt into ‘a large conflict possibly outside the Middle East’.65 Additionally, any act of perceived colonial aggression would harm Britain in the eyes of the world, and most importantly for the economic well-being of the country, in the eyes of Commonwealth partners: ‘Britain can … [ill] afford a reputation for colonialist belligerency: we might fail to intimidate Nasser, but succeed in permanently estranging India. It is very important that Parliament should debate these issues before further decisions are taken.’66 The threat of international condemnation for any potential action was the cornerstone to the newspaper’s argument that Britain needed to handle everything through international channels such as the United Nations Security Council. For the Record, taking the matter to the UN Security Council would also force Russia to put its cards on the table.67 The possibility of a Third World War erupting as a result of armed intervention at Suez greatly concerned the newspaper, which took its role seriously as a voice for the common soldier.68 Thus, because the Daily Record saw the Suez Crisis as an international situation demanding an international solution, it feared that the use of force, unsanctioned by the United Nations, might taint Britain with the tag of aggressive colonisers and harm the country’s world reputation. The Glasgow Herald and The Scotsman fully supported the actions of the government from the beginnings of the Suez Crisis through armed intervention around the Canal Zone in late October/early November until the end of the period under review. Both newspapers argued consistently that there was nothing colonial about Britain’s plans or subsequent actions regarding Suez. This was a response to the charges levelled against the United Kingdom mainly by the United States. The Scotsman claimed more than a month before armed intervention began that the United States did not want to get involved in the Suez dispute because they were afraid of being viewed as a ‘colonial’ power or thought to support a ‘colonial’ policy.69 The US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles was singled out for his anti-colonial rhetoric by The Glasgow Herald. Dulles was, after all, a politician during an election year and he needed to be careful to avoid supporting anything misconstrued as a colonial policy because the word ‘colonial’ was dirty to US ears.70 But that did not stop the Herald from attacking Dulles for his ‘customary ineptitude’ in claiming that the British case against Egypt before the Security Council smacked of colonialism.71 [ 169 ]

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Following the armed intervention by Franco-British forces, which began on 31 October and ended on 7 November, and the massive damage this caused to Anglo-American relations, the Herald began to change its tune and argued that the British government should do everything in its power to keep the United States on side. The Herald stated that the United States saw Suez as a colonial adventure. Given the negative connotations ascribed to this word by the ex-colony, the British could not afford to alienate the Americans. The Atlantic Alliance was too important to risk, so the British needed to capitulate to US demands and withdraw troops from the Suez region.72 The defiant Scotsman, on the other hand, said that the Americans had it all wrong, claiming that the Suez intervention was meant to protect the west against Soviet expansion. The editor believed that the only explanation for this error was that old beliefs about colonialism died hard in the United States.73 A little over a week later, The Scotsman used the example of VicePresident Nixon and the metamorphosis he had undergone since the Presidential election: whereas Nixon utilised anti-colonial rhetoric before the election, he was now calling for conciliation and wanted to assist Britain with the difficulties that had arisen for her owing to the intervention. According to the editor, the United States ‘cannot afford to isolate herself from Britain and France in the self-righteous anticolonialism which Mr. Nixon favoured a month ago’.74 The Americans needed the British as much as the British needed the Americans. Overall, the problem for the British was that the perception of colonialism harmed them in the realm of world opinion, as exemplified by US opposition to intervention. Whether this was right or wrong is inconsequential. What mattered was that the vast majority of the international community stood up against the British and their collaborators and shamed them for their actions. The Daily Record understood this.75 Even though The Glasgow Herald began to come around by late November, its editors failed to recognise the consequences of any perceived imperial action until it was too late. The Scotsman never recognised the difficulties caused by this perception. The second, and closely related, question was whether force should be used against Nasser to reclaim the Canal. Given the nature of the situation following nationalisation, the Daily Record did not believe there was justification for force to be utilised.76 The only defence for following a policy of belligerence would be ‘if Colonel Nasser himself became a military aggressor. It should then be the action of the United Nations.’77 Fighting alone to secure oil supplies was nonsensical because it might actually lead to a major outbreak that could open the Middle East to the Russians, damage the Anglo-American alliance, break the Commonwealth, and needlessly waste British lives.78 As [ 170 ]

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letters to the editor testify, Scots worried that this might actually lead to a Third World War and the loss of more young men.79 Given that most of these fighting men would come from the working classes, the demographic targeted by the Daily Record, it is easy to see how these letters might influence the editor. As was commonplace with Suez coverage, The Glasgow Herald and The Scotsman agreed that Britain had the right to use force against the recalcitrant Nasser. In early September, they lambasted Labour for forswearing the use of military force without permission from the United Nations: ‘The prosperity and security of the British people must be guaranteed in one way or another against the tantrums and caprices of Egyptian rulers.’80 For the editor of The Scotsman, the United Nations was not a satisfactory solution to the world’s problems because the Soviet Union maintained a veto on the Security Council and could scuttle any proposals it opposed.81 Accordingly, the editor viewed it as a serious mistake to renounce the use of force until the United Nations was capable of efficiently policing the world.82 Until that time ‘we are undoubtedly right to prepare and have at instant call the forces to save ourselves and the other users of the canal if we are driven to use them’.83 These two dailies would soon have their way as the attack on Nasser, though cloaked in lies, lurked just around the corner. On 31 October 1956, just two days after the Israelis engaged Egyptian forces on the Sinai Peninsula, Franco-British forces began their assault on Egyptian airfields following the expiration of an ultimatum to both Israel and Egypt to cease hostilities. The editorial columns of all three newspapers focused on the war in the north-east corner of the African continent. The Daily Record vehemently opposed the use of force because it predicted the international repercussions for such a step. The column condemned Prime Minister Eden for splitting the Commonwealth, alienating the United States and flouting the United Nations. The thoughts of everyone at the newspaper went out to all of the British soldiers and sailors who were required to carry out their orders and prosecute this conflict. But the column ended on a note of outrage. ‘In these circumstances we believe the use of force can settle nothing and achieve nothing. it is the culminating blunder in a disastrous policy.’84 The Glasgow Herald, on the other hand, trumpeted Eden’s ‘bold and resolute action’ and heaped scorn on Hugh Gaitskell MP, Leader of the Opposition, for verbally abusing Prime Minister Eden.85 The Scotsman echoed the sentiments of its fellow broadsheet and told its readers that the move to intervene militarily was actually done to protect the Arabs. According to the column, Eden had taken a course [ 171 ]

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that was necessary if Britain wanted to see ‘an orderly approach to full nationhood among the Arab States’.86 Any Scot reading all three of these papers on 1 November 1956 would have noted the stark contrast between the tabloid and the broadsheets. While the Daily Record would continue to attack the government’s policy, The Glasgow Herald and The Scotsman attempted to justify the use of force. As the hostilities began, The Scotsman praised the peacekeeping nature of the Franco-British mission. Their editor claimed that the action taken by British and French forces was meant ‘to limit and contain a war that could set the whole Middle East in flames’.87 This police action intended to stop a dangerous conflict from turning catastrophic, while safeguarding the Suez Canal; something that the United Nations was not quick enough to prevent.88 For The Glasgow Herald, the line was the same: intervention by Britain and France preserved the peace.89 The editor viewed the government as resolute and valiant in undertaking the Suez mission. Without their intervention, the newspaper surmised that all of the Arab states would be embroiled in the conflict; possibly even the Great Powers.90 The government had possibly prevented the outbreak of another Korean War or even a Third World War. There was no doubt in the minds of these editors that the swift action of their government had saved the world from increased tensions and hostilities. Little did they know that the government had colluded to make the intervention a reality. The editors also engaged the economic implications of the Suez Crisis in their columns. The Daily Record called on Prime Minister Eden to resign because his actions had led to a blockage of the Canal that would not be cleared for months, costing Britain hundreds of millions of pounds.91 The Glasgow Herald countered, however, that the economic costs of Suez could only be determined by a comparison with the economic and political costs of inaction.92 Since the conflict between Israel and Egypt was so close to the Canal, The Scotsman claimed that Britain and France had been forced to take action to prevent extensive damage to this most important of waterways and its most valuable commodity: cheap transportation of oil to western Europe.93 In the end, economic arguments existed for both those opposing and championing intervention. It all came down, quite simply, to whether the speculation about the costs of inaction would have exceeded those of action. The fourth question debated in the Scottish press asked whether the use of force at Suez had a direct impact on Soviet policy towards the Hungarian rebellion. Only two of the major dailies discussed this very controversial topic in their editorial columns. The Daily Record derided the British government for flaunting the United Nations and [ 172 ]

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attacking Egypt because it prevented Britain from being able to take the moral high ground and condemn the Soviets as they attacked the Hungarian rebels: ‘Britain has always been part of the conscience of the world. … [But] today the British people are unhappy that their Government cannot condemn Russia for defying U. N. O. Britain has shown the example. We are just beginning to pay the price of Eden’s war.’94 An occasional columnist for the Record, the Labour MP Dick Mabon, utilised even more forceful language. To him, Britain’s actions may have influenced the Russian decision to ‘crucify the liberty-loving people of Hungary’.95 The Scotsman also weighed in on the allegation that British action over Suez gave the Soviets an excuse to crush the Hungarian rebellion. The editor claimed that the situation was caused by simple Russian tyranny. The intervention, after all, ‘may well have prevented a conflagration’ and this action could be built upon by the United Nations, making its presence in the region a formidable one.96 For The Scotsman, given the timeline of events in Hungary, there was little the British could have done to stop the bloodshed by the Soviets. The Hungarian rebellion began well before Franco-British intervention at Suez, and the Soviets were not about to risk losing one of their satellites in eastern Europe. The Hungarian rising would have been dealt with mercilessly even if nothing had transpired in Egypt.97 Despite this argument, the British were still hard-pressed to condemn Soviet action when they were concomitantly involved in a conflict seen by much of the world as a colonial deed. The final question that provided heated debate in the House of Commons and within the Scottish press asked whether there had been collusion between Britain, France, and Israel over the latter’s attack on Egyptian forces on the Sinai Peninsula. Did Britain and France know that Israel was going to attack? Was the choice of the Canal Zone as the place of intervention planned in advance to regain control of the international waterway? At the time the charge of collusion was based on rumour; the dark truth of the Protocol of Sevres was not public knowledge. In this atmosphere of rumour and assumption, The Glasgow Herald and The Scotsman used their editorial columns to defend the government against these charges. Meanwhile, the Daily Record said that there was no use to engaging in assumption. History would determine who was right and who was wrong.98 A letter to the editor of The Glasgow Herald echoed this sentiment. According to the correspondent, Robert Main: We are left with the most important question of all: Why did we join with the French in an attack on Egypt? If we accept that the Israeli invasion of Egypt was an action conceived and initiated solely to weaken

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the Egyptian military machine, and if we accept that our Government, together with the Government of France, acted only to ensure the maintenance of the Suez Canal as a vital waterway, and to safeguard our nationals in Egypt, then we can say that, however imprudent such action may have been, it was an action justified by the prevailing circumstances. But if we feel that this action was designed primarily to regain control of the Suez Canal and secondly to depose the Egyptian dictator, and that the idea of an Anglo-French police force was a belated concession to world opinion, then we can but hang our heads in shame.99

If proven true, collusion, for this neutral correspondent, would com­­­ pletely change how he viewed the Suez intervention. The editorials of the two broadsheets, however, would not qualify their condemnations of collusion rumours. At the start of the armed intervention, the Leader of the Opposition, Hugh Gaitskell, levelled the charge of collusion against Eden and the government. The Scotsman did not mince words when relaying its disdain for Gaitskell to its readers. The editorial said that it was regrettable that Gaitskell ‘should have thrown doubt on the Prime Minister’s integrity by repeating the theory sponsored by Russia and apparently the United States that Israel’s attack on Egypt was a matter of collusion between the British and French Governments and the Government of Israel’.100 The Glasgow Herald stated unequivocally that the time was ripe for Israel to carry out a pre-emptive strike against the military build-up of Egypt. Collusion had not occurred.101 Both papers were quick to attack the Shadow Foreign Secretary Aneurin Bevan’s claims of collusion in a House of Commons Debate with the Foreign Secretary Selwyn Lloyd on 5 December 1956. The Herald called Bevan’s vitriolic attacks naïve and unrealistic.102 The Scotsman said this was a weak case because Israel was trying to eliminate the Egyptian government and it was Franco-British intervention that prevented this.103 If they were colluding, why stop the Israeli onslaught? Finally, following Eden’s last appearance in the House of Commons on 20 December 1956, in which he denied the collusion claim for the final time as Prime Minister, both papers attempted to shame those who kept pushing this view. The Herald averred that the collusion argument had been started by a Washington Post diplomatic correspondent for political purposes. It was thus nothing more than a distasteful party political stunt.104 The Scotsman dared the Opposition ‘to prove their case or abandon the charges’.105 No solid proof would be forthcoming during Eden’s lifetime. On 9 January 1957 Prime Minister Anthony Eden resigned. Management of the Suez Crisis had taken a physical toll on him. The mental strain of hiding collusion from the public probably also did him no favours. [ 174 ]

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In Scotland, as in the rest of Britain, the general public remained divided on the issue of Suez. Those reading these three major Scottish dailies had been inundated with editorial columns and letters to the editor for more than four months with the vast concentration appearing between 31 October and the end of the year. The number of editorials appearing in each newspaper within the course of two months is staggering when it is remembered that the Daily Record never produced more than two in a day and The Glasgow Herald and The Scotsman never more than four each: The Scotsman: 50 The Glasgow Herald: 56 Daily Record: 27 Overall, the papers remained fairly consistent with their individual messages. The Scotsman and The Glasgow Herald supported the government’s actions while the Daily Record shunned the government for putting the British people in harm’s way when the matter needed to be handled solely by the United Nations Security Council.106 The Scots, always interested in imperial matters, received an extensive amount of information on events as they unfolded in Egypt.

Conclusion Overall, whether or not the three national Scottish newspapers criticised the government for its handling of Mau Mau or Suez, the important thing is that these were imperial issues. The Scotsman, The Glasgow Herald, and the Daily Record provided an information overload to the Scottish newspaper-reading public on these topics and that reflects the argument of this chapter that the Scots had an appetite for all things imperial, whether they thought of themselves as proponents, opponents, or even victims of empire. Moreover, the dedicated focus on Africa shows that this continent was a preferred destination for Scottish readers.107 Newspapers are in the business of selling their information to the general public. As such, they focus on stories that will hold the interest of their potential readers. The vast coverage of the imperial situations in Kenya and at Suez demonstrates that these three newspapers knew coverage of these stories infatuated the Scottish public. The Scots were not absent-minded when it came to the British Empire during the 1950s.

Acknowledgement A version of this chapter was published in Bryan S. Glass, The Scottish Nation at Empire’s End (Basingstoke and New York, 2014), pp. 86–114.

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Notes   1 The word ‘imperialism’ is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as ‘a policy of extending a country’s power and influence through colonization, use of military force, or other means’.   2 The seminal work on the Suez Crisis by Keith Kyle uses the term ‘swing-door of the British Empire’ to describe the critical importance of the canal to Britain and her overseas possessions, colonies and Commonwealth partners. But the term is borrowed by Kyle from a speech made by Anthony Eden in the House of Commons on 23 December 1929 in which the future Prime Minister stated that ‘If the Suez Canal is our back door to the East, it is the front door to Europe of Australia, New Zealand, and India. If you like to mix your metaphors it is, in fact, the swing-door of the British Empire, which has got to keep continually revolving if our communications are to be what they should.’ Keith Kyle, Suez: Britain’s End of Empire in the Middle East, revised edition (London, 2003), p. 7.   3 The Scotsman, based in Edinburgh, was founded in 1817; The Glasgow Herald, based in Glasgow, was founded in 1783; the Daily Record, based in Glasgow, was founded in 1895.   4 It is important to note that there were other very popular papers in Scotland at this time including the Scottish Daily Express. But as it was an offshoot of Lord Beaverbrook’s larger English-based Daily Express, it is not considered here. Additionally, regional papers with large followings, such as the Dundee Courier and Advertiser, are not analysed in depth. However, on inspection of the Courier it shows the same high levels of imperial coverage as the three scrutinised. But the Courier did not have a national reach in the 1950s. This chapter is concerned with the coverage of these two imperial events by Scottish-only newspapers with a national reach. The Dundee Courier and Advertiser was consulted by the author at Dundee Central Library, 23 July 2014, with the assistance of John M. MacKenzie and Nigel Dalziel.   5 These statistics are available from the Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC). ABC is the industry body for media measurement in the UK and current circulation statistics on all member newspapers are available on their website at www.abc.org.uk.   6 Harry Reid, Deadline: The Story of the Scottish Press (Edinburgh, 2006), p. x. Reid declares that for the past 50 years (in 2006) Scots have had ‘a voracious appetite for newspapers’.   7 The current circulation statistics for these newspapers are available at www.abc.org. uk.   8 John M. MacKenzie, ‘The Press and the Dominant Ideology of Empire’ in Simon J. Potter (ed.) Newspapers and Empire in Ireland and Britain: Reporting the British Empire, c. 1857–1921 (Dublin, 2004), pp. 23–25. One exception to this rule is: Susan L. Carruthers, Winning Hearts and Minds: British Governments, the Media and Colonial Counter-Insurgency 1944–1960 (London, 1995).   9 Simon J. Potter, ‘Introduction: Empire, Propaganda and Public Opinion’ in Simon J. Potter (ed.) Newspapers and Empire in Ireland and Britain: Reporting the British Empire, c. 1857–1921 (Dublin, 2004), pp. 16–17. 10 The Daily Record favoured the Unionist Party until purchased by the Mirror Group in 1956. The paper then switched its political allegiance to the Labour Party. See: Ewen Cameron, Impaled Upon a Thistle: Scotland Since 1880 (Edinburgh, 2010), p. 263. 11 Potter, ‘Introduction: Empire, Propaganda and Public Opinion’, pp. 18–19. 12 ‘The Great Debate: A Truce’, Daily Record, 15 November 1956, p. 2. 13 In his study of newspapers in late nineteenth-century Scotland, Richard Finlay argues that The Glasgow Herald had a large and enthusiastic audience for its pro-imperial message because ‘Glasgow, with its strong sense of imperial identity stimulated by the area’s commercial and industrial links with the empire’ appealed to the city’s large business class. This business class, perhaps more than that of any other city in the United Kingdom, was heavily involved in the British Empire. Richard Finlay, ‘The Scottish Press and Empire, 1850–1914’ in Simon J. Potter (ed.), Newspapers and

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Empire in Ireland and Britain: Reporting the British Empire, c. 1857–1921 (Dublin, 2004), p. 65. The 50.1 per cent of the vote won by the Unionists marks the only time in the history of Scottish elections that one party secured a majority of the votes cast. See David Seawright, An Important Matter of Principle: The Decline of the Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party (Aldershot, 1999), pp. 2–3. Paul Ward, Unionism in the United Kingdom, 1918–1974 (Basingstoke, 2005), p. 13. I. G. C. Hutchison, Scottish Politics in the Twentieth Century (Basingstoke, 2001), p. 71. Ewen A. Cameron, ‘The Politics of the Union in an Age of Unionism’ in T. M. Devine (ed.) Scotland and the Union 1707–2007 (Edinburgh, 2008), pp. 126, 132. It should be noted here that Cameron claims the Liberals and the SNP ‘were condemned to the margins of a bi-polar political system until the 1960s’. According to him, this was responsible for their low share of the vote. However, not once in his chapter does he refer to the empire and the influence it exerted over Scottish voters. This begs the question: why would you support a party that’s calling for the devolution of authority from, or the complete ending of, a centralised state that offered the Scots so many opportunities on the global stage? Knowingly ignoring the empire, and especially its end, when trying to understand Scottish politics after the Second World War misleads readers and is akin to Eden’s behaviour over Suez. It is a huge failure shared by many insular Scottish historians. Eric Richards, Britannia’s Children: Emigration from England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland since 1600 (London, 2004), p. 257. Ibid., p. 262. See the chapter by Marjory Harper, ‘Initiatives, Impediments and Identities: Scottish Emigration in the Twentieth Century’, in this volume. T. M. Devine, To the Ends of the Earth: Scotland’s Global Diaspora 1750–2010 (Washington, 2011), p. 270. Trevor Royle, The Black Watch: A Concise History (Edinburgh, 2006), p. 201. Ibid., p. 199. Ibid., pp. 204–206. Email from Stuart Allan to author, 23 September 2014. Ward, Unionism in the United Kingdom, p. 19. Benjamin Grob-Fitzgibbon, Imperial Endgame: Britain’s Dirty Wars and the End of Empire (Basingstoke, 2011), pp. 212–214. Caroline Elkins, Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya (New York, 2005), pp. 24–25. Grob-Fitzgibbon, Imperial Endgame, pp. 214–215. David Anderson, Histories of the Hanged: The Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire (London, 2005), pp. 55–56. ‘Firm Hand—’, Daily Record, 22 October 1952, p. 2. ‘Crisis in Kenya’, The Scotsman, 21 October 1952, p. 4. ‘Next Step in Kenya’, The Scotsman, 22 October 1952, p. 6. There is also a damning report in the Daily Record about this trip claiming that Jomo Kenyatta paid for the plane tickets of the two Labour MPs and while in Kenya they stayed with the family of the men charged in the murder of Chief Waruhiu. Dudley Hawkins, ‘Kenyatta paid for MPs’ Kenya trip’, Daily Record, 30 October, 1952, p. 3. ‘The Crisis in Kenya’, The Glasgow Herald, 21 October 1952, p. 4. ‘Situation in Kenya’, The Glasgow Herald, 30 October 1952, p. 4. ‘The Kenya Problem’, The Glasgow Herald, 8 November 1952, p. 4. ‘Kenya Problem’, The Scotsman, 8 November 1952, p. 6. ‘Kenya Police Get More Power’, Daily Record, 12 November 1952, p. 3. ‘Evil v. Good’, Daily Record, 26 November 1952, p. 2. ‘The Emergency in Kenya’, The Glasgow Herald, 26 November 1952, p. 4. ‘Kenya Crisis’, The Scotsman, 27 November 1952, p. 6. ‘Kenya Policy’, The Scotsman, 17 December 1952, p. 6. ‘The Issue’, Daily Record, 17 December 1952, p. 2.

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ANTI-COLONIALISM, THE MILITARY AND NATIONALISM 44 ‘Policy for Kenya’, The Glasgow Herald, 17 December 1952, p. 4. It is fascinating to note that Grob-Fitzgibbon’s book makes this exact argument in its epilogue: ‘If there is one clear conclusion to be drawn from the end of Britain’s empire, it is that liberal imperialism can only be sustained by illiberal dirty wars.’ Grob-Fitzgibbon, Imperial Endgame, p. 377. 45 Colin Legum, ‘Political Ferment in Colony’, The Scotsman, 30 October 1952, p. 7. 46 Colin Legum, ‘Campaign against Mau Mau: Force Fails to Crush its Adherents’, The Scotsman, 13 November 1952, p. 7. 47 ‘Next Step in Kenya’, The Scotsman, 22 October 1952, p. 6. 48 ‘Kenya Land Problems’, The Scotsman, 11 December 1952, p. 6. 49 Colin Legum, ‘Jomo Kenyatta’s Influence’, The Scotsman, 23 October 1952, p. 8. 50 ‘Policy for Kenya’, The Glasgow Herald, 17 December 1952, p. 4. 51 ‘Crisis in Kenya’, The Scotsman, 21 October 1952, p. 4. 52 ‘Kenya Problem’, The Scotsman, 8 November 1952, p. 6. 53 ‘Shackles’, Daily Record, 8 November 1952, p. 2. 54 ‘Evil v. Good’, Daily Record, 26 November 1952, p. 2. 55 Francis Daniel Hislop, ‘Perspective on Kenya: Kikuyu Flare-Up Likely to Be Last of Its Kind’, The Scotsman, 31 October 1952, p. 6. 56 ‘Background of Hope in Kenya’, The Glasgow Herald, 20 November 1952, p. 4. 57 In a front-page article in the Daily Record, the violence of Mau Mau is detailed using accounts of particular individuals who refused to take the oath. One, a Joseph Kiburja, refused the oath and instead tried to preach Christianity, the opposite of this barbarism. He was beaten to death, and other Africans at the scene were compelled to take the oath by rubbing flesh from the dead man’s body across their mouths. Dudley Hawkins, ‘Four Mau Men Flogged’, Daily Record, 8 November 1952, front page. 58 ‘Government Under Fire on Kenya’, The Scotsman, 30 October 1952, p. 8. 59 The deal brokered by Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli with financing from the Rothschild banking dynasty purchased around 44 per cent of the Canal shares for the British Government. For more information see: Ronald Hyam, Britain’s Declining Empire: The Road to Decolonisation 1918–1968 (Cambridge, 2006), p. 227. 60 Kyle, Suez, p. 7. 61 J. C. Hurewitz, ‘The Historical Context’ in W. Roger Louis and Roger Owen (eds.), Suez 1956: The Crisis and its Consequences (Oxford, 1989), p. 19. The Aswan High Dam was meant to increase the productivity of Egyptian agriculture and support Egyptian industrialisation. 62 Michael Johnston to John Phillips, 6 June 1956, FO 371/119055. Quoted from Keith Kyle, ‘Britain and the Crisis, 1955–1956’ in W. Roger Louis and Roger Owen (eds.), Suez 1956: The Crisis and its Consequences (Oxford, 1989), p. 110. 63 ‘Crisis Moves: Nasser on Eve of Mobilising’, Daily Record, 6 August 1956, front page. 64 ‘“Go it alone” is Folly’, Daily Record, 14 August 1956, p. 2. 65 ‘Warning by Russia: Don’t Use Force on Nasser’, Daily Record, 18 August 1956, front page. 66 ‘Recall us now, say M.P.s’, Daily Record, 3 September 1956, front page. 67 ‘Better late than never’, Daily Record, 25 September 1956, p. 2. 68 This was mainly due to the fact that most of the soldiers coming out of Scotland hailed from the urban working classes living around the conurbation of Glasgow. The Daily Record’s role as a stalwart defender of the common soldier was solidified when it named The British Soldier its Man of the Year for 1956. ‘Man of the Year: The British Soldier’, Daily Record, 25 December 1956, pp. 4–5. 69 ‘U.S. Policy’, The Scotsman, 21 September 1956, p. 8. 70 ‘Elections and Colonialism’, The Glasgow Herald, 20 October 1956, p. 6. The column also claimed that all US politicians were ‘running scared’ trying to secure re-election, and they simply could not support anything that might be misconstrued as imperialism. 71 ‘Muddy Waters’, The Glasgow Herald, 5 October 1956, p. 6.

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NEWSPAPERS AND EMPIRE 72 ‘Atlantic Alliance’, The Glasgow Herald, 28 November 1956, p. 6. In a separate leader two days later, the editor reiterated this point and added that Anglo-American unity was of paramount importance given the difficult and dangerous problems facing the Middle East. ‘Interim Report’, The Glasgow Herald, 30 November 1956, p. 6. 73 ‘Transatlantica’, The Scotsman, 29 November 1956, p. 6. 74 ‘Mr. Nixon’s Lead’, The Scotsman, 8 December 1956, p. 6. 75 In an editorial written in late November, the Daily Record echoed the sentiments of the Canadian Foreign Minister, Lester Pearson, who stated that Britain’s life in a dangerous world could only be safeguarded by a united Commonwealth in alliance with the United States. To them, the actions of the British Government placed the Commonwealth on the verge of collapse and severely harmed the Anglo-American relationship because it was perceived as a colonial exercise. ‘Danger’, Daily Record, 29 November 1956, p. 2. 76 ‘No War!’, Daily Record, 15 August 1956, front page. 77 ‘Eden’s Chance!’, Daily Record, 16 August 1956, front page. 78 ‘Suez Crisis: The Demand Grows. Recall MPs NOW! NOW! NOW!’, Daily Record, 1 September 1956, front page. 79 ‘We Don’t Want a War!’, Daily Record, 3 November 1956, p. 2 and ‘The Great Debate’, Daily Record, 13 November 1956, p. 2. 80 ‘Parliament Recalled’, The Glasgow Herald, 7 September 1956, p. 6. 81 ‘After the Debate’, The Scotsman, 15 September 1956, p. 6. 82 ‘Mr. Menzies Hits Out’, The Scotsman, 26 September 1956, p. 8. 83 ‘What Next?’, The Scotsman, 11 September 1956, p. 6. 84 Emphasis in original. ‘Eden’s War’, Daily Record, 1 November 1956, front page. 85 ‘The Die Cast’, The Glasgow Herald, 1 November 1956, p. 6. 86 ‘Intervention’, The Scotsman, 1 November 1956, p. 8. 87 ‘Action Stations’, The Scotsman, 31 October 1956, p. 6. 88 ‘Britain’s Case’, The Scotsman, 2 November 1956, p. 6. 89 ‘Preserving the Peace’, The Glasgow Herald, 31 October 1956, p. 6. 90 ‘Mission Accomplished?’, The Glasgow Herald, 7 November 1956, p. 6. 91 ‘Eden’s War: ALL Pay the Price’, Daily Record, 12 November 1956, front page. 92 ‘Estimating the Cost’, The Glasgow Herald, 13 November 1956, p. 6. 93 ‘Middle East Oil’, The Scotsman, 5 November 1956, p. 6. 94 ‘Eden’s War: A Bitter Day for Britain’, Daily Record, 5 November 1956, p. 3. 95 Dick Mabon, MP, ‘Tory Night of the Long Knives May Come’, Daily Record, 9 November 1956, p. 4. 96 ‘Two Crises’, The Scotsman, 5 November 1956, p. 6. 97 ‘Vote of Censure’, The Scotsman, 7 December 1956, p. 6. 98 ‘The Great Debate: A Truce’, Daily Record, 15 November 1956, p. 2. 99 ‘British Policy in the Middle East: Awaiting the Test of Results’, The Glasgow Herald, 12 November 1956, p. 6. 100 ‘Intervention’, The Scotsman, 1 November 1956, p. 8. 101 ‘Collusion by Whom?’, The Glasgow Herald, 24 November 1956, p. 6. 102 ‘Premature Inquest’, The Glasgow Herald, 6 December 1956, p. 6. 103 ‘Suez Debate’, The Scotsman, 6 December 1956, p. 8. 104 ‘No Collusion’, The Glasgow Herald, 21 December 1956, p. 4. 105 ‘Suez Clearance’, The Scotsman, 21 December 1956, p. 6. 106 The Glasgow Herald did begin to worry near the end of November 1956 that the actions of the government, even if justified, were harming the British in the realm of global public opinion. 107 Given the Scottish involvement in Africa, especially in Nyasaland, it would be shocking if another area of the world demanded their collective attention. Scottish involvement on the Indian subcontinent was also remarkable, but this ceased to be an imperial subject after the transfer of power was completed on 15 August 1947.

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CHA P T ER N IN E

David Livingstone, the Scottish cultural and political revival and the end of empire in Africa John M. MacKenzie Background: the malleable myth of Livingstone The heroic myth of Livingstone has been such a powerful one as to be infinitely malleable.1

It started out as a myth of exploration, of the opening up of a continent, taking on board the already established shibboleth of Christianity, Commerce and Civilisation. It was soon transformed into a great mythic energising of the abolition of the slave trade, now transferred from its West African, European and Atlantic manifestation into a supposedly ‘Arab’ or Swahili (to some extent Portuguese) and Indian Ocean form. During the years after David Livingstone’s death it became the powerful myth underpinning the outburst of missionary enterprise in Africa, embracing all denominations, but perhaps particularly associated with Scottish missions, prominently in Nyasaland/Malawi.2 Livingstone’s congregationalism and his openness to a diversity of Christian churches ensured that his heroic leadership was acknowledged by many different missionary traditions. Within ten years of his death he had become the ‘patron saint’ of imperialism in Africa, hailed by politicians, administrators and military men as the forerunner of the extension of empire and white settlement to the continent, even if Livingstone’s own vision was a complex one, often contradictory, and essentially different from the scramble for territory that occurred in the 1880s and 1890s.3 His name, however, tended to be on the lips of many (and not just the British) engaged in that imperial/colonial enterprise. In the twentieth century, the appeal to Livingstone as the justificatory ancestor figure, the heroic antecedent that could be turned to many different ends, continued unabated. The missionary Alexander Hetherwick subtitled his memoirs, ending in 1928, with the assertion ‘How Livingstone’s Dream Came True’.4 But Livingstone was also one [ 180 ]

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of the heroes of white settlers in the inter-war years, in Central Africa a ‘founder’ along with Cecil Rhodes. Not for nothing was the research institution and museum in the town of Livingstone named the ‘RhodesLivingstone Institute’. When the Federation of Northern and Southern Rhodesia and Nyasaland was being mooted, he was hailed as a great forerunner of this alleged exercise in partnership by the doctor and historian Michael Gelfand.5 In a contradictory manner, his memory was also appealed to as symbolising opposition to the Federation, for example by the Labour minister James Griffiths. By this time, he was beginning to appear in works of literature, again invariably Janus-like, facing both ways.6 This phenomenon was to continue into modern times. But another extraordinary transformation was about to take place. He became a patron saint of African nationalism. The most celebrated exponent of this view was the first President of Zambia, Kenneth Kaunda, who hailed him as the ‘first African nationalist’.7 Kaunda also referred to as him the ‘first African freedom fighter’, referring to his battle against the slave trade.8 At the time of the break-up of the Federation, between the emergencies of 1959 and its disbandment in 1963, followed by decolonisation for Zambia and Malawi in 1964, he was again hailed as the prophet who had prefigured this new policy. On the centennial of his death in 1973, the inevitable debunking began,9 but despite this several African countries issued stamps to commemorate his life and death in Africa.10 His name and his birthplace continued to be used as topographical identities in the city of Livingstone (the first capital of Northern Rhodesia until the new planned capital of Lusaka was built in the 1930s), in Blantyre in Malawi, and in Livingstonia (including the mountains of that name) in the north of that country. The name of Rhodes was dropped from the Institute, but that of Livingstone survived. That Institute had become, and remains, a major repository of Livingstone documents and artefacts, a site of research into his work and reputation, while an entire room of the museum is devoted to his life and memory.11 All of this is symbolised in the extraordinary range of statuary of Livingstone. There are statues of him in Glasgow and Edinburgh, at the Royal Geographical Society in London and even in the façade of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in Whitehall. The great statue by Sir W. R. Dick was erected at the Victoria Falls on the Zimbabwean side in 1934, complete with striking commemorative plaques, and with ‘Missionary, Explorer, Liberator’ prominently carved into its plinth. Not to be outdone, a striking, and even more heroic, counterpart was erected on the Zambian side in 2005 to commemorate the 150th anniversary of his sighting of the Falls. There are also statues at Livingstone Airport (also featuring James Chuma and Abdullah Susi) [ 181 ]

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and outside the eponymous museum. In the year of the bicentennial of his birth, posters containing his image were prominently displayed everywhere. Indeed, it can be said that perhaps no one in British, African or Commonwealth history has been the subject of more commemorations. These took place in 1907 (the fiftieth anniversary of the address in the Cambridge Senate House and the founding of the Universities’ Mission to Central Africa, UMCA), 1911 (the Scottish National Exhibition), 1913 (the centennial of his birth with major events in London, Scotland and throughout the British Empire, in 1929 (the opening of the birthplace in Blantyre, Lanarkshire), 1955 (the centennial of his arrival at the Victoria Falls), 1957 (the centennial of the founding of UMCA), 1973 (the centennial of his death), 2005 (the centennial of the establishment of the city of Livingstone and sesquicentennial of his arrival at the Falls) and in 2013 (the bicentennial of his birth).12 Associated with these events, he has been hailed as the man who united Zambians and made them a Christian nation (by the present Chief Chitambo, successor to the chief in whose village he died in 1873),13 as ‘one of us’ by many Africans in Zambia, Malawi and Botswana, as an ‘ancestor’ (by Bishop James Tengatenga in the Duff Missionary Lecture at New College, the University of Edinburgh, when the bishop provided an interesting justification for his use of that word),14 as an early conservationist,15 and as the founder of Zambian tourism (by HRH Senior Chieftainess Nkomeshya Mukamambo II, Chair of the Zambian House of Chiefs).16 In addition to all of that, his medical knowledge and his science have been the subject of major re-evaluations in recent years.17 The obvious question arises as to why it is that Livingstone has been the subject of so much acclaim and why his astonishingly powerful myth has proved capable of surviving and passing through so many twists and turns in his reputation, not to mention the growth, decline and destruction of imperialism in Africa, leading to the rise and consolidation of African nationalism. Before moving on to the main body of this chapter, it is perhaps necessary to offer a brief explanation of this phenomenon. First, as I have written before, it is impossible to manufacture a great heroic myth out of a man (or woman) of straw. The fact of the matter is that Livingstone was truly remarkable in many ways. His grit, perseverance and powers of survival were as extraordinary as his obsessive pursuit of ambitions, almost to the point of mental imbalance.18 His activities happened to chime at precisely the right moment with certain key developments in Victorian Britain, with the self-congratulatory notion of an ‘open society’ that could foster a ‘rags to fame’ story, with the development of new forms of religiosity, with the emergence of powerful and influential institutions like the Royal [ 182 ]

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Geographical Society and the British Association for the Advancement of Science, with the fascination with exploration and the unveiling of the supposedly ‘Dark Continent’, with pride in new technologies, as well as scientific and medical advances, with the renewal of the albeit paternalistic – and some would say ultimately imperialistic – obsession with the ending of slave trades and the abolition of slavery, and with the growth of print culture in the press, pamphlets, popular publications and biographies now available to all. One of Livingstone’s characteristics was indeed that he was a major self-publicist. If Sir Roderick Murchison and others were his equivalent of Max Clifford, the fact of the matter is that he knew how to promote himself. That perhaps explains his indefatigable letter-writing, his lecturing, his appearance at so many public meetings, and his insistence – often grossly inaccurate – that he was always the first to see and publicise this or that geographical feature. The most striking example of the latter characteristic was that he had ‘discovered’ and revealed the significance of Lake Nyasa/Malawi when, in reality, the lake had been appearing, almost in its correct shape and dimensions, on maps since the seventeenth century.19 He has also been accused of appropriating the achievements of his companions, as in the case of William Cotton Oswell and the ‘discovery’ of Lake Ngami.20 But against this we can set his very real geographical achievements as well as his book Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa.21 There is no question that the latter is a masterpiece and that it deserved to be the great best-seller that it became. It is a remarkable piece of writing, illustrative of his extraordinary powers of observation and description, full of geographical, geological, meteorological, botanical, zoological, hydrological, philological, anthropological and medical information. It is often amusing, frequently sentimental, and above all strikingly free of racism. Indeed, his affectionate and engaging descriptions of Africans invariably reveal the manner in which he likened them to people in Britain. Justin Livingstone has argued that it is a ‘hybrid’ text which in a sense leans two ways, illustrating aspects of an imperial mindset while also demonstrating genuine anxieties about frontier violence and about the destructive extension of white rule (some of these observations are to be found in parts of the text which were not published, whether because Livingstone thought the better of them or because his publisher John Murray requested their excision).22 It seems to me that it occasionally demonstrates a Scottish radical tradition that can be found in other aspects of church criticism of imperial activity. At any rate, not for nothing did both Max Gluckman and Isaac Schapera, both distinguished twentieth-century anthropologists, assert that Livingstone was capable of genuine anthropological analysis.23 Brian Stanley [ 183 ]

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has seen his debate with the rain doctor – to be found in a variety of different versions in his journals, the book and correspondence – as demonstrating an early example of religious anthropology.24 Much of this helps to explain his fame, his continuing reputation and the capacity of his mythic reputation to be repeatedly burnished and manipulated. But I would go further. It seems to me that he was also a man ‘out of period’, meaning that he invariably produced sentiments and ideas that were unusual, even unique, among his contemporaries.25 Henry Morton Stanley produced a highly telling remark in his book about his finding of Livingstone in central Africa, when he reported on the many conversations the two men enjoyed. Writing of attitudes to Africans, Stanley wrote that Livingstone ‘sees virtue where others see nothing but savagery’.26 The ‘others’ here were clearly most white contemporaries, almost certainly including Stanley himself. Livingstone’s letter of instructions to the young geologist Richard Thornton, prior to the Zambezi Expedition, similarly reveals attitudes that were shared by few explorers of the time. Having remarked that ‘It is hoped that no action will ever arise in which it will be necessary to use our firearms against the natives but the best security from attack consists in so acting as not to deserve it’, he went on: ‘You are strictly enjoined to exercise the greatest forebearance [sic] towards the people, and while retaining proper firmness in the event of any misunderstanding to endeavour to conciliate as far as possibly can be admitted with safety to our party.’ Later he writes: ‘While it will be necessary to employ our firearms to procure supplies of food and in order to secure specimens of animals and birds for the purposes of Natural History the wanton waste of animal life must be carefully avoided and in no case must a beast be put to death unless some good need is to be answered thereby.’27 Elsewhere he wrote of his abhorrence of the slaughter of animals indulged in by so many of his hunting contemporaries and especially regretted the killing of elephants.28 Thus, it is surely the manner in which Livingstone certainly wrote against the conventions of his age that helped to provide him with a reputation which has now successfully spanned three centuries and very different historical conditions. It may also help to explain why, almost uniquely, his name and reputation remained revered by so many Africans.

Livingstone: British or Scottish hero? The other dimension to Livingstone’s remarkably protean reputation is the manner in which it was capable of embracing and responding to different aspects of British ethnicity. There is no doubt that during the peak of his fame he was, in effect, claimed as a British hero. He [ 184 ]

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himself was clearly happy to be incorporated into an English Establishment in London, where he was lionised and became a leading figure in society. He had received his missionary and theological training in the south-east and had joined the London Missionary Society. Moreover, so many of the wealthy hunting friends he had encountered in South Africa and Botswana – like William Cotton Oswell, Thomas Montague Steele and Frank Vardon – were Englishmen, although Mungo Murray of Lintrose was a Scot, comfortably off with a small estate and large house in the county of Angus. Livingstone often described himself as an Englishman when in Africa, but he probably regarded this as a linguistic category as well as marking him out as ‘Inglese’ and therefore different from the Portuguese. It was also, of course, a convention of the time to use England as a synecdoche for Britain. His ambivalence is revealed in the fact that in a letter to his parents and sisters he wrote that ‘I should have liked the children to have attended school in Scotland, but fear that the climate is too severe for them’. But on the other hand ‘I don’t like them to speak broad Scotch either’.29 In October, 1853, he wrote to his children: ‘Don’t speak Scotch. It is not as pretty as English.’30 This was, perhaps, an example of the Celtic cultural cringe of the time, although it may also have been inspired by the usual ambition of a father that his children would get on where it mattered – the same sort of reason that aristocratic and upper-middleclass Scots sent their children to English public schools: to give them the appropriate accent and prepare them to flourish in what was perceived as superior society. When Livingstone’s body was returned to Britain after the heroic journey across Africa of his followers, led by James Chuma, Abdullah Susi and Jacob Wainwright, he was welcomed into an English Valhalla. The city council of Southampton turned the reception of his remains into a major civic event.31 Then his funeral in Westminster Abbey finally set the seal on his incorporation into an English/British mausoleum of the great and good of the land.32 This was certainly the trajectory which Samuel Smiles wished to emphasise when he turned Livingstone into one of his prime exemplars of ‘self-help’.33 On the other hand, Livingstone when alive was, as in many things, ambivalent. He also took pleasure in stressing his Scottishness. Famously, in the introduction to Missionary Travels he described himself as descending on his father’s side from Highland Jacobites while later his biographer William Gardner Blaikie added that his mother, Agnes Hunter, was descended from Lowland Covenanters (a strangely contradictory inheritance in religious and political terms, but that may have been the point).34 Missionary Travels also contains many references to and comparisons with Scotland and Scots. In [ 185 ]

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his Last Journals, edited by Horace Waller, Livingstone writes that tattoos are like Highland tartans – in other words acting as signifiers of particular regions or clans.35 But Waller also asserts, although it is not clear how he verified this, that each Sunday Livingstone held a service according to the rite of the Church of England.36 However, it is certainly the case that Livingstone extolled the virtues of his Scottish upbringing, schooling and university training. In many ways it was these influences which were crucial to his make-up – his fascination with natural history, his botanical studies as a trainee doctor, aspects of his intellectual debt to the Scottish Enlightenment, his rooting in a Scottish independent church tradition, his reconciliation of science and religion through his reading of the works of the Rev. Thomas Dick, and the streak of radicalism that ran through his thinking. When he addressed Scottish students at the University of Glasgow in 1858 he enjoined them to follow the example of ambitious and notable Scots (like James ‘Paraffin’ Young) whom he had known when he was a student himself.37 Moreover, while his death unquestionably stimulated missionary activity everywhere, even on the continent of Europe, the greatest effect was upon the two Scottish churches, Established and Free. It may be said that his most celebrated legacy in Africa was the missions founded by these two churches in Blantyre in southern Malawi and (eventually) in Livingstonia further north – although the Universities’ Mission, after its initial tragedies, ran a close second with its cathedrals on Zanzibar and on Likoma Island in Malawi. It was partly because of the notion that Livingstone was the inspirer of Scottish missions in Africa that the process of incorporation of the hero into a distinctively Scottish pantheon became more apparent. When the Royal Scottish Geographical Society was founded in 1884, it was apparent that it regarded the life of Livingstone as one of its inspirations. Livingstone’s daughter, Agnes Livingstone Bruce, was closely involved in its establishment, and early meetings stressed the significance of Livingstone in its deliberations.38 Within a few years, Scots were campaigning to oppose what they saw as the dangerous prospect of the encroachment of the Portuguese on their sphere of missionary influence in southern Malawi. Portuguese ambitions – or desire to re-establish what they saw as their rights – became apparent in 1888. Immediately anxieties were expressed in Scotland. In 1889 Sir Harry Johnston was sent to Lisbon to negotiate a treaty and the resulting draft agreement aroused the worst of Scottish fears. Meetings produced memorials and petitions all over Scotland and the press repeatedly asserted that public opinion would not tolerate any danger to the work of Livingstone.39 When Archibald Scott, the Convenor of the Church of Scotland Foreign Mission Committee, presented a ‘monster [ 186 ]

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petition’ to the Prime Minister, he announced ‘My Lord, this is the voice of Scotland’.40 It was a public outcry that successfully pressured the government of Lord Salisbury to decline to ratify the treaty. The name of Livingstone was used as a court of appeal to ensure that the southern Malawian missions would remain in British hands. In 1910, when the first World Missionary Conference was convened in Edinburgh (bringing together 1,200 delegates from 160 churches and evangelical societies), The Scotsman considered in an editorial that in proportion to its population, Scotland had done more for missions than any other country in the world.41 Almost inevitably, it cited Livingstone (among other Scots missionaries) as offering a reason for Edinburgh being chosen for this ‘signal honour’. Livingstone also featured in Scottish exhibitions. In the 1888 exposition in Glasgow his image appeared in a set of busts in white Windsor soap. They comprised Victoria and Albert, Burns, Scott and Livingstone. In 1911, his life and reputation was prominently displayed in a separate exhibit in the Scottish National Exhibition in Glasgow. In the 1938 Scottish Empire Exhibition, he was included in a set of figures of Scottish achievers, the others being Burns, Scott, Carlyle and James Watt.42 On the centennial of his birth in 1913, commemorations took place in St Paul’s Cathedral, Westminster Abbey, the Royal Albert Hall and the Royal Geographical Society. In that year, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Randall Davidson, himself from Scotland (one of a succession of Scottish holders of that office in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries) announced in a speech that Scots constituted the greatest explorers of Africa. There were of course similar events in Scotland (as well as throughout the British Empire, where Caledonian and St Andrew’s Societies often claimed him as a notable figure, one of a triumvirate with Robert Burns and Sir Walter Scott).43 This was certainly the case in South Africa, but was also true in Canada, Australia (there was a notable 1913 commemorative exhibition in Hobart, Tasmania) and in New Zealand.44 The Royal Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh (now the National Museum) put on an extensive exhibition with a remarkable breadth of exhibits from both public and private sources. This exhibition was opened by a massive reception and private view involving no fewer than 2,000 guests, in evening dress and academic regalia.45 The catalogue makes it clear that Livingstone was indeed being reclaimed for Scotland, although many of the sentiments expressed in it, with regard to Africans, to ‘witch doctors’ and to the work of missionaries make it clear that its mind-set was still firmly placed in the nineteenth century. It described the ‘transformation of the moral wilderness made by the witch doctor and the slave raider into a region of peace, freedom and advancing enlightenment’.46 [ 187 ]

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Livingstone and the cultural and political revival of  Scotland He was also now being inserted into a distinctive Scottish history. The prolific missionary biographer W. P. Livingstone (no relation) described Livingstone as inspiring a distinctive Scottish endeavour in Africa which would finally assuage the disaster of Darien.47 If the Darien scheme of the 1690s had represented a disastrously failed attempt at the creation of a separate Scottish empire, now in the colony of Nyasaland – and perhaps in other places too – Scotland had its imperial territory under the flag of the British Empire. However, the role of Livingstone as a heroic reviver of Scottish traditions, history and culture was most prominently emphasised at the opening of the memorial birthplace and museum in Blantyre, Lanarkshire in 1929. The background to this has been described elsewhere, but it may be said that this was a distinctively Scottish enterprise which was created on the basis of large numbers of donations in churches and Sunday Schools throughout the land.48 To a certain extent it also represented a celebration of the Scottish mill culture in which Livingstone had been brought up.49 The ceremonial opening took place in October of that year and the guest of honour was the Duchess of York, the future Queen Elizabeth and Queen Mother.50 She too was appropriated for Scotland, even although she had been born in England. She was described as the second lady of the kingdom – after Queen Mary presumably – and as a person who ‘belonged to Scotland and Scotland belonged to her’. The Bowes-Lyon family, from which she sprang, had its great seat at Glamis Castle near Forfar. In her speech she described the birthplace as a ‘place of pilgrimage’, since Livingstone’s life ‘must always appeal in its courage and adventure to the youth of this country’. In many previous celebrations ‘this country’ would have referred to Britain, but in this context there seems little doubt that it was intended to mean Scotland and would have been accepted in that meaning by her listeners. The missionary Dr Donald Fraser, who worked in Nyasaland/ Malawi, emphasised this by announcing that ‘they were giving back to Scotland the memorial of her greatest son’. ‘Giving back to Scotland’ is clearly an ambiguous phrase, but one at least of its possible meanings could be re-appropriating him from these wider national and international contexts. ‘Livingstone’, he continued, ‘was one of the greatest moral assets of their nation’, one who ‘would always call the best in Scotland to the life of service for others’. The Secretary of State for Scotland in the second Labour government, William Adamson, spoke of the particular potency of rescuing [ 188 ]

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the cotton workers’ tenement from what he described as ‘slumdom’, a word with particular potency for a Labour minister in the conditions of the inter-war years and on the eve of a major economic recession. ‘In doing honour to David Livingstone’, he went on, ‘they were honouring themselves as a nation.’ There could be few more explicit statements than that. Livingstone had returned, as it were, and Scots could bask in his glory as Scots and not just as Britons. The Edinburgh newspaper The Scotsman similarly connected Livingstone firmly into a Scottish hall of heroes and into its glorious pasts. Blantyre, it suggested, would perform the same function for Livingstone as Abbotsford already did for Sir Walter Scott and Alloway for Robert Burns, here referring to Scott’s great house near Melrose in the Borders and to the thatched Burns birthplace cottage in his home village in Ayrshire. These had already become places of pilgrimage, to use the phrase again, for admirers of the two great (though very different) writers. The Blantyre birthplace also linked Livingstone to his ancestors. The Scotsman reported that he was descended on his father’s side from Alan Stewart of Appin (a dubious proposition, but revealing the yearning to create iconic ancestors for a notable figure), a connection that was symbolised in the birthplace displays by ‘a scene from Culloden’. And since his mother came from Covenanting stock, another scene featured ‘Covenanters on a hillside’ (al fresco worship necessitated by the fact that they were proscribed). Interestingly, this double ancestral heritage reflected, in their different ways, opposition to government and radical attempts at transformation. Was there any hint that that was also what Livingstone was about in his influencing of the English? Without making that inference, Livingstone’s many biographers had repeatedly stressed the fact that he united Highlands and Lowlands in his bloodlines, as well as symbolising different streams of Scottish history. He was indeed a convenient and useful Scottish hero. Nevertheless, here was a hero to be set into international contexts. Livingstone’s fame ensured that Scotland escaped from all hint of remote parochialism. Scots had of course become a global people through migration, but Livingstone’s transcendent reputation took this on to a higher plane. At the 1929 event, telegrams were read out from Blantyre, Nyasaland, leading the chairman of the day, the Lord Lieutenant Sir Robert King Stewart, to joke that this had caused the Post Office some considerable confusion. There was also a telegram from what was described as a ‘native church’ in Blantyre. The tributes had earlier spread out beyond Africa. Back in 1913, a telegram had been sent by President Woodrow Wilson in which he had declared that ‘all my life I have held the name of David Livingstone in particular honor and admiration’.51 In the same year, The Scotsman claimed to have [ 189 ]

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an ‘Italian contributor’ (unnamed) who had written to describe the extent to which Livingstone was admired in Italy.52 There, apparently, he was seen as a ‘typical Scot’ with his ‘many-sided intelligence, his pure philanthropy, his piety without superstition, his pluck as cheery as it was dauntless’. Livingstone, apparently, constituted a very useful route to a self-congratulatory pride. This Italian also proclaimed that Livingstone had inspired both Christian missions in Italy and Italian colonialism in Eritrea, Somaliland and Cyrenaica. This was perhaps a compliment which Livingstone – and fellow Scots – could perhaps have done without. We have already seen the manner in which his name was used on both sides of the British argument about the Central African Federation, but the appeal to Livingstone was also taken up by Africans. Some elements of Scottish society swiftly went into opposition mode. In 1952, there had been protest meetings organised by W. D. Cattanach of the World Church Group and the Northern Rhodesian missionary Kenneth Mackenzie, addressed by Hastings Kamuzu Banda and Julius Nyerere.53 In 1953, on the eve of the formation of the Federation, a deputation of five African chiefs arrived in Scotland to urge Scots to save them from this new political unit, which they well knew would be dominated by white settlers, with its capital in Salisbury (Harare), Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe). At a press conference in Edinburgh in January of that year, Paramount Chief Mberwa [Mbelwa] of the Angoni (Ngoni) urged Scots to help in opposing the setting up of the Federation, suggesting that it would ‘rob our people of their country and take us back to the days of slavery which Dr Livingstone had fought against’. ‘Our hopes are in Scotland. It is for Scotland to see that her work which was planted by her son David Livingstone is not destroyed.’54 One of the other chiefs, Gomani, called into question the integrity of the British government since they were indulging in intimidation of Africans to achieve their ends. Hence Africans were not free to express their views. They were aware, he said, of the hardships of their friends in South Africa and the thought the British would be creating another Malan in Central Africa (Dr D. F. Malan, the Nationalist prime minister of the apartheid regime). He concluded by saying that ‘we value freedom more than material wealth’. Chief Kuntaja described how Scottish missionaries in Nyasaland were becoming estranged from the government. He was pleased to be in Scotland where he could ‘shed his tears before the great Scots people’. He appealed to Scots: ‘do not forget Livingstone. I am sure they will not forget that spirit which he led us to follow, and in which we still believe. The question [Federation] will decide what Livingstone brought was true or not’. One of the interpreters present, B. W. Matthews Phiri illustrated the preva[ 190 ]

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lent intimidation by announcing that he had been dismissed from his post as assistant master of the government Secondary School in Dedza when it was known that he was to accompany the chiefs. There were, he said, other examples of such intimidation. A letter to The Scotsman had earlier commended the chiefs and urged Scots to support them.55 This was signed by (among others) the Lord Provost of Edinburgh, the Bishop of Edinburgh, the Principal of New College (the School of Divinity of the University) and the chair of the Church of Scotland Foreign Mission Committee. It suggested that Britain was failing to meet its responsibilities to Africans and would sacrifice all the work of Scottish missionaries if Protectorate status were ended and safeguards for Africans removed. The letter quoted a retired Provincial Commissioner from Northern Rhodesia, Commander Fox-Pitt, as attesting to the widespread intimidation going on in a situation where opposition ran right through the African population. There was also notable support from the women of Scotland. The Women’s Foreign Mission General Committee, representing fifty-seven presbyteries of the Church of Scotland, sent in a protest in which they declared that they ‘earnestly beg Her Majesty’s Government not to impose the proposed scheme in the face of African opposition’.56 The Scottish press contained many other examples of such resistance. There can be little doubt that Henry Hopkinson, the Minister of State at the Colonial Office in charge of the Federation proposal, considered that such obtuse (as he saw it) opposition was essentially Scottish. He proposed that the agitation came from the educated members of the African population and not from the general population who were too ignorant to understand it. He also argued that the missionary opposition came from fewer than fifty per cent of missionaries, mainly the Scottish ones.57 The majority, representing the Roman Catholics, the Seventh Day Adventists, the Dutch Reformed Church, and most of the personnel of the Church of England, supported the Federation. Whatever the truth of this proportion of missionaries in the opposing camps, he was clearly singling out the Scots for government opprobrium. It is all a fascinating illustration of the manner in which Scotland was seen as capable of standing against London in this crucial aspect of colonial policy, with both Africans and Scots repeatedly invoking the name of Livingstone as they did so. It has, however, to be said that the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland declined to oppose Federation in its deliberations that year.58 Moreover, it did not stop the Tories from winning a majority of seats in Scotland in the general election of 1955. Scots anti-Conservatism was to emerge later and came to full flower only in the years of the much-hated Margaret Thatcher. [ 191 ]

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The Federation went ahead and the chiefs’ visit was in vain. But in 1959 the Federation was effectively ended by the emergency in Nyasaland (during which some sixty Malawians were shot dead by security forces) and unrest in Northern Rhodesia (Zambia). In that year the Scottish Council on African Questions (founded in 1952, its secretary the Rev. Kenneth Mackenzie) wrote a letter to every newspaper in Scotland urging Scots to help destroy the Federation and, almost inevitably, proclaiming the name of David Livingstone as the founder of the Scottish connection with Central Africa.59 To a certain extent this plea was answered more effectively than the earlier one. Mackenzie and the Rev. George MacLeod proceeded to lead a powerful protest against the Federation, although it had to face opposition from Scots who regarded this as an unacceptable agitation.60 The Scottish press (and some significant elements of the English too) had now begun to support the cause of disbandment of the Federation.61 Thus, some elements of the Church of Scotland made common cause with black nationalists in protest meetings convened by the Church’s Committee on Central Africa, and notably in the celebrated debate and resolutions of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland which took place in May 1959.62 Some have seen the General Assembly debates in the years before devolution as representing a sort of continuing Scottish parliament, and at this point it fiercely attacked the placing of Africans in Central Africa under the thumb of white settlers, not to mention the methods used by the colonial authorities to suppress discontent during the unrest of that year. Once again, Livingstone’s legacy was invoked. Press comment was generally favourable and the Prime Minister Harold Macmillan railed against ‘dangerous and subtle agitators’ in the Church.63 The Devlin Report on the Nyasaland emergency, published in July, referred to ‘a cleavage between the [Nyasaland] Government and the Church of Scotland missions’,64 but the colonial authorities had already been producing anti-church propaganda, while the apparent radicalism of the General Assembly caused more conservative elements in Scotland to overcome the control that Mackenzie and MacLeod exercised on the key oppositional bodies. Though the opposition to Federation seemed impressive, it must be said that neither Scotland nor its Established Church ever spoke with one voice. Still, John McCracken has suggested that the active involvement of the Church of Scotland on the side of Malawian nationalists does seem to be for historical reasons – ‘the belief that Scotland had a special responsibility for the Nyasaland Protectorate as a result of the connection with Livingstone’. He concludes that the campaign was significant in shaping public opinion in Britain was important, as the Deputy High [ 192 ]

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Commissioner for the Federation in London, P. F. Barnett, acknowledged. He made a direct connection with Welsh and Scottish nationalism when he argued that ‘self-determination is very popular in this country and is widely supported by Welshmen and Scotsmen who want self-government for their own countries’.65 The long reach of Livingstone had operated yet again. The association of the name of Livingstone with resistance to colonial rule can certainly be charted through the activities of many of the Scottish missionaries in Malawi. It is perhaps for this reason that the first President of Malawi, Dr Hastings Kamuzu Banda, also seemed to admire both the missionaries and their forebear Livingstone. It may explain why Banda, in a remarkable and totally unsolicited letter, wrote to Dr H. Wilson, Livingstone’s grandson, in November of 1968.66 Banda announced that he had seen Dr Wilson and his sister at Kasungu at a church service many years before. The President remembered the occasion because Wilson and his sister had been presented to the congregation as the grandchildren of the great Livingstone. He had been impelled to write because the historian Hugh Macmillan had informed him that Wilson was still alive and consequently he wished to convey to him the fact that the names of many of the Scottish missionaries and, presumably of Livingstone himself, evoked in him ‘a feeling of filial reverence’. This was despite the fact that, at the time of the writing of this letter, Banda was already making serious inroads on human rights in Malawi and was beginning to insist that missionaries had no right to criticise his government. Missionaries had to grapple with such disappointing post-colonial political developments as they have described in an oral history project, interviewing Scottish missionaries who worked in Central Africa, mainly in Zambia but also in Malawi, in the period from the 1950s to 1970s. Many of the interviews indicated the complexities of the relationship between Livingstone and the region. While acknowledging the significance of Livingstone’s fame in their own vocations, they also sought to distance themselves from any imperialist leanings associated with his name. They invariably contrasted the conditions which he had encountered with those they experienced in Africa, as well as their approach to family life compared with his. But for them, evangelism was certainly ‘a useful adjunct to political action’ (which it could be said was also true of Livingstone), enabling them to oppose the Federation and also display their affiliations to African nationalist parties. For the initiators of this project, Livingstone’s political views were ‘projected to the 1950s and 60s’, while they assert that ‘Without Livingstone’s legacy, the missionary movement in central Africa would have looked very different’.67 [ 193 ]

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But the events of 2013 particularly reflected the long history of association between Scotland and Malawi, and it is this connection which has been particularly re-developed in recent times. The Scotland–Malawi partnership was founded in 2004, originally by the University of Strathclyde and Bell College, the nearest higher education institution to Livingstone’s birthplace.68 Strathclyde is the inheritor of the Andersonian Institution of which Livingstone was an alumnus – although he also attended classes at Glasgow University and received an honorary degree there. This idea was supported by the Lords Provost of both Glasgow and Edinburgh and was enthusiastically taken up by the devolved Scottish parliament. One of the original political sponsors was Jack McConnell, Labour First Minister, who continued to be involved as Lord McConnell. An Inter-Governmental Co-operation Agreement between Scotland and Malawi was set up. Later, the Scottish National Party government took up the cause with some enthusiasm. In November 2012, a parliamentary debate on this relationship mentioned the name of Livingstone no fewer than seventy-two times, while Humza Yousaf, who held the portfolio of External Affairs and International Development in the Scottish government, delivered a speech on the significance of 2013 for the connection between Scotland and Malawi. Not to be outdone, First Minister Alex Salmond used the occasion of his Christmas broadcast in 2012 to visit the David Livingstone exhibition at the National Museum of Scotland. His message was then partly filmed in front of a portrait of Livingstone. He asked his viewers and listeners to reflect on the manner in which Livingstone should be seen as ‘exemplifying the best characteristics of Scotland: an internationalist outlook, an ambition to succeed, a passion for education, and perhaps most of all a strong sense of solidarity and a deep sense of compassion’. Scots should ‘care about those who may be facing hardships, loneliness or illness – much as David Livingstone had done throughout his extraordinary career’. He also stressed the strong relationship between Scotland and Malawi, symbolised by electricity and water projects, along with various other connections. Scotland, uniquely in his view, was also promoting its ‘Climate Justice Fund’ (associated with mitigating the effects of global warming), itself presumably reflecting Livingstone’s close relationship with the environment of Africa.69 The year 2013 saw the bicentennial of Livingstone’s birth, and to mark this occasion Joyce Banda, the President of Malawi (and no relation to Hastings), visited Scotland and attended ceremonies at the Blantyre birthplace. First Minister Alex Salmond announced £5 million in aid to Malawi for projects in health and education most closely associ[ 194 ]

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ated with Livingstone. The President also attended a commemorative service in Westminster Abbey on the actual date of Livingstone’s birth, an event attended by the then Secretary of State for Scotland and his under-secretary, Michael Moore and David Mundell (a Social Democrat and a Tory, both Unionists); by Humza Yousaf, Scottish National Party minister; by the Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, Rev. Albert Bogle; as well as other prominent Scots such as Lords Steel and McConnell and Sir Kenneth Calman, Chancellor of Glasgow University and chairman of the National Trust for Scotland.70 The bicentennial ‘Great Scots’ exhibition at the National Museum of Scotland also maintained this Malawi focus and some visitors noticed that Livingstone’s early years in what is now Botswana, as well as his connection with Zambia, received rather less attention.71 Although Malawi has tended to maintain particular prominence in all these affairs, to the slight detriment of Zambia and Botswana, still there are also health and education schemes in place in relation to the city of Livingstone in Zambia.72 Clearly all this is important for Scotland. It helps to provide an international dimension to the devolved administration which can appear to be, at least in some senses, separate from Britain. Thus it saves it from the charge of parochialism. No doubt it may also be viewed as a dummy run for international and diplomatic efforts if Scotland ever gains its independence. It may almost be said that the Livingstone myth has come to be manipulated by Scottish devolution and even nationalism just as much as it has been by African nationalism. Kenneth Kaunda once remarked that Livingstone was ‘one of us’, and this notion was repeated by Malawians during the 2013 commemorations.73 The name and reputation of Livingstone have unquestionably cemented the connection between Scots and Africans in Central Africa. Once again, Scotland found a means of bypassing England and demonstrating afresh the significance of setting the relationships between the United Kingdom and the British Empire into the context of the ‘four nations’ (England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland).74 Livingstone’s ‘After Life’ has certainly been as significant, if not more so, than his influence during his lifetime. The malleability of his heroic myth has been truly extraordinary.

Acknowledgement I am grateful to Sarah Worden, Justin Livingstone, John McCracken, Ken Ross and Stuart Ward for help with various aspects of this chapter.

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Notes   1 John M. MacKenzie, ‘David Livingstone: The Construction of the Myth’ in Tom Gallagher and Graham Walker (eds.), Sermons and Battle Hymns: Protestant Popular Culture in Modern Scotland (Edinburgh, 1990), pp. 24–42; ‘David Livingstone and the Worldly After-Life: Imperialism and Nationalism in Africa’ in John M. MacKenzie (ed.), David Livingstone and the Victorian Encounter with Africa (London, 1996), pp. 203–216: ‘The Iconography of the Exemplary Life: The Case of David Livingstone’ in Geoffrey Cubitt and Allen Warren (eds.), Heroic Reputations and Exemplary Lives (Manchester, 2000), pp. 84–104.   2 In the early 1890s, a German traveller, Tom von Prince, referred to the incipient colony of Nyasaland as ‘African Scotland’. John M. MacKenzie with Nigel R. Dalziel, The Scots in South Africa: Ethnicity, Identity, Gender and Race (Manchester, 2007), p. 5.   3 John M. MacKenzie, ‘David Livingstone – Prophet or Patron Saint of Imperialism in Africa: Myths and Misconceptions’ Scottish Geographical Journal, Vol. 129, nos. 3–4 (2013), pp. 277–291.   4 Alexander Heatherwick, The Romance of Blantyre: How Livingstone’s Dream Came True (Dunfermline, 1931).   5 Michael Gelfand, Livingstone the Doctor: His Life and Travels, a Study in Medical History (Oxford, 1957).   6 These examples are drawn from Justin Livingstone, Livingstone’s ‘Lives’: A Metabiography of a Victorian Icon (Manchester, 2014).   7 www.rowzambezi.com/davidlivingstone (accessed October 2012).   8 Friday Mufuzi, ’The Livingstone Museum and the Memorialisation of David Livingstone in Colonial and Post-Colonial Zambia 1934–2005’ in S. Worden (ed.), David Livingstone: Man, Myth and Legacy (Edinburgh, 2012), pp. 131–153, particularly p. 141.   9 Tim Jeal, Livingstone (London, 1973; second edition, London, 2013). 10 Peter J. Westwood, David Livingstone: His Life and Work as Told through the Media of Postage Stamps and Allied Material (Edinburgh, 1986). 11 The author visited this museum in April 2013. 12 Some of these commemorations are considered in MacKenzie, ‘David Livingstone: The Construction of the Myth’. See also Joanna Lewis, ‘Rivers of White: David Livingstone and the 1955 Commemorations in the Lost “Henley-upon-Thames” of Central Africa’ in Jan-Bart Gewald, Marja Hinfelaar and Giacomo Macola (eds.), Living the End of Empire: Politics and Society in Late Colonial Zambia (Leiden, 2011), pp. 161–205. 13 Chief Chitambo’s remarks can be found in ‘Chief Chitambo on Why Zambia is a Christian Country’ at www.vimeo.com/4574368 (accessed October 2012). 14 James Tengatenga, ‘“Dr. Livingstone, I presume”: The Legacy of David Livingstone in Church and Society’, the Duff Missionary Lecture at the conference ‘Livingstone’s Legacy’, New College Edinburgh, 16 March 2013. 15 By me, in a public lecture in Livingstone Town Hall, 22 April 2013. 16 This talk took place during the opening ceremony of ‘Imperial Obsessions’, the Livingstone Bicentennial Conference, Wasawange Lodge, Livingstone, Zambia, 18 April 2013. It may be balanced by the fact that the Malawian nationalist Henry Masauko Chipembere, in the early 1960s, described Livingstone as a ‘tourist’, presumably in a derogatory sense. Private information from John McCracken. 17 Lawrence Dritsas, Zambezi: David Livingstone and Expeditionary Science in Africa (London, 2010); Debbie Harrison, ‘A Pioneer Working on the Frontiers of Western and Tropical Medicine’ in Worden (ed.), David Livingstone: Man, Myth and Legacy, pp. 69–81; Michael Barrett, ‘Long Walk to Freedom’, New Statesman, 22–28 February 2013, pp. 24–29 (this article by the Professor of Biochemical Parasitology at Glasgow University constitutes an important reassessment of Livingstone as a medical man. I am grateful to Professor I. W. Campbell, Emeritus Professor of Medicine at St Andrews University for drawing my attention to it.) There was also a conference

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19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27

28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39

on Livingstone’s medical achievements, among other things, at the Royal College of Physicians of Glasgow on 19 March 2013. I am grateful to Dr Jonathan Cossar for information about this conference. See also John M. MacKenzie, ‘Missionaries, Science and the Environment in Nineteenth-Century Africa’ in Andrew Porter (ed.), The Imperial Horizons of British Protestant Missions, 1880–1914 (Grand Rapids, MI, 2003), pp. 106–130. Oliver Ransford, Livingstone: The Dark Interior (London, 1978), in which Ransford, a medical doctor, suggested, perhaps on rather flimsy evidence, that Livingstone suffered from manic depression or cyclothymia. T. Jack Thompson, ‘Lake Malawi, I Presume? David Livingstone, Maps, and the “Discovery” of Lake Malawi in 1859’, paper delivered at the ‘Livingstone’s Legacy’ conference, New College, Edinburgh, 16 March 2013. Judith Listowel, The Other Livingstone (Lewes, 1974). David Livingstone, Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa (London, 1857). Justin Livingstone, ‘The Meaning and Making of Missionary Travels: The Sedentary and Itinerant Discourses of a Victorian Bestseller’, Studies in Travel Writing, Vol. 15, issue 3 (2011), pp. 267–292. Livingstone, ‘Meaning and Making’, p. 282; Isaac Schapera (ed.), Livingstone’s Missionary Correspondence 1841–1856 (London, 1961), p. xii. Brian Stanley, ‘The Missionary and the Rainmaker: Enlightenment Scotland Encounters Africa’, paper at ‘Imperial Obsessions’ conference, Livingstone, Zambia, 19 April 2013. John M. MacKenzie, ‘David Livingstone: A Man Out of Period’, lecture in Livingstone Town Hall, Zambia, 22 April 2013. Henry M. Stanley, How I Found Livingstone in Central Africa: Travels, Adventures, Discoveries (London, 1895), p. 358. This letter can be seen displayed in the Livingstone Institute Museum, Livingstone, Zambia. It is published in Timothy Holmes (ed.), David Livingstone: Letters and Documents 1841–1872, the Zambian Collection at the Livingstone Museum (Livingstone, 1990), pp. 51–52. Quoted in John M. MacKenzie, The Empire of Nature: Hunting, Conservation and British Imperialism (Manchester, 1988), pp. 103–104. Livingstone to Mr and Mrs N. Livingstone and daughters, October, 1851 in Isaac Schapera (ed.), Family Letters (London, 1959), vol. 2, pp. 143–144. Quoted in Julie Davidson, Looking for Mrs Livingstone (Edinburgh, 2012), p. 219. Joanna Lewis, ‘Southampton and the Making of an Imperial Myth: Livingstone’s Remains’ in Miles Taylor (ed.), Southampton: Gateway to the British Empire (London, 2007), pp. 31–46. Joanna Lewis, ‘The Empire of Sentiment: David Livingstone’s 1874 Funeral and Africa at the Heart of the Nation’, paper at the ‘Imperial Obsessions’ conference, Livingstone, Zambia, 20 April 2013. Samuel Smiles, Self Help with Illustrations of Character and Conduct (London, 1908, first published by Smiles himself in 1859). Smiles, a Scot from Haddington in East Lothian, gave his fellow Scot Livingstone great prominence. William Gardner Blaikie, The Personal Life of David Livingstone, 6th edition (London, 1892), p. 5. Blaikie was a divine at New College, Edinburgh. Horace Waller (ed.), The Last Journals of David Livingstone in Central Africa (London, 1874), vol. 1, p. 110. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 222. Scotsman, 27 February 1858, p. 4. John M. MacKenzie, ‘The Provincial Geographical Societies in Britain, 1884–1914’ in Morag Bell, Robin Butlin and Michael Heffernan (eds.), Geography and Imperialism 1820–1940 (Manchester, 1995), pp. 93–124. These meetings can be charted in the Scottish press, e.g. Scotsman, 25 July 1888, p. 5; 22 December 1888, p. 6; 29 December 1888, p. 6; 24 April 1889, p. 6; 30 May 1889, p. 6, and many others.

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ANTI-COLONIALISM, THE MILITARY AND NATIONALISM 40 W. P. Livingstone, A Prince of Missionaries: The Rev. Alexander Hetherwick of Blantyre (London, n.d.), p. 52. This was on the occasion of the presentation of a memorial signed by 11,000 ministers and elders. Salisbury seemed pleased to turn this agitation to his own ends. There was a similar agitation in churches throughout Britain, together with a large public meeting at Exeter Hall in London, in 1892 at the prospect of Uganda being abandoned by the Imperial British East Africa Company. 41 The Scotsman, editorial, 14 June 1910, p. 6. 42 Perilla Kinchin and Juliet Kinchin, Glasgow’s Great Exhibitions, 1888, 1901, 1911, 1938, 1988 (Wendlebury, 1988); MacKenzie, ‘David Livingstone: The Construction of the Myth’, p. 36. 43 MacKenzie, ‘David Livingstone: The Construction of the Myth’, pp. 36–37. 44 MacKenzie with Dalziel, The Scots in South Africa, passim; see also The Mercury (Hobart), 19 February 1913, for an account of the exhibition and the commemoration that took place in Tasmania. 45 The Scotsman, 18 March 1913, p. 8. A galaxy of Scottish luminaries seems to have attended this reception. 46 Scotch Education Department, Royal Scottish Museum, Centennial Exhibition (Edinburgh, 1913, price one penny!), p. 3 and passim. 47 W. P. Livingstone, Laws of Livingstonia: A Narrative of Missionary Adventure and Achievement (London, 1921), p. 9. W. P. Livingstone suggested that this would be ‘a more noble undertaking’ than Darien, ‘more in line with the higher genius of the people … to realise the life-aims of Livingstone’. 48 MacKenzie, ‘David Livingstone: The Construction of the Myth’, pp. 36–40; James I. Macnair, The Story of the Scottish National Memorial to David Livingstone (Blantyre, n.d.). 49 For that mill culture, see Stephen Mullen, ‘One of Scotia’s “Sons of Toil”: David Livingstone and Blantyre Mill’ in Worden (ed.), David Livingstone, pp. 15–31. 50 The account of this event and all the quotations that follow can be found in The Scotsman, 7 October 1929, p. 10. 51 Quoted in The Scotsman, 19 March 1913, p. 11. 52 The Scotsman, 17 March 1913, p. 8. 53 John McCracken, ‘Missionaries and Nationalists: Scotland and the 1959 State of Emergency in Malawi’ in Afe Adogame and Andrew Lawrence (eds.), Scotland and Africa: Historical Legacies and Contemporary Hybridities (Leiden, 2014), pp. 42–73. I am grateful to Professor McCracken for supplying me with a copy of this paper. 54 This and other quotations come from The Scotsman, 26 January 1953, p. 5, columns 1–2. 55 The Scotsman, 23 January 1953, p. 6, column 6. 56 The Glasgow Herald, 13 March, 1953, p. 3, column f. 57 The Scotsman, 6 February 1953, p. 7, columns 6–7. 58 McCracken, ‘Missionaries and Nationalists’. McCracken points out that, in the 1950s, the Church of Scotland had one and a half million members. 59 Kenneth R. Ross, ‘Livingstone’s Legacy: Malawi and Scotland – Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow’, paper delivered at the ‘Livingstone’s Legacy’, New College conference 16 March 2013. I am grateful to the Rev. Dr Ken Ross for supplying me with a copy of this paper. 60 McCracken, ‘Missionaries and Nationalists’. 61 Rosie Coffey, ‘“The paladins of Fleet Street”: The British Press, the Colonial Office and the Blantyre Riot, 1960’, paper at the ‘Imperial Obsessions’ conference, Livingstone, Zambia, 20 April 2013. This paper is part of doctoral research at the London School of Economics on the wider issues of press reactions to the Federation in this period. 62 At the age of fifteen, I attended this celebrated debate, having been taken to Edinburgh by my then minister, the Rev. David Orrock of Glasgow’s Finnieston Church, who considered that as a former resident of the Federation, I should be present. I well remember the excitement and tension in the hall when the Rev.

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DAVID LIVINGSTONE AND SCOTTISH REVIVAL George MacLeod made his celebrated and impassioned speech. 63 McCracken, ‘Missionaries and Nationalists’. 64 Report of the Nyasaland Commission of Inquiry (London, Cmnd 814, presented to Parliament, July 1959), p. 23. 65 McCracken, ‘Missionaries and Nationalists’. 66 Hastings Kamuzu Banda to Dr H. Wilson, 5 November 1968, the H. K. Banda Archive, 1950–1999, Indiana University, Bloomington, African Studies, H. K. Banda Correspondence 1932–1999. I am grateful to Professor Stuart Ward for drawing my attention to this letter. 67 Lawrence Dritsas and Joan Haig, ‘“Pilgrimage to Chipundu”: Livingstone’s Legacy among Scottish Missionaries in Northern Rhodesia/Zambia, 1950s–1970s’, Scottish Geographical Journal, Vol. 129, nos. 3–4 (September–December 2013), pp. 243–257. See also John Stuart, British Missionaries and the End of Empire: East, Central and Southern Africa, 1939–64 (Cambridge, 2011). 68 Ross, ‘Livingstone’s Legacy’. More information can be found about the Scotland– Malawi Partnership on its website, www.Scotland-Malawipartnerhip.org (accessed May 2013). 69 ‘Salmond Urges Scots to Think of Others as He Highlights Livingstone’s Legacy’, www.newsnetscotland.com/index.php/scottish-news/in-brief/6470 (accessed May 2013). 70 Westminster Abbey, ‘A Wreath-Laying Ceremony to Commemorate the Bicentenary of the Birth of Dr David Livingstone 1813–1873, Tuesday 19th March 2013’. 71 The exhibition tended to gloss over the early years of Livingstone’s relationships with Africa, notably the period he spent in what later became Botswana, as well as his early expeditions. The audio-visual display featured entirely Malawi and Malawians. A Livingstone exhibition is also to be held in Blantyre, Malawi. See also Sarah Worden and Geoffrey N. Swinney, ‘Exhibiting Livingstone: A Life and Legacy on Display’, Scottish Geographical Journal, Vol. 129, nos. 3–4 (2013), pp. 258–276. 72 This was announced at the ‘Imperial Obsessions’ conference in Livingstone, Zambia, April 2013. 73 Kaunda said this in an interview with Dr Joanna Lewis in 2005. Lewis quoted this in her paper at the ‘Imperial Obsessions’ conference in Livingstone and I am grateful to her for permission to repeat it. Malawians in the audio-visual display at the exhibition in the National Museum of Scotland not only extolled the legacy of Livingstone, but also used the phrase ‘one of us’. It may be that we should make allowance for the possibility that they were saying what they thought their Scottish audience would want to hear. 74 John M. MacKenzie, ‘Irish, Scottish, Welsh and English Worlds? The Historiography of a Four-Nations Approach to the History of the British Empire’ in Catherine Hall and Keith McClelland (eds.), Race, Nation and Empire: Making Histories 1750–the Present (Manchester, 2010), pp. 133–153.

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C HAP T ER TEN

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Three referenda and a by-election: the shadow of empire in devolutionary politics Jimmi Østergaard Nielsen and Stuart Ward

Scene: Cattle Sale Yard, Scottish Highlands, spring 2014 English chap to Scottish farmer: ‘We support you guys. Look at the money we give you.’ Scottish farmer to English chap: ‘If we’re costing you that much, let us go. The other bits of the empire took back their independence a while ago and are doing fine.’1

This chance encounter represents just one regional, rural snippet of a conversation that resonated in myriad ways during the Scottish independence referendum campaign of 2014. The protracted debate traversed complex issues ranging from oil, to pensions, to nuclear submarines, to the personal loyalties of Andy Murray. But looming above these immediate, avowedly contemporary concerns was the long shadow of British imperialism. The Scottish farmer’s pointed reference to ‘the other bits of the empire’ exemplifies the effortless, almost instinctive resort to colonial language and imagery to describe the underlying dynamics of devolution. His easy equation of Scotland’s condition with former overseas British colonies could be spontaneously invoked as a self-evident historical legacy, without further explication or elaboration. The casual intrusion of the imperial past into the everyday dialogue of the Scottish independence debate has never been systematically explored. Yet it remains one of the more persistent ‘metanarratives’ of the politics of devolution. Indeed, the idea that popular support for an independent Scotland has its origins in the global tide of post-war decolonisation has been around for decades. Latent assumptions about the determining agency of imperial decline have punctured the surface tension of the debate with remarkable consistency and durability. This chapter examines four seminal moments in the evolution of this ambit claim: the three devolutionary referenda of 1979, 1997 and 2014, and [ 200 ]

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the Hamilton by-election of November 1967, when Winifred Ewing achieved a breakthrough victory to secure the first SNP seat in the House of Commons.2 At each of these key junctures, a deeper causation was conjured from the experience of colonised peoples the world over and the aspirations of Scotland to follow in their footsteps. Alternative readings credited the end of empire with extinguishing the common purpose that had held the Union together over three centuries of global maritime expansion. The persistence and pervasiveness of post-imperial ‘declinism’, it was commonly argued, prompted the Scots to seek a more promising future as an independent nation. Yet these tendencies – well rehearsed in political debate and public commentary – are by no means reflected in a scholarly consensus. Indeed, many historians are inclined to follow T. M. Devine in dismissing any possibility of an imperial afterlife in Scotland’s ‘neverendum’. We therefore conclude with a critique of Devine’s approach, arguing that the seemingly irresistible resort to ‘empire’ as a catchall for comprehending the dynamics of devolution needs to be taken more seriously as an integral ingredient of Scotland’s post-imperial ­inheritance.

‘Scotland must get a boat of her own’: the 1960s It is difficult to pinpoint precisely when Scotland’s place in the Union became rhetorically tied to the contemporaneous disintegration of the British Empire. There is no evidence of the connection being made during the events culminating in the independence of India and Pakistan in the late 1940s, nor indeed at the time of Africa’s ‘wind of change’ in the Macmillan era. Although the early 1960s witnessed a surge in books, pamphlets and articles poring over the parlous state of contemporary Britain (dubbed the ‘What’s wrong with Britain’ genre), often with the end of empire as an implicit index of national decline, these rarely, if ever, considered the break-up of the Union as one of the potential consequences of national failure.3 Indeed, there is every indication that it was not until the empire was widely referred to in the past tense that it became possible to render Scottish politics in postcolonial language. The earliest signs can be detected at the October 1964 general election, when SNP candidate (and later party chairman) Billy Wolfe published a political advertisement heralding: ‘Nyasaland now has independence – what about Scotland – but of course Scotland is a profitable colony. So long as we are a nation of labourers in our own land we will remain England’s last satellite.’4 Similar parallels were made in campaign material urging voters: ‘Surely, you think, when the British Government can confer full nationhood so freely on former [ 201 ]

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colonial peoples in Africa and Asia, the least that ancient Scotland can expect is federal self-government within a customs union.’5 Yet by and large the SNP in these years deployed colonial language and imagery in a low key. In a decade when the party organisation went from strength to strength in terms of membership, new branches and an increase in the popular vote, the contemporaneous fate of other ‘colonial’ peoples remained only a peripheral concern and never formed a coherent part of campaign strategy.6 We need to look to the later 1960s for signs of a more consistent analytical trend. Scottish historian Harry Hanham made the intriguing observation in 1968 that ‘it has become fashionable in the press to refer to the sudden surge of [Scottish] nationalism as if it were somehow to be entirely explained by the loss of empire’.7 He did not elaborate further, but the remark clearly suggests that a cumulative tipping point had been reached. The crucial context was undoubtedly the victory of SNP candidate Winifred Ewing in the Hamilton by-election of November 1967 – an event that remains seminal in party folklore as marking the arrival of Scottish nationalism as a credible electoral force. The SNP had emerged from its origins as a fringe organisation (polling less than 1 per cent of the vote in the 1950s) to become a meaningful cipher for local discontent, with significant electoral returns in key constituencies in 1962 and 1964. But it had never been considered a genuine threat by the major parties, and Mrs Ewing’s triumph (turning a Labour majority of more than 16,000 into a small SNP majority of 1,779) was therefore ripe for deeper political and social analysis. The Wilson government’s devaluation of sterling less than three weeks later on 18 November meant that connections would inevitably be made between Scottish national feeling and Britain’s dwindling fortunes in the wider world. SNP Chairman Arthur Donaldson made the connection explicit in the aftermath of the sterling debacle: ‘We are on a sinking ship. We have left it rather late to take the necessary steps. But Scotland must get a boat of her own.’8 One interesting paradox about Hamilton is that the post-imperial context was almost entirely absent from the by-election campaign itself. Viewed through a local lens, there is very little to suggest that Mrs Ewing appealed directly to a sense of imperial servitude, or even a lingering sense of loss in the wake of the disappointments of decolonisation. The one theme that defined the campaign was the London government’s failure to address the issues of particular importance to Scotland.9 Through her column in the SNP pamphlet Hamilton Herald, Mrs Ewing focused relentlessly on the disparity of resources devoted to Scotland compared to the south-east of England, predicting that the ‘first shackle of London-based control is going to be broken [ 202 ]

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right here in Hamilton’.10 While the image of breaking chains may have carried echoes from recent colonial contexts, this was hardly an overt appeal to the spirit of anti-colonial nationalism. The local newspaper, the Hamilton Advertiser, attributed her impressive win to her personal qualities in stirring hope in a disillusioned electorate, breathing a ‘kiss of life to a public that was suffocating from lack of interest’.11 The Scotland-wide press, too, interpreted her win as a blow against the political establishment rather than a revolt of the Scottish people against alien rule.12 It was only at the level of national political commentary (and primarily the view from England) that a deeper causation was intuited in the receding frontiers of empire. While due weight was given to the effect of a ‘protest vote’ against the major parties, there was also widespread reflection on Britain’s diminished role in the world. As the Guardian editoralised (even before the devaluation of sterling) in November 1967: Large groups of voters are in a highly emotional mood, which has been caused by the shock of discovering Britain’s reduced status in the world, and the pain of economic adjustments. Could not the Welsh or the Scots manage their own affairs better?13

Separatism, according to the Guardian, had achieved prominence not least because it was an ‘untried means of escape from what seems to be a stagnation that has persisted’.14 Thus, the nationalist movement, far from being a movement with only a temporary appeal, was seen as having a deeper raison d’être in Britain’s diminished standing in the world. It was only a small leap from this idea to Ludovic Kennedy’s ringing verdict on ‘the Disunited Kingdom’, broadcast on BBC radio in June 1968: Now, there can be no denying that this union brought to Scotland a stability in her affairs which she had never before had. And there can be equally no denying that we on our part greatly helped you, first by force of arms, to establish and then to administer, the biggest and richest empire there has ever been. Well, that empire is now dead. It didn’t, as empire’s [sic] go, last long … And it may seem to you – as it does to many of us – that it was the empire above all, that made and kept us British. Today it is mainly you – the English – who think of yourselves as British. Most of us up here think of ourselves as Scots.15

Whether Kennedy accurately depicted the post-colonial underpinnings of Scottish nationalism is beside the point. The significance lies in how the cold facts of an empire ‘now dead’ could cast doubt on the contemporary relevance and utility of being British. [ 203 ]

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‘Back in our own country for keeps’: the 1970s Ewing’s victory at Hamilton sparked a series of events that would culminate in the first referendum on devolution in 1979. The SNP took the Western Isles at the 1970 general election and picked up the additional seat of Glasgow Govan in a 1973 by-election. But it was the much-publicised discovery of North Sea oil in the late 1960s that brought new momentum to the party’s political fortunes, particularly with the quadrupling of the oil price during the 1973 OPEC crisis. The high-profile ‘It’s Scotland’s Oil’ campaign of the 1970s brought immediate electoral dividends. At the two general elections in 1974 the SNP secured seven and eleven seats respectively, winning over 30 per cent of the vote in Scotland in the latter poll. In the meantime, the major parties vied with each other for workable solutions to the problem of nationalist aspirations in Scotland and Wales. The Wilson government had established a Royal Commission on the Constitution in 1969, which finally recommended a system of devolved regional assemblies in 1973 (albeit with internal dissent about what constituted a ‘region’, particularly in England). Thus with the unprecedented surge in the SNP vote in 1974, the stage was set for a process of popular consultation on the future status of Scotland and Wales in the Union. Here again the legacy of empire provided a ready backdrop for political commentators seeking an explanation for the dramatic shift in the political landscape. In 1975 Daniel Jenkins published The British, Their Identity and Their Religion, where he posited an inversion of J. R. Seeley’s famous aphorism: ‘If the British Empire was built in a fit of absent-mindedness, the United Kingdom could easily, and quite unnecessarily, become the disunited Kingdom in the same way.’16 That same year, Michael Hechter’s Internal Colonialism appeared, unequivocally aligning Scottish historical experience with the broad sweep of European imperialism.17 Indeed, it was at the very height of the SNP’s electoral popularity in the mid-1970s that the post-imperial analogy seemed most apposite. The leader writer for The Times Owen Hickey provided its most detailed elaboration: While Great Britain was, or was still regarded by many of its citizens as being, an imperial power and a major economic, political and military force in the world, there were compensations to make up for Scotland’s submerged nationhood. The scale of British operations abroad opened up an almost endless range of opportunities; and dominating Scotsmen were afforded the opportunity of ruling an empire in exchange for ruling themselves in the north of the British Isles. Those compensations have faded … It would not be surprising if the hold of British patriotism over the Scots had weakened as Britain’s status has declined.18

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Here we can see a clear shift of emphasis from the earlier nationalist tendency to equate Scottish aspirations with other former colonies. Scotland’s emergence from empire was no longer a simple case of casting off the ‘shackles’ of dominion, and had become more a matter of embracing the promise of a long ‘submerged nationhood’. It was an exercise in cutting the losses of empire, electing to rule themselves once more now that ruling the world was no longer an option. The SNP adopted a strikingly similar posture at the launch of their blueprint for independence in September 1974: Britain was living ‘at the end of an imperial era and … there was no reason why the four nations within Britain should not live in an independent state’.19 Such was the gathering momentum of this view that Conservative voices north of the border were also tempted by its seemingly unanswerable logic: ‘How important to England is the United Kingdom?’ asked the Conservative member for Edinburgh North (and future Under-Secretary for Scotland under Thatcher), Alexander Fletcher. ‘Having lost the Empire and while retaining a rather tenuous link with the Commonwealth would it really matter very much if Scotland and Wales were to do their own thing and go their own separate ways?’20 Perhaps the surest index of the pervasiveness of post-imperial reasoning is to be found in the unmistakable note of irritation among its detractors. The veteran anti-devolution campaigner Tam Dalyell (Labour MP for West Lothian, a constituency long coveted by the SNP) impatiently told readers of The Times that it was ‘high “time” that an historian exploded the notion that pre-1707 Scotland was some kind of social democratic classless state, to which we should return now that there are no pickings from the British Empire’.21 Yet, broadly speaking, it was precisely this variant of the ‘end of empire’ thesis that would periodically puncture the legal and constitutional minutiae of the devolution debate for the remainder of the decade. Tom Nairn’s seminal The Break-Up of Britain, published in 1977, furnished it with a more sophisticated scholarly foundation, albeit in language that made no pretence of scholarly detachment. For Nairn, it was not merely the Scots but also the English who needed ‘to rediscover who and what they are, to reinvent an identity of some sort better than the battered cliché-ridden hulk which the retreating tide of imperialism has left them’.22 The timely appearance of Nairn’s book coincided with the tortuous parliamentary negotiations over the scope and appropriate mechanisms for reaching a devolutionary pact with Scotland and Wales. The Labour Party had fought the 1974 elections on a promise to move forward with devolutionary measures but these quickly became bogged down in bureaucratic red tape and internal party dissent. [ 205 ]

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The first, ill-fated attempt was the Scotland and Wales Bill, introduced by the Callaghan government in 1976 as a step towards consulting the Scottish and Welsh people. During the second reading debate in December 1976, speakers from all major parties drew freely on imperial imagery to make sense of a country at an unprecedented constitutional crossroads. Labour’s Jim Sillars (Ayrshire South, who would later defect to the SNP) described the demand for self-government in Scotland as ‘a natural process of imperial decline’. The ‘minority nations’ in the United Kingdom were ‘seeking a new postimperial partnership with England’ that members could only disregard at their peril.23 For the Conservatives, Alan Glyn (Windsor and Maidenhead) ascribed devolutionary pressures among other things to ‘the fact that we once had an Empire and a Commonwealth to which many Scottish people went. There is no similar outlet now.’24 And the SNP’s George Reid performed an extended meditation on the deeper forces at work that is worth quoting at length: English MPs fail to understand that the United Kingdom is not a nation. Do they recite ‘O to be in the United Kingdom now that April’s here’ or sing ‘There’ll always be a United Kingdom’? The United Kingdom is a multinational State comprising the separate nations of the British Isles … What is taking place … is that we have come to the end of the Empire and the United Kingdom is currently in a state of economic decline. No one here would deny that. I may be making a point against myself, but we Scots had a privileged position in the days of Imperial grandeur. We were both Scots and British. We ran the docks in Hong Kong, the judicial system in the Punjab and held Burns suppers in temperatures of 102 degrees in India. Those days are gone and those options are no longer open to us. We stay at home. The young Scots in Scotland today, looking at the obvious degradation and neglect, are not prepared to tolerate these conditions. They are back in our own country for keeps and wish to do something about the situation – usually by joining the SNP.25

Rarely had the SNP rendered their ‘out of empire’ rationale in such explicit, elaborate terms. Winifred Ewing’s 1967 triumph elicited no rhetorical turn to match this self-conscious deliverance from an imperial trade-off that no longer paid a serviceable dividend. Nothing in Reid’s reflections implied a state of ‘internal colonialism’ or resistance to the last vestiges of imperial rule. It was about sloughing off the burden of empire building, spurning the ‘privileges’ of the imperial past and constructing a new future that might transcend the dubious legacies of colonialism. It meant being ‘back in our own country for keeps’; a compelling metaphor for a people reconciled to the diminishing scope for outward endeavour. [ 206 ]

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Although passed by a slim majority at the second reading, the Scotland and Wales Bill was defeated by a rebellion of Labour and Liberal MPs in February 1977 and was subsequently divided into two separate bills for Scotland and Wales respectively. These were to have an equally rough passage and were only passed following a Labour backbench amendment in January 1978, requiring that the two referenda be passed not only by an absolute majority but also by 40 per cent of the electorate, thus raising the bar considerably higher. These intractable talks unfolded at a time of increasing social and economic disaffection, fuelled by increasingly pessimistic commentary on the state of the Union. Even the pageantry of a Royal Jubilee in 1977 could do little to remove the tarnish of flagging growth, a brittle ‘Lib-Lab’ parliamentary pact and the constant threat of industrial disputes. The Queen herself expressly forbade any conspicuous over-exuberance, perhaps recognising the symptoms diagnosed by The Times on the eve of the Jubilee: The popular imagination can no longer feed on the glories and wonders of empire or even on the evolutionary subtleties of the British Commonwealth of Nations. Nor, it has to be admitted, does the Britain of 1977, relieved of almost all its imperial baggage, present the sort of spectacle to light in the mind the bonfires of national rejoicing.26

At the Conservative Party Conference some months later, the Powellite shadow minister John Biffen aired a similarly pessimistic prognosis based on his 1976 pamphlet appropriately titled A Nation in Doubt. Among the major social challenges facing the party and the nation in the years ahead were sectarian violence in Northern Ireland, growing ethnic diversity in the urban centres of England and the threat to unity posed by Scottish nationalism. He contrasted the extraordinary recent electoral success of the SNP with the situation as recently as 1955 when the Conservatives held a majority of seats in Scotland, voicing his conviction that ‘we are stumbling towards a cataclysm’. Biffen was adamant that the root causes lay far deeper than the discovery of oil or a late flowering of ‘regionalism’: In my view the dissolution of the British Empire in the two decades after the second world war was bound to have consequences upon the kingdom that had been its heart. The Union had great attractions when London was the hub of an Empire. It appealed to imagination and pride. These sentiments diminished as London became merely an administrative centre for the growing bureaucracy of modern government.27

While giving due consideration to Britain’s economic woes, Biffen signi­ ficantly placed greater weight on the empire’s diminishing capacity to ignite a sense of pride and common purpose. It was as much the [ 207 ]

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i­ maginative as the material consequences of decolonisation that were seen to be corroding the core of a common Britishness. On the eve of the two devolution referenda in March 1979, several accounts were published that tapped into similar assumptions about the deflating effects of the loss of empire on national morale. Vernon Bogdanor’s Devolution placed the problem squarely within the context of Britain’s wider fortunes in the world, describing Scottish separatist pressures as a ‘by-product of the politics of British decline’.28 Meanwhile, Tam Dalyell, in Devolution: The End of Britain?, cast his mind back to his narrow 1962 by-election victory over the SNP’s Billy Wolfe, which had prompted a prescient exchange with Scottish Labour stalwart and prolific author John Strachey. ‘Writing my books’, Strachey mused, ‘I have had to reflect deeply on what happens to countries when they divest themselves of colonies and dominions … Now that the Empire is vanishing, we must prevent the “Balkanisation of Britain” at all costs’. The clear implication was that Strachey’s post-imperial premonition marked the beginning of the slippery slope to the devolutionary debacle of the 1979 referendum.29 James Morris spelt it out to readers of the Daily Telegraph on the eve of the poll: In the days of the never-setting sun all the pride of Empire was there for the sharing, and to be part of one of the most vital and exciting of the world’s Powers was certainly a compensation. But who gets satisfaction from the present state of the Union? Who is really content with this grubby wreck of old glories?30

In the event, neither the Welsh nor Scots proved sufficiently discontent to change their constitutional status, with both referenda failing to meet the requirements of the UK legislature. By the time the matter finally went to the people, the SNP had suffered a steady decline in support, losing three by-elections in succession in 1978. Although the 1 March referendum delivered a slim Scottish majority in favour of a devolved assembly (52 per cent), the turnout was poor and failed to secure a yes vote from the required 40 per cent of eligible voters. Meanwhile, Welsh electors voted against their own regional assembly by a majority of nearly 80 per cent. Within months, the Labour government had completely abandoned the devolution project, sparking a revolt among SNP and Liberal backbenchers that triggered an early election and a Tory victory to Margaret Thatcher. Reduced to only two seats in Westminster and faced with ever-bleaker prospects, the SNP hierarchy lobbied the UN Secretary General Kurt Waldheim to invoke UN Resolution 1514 (better known as the ‘Resolution on ­Decolonisation’) of December 1960. This last-ditch attempt to bypass the democratic process represented the SNP’s most explicit, and certainly ill-advised, alignment of [ 208 ]

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Scotland’s plight with oppressed colonial peoples the world over. Yet it merely served to bring further scorn to an already demoralised party. The verdict of the Guardian was not wide of the mark:

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It has all gone rather quiet in Scotland since the referendum of March 1; and nowhere quieter than in the Scottish National Party, where the loudest sound these past six months has been of more and more former supporters leaving the room … There is a sense in political Scotland that the referendum has effectively removed Scotland, for the time at least, from the map.31

‘The settled will of the Scottish people’: 1997  and  its  aftermath If Winifred Ewing’s Hamilton victory of 1967 represents the renaissance of SNP folklore, the 1980s are generally regarded as something of a latter-day dark age, with internecine infighting, an implacably hostile Prime Minister in Margaret Thatcher, and the ever-looming threat of electoral irrelevance. The poor results of the 1979 general election persisted throughout the decade, with the 1987 poll delivering the added insult of electoral defeat for the party chairman Gordon Wilson. But it was also around this time that the party’s fortunes slowly began to change. It was in 1987 that the party altered its course on Europe from a mildly Eurosceptic stance to the policy of ‘Independence in Europe’. And the following year, Jim Sillars secured a major upset to win the Govan by-election for the SNP (overturning a Labour majority of 19,000), delivering much the same catalysing effect that Ewing’s win in Hamilton had brought twenty years earlier. As in 1967, the result sparked widespread consternation in the Labour Party, which duly agreed to take part in the Scottish Constitutional Convention (SCC), founded in 1989 as a cross-party forum to consider possible frameworks for devolution. With the election of Alex Salmond as party leader in 1990, momentum gradually built to the 1997 general election when the SNP doubled its parliamentary representation from three members to six. Yet it was arguably John Smith, long before he became leader of the Labour Party, who charted the course towards the devolution referendum in his oft-quoted 1989 proclamation that support for a Scottish Assembly was ‘the settled will of the Scottish people’,32 a commitment that Tony Blair felt bound to honour when he succeeded Smith upon the latter’s untimely death in 1994. It was during this period of quiet consolidation that historians and social scientists turned to the subject of ‘Britishness’ as a scholarly endeavour – a conspicuously late addition to the burgeoning field of ‘national identity’. Raphael Samuel’s three-volume Patriots (1989) was [ 209 ]

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followed three years later by Linda Colley’s landmark study Britons: Forging the Nation.33 Both works were influenced by a clear conviction that it was the fundamental frailty of the contemporary Union that lent urgency and relevance to the study of Britishness. This was implicit in Samuel’s subtitle The Making and Unmaking of British National Identity, and spelt out by Colley in her remarks about ‘today’s increasingly strident calls for a break-up of Britain’: We can understand the nature of the present crisis only if we recognize that the factors that provided for the forging of a British nation in the past have largely ceased to operate. Protestantism, that once vital cement, has now a limited influence on British culture … Recurrent wars with the states of Continental Europe have in all likelihood come to an end … And, crucially, both commercial supremacy and imperial hegemony have gone. No more can Britons reassure themselves of their distinct and privileged identity by contrasting themselves with impoverished Europeans (real or imaginary), or by exercising authority over manifestly alien peoples.34

The wide-ranging influence of Colley’s study ensured that the end of empire became common currency in contemporary diagnoses of the British problem, ready to hand among journalists and social commentators. In 1995, for example, the SNP’s surprise by-election victory in Perth and Kinross (Alec Douglas-Home’s former seat) elicited a perfect facsimile of the Colley thesis in a Times editorial: ‘with the Empire lost, the Royal Family weakened, the Church no longer so potent and the threat of war a dimming memory, it is not surprising that Scots now question the benefits of Union and the absence of a parliament’.35 Weeks earlier, a BBC2 Big Picture survey of ‘The Break-up of Britain’ offered similar musings on the ‘dissolving glue’ of nationhood, with the empire once again to the fore. The nationalist writer and broadcaster Billy Kay offered his own personal take on the creeping obsolescence of post-imperial Britishness: The British identity that I’m supposed to feel part of I see as being first of all an imperial identity through the Empire and then an identity which has been forced by the idea of people coming together to fight two world wars. I don’t think that’s a healthy identity to carry into the 21st century.36

An emerging consensus suggested that the pillars of Britishness were becoming increasingly consigned to the past, prompting widespread calls to politicians and policy-makers to find a new philosophical foundation and ‘political settlement’ that might give the Union a new lease of life. These sentiments co-existed with growing nationalist [ 210 ]

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self-confidence in Scotland and Wales, but the two were not necessarily mutually reinforcing. On the contrary, the 1996 film Trainspotting injected a note of despair in Renton’s memorable ‘It’s shite being Scottish’ monologue: ‘Some people hate the English, I don’t. They’re just wankers. We on the other hand are colonised by wankers. We can’t even find a decent culture to be colonised by.’37 Here was an entirely novel variant of the post-colonial metaphor – Scotland as a colony that was further demeaned by the abject decline of its imperial caretaker. Meanwhile, trenchant opponents of rising devolutionary pressures poured scorn on nationalist aspirations as parochial and regressive if not downright nasty and chauvinistic. One particularly crude verdict came from Matthew Parris, who mounted a defence of empire to bolster his case: ‘Empire served Britain and her colonies well, and Union serves us well. The first is over, the second beginning to loosen … I fear this may be counter-revolutionary.’38 His intervention provoked the following counter-strike from none other than Winifred Ewing, now President of the SNP: Is not Matthew Parris, in denouncing the ‘parochialism’ of Scottish nationalism, being supremely parochial himself when he denies the will of the Scots to establish more fulfilling international relations with our European partners? Victoria’s empire is dead, Mr Parris, the marriage has soured and England is turning into a small-minded spent force in Europe in front of our eyes.39

Thus, by the time devolution had been affirmed as a ‘core promise’ in New Labour’s election manifesto in 1996, it had become standard journalistic practice to include a few sage remarks about the setting sun of empire in Scottish election coverage. One example from the Guardian in November 1996 appeared under the title ‘Welcome to England’s Last Colony’, with obligatory gestures to the Colley thesis: ‘The unifying force of the second world war was a long time ago for many electors. The thought of Empire, and the part played by Scottish regiments, creates a sense of embarrassment.’40 It would be misleading, however, to suggest that these arguments saturated the rhetoric of the 1997 referendum campaign, which was predominantly concerned with the material and constitutional intricacies of the case for and against a Scottish Parliament. Nonetheless, the post-imperial context continued to creep into the conversation, unannounced and generally unelaborated, at times of deeper reflection on the state of the Union during a time of palpable political strain. Although it was generally absent from SNP political language and campaign slogans, nationalist leaders occasionally let the empire cat [ 211 ]

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out of the bag, as in the following example from party chief executive Mike Russell on the eve of the referendum. Britishness, he reflected, was an 18th century construct designed to make Scots feel OK about losing their parliament … Scots bought into the created ‘Britain’, and for a long while it made sense. Together the Scots, English, Welsh and Irish conquered the globe and built an empire. They shared a monarch, a flag, an anthem, a belief in high standards and fair play – and great wealth. But now the needs of empire have gone, and the glue of the Union is dissolving. Its chief institutions – the crown, the church, Westminster and the welfare state – have lost their authority and allure.41

Even the leader of the ‘no’ campaign, Donald Findlay, let his guard down on one occasion, conceding in an interview that within his own lifetime ‘the idea of Britain has shrunk into irrelevance’.42 It was perhaps an understandable slip given the strong poll indications that the yes vote would win comfortably (with the full support of Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the Greens as well as the SNP). In the event, the widely predicted 60 per cent margin underestimated the strength of devolutionary fervour. The referendum of 11 September returned a majority of nearly 75 per cent in favour of a Scottish Assembly from a turnout of 60 per cent of the electorate. Overall, press commentary interpreted the result as the chance for a new, more inclusive foundation for the Union rather than the death knell of Britishness. Melvyn Bragg’s reflections were not atypical: ‘Just as we had to face up to losing a territorial empire, so now we have to face up to ridding ourselves of the institutional empire that grew on its back. Indeed, it could be that through constitutional reform new energies will be released.’43

‘The ghosts of empire are still rattling their chains’: 2014 On 10 May 2011, the Guardian’s Simon Jenkins greeted his readers with the lofty pronouncement: ‘It’s time for England’s first empire to get independence.’44 The occasion was the dramatic outcome of the Scottish parliamentary elections only days earlier, in which Salmond’s SNP came from behind in the polls to secure an unprecedented majority at Holyrood. For the first time in its seventy-sevenyear history, the SNP was in a position to deliver on its promise of a referendum on Scottish independence. Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron lost no time in declaring his determination ‘to keep the United Kingdom together with every single fibre I have’.45 Jenkins promptly condemned Cameron’s ‘Anglo-Saxon machismo’, branding his resistance to Scottish independence in accordance with timehonoured tradition: ‘The ghosts of empire are still rattling in their chains.’46 [ 212 ]

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Although popular feeling on the dissolution of the Union remained bitterly divided, the weight of opinion published and broadcast during what was effectively a three-year campaign often revealed an underlying fatalism. Upon his retirement in December 2011, Britain’s most senior civil servant, Sir Gus O’Donnell, publicly questioned the United Kingdom’s long-term viability, counting this among the ‘enormous challenges’ facing the political establishment in the years ahead.47 Leading British columnists began to write openly about ‘our disuniting Kingdom’48 and to herald the demise of the Union with ever growing certainty. ‘Britain no longer has a generally accepted story’, declared Melanie Phillips in February 2014. ‘For years it has been dismantling that story brick by brick.’49 There was no dissenting voice in a BBC Radio 4 panel debate in January 2012 when Peter York ascribed the renewed push for Scottish independence to the collapse of the ‘great unifying thing’ – the British Empire.50 That same month, Dominic Sandbrook reproduced remarkably similar logic even as he sought to disavow it in an impassioned plea to preserve the Union: When they stood together at Waterloo, Omdurman, the Somme and Dunkirk, the men of England, Wales and Scotland knew that they were one people, united by ties of history, language, values and blood. They would have had no time for Alex Salmond’s mean-spirited, short-sighted, narrow-minded nationalism. Much has changed, of course, since Britannia’s imperial heyday. But there is no reason why the end of empire should mean the end of the most successful partnership in history.51

Needless to say, this statement only makes sense if it is generally understood that there was every reason why the end of empire should mark the prelude to the end of Britain – or at least, a widespread and unshakeable perception that this was the case. Among the leading protagonists in the campaign itself, the end of empire inevitably took a back seat to arguments about the pound, pensions, EU membership and other hotly contested issues. The rhetorical strategies of Alex Salmond are indicative of the trend. In his opening address to the Scottish Parliament in May 2011 he offered a solemn pledge to bring an end to ‘304 years of subordination’, adding: ‘the age of empires is over’.52 But henceforth he generally avoided labelling the English as latter-day ‘imperialists’, in line with a concerted SNP attempt to diffuse the stigma of anglophobia. This made good electoral sense, given the lurking suspicion of national chauvinism in the SNP’s platform and the sheer number of voters that still needed to be persuaded of a more positive case for independence. Thus while SNP stalwart Jim Sillars could proclaim (in a televised Newsnight clash with George Galloway) that the United Kingdom was [ 213 ]

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‘in the final stages of the end of the English/British Empire’, this fell short of claiming that Scotland remained in a state of colonial bondage to England.53 A fine line, to be sure, but by and large SNP campaign strategy sought to look ahead to the social, political and material benefits of independence (when not fending off doubts and uncertainties constantly raised by the ‘Better Together’ campaign) rather than harking back to arguments about empire. This did not deter columnists, analysts and outsiders observing the events unfolding from south of the border. One intriguing side-effect of the referendum was the volume of press commentary it generated on the status of England and Englishness in the event of an amicable divorce, much of which borrowed freely from imperial language normally reserved for Scottish separatism. Irvine Welsh (of Trainspotting fame) was not alone in condemning the Union for having failed England, which ‘had a mission to be an inclusive multicultural nation and this old-fashioned imperialist UK has stopped it from fulfilling its political destiny, as much as it has stopped Scotland from fulfilling its by becoming a more social democratic state’.54 Others, such as Hugo Rifkind in The Times, saw the referendum itself as the moment when a ‘vitally British’ social diversity was shattered: ‘It was both a product of three centuries of union and its cause. It gave us the multiculturalism that has forged our post-Empire identity and is the faith on which the United Kingdom was built.’55 Meanwhile, the Telegraph’s Ben MacIntyre could mount an argument that Scotland owed a duty of loyalty to England for three centuries of imperial endeavour that spread Scottish ingenuity to all corners of the globe. ‘Scotland was a powerhouse of inventiveness in the 18th and 19th centuries’, he maintained, ‘but the British Empire was the vehicle for distributing those inventions.’56 And only weeks before the 18 September poll, Gordon Brown inverted the paradigm by warning that Scotland would be reduced to a ‘neo-colonial relationship’ with England if it were to vote for independence while retaining the pound sterling. Empire, it seems, could serve almost any argument.57 As referendum day drew nearer and the polls tightened, recriminations rebounded against the ‘no’ campaign for its lack of charisma, its relentless negativity and its failure to provide an emotional dimension to the Unionist cause. But the absence of heartfelt appeals to the enduring bonds of Britishness was not just a matter of campaign slogans or focus groups. As Janan Ganesh noted in the Financial Times, ‘big things do not happen for small reasons ... the trigger for such large events may be fiddly and particular … but the ultimate cause is deep and structural’. He noted the conspicuous reticence among Better Together’s critics in spelling out precisely how they might put some [ 214 ]

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heart into the ‘no’ message. The scapegoating of the campaign leadership overlooked the more intractable dilemma that had provided the independence movement with such underlying momentum: that ‘the substance of the Union has been thinning out since 1945’.58 Ian Jack also noted the absence of a sentimental ‘soft-edge’ in Alistair Darling’s appeal to Scottish voters. ‘Perhaps focus groups had given Britishness the thumbs down’, he mused, ‘as an idea that long ago lost traction in Scotland.’59 Like Jack, the Guardian’s Patrick Wintour located ‘the deeper source of decline’ in the early 1960s. This was when ‘the Tory party’s role as a Protestant party of the Union and empire waned’, transforming it into a symbol of English arrogance and indifference to Scotland’s post-industrial discontents.60 The final week of the campaign produced a torrent of commentary, much of it triggered by the last-minute influx of Westminster’s political elite to make a belated plea for the Union. The widespread cynicism this engendered prompted many to sound the death knell, not only of the Union but of the imperial remnants of Britain itself. Adam Ramsay mocked the ‘imperial behemoth’ descending on the Scottish electorate, while Suzanne Moore issued an even blunter verdict: ‘Ignore the strange dry-eyed weeping from the English – it’s nothing more than British imperialism’.61 Glasgow University’s Duncan Ross informed readers of the Toronto Globe and Mail that Scots were poised to choose a confident, independent future in place of ‘a rose-tinted version of Britain’s imperial past’.62 And acclaimed Scottish writer A. L. Kennedy invoked the prospect of ‘a huge paradigm shift. Britain has never faced the true legacy of empire – has never come to terms with the fact that empire is not a way of doing the world a favor. The mere possibility of a “Yes” vote shakes what British identity has meant for more than 300 years.’63 The natural association of independence with a break from the imperial past was not merely the preserve of radical elites, but remained widely accessible to ordinary voters. When the Labour Shadow Cabinet’s stroll through the streets of Glasgow was disrupted by the cry of ‘welcome imperial masters’ (set to the tune of Darth Vader’s Imperial March, booming from a rickshaw) nobody needed the prank explained.64 Indeed, comedians could effortlessly generate a spontaneous laugh through the mere mention of the ‘e’ word. John Oliver’s take on the referendum in his weekly American programme Last Week Tonight was typical: ‘It seems like England may lose yet another country. Look, I’m not saying that the sun is setting on the British Empire. Let’s just say the restaurant of history is switching to its dinner menu.’65 This is not to suggest that these deeper currents were at the forefront of voters’ minds when they stepped into the ballot box. The majority that ultimately opted [ 215 ]

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for ‘no’ represented a complex mixture of anxiety about the unknown fiscal implications of independence, anticipation of a much improved devolution settlement with Westminster and – doubtless in some cases – satisfaction with the status quo. Similarly, the substantial minority of nearly 45 per cent who voted yes were primarily motivated by the promise of a genuinely social democratic society and a more accountable legislature – rather than striking a blow against English domination. Yet it is no simple task to separate the more immediate, material issues from their deeper context, given the long history of framing talk of independence against the wider backdrop of British imperial decline. At the very least it seems clear that the longue durée of Britain’s imperial retreat provided a ready trope that subtly influenced perceptions of what was ultimately at stake. There remains, however, a paradox. Despite more than four decades of idle commentary from all walks of life and political persuasion linking Scotland’s independence dilemma to the aftermath of empire, very few professional historians who have taken the time to examine the issue closely seem persuaded that any link exists at all. With the exception of Nairn, support for the end of empire thesis tends to appear in generalist histories with little empirical ballast,66 while those with specialist credentials are generally more sceptical. During the final throes of the 2014 campaign, Colin Kidd debunked the entire notion of a post-imperial story in a Scotsman essay provocatively titled: ‘Say No to Colony Myth’. He took aim at ‘nationalist intellectuals’ who had ‘aligned’ Scottish historical experience with the cultural experiences of formerly colonised peoples. Indeed, he argued, the depiction of Scotland as a ‘downtrodden colony’ had emerged from the margins of politics to become an ‘axiom of popular nationalism’. This was not only ‘nonsensical as history’, but also ‘insulting to the real victims of empire’. He pointed out that one of the main catalysts of the 1707 Union was the failure of Scotland’s own colonial project at Darien, and that the idea of Union itself was largely a sixteenth-century Scots invention. He thus urged voters not to fall for ahistorical colonial narratives that depicted unionists as somehow less concerned to defend Scottish institutions, identity and prosperity.67 Somewhat less polemically, Linda Colley’s Acts of Union and Disunion, published only months before the referendum, also counselled caution about the post-colonial dynamics of the independence movement. In line with Colin Kidd she emphasised the disproportionate Scottish contribution to empire and Union alike, concluding that the contemporary independence dispute was more a struggle between two ‘modes of Scottish national consciousness’ rather than a pitched battle between nationalism and imperialism.68 [ 216 ]

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Colley was specifically critiquing the ‘internal colonialism’ framework, as distinct from her earlier claims that the end of empire might have eliminated a formative realm of ‘otherness’ that forged the bonds of Britishness. Other historians, however, have refused to countenance any imperial after-effect in the modern history of separatist politics. Around the time of the 1979 referendum, for example, both Keith Webb and Keith Robbins were highly dismissive of what Webb termed ‘the decline of empire thesis’. They rejected outright the suggestion that the empire was the crucial ingredient in forging a unitary Britishness, let alone the root cause of its dissolution. As Webb put it, ‘the fault of this type of theory is that the mere overlap of two historical sequences is taken as evidence that the one is causing the other’.69 Fundamentally their arguments boiled down to a lack of evidence, both in terms of the end of empire having any measurable impact on contemporary Scotland – politically or economically – as well as the self-evident failure of the Union to disintegrate at empire’s end. As Robbins concluded in the aftermath of the 1979 poll, ‘it is most unwise to assume that the devolution exercise was part of some grand, uniform historical phenomenon with an inevitable success’.70 The most prominent intervention in recent times has come from T. M. Devine in two instalments: a 2006 essay in Transactions of the Royal Historical Society and the penultimate chapter of his major 2011 study, To the Ends of the Earth.71 Both pieces purportedly debunk, once and for all, attempts to map the history of imperial decline on to the weakening unionist consensus in Scotland. Devine’s argument is structured around three key components. First, that it was developments in the inter-war years, and not the 1960s, that fundamentally ‘conspired to corrode Scotland’s emotional attachment to empire’.72 Second, that during the 1960s ‘imperial decline failed to produce much political concern in Scotland’. And finally, that it was the policies of the Conservative governments of the 1980s, including the sell-out of industrial workers and the introduction of the infamous ‘poll tax’ in Scotland, that provided the spur to popular support for loosening the bonds of the Union. ‘Mrs Thatcher’, Devine concludes, ‘has an infinitely greater claim to be the midwife of Scottish devolution than the factor of imperial decline.’73 Yet on none of these counts can Devine be said to have clinched the argument. He makes a strong case that imperial markets ceased to be important to Scotland’s economy well before the end of formal decolonisation.74 He is also right to emphasise that Scottish national feeling did not simply emerge as a corollary to the end of empire. Demands for Home Rule had co-existed with empire since the late nineteenth century, and national sentiment in Scotland had even [ 217 ]

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deeper roots that were entirely distinct from and unrelated to colonial national movements elsewhere. But on closer examination, Devine’s core claims fail to convince. The suggestion that Scottish emotional attachment to empire had largely faded by the mid-twentieth century is particularly contentious, and has recently been challenged by Bryan Glass in his path-breaking study of Scotland and the end of empire.75 The eclipse of the empire’s commercial and industrial pre-eminence in inter-war Scotland doubtless carried significance for those immediately affected, but Devine offers very little to suggest that it was accompanied by a wholesale popular revision of longstanding assumptions about Britain’s place in the world. The same can be said of Devine’s treatment of the 1960s. He rightly points out that ‘the process of decolonisation in Asia and Africa … evoked little protest or opposition in Scotland’, and goes on to note that the Church of Scotland openly supported the cause of African nationalism and was critical of the government for the slow pace of constitutional change. Yet he concludes from this that empire ‘had little perceptible consequence on the nation’.76 This logic presupposes only one possible model for gauging the domestic impact of imperial decline: that of a disaffected, disillusioned people rejecting the Union in protest against the premature liquidation of empire. It is far more likely that a nationalist cause would have drawn momentum from the global spectacle of colonial emancipation, rather than tapping into some popular ‘protest or opposition’ to decolonisation. In an international climate of civil rights discourses reverberating around the world, fuelling liberation movements from Africa to South East Asia to indigenous Australasia and beyond, it is at least conceivable that the public mood in Scotland became progressively more receptive to the idea of loosening the ties to London. But Devine neither considers this possibility nor seeks any evidence for it. That the end of empire ‘evoked little protest’ need not suggest that it played little role in shaping popular expectations and political aspirations. Lastly, Devine’s conviction that Margaret Thatcher played an ‘infinitely greater’ role in the gathering momentum of devolution presumes a zero sum game of historical causation. Thatcher’s unfailing capacity to alienate Scottish voters cannot be overlooked, but nor should we forget that the first major surge in SNP electoral momentum long preceded her tenure at Downing Street (as did the ‘end of empire thesis’ that was already standard journalistic fare by the time she came to office). Indeed, it is striking that Devine seems prepared to accept the ‘Thatcher thesis’ at face value, without submitting it to the same critical scrutiny that is (rightly) deemed timely and appropriate for the end of empire. No consideration is given, for [ 218 ]

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example, to why the Thatcher era coincided with the lowest ebb in the SNP’s electoral fortunes in the four decades after its 1974 triumph. While it is indeed the case – as the editors point out in the introduction to this volume – that the regions that recorded a ‘yes’ majority in the 2014 referendum were predominantly those most affected by the post-industrial austerity of Thatcherism, these were also areas that were once heavily reliant on imperial networks of commerce and industry.77 Thus it is possible that Thatcher’s impact was itself a consequence of imperial decline, and thus a complementary rather than competing prism for understanding the long-term emergence of separatist politics. In sum, Devine’s heavy reliance on inter-war economics and his narrow criteria for measuring the likely domestic repercussions of the end of empire lead him to reject a hypothesis that he never really tests. Yet historians readily take their cue from his verdict as though it represents the last word on the subject.78 The reluctance of historians to be pulled along in the wake of decades of cumulative political rhetoric and populist commentary is understandable, even laudable. But this need not entail a blanket refusal to consider the more subtle, indirect, even unconscious political resonances of imperial decline. Understanding these responses requires attention not only to material, economic and constitutional realities but also to the symbolic and imaginative realm that was no less abruptly challenged by an era of unprecedented global change. In the case of Scotland and devolution, it seems inconceivable that contemporaries from all segments of opinion at every major turning point over successive decades could so readily intuit the after-effects of imperial decline without there being a shred of substance to those perceptions. The fact that Robbins, Webb and Devine all placed decisive weight on the (admittedly indisputable) fact that the Union has held firm suggests a flawed expectation of clear-cut, absolute outcomes as the only firm foundation for positing plausible causation. The capacity of the independence agenda to come back with a vengeance suggests that the unionist consensus has worn progressively thinner, together with diminishing popular identification with the sentiments and aspirations of being British. The way in which ‘Better Together’ campaigned almost exclusively on material issues with nary an appeal to the British heart is only the most conspicuous index of a deeper malaise. Accounting for this state of affairs naturally requires a far wider remit than the upheavals of decolonisation more than four decades ago. But to exclude those vistas entirely from the field of vision seems counterproductive. No historical episode or evolution, however crudely material in its immediate implications, can be disaggregated from its discursive resonances. In the case of the decline of the British [ 219 ]

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Empire, empirical analysis of the economic, political and constitutional ‘impact’ on metropolitan Britain is only part of the story, and perhaps not the decisive one. As this survey illustrates, the loss of empire generated a spontaneous and enduring rhetorical response that was rapidly transferred from one political context to the next, lending shape and clarity to the present strains and future prospects of the Union in a post-imperial world. This was no more clearly in evidence than in the aftermath of the Hamilton by-election of 1967 and the three referendum campaigns of the ensuing decades. At each key juncture, the persistence and pervasiveness of imperial imagery and argument brought its own capacity to generate political momentum and engender change. While the reductive polemics of ‘internal colonialism’ should be treated with due caution, there remains at the very least a prima facie case for keeping the underlying, discursive pressures of the end of empire in mind when assessing the origins and ever-growing momentum of devolutionary politics.

Acknowledgement The authors would like to thank the Velux Foundation for their generous support of the research for this chapter, and the editors of the volume for their valuable advice and feedback on an earlier draft.

Notes   1 As recounted by Isle of Mull farmer Iain Mackay in the Guardian, 9 May 2014.   2 Leaving aside Robert McIntyre’s brief spell as MP for Motherwell in 1945.   3 For a representative sample see Anthony Sampson, The Anatomy of Britain (London, 1962); Anthony Hartley, A State of England (London, 1963); Michael Shanks, The Stagnant Society: A Warning (Harmondsworth, 1961); John Mander, Great Britain or Little England? (Harmondsworth, 1963).   4 Quoted in Billy Wolfe, Scotland Lives: The Quest for Independence (Edinburgh, 1973), p. 53.   5 Neil Douglas, How London Spends Your Money (Edinburgh). Undated, but most probably 1964 judging from its general context and file placement in the Arthur Donaldson Papers, National Library of Scotland, Acc. 6038/2, ‘Correspondence of and to Arthur Donaldson’, Folder 2.   6 See Jimmi Østergaard Nielsen and Stuart Ward, ‘“Cramped and Restricted at Home”? Scottish Separatism at Empire’s End’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, forthcoming 2015.   7 H. J. Hanham, ‘The Scottish Nation Faces the Post-Imperial World’, International Journal, Vol. 23 (1968), p. 584.   8 Arthur Donaldson’s Diary ‘The True Significance of Devaluation’, Scots Independent, 25 November 1967.   9 This is enlarged upon in Nielsen and Ward, ‘“Cramped and Restricted at Home”?’. 10 National Library of Scotland, P.1a.7030, Hamilton Herald, October 1967. 11 ‘“Scots wha hinnae” Won for Winnie’, Hamilton Advertiser, 10 November 1967. 12 E.g. ‘Vote rebuff turns spotlight on Mr Ross’, Scotsman, 4 November 1967; ‘Aftermath’, Glasgow Herald, 4 November 1967. 13 ‘Don’t Laugh at the Threat, It Has Promise’, Guardian, 17 November 1967.

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THREE REFERENDA AND A BY-ELECTION 14 Ibid. 15 National Library of Scotland, Acc. 10090/113. Ludovic Kennedy, ‘The Disunited Kingdom’, transcript of BBC broadcast, 12 June 1968. 16 Daniel Thomas Jenkins, The British, Their Identity, and Their Religion (London, 1975), p. 135. 17 ‘In common with colonialism overseas, the English state attempted to rule the Celtic lands for instrumental ends’. Hechter was more hesitant about the implications for the present and future, speculating that Celtic peoples might become more reconciled to the English by the growing presence of non-white migrants from the former colonial empire. Michael Hechter, Internal Colonialism: The Celtic Fringe in British National Development, 1536–1966 (London, 1975), pp. 342, 350. 18 The Times, 18 April 1974. 19 The Times, 24 September 1974. 20 The Times, 25 February 1975. 21 The Times, 1 May 1976. 22 Tom Nairn, The Break-Up of Britain: Crisis and Neo-Nationalism (London, 1977), p. 259. 23 Hansard, House of Commons, Vol. 922, cols. 1320–1322, 14 December 1976. 24 Ibid., col. 1410. 25 Ibid., col. 1359. 26 The Times, 6 July 1977. 27 John Biffen, A Nation in Doubt (London, 1976), p. 8. His address to the party conference was reported in The Times on 4 October 1977. 28 Vernon Bogdanor, Devolution (Oxford, 1979). 29 Tam Dalyell, Devolution: The End of Britain? (London, 1977), p. 83. 30 Quoted in Keith Robbins, ‘“This Grubby Wreck of Old Glories”: The United Kingdom and the End of the British Empire’, Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 15, issue 1 (1980), p. 83. 31 Guardian, 30 August 1979. 32 Cited in Gary Hassan, The Scottish Labour Party (Edinburgh, 2004), p. 47. 33 Raphael Samuel (ed.), Patriots: The Making and Unmaking of British National Identity, 3 volumes (London, 1989); Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven, 1992). 34 Colley, Britons, p. 383. 35 The Times, 27 May 1995. 36 The Big Picture: The Break-Up of Britain, BBC2, 23 April 1995. See also presenter Mary Ann Sieghart’s column in The Times, 22 April 1995. 37 Based on the ‘It’s nae good blamin it oan the English fir colonising us’ passage in Chapter 2 of Irvine Welsh, Trainspotting (London, 1993). 38 The Times, 20 May 1996. 39 The Times, 31 May 1996. 40 Guardian, 30 November 1996. 41 Interviewed by Jonathan Freedland, ‘Welcome Scotland, Goodbye Britain’, Guardian, 28 August 1997. 42 Ibid. 43 The Times, 13 July 1998. 44 Simon Jenkins, ‘It’s Time for England’s First Empire to Get Independence’, Guardian, 10 May 2011. 45 Telegraph, 7 May 2011. 46 Jenkins, ‘It’s Time for England’s First Empire to Get Independence’, Guardian, 10 May 2011. 47 Telegraph, 21 December 2011. 48 Timothy Garton Ash, Guardian, 1 February 2012. 49 The Times, 10 February 2014. 50 Broadcasting House, BBC Radio 4, 14 January 2012. 51 Dominic Sandbrook, ‘Are We about to Witness the End of Britain?’, Mail on Sunday, 29 January 2012.

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ANTI-COLONIALISM, THE MILITARY AND NATIONALISM 52 Reported in the Telegraph, 19 May 2011. 53 Quoted in Bryan Glass, ‘A Scottish Referendum on the Failed Empire?’, http:// imperialglobalexeter.com/2014/06/10/a-scottish-referendum-on-the-failed-empire (accessed 13 August 2014). 54 Interviewed by Serena Kutchinsky in Prospect, 24 April 2014. 55 The Times, 22 April 2014. 56 Telegraph, 21 February 2014. 57 Guardian, 15 August 2014, reporting on the publication of Brown’s My Scotland, Our Britain (London, 2014). 58 Financial Times, 8 September 2014. 59 Ian Jack, ‘Is This the End of Britishness?’, Guardian, 16 September 2014. 60 Guardian, 10 September 2014. 61 Guardian, 16 and 18 September 2014. 62 Globe and Mail, 16 September 2014. 63 The New Republic, 12 September 2014. 64 Huffington Post, 11 September 2014. 65 John Oliver, Last Week Tonight, HBO, broadcast 14 September 2014. 66 Three prominent examples (among many) are Norman Davies, The Isles: A History (Basingstoke, 1999), p. 1053; Richard Weight, Patriots: National Identity in Britain, 1940–2000 (Basingstoke, 2000), p. 727; Murray Pittock, The Road to Independence? Scotland Since the Sixties (London, 2008), pp. 15–16. 67 Scotsman, 13 August 2014. The essay was co-authored with Scottish Labour MP Gregg McClymont. 68 Linda Colley, Acts of Union and Disunion: What Has Held the UK Together and What is Dividing It? (London, 2014). 69 Keith Webb, The Growth of Nationalism in Scotland (Glasgow, 1977), p. 87. 70 Robbins, ‘This Grubby Wreck of Old Glories’, p. 82. 71 T. M. Devine, ‘The Break-Up of Britain? Scotland and the End of Empire’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, Vol. 16 (2006), pp. 163–180; To the Ends of the Earth: Scotland’s Global Diaspora, 1750–2010 (London, 2011), pp. 251–269. 72 Devine, ‘The Break-Up of Britain?’, p. 174. 73 Ibid., pp. 163, 166. 74 Ibid., p. 179. 75 Bryan Glass, The Scottish Nation at Empire’s End (Basingstoke and New York, 2014). Glass’s work is primarily concerned with demonstrating the wide-ranging repercussions of decolonisation in Scotland ranging from business circles to the churches, the print media, education and individual testimony. Nevertheless, he endorses the idea of contemporary Scottish separatist politics as a ‘post-imperial nationalism’, while distancing himself from the ‘internal colonialism’ model of Hechter, Nairn and others. See pp. 2, 5, 163–164. 76 Devine, ‘The Break-Up of Britain?’, p. 167. 77 See Introduction, pp. 17–18. 78 See, for example, Richard Finlay’s concluding sentence to the final chapter of Devine and MacKenzie’s 2011 Oxford History of the British Empire volume on Scotland: ‘As Tom Devine rightly notes, the decline of the empire did not lead to a diminution in British identity north of the border.’ Richard Finlay, ‘National Identity, Union and Empire’ in John M. MacKenzie and T. M. Devine (eds.), Scotland and the British Empire (Oxford, 2011), p. 315.

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INDEX

Aberdeen 15, 32–3, 39, 70, 102, 117 Aberdeen, Lady 86 Adamson, William 188–9 Aden 14, 132, 143–8, 150 affinity Scot 44–5, 58 American Quota Acts (1921 and 1924) 26 Americanisation 34 Anderson, Sir John 82 Anderson, Robert 120 Anglo-American relations 170 Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902) 1, 3, 50, 91 apartheid 114, 164, 190 Arbroath, Declaration of (1320) 122 Ascherson, Neal 122 Ashley, Gordon 33–4 associational culture 38–40, 51 Australia 7, 11, 13, 27, 29, 32–4, 37, 39, 46, 48, 51–2, 54–5, 91, 94, 99, 159, 187 Bain, James Thompson 102 Baker, Richard and Blanche 97, 99 Banda, Hastings Kamuzu 190, 193 Banda, Joyce 194 Banglar Urmi 76 Barbour, Mary 100 Baring, Sir Evelyn 162 Barr, Rev. James 54 Basu, Paul 124 BC Worker’s News 90 Belgium 58, 121 Belhaven, Lord 142 Bell-Irving, Henry O. 87–8, 90–1 Bennett, ‘Old Bill’ 90–1 Benthall, Edward 78–81, 83 ‘Better Together’ campaign 214–15, 219 Bevan, Aneurin 117, 174 Beveridge, Craig 123

Biffen, John 207 Black Watch 121, 138, 160 Black Watch, The 53 Blaikie, William Gardner 185 Blair, Tony 53, 209 Blantyre (Lanarkshire) 182, 188–9, 194 Blantyre (Malawi) 181, 186, 189 Boas, Franz 92 Bogdanor, Vernon 208 Bogle, Rev. Albert 195 ‘Book of Scottish Connections, The’ 10, 58 Botswana 182, 185, 195 box wallahs 71 Bragg, Melvyn 212 Bramwell, Elizabeth Ida 98 Braveheart (1995) 151 Brigade Groups 140–1 British Association for the ­Advancement of Science 183 British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) 34, 36, 148, 203, 210, 213 British Columbia 12–13, 31–3, 36, 40, 86–8, 90–8, 100–3 British Empire Census (1901) 10, 44, 59 British Empire Exhibition 1924 (Wembley) 54–5 British Empire Exhibition 1938 (Glasgow) 55, 100, 187 British Nationality Act (1948) 46 British Socialist Party (BSP) 116 Britishness 13, 66, 70, 79, 121, 208–10, 212, 214–15, 217 Brown, Gordon 214 Bruce, Agnes Livingstone 186 Bruce, Robert Randolph 86 Bruce, Robert the 15, 113 Bruce, Steve 67 Bruce, William Spiers 5, 8

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INDEX

Bryant, Christopher 66–7, 81 Bryce, James 102 Buchan, John (1st Lord Tweedsmuir) 5 Buchan, John (2nd Lord Tweedsmuir) 166 Buckle, George 50 Burns Societies 54, 86, 206 Burns, Robert 5, 8, 50, 54, 83, 90, 187, 189 burra sahib 70, 82 Calcutta 10, 11, 48, 67–83 Calder, Angus 122 Caledonian Society of Kenya 37–9 Calman, Sir Kenneth 195 Cameron, David 81, 212 Campbell, Allan 89–90 Campbell, Sir Colin 5 Campbell, Jock 116 Campbell, Roddy 31–2, 36 Canada 5, 7–8, 11–13, 25–8, 30–7, 39–40, 46, 51–2, 55, 86–7, 90–1, 94–6, 99, 102, 120, 159, 187 Canadian Collieries Ltd 88 Canadian Communist Party 89–90 Canadian Pacific Railway 86–8 Cannadine, David 79 Carnegie, Andrew 5 Cattanach, W.D. 190 Central African Federation 16, 157, 181, 190, 192–3 Cheviot, the Stag, and the Black Black Oil, The 53 Chitambo, Chief 182 Chuma, James 181, 185 Church of Scotland 39, 119–20, 186, 191–2, 195, 218 Church of Scotland Committee on Central Africa 192 Church of Scotland General Assembly (1959) 192 Churchill, Winston 73, 75, 77 Clarion 12, 101 Clark, Angus 28 Clough, Monica 77, 79, 81 Co–operative Commonwealth

­Federation (CCF) 89, 96 Colley, Linda 66, 82, 210–11, 216–17 Colville’s steel works 31 Commonwealth Games (1986) 17 Commonwealth Games (2014) 9 Conservative Party 1, 57, 157, 159, 205, 207 Coupland, Sir Reginald 16–17 Covenanters 122, 149, 185, 189 Cowan, James 90 Cox, Ernest 72–4 Craig, Cairns 123 Craigdarroch Castle 88 Crawford, Archibald 74 Crawfurd, Helen 100 Crimean War 138–9 Cripps, Sir Stafford 75–7 Curtin, John 48 Cyprus 143–5, 160 Daily Mail 50, 149 Daily Record 14, 142–3, 146, 155–9, 162, 163–73, 175 Daily Telegraph 146, 208 Dalyell, Tam 146, 205, 208 Darien Scheme 188, 216 Darling, Alistair 215 Darwin, John 80 Das, Shrindranath 69–70 Davidson, Randall 187 Department of Indian Affairs (Canada) 93 Devine, T. M. 6, 66–7, 81, 120, 201, 217–19 Devlin Report 192 Dick, Rev. Thomas 186 Dollan, Agnes 100 Dominions Office 28, 36 Donaldson, Arthur 49, 202 Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan 5, 50 Drew, George 35 Dulles, John Foster 169 Dunbar, Andrew 116 Duncan, James Alexander 75 Dundee 4, 7, 10–11, 15, 17–18, 49–50, 67–8, 70–81, 83, 99

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Dundee Advertiser 72 Dundee Association of Jute Spinners and Manufacturers 73 Dundee Chamber of Commerce 73–4 Dundee Courier 49 Dundee Technical College 68 Dunsmuir, James 88 Dunsmuir, Robert 88, 90 East India Company 70 Economist, The 65 Eden, Anthony 171–4 Edinburgh 6, 17, 29, 47–9, 52, 56–7, 116, 118, 120, 125, 181, 187, 190–1, 194 Edinburgh Military Tattoo 52, 139 Edinburgh University 28, 32, 182 Egypt 70, 158, 167, 169, 171–5 Elizabeth II (I in Scotland) 56 Empire Settlement Act (1922) 26–7 Enlightenment, Scottish 186 EOKA insurgency 143–4 European Economic Community (EEC) 57–8 European Union (EU) 50, 57 Ewen, Tom 91–2, 102 Ewing, Winifred 57, 147, 201–2, 204, 206, 209, 211 exhibitions, Scottish 187 Falklands War (1982) 53 Fanon, Frantz 123 Federationists 89 Ferguson, Niall 80 Field 86 Findlay, Bill 90 Findlay, Donald 212 Finlay, Richard 115, 119 First Nations People, Canada 12, 87, 91–4, 96 First World War 3–4, 9, 16, 25, 30, 41, 51, 87–9, 92, 102 Fisherman, The 90 Fletcher, Alexander 205 Foot, Dingle 74–6 Forward 12, 88, 101 Fraser, Donald 188

Fraser, Eugenie and Ronald 68–9, 71, 77–9, 82–3 Gallacher, Willie 90, 101 Galloway, George 213 Gandhi, Mohandas 75 Ganesh, Janan 214 Geddes Axe 26–7 Gelfand, Michael 181 General Register for Scotland 58 Gibb, Andrew Dewar 101 Gibson, Alison 35 Gilchrist, R. N. 82 Gillies, Ronnie 32–3, 36–7 Glasgow 1, 4, 9, 18, 29, 33–4, 37, 49, 51, 55, 57, 66, 70, 80, 88–90, 97–100, 102, 117, 125, 133, 141–2, 156, 159, 181, 187, 194, 204, 215 Glasgow Evening Citizen 146 Glasgow Govan by-election (1988) 57 Glasgow Herald 14, 66, 136, 142, 155–8, 162–5, 167–75 Glasgow University 147, 186, 194–5, 215 Glass, Bryan 120, 218 Globe and Mail 215 Glover, Thomas Blake 5, 8, 10 Gluckman, Max 183 Glyn, Alan 206 Graham, R. B. Cunninghame 49, 113, 115, 122–3, 126 Graham, Robert Cruickshank 102 Grant, Dr Lachlan 29 Great Depression 26–7, 73, 76, 88, 99, 101 Griffiths, James, 181 Guardian, The 203, 209, 211–12, 215 Guthrie, Sam 88 Hamilton Advertiser 203 Hamilton by-election (1967) 17, 57, 147, 201–4, 209, 220 Hamilton Herald 202 Hanham, Harry 202 Hardie, James Keir 3, 11, 52, 101, 118

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INDEX

Healey, Denis 148 heavy industry 4, 18, 30 Hechter, Michael 65, 123, 204 Henderson, Douglas 28 Henderson, Hamish 122 Hetherwick, Rev. Alexander 180 Hickey, Owen 204 Highland Development League 29 Highland Land League 28 Highlander (1986) 151 Holland, Robert 151–2 Holyrood 212 Horsbrugh, Florence 72, 74, 76 Howard, Sir Anthony 79 Hudson’s Bay Company 32 Hungarian Rebellion (1956) 168, 172–3 Hunter, Peter 90 Hutton, Flora 99–101 Huxley, Elspeth 165 Hynd, John and Harry 117 Hyslop, Jonathan 11, 13, 116 Immigration Act (1971) 46 Imperial Census (1901), 10, 44, 58–9 imperial memory 121, 124 Inchmahome Priory 113 ‘Independence in Europe’ 57, 119, 209 Independent Labour Party (ILP) 16, 88, 101, 116–17 India Office 73, 80 Indian Central Jute Committee 68 Indian Civil Service (ICS) 71, 78 Indian Industrial Commission Report (1918) 68 Indian Jute Mills Association 68, 72, 82 Indian Rights Association 92–3 internal colonialism 65, 122, 204, 206, 217, 220 Iolaire 30 Iraq 53, 121 Ireland 2, 13, 16–17, 37, 54–5, 59, 65–6, 125, 195 Israel 171–4 Italy 190 ‘It’s Scotland’s Oil!’ 57 ITN 145

Jack, Ian 215 Jack, P. Ewart 76 James, C. L. R. 118 Jamieson, Laura 96 ‘Janet Smith’ Bill 98 Japanese immigrants 12, 94, 96 Jenkins, Daniel 204 Jenkins, Sir Simon 212 Jinnah, Mohammed Ali 75, 135 Johnson, Samuel 3, 38, 70 Johnston, Sir Harry 186 Johnston, Michael 167 Johnston, Thomas 68, 101, 160 Jones, Mary 97 Jute Control System 76 jute wallahs 70–1 Kaunda, Kenneth 181, 195 Kay, Billy 210 Kenefick, William 116–17 Kennedy, A. L. 215 Kennedy, Ludovic 203 Kenya 14, 37–9, 155–6, 160–7, 175 Kerr, Elizabeth 88–9, 100 Kidd, Colin 119, 216 kilt 45, 52, 54, 88, 142, 151 Kipling, Rudyard 86, 95, 134 Kirk, Neville 117 Ku Klux Klan 97 Kumar, Krishan 52 Labour Party 14, 16, 18, 56–7, 88, 100–1, 116–18, 146, 159–60, 194, 202, 205, 207, 209, 212, 215 Ladysmith Strike 88, 101 Ladysmith, Relief of 1 Lake Ngami 183 Lake of Menteith 113 Lanarkshire Miners’ Union 88 Last Week Tonight 215 Lauder, Sir Harry 51 Law, Charlie and Molly 32, 36 League Against Imperialism 92 Leask, Nigel 121 Lee, Jennie 117 Legum, Colin 164–5 Leng, John 67–8

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INDEX

Lewis, Isle of 6, 30 Liberal Democrats, see Liberal Party Liberal Party 29, 159–61, 207, 212 Lindsay, H. A. F. 73 Linklater, Eric 65 Linlithgow, Lord 70 Litterick, Jim 89 Little Englanders 115 Livingstone (Zambia) 181–2, 195 Livingstone, David 5, 7–8, 15–16, 180–199 Livingstone, Justin 183 Livingstone, W. P. 188 Livingstonia 181, 186 Lloyd George, David 30 Loos, Battle of 51 London Missionary Society 185 Lyall, George 72 Lyttelton, Oliver 164–6 Mabon, Dick 173 MacDiarmid, Hugh (Christopher Murray Grieve) 13, 48–9, 119, 123–4 MacDonald, H. O. 97–8 Macdonald, Sir Hector 5 Macdonald, James Ramsay 3, 11, 29, 101, 118 MacDonald, John L. 90 MacDonald, R. C. ‘Claymore’ 96 MacDougall, Rev. Duncan 97 Macinnis, Angus 96 MacIntyre, Ben 214 Mackenzie, Sir Alexander 5 MacKenzie, Compton 48–9 Mackenzie, D. 87 MacKenzie, Ian 95–6 MacKenzie, John 66–7, 116–17 Mackenzie, Rev. Kenneth 190, 192 MacLean, John 115 MacLeod, Rev. George 192 Macleod, Iain Norman 6 Macleod, Murdo 30 Macmillan, Harold 6, 192, 201 Macmillan, Hugh 193 MacPherson, Malcolm 117 Macwhirter, Norman 66

Mafeking, Relief of 1 Maiden, William E. 94–5 Mairs, Joseph 88 Malan, D.F. 190 Malawi (Nyasaland) 157, 180–3, 186, 188, 190, 192–5, 201 Malawian chiefs in Scotland 190 Malaya 14, 49, 141, 145, 157 Marloch 31 Marxism 89 Matthew, Alex S. 97–8 Mau Mau 14, 155–7, 159–67, 175 Maxton, James 54 McAllan, William 94 McConnell, Jack 194–5 McCracken, John 192 McDonald, Rev. Donald 149, 151 McLashan, John 94 McLean, Sorley 123 mem-sahibs 77 Metagama 31 Middle East 14, 136, 141–3, 167, 169–70, 172 Miller, George 90–2 Milton, Nan MacLean 118 Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa 183, 185 Mitchell, Lt. Col. Colin 144–7, 151 Moore, Michael 195 Moore, Suzanne 215 Morris, James 208 Morrison, Donald 36 Mothers’ Council of Vancouver 89 Mountbatten, Lord Louis 134 Movement for Colonial Freedom 117 Muggeridge, Malcolm 69 Muir, John 8 Muirhead, Roland 16, 49 Munro, Elsie 89–90, 100–1 Munro, Peter Campbell 89–90 Munster, Earl of 166–7 Murchison, Sir Roderick 183 Murdoch, John 97 Murray, John 183 Murray, Mungo, 185 Nagasaki 10

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INDEX

Nairn, Tom 67, 82, 122–3, 205, 216 Napier, Theodore 47–8, 52 Nasser, Gamal Abdel 155, 167–71 National Library of Scotland 7 National Museum of Scotland 7, 187, 194–5 National Portrait Gallery of Scotland  7 National Service 14–15, 139–41 National War Memorial, Edinburgh Castle 51 Nehru, Jawaharlal 75 Neill, Allan Webster 93–7, 101–2 Neish, Euphemia 99 New Commonwealth immigration 37, 46 New Towns 57 New Zealand 7, 11, 13, 27–8, 31, 33–4, 37, 46, 48, 51, 55, 94–5, 99, 102, 159, 187 Newsnight 213 Nixon, Richard 170 No-Conscription Fellowship 52 Noble, John and Joan 32–3, 35–6 North Lanarkshire 18 North Sea oil 57, 204 North-West Frontier Province 135, 160 Norway 81–2 Nyasaland, see Malawi Nyerere, Julius 190 O’Donnell, Sir Gus 213 Oliver, John 215 OPEC crisis (1973) 204 Oswell, William Cotton 183, 185 Ottawa Agreement (1932) 54, 76 Outer Hebrides 30 Overseas Settlement Board 99 P&O Line 69, 71 Palestine Mandate 136 Parris, Matthew 211 Pathé News 56, 142 Patterson, James 69–71 Peace and Empire Congress (1938) 100

Perham, Margery 165 Peshawar 134–5, 137, 140 Phillips, Melanie 213 Pincher, Chapman 147–8 Pinkerton’s Detective Agency 32 poll tax 17–18, 217 Porter, Bernard 114, 117 Potter, Simon 34 Primrose, Archibald (5th Earl of Rosebery) 160 Protocol of Sevres 173 Queen Mary’s Coronation Hostel 98 Rae, John 5 Ramsay, Adam 215 Rankin, John 117 ‘Red Clydeside’ 2, 100–1, 115, 160 Red Fort (Delhi) 134 referenda (1979, 1997, 2014) 17, 57, 200, 208 Reid, George 206 Reid, Helen R. Y. 102 Reid, Tom 95–6 reverse migrants 25–6, 35, 40, 46 Rhodes, Cecil 50, 181 Rhodes–Livingstone Institute 181 Rhodesia, Northern, see Zambia Rhodesia, Southern, see Zimbabwe Rifkind, Hugo 214 Rob Roy (1995) 151 Robbins, Keith 217 Robertson, James 73 Rogers, Frank 87–8, 102 Ronaldshay, Lord 70 Ross, Duncan 215 Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) 90 Royal Commission on Japanese and Chinese Immigration 94 Royal Commission on the ­Constitution (1969) 57, 204 Royal Geographical Society 181–3, 187 Royal Jubilee (1977) 207 Royal Scottish Geographical Society 186

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Rush, Maurice 89–90 Russell, Mike 212 Salisbury, Lord 187 Salmond, Alex 8, 59, 65–6, 194–5, 209, 212–13 Salvation Army 27, 39 Samuel, Raphael 210 Sandbrook, Dominic 213 ‘Save the Argylls’ campaign (1968) 132, 145–6, 151 Schapera, Isaac 183 Schreiner, William 52 Scotland and Wales Bill 206–7 Scotland–Malawi Partnership 194 Scots National League 119 Scotsman, The 14, 32, 155–8, 162–75, 187, 189, 191, 216 Scott, Archibald 186 Scott, Sir Walter 5, 65, 113, 187, 189 Scottish civil society 5–6, 54, 121–2 Scottish Constitutional Convention (SCC) 209 Scottish Council on African Questions 192 Scottish Daily Express 142–3, 145–8 Scottish education system 48, 119–20 Scottish Home Rule 13, 49, 54, 56, 118–19, 159, 217 Scottish Immigrant Aid Society 27 Scottish National Party (SNP) 8, 17–18, 29, 48–9, 53, 57, 65, 119, 121, 132, 147, 159, 194–5, 201–2, 204–14, 218–19 Scottish Nationalism 6, 8, 10, 13, 16–17, 49, 58, 65, 81, 83, 113, 115, 118–19, 121–2, 132, 193–5 Scottish Office 56 Scottish Parliament 59, 83, 194, 211–13 Scottish Patriots 28–9 Scottish regiments 13–15, 50, 52, 121, 131–4, 137–44, 148, 150–2, 160, 211

1st Battalion Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders 132, 138, 144, 150 1st Battalion Cameronians 133, 144, 148–9, 151 1st Battalion Highland Light Infantry (1st HLI) 133, 138, 141, 143–4 1st Battalion Queen’s Own Cameron Highlanders 141, 143 1st Battalion Royal Scots (1st Royal Scots) 134, 136, 160 1st Battalion Royal Scots Fusiliers (1st RSF) 134, 136, 138, 141, 143–4 1st Battalion Seaforth Highlanders 141, 143 2nd Battalion Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders 138 2nd Battalion Black Watch (2nd Black Watch) 135, 137–8, 141, 160 2nd Battalion King’s Own Scottish Borderers (2nd KOSB) 134, 136, 140 2nd Battalion Royal Scots (2nd Royal Scots) 136, 140 2nd Battalion Seaforth Highlanders 139 Scottish Secretariat’s Anti-­ Conscription Correspondence and  Literature 52 Scottish soldier 13, 52, 65, 121–2, 131, 136, 140–1, 143, 145, 150 Second World War 2, 4, 17, 26–7, 30, 45, 48, 52, 56, 68, 133, 139, 159–60, 207, 211 Secretary of State for Scotland 56, 188, 195 Seeley, Sir John 204 Shinwell, Emanuel 74 Sillars, Jim 57, 206, 209, 213–14 Sime, John 68 Sing, Wong Foo 97 Slessor, Mary 5 Smiles, Samuel 185 Smillie, Bob 101

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INDEX

Smith, Dai 122 Smith, Donald 5 Smith, Janet 87, 96–9 Smith, John 209 Smith, Mary Ellen 98 Smout, T. C. 123 Social Democratic Foundation (SDF) 116 Socialist Party of Canada (SPC) 87 Socialist Sunday Schools 100–1 Soldier Settlement Scheme (1919– 1922) 26 Somme, Battle of the 51 South Africa 1, 11–13, 34, 39, 46, 48, 50–1, 86, 94, 99, 101–2, 114, 116–17, 126, 157, 159, 164–5, 167, 185, 187, 190 Soutter, James 39 Soviet Union 89–90, 118, 168–73 Spence, Lewis 28 St Andrew’s Day Celebrations 70–1 Stanley, Brian 183–4 Stanley, Henry Morton 184 Statesman 70 Statute of Westminster (1931) 53 Steel, David 195 Steele, Thomas Montague 185 Stephen, George 5 sterling devaluation 27, 202–3 Stevenson, Robert Louis 5, 123 Stewart, Edward 31, 36 Stoler, Ann 79 Stone of Scone 55–6 Stornoway Gazette 27, 29 Strachey, John 208 Stratton, Fergus Hunter 98, 102 Stratton, Jessie Victoria 98–9, 102 STV 148 Suez Crisis 14, 31, 132, 141, 144, 155–6, 158, 160–1, 167–75 Sunday Post 33, 146 Susi, Abdullah 181, 185

Teit, James Alexander 92–3, 102 Templar, Sir Gerald 142 Thatcher, Margaret 2, 17–18, 81, 191, 205, 208–9, 217–19 ‘Thin Red Line’ 138 Thomas Cook 33 Thompson, Andrew 114 Thornton, Richard 184 Times, The 50, 146, 204–5, 207, 210, 214 Trainspotting (1996) 211 Transvaal 52, 91, 101–2 Treaty of Versailles 53 Trident nuclear facility (Faslane) 53 Tulloch, Rob and Cathie 33 Turnbull, Ronald 123 Tutu, Archbishop Desmond 114

Tait, Willie 118 tartan trews 142 ‘tartan/ancestral tourists’ 36, 44 Tassie, J. A. 70

Wainwright, Jacob 185 Waldheim, Kurt 208 Wales, 2, 17–18, 37, 46, 49, 115, 117, 122, 125, 193, 195, 204–7, 211, 213

UN Resolution 1514 (‘Resolution on Decolonisation’) 208 Union, Act of (1707) 5, 16, 25, 67, 101, 115, 119, 121, 149, 203, 207–8, 210–11, 215–20 Unionist Party (Scotland) 101, 157–60, 164 United Council of Scottish Societies 97 United Mineworkers of America 88 United Nations 169–73, 175 Universities Mission to Central Africa (UMCA) 182, 186 Ure, William 78 USA 1, 5, 8, 25–6, 32, 94, 159, 167, 169–71, 174 Vance, Easton 31 Vancouver Women’s Labour League (WLL) 89 Vardon, Frank 185 Victoria, British Columbia 52, 86, 88–9, 96, 98 Victoria, Queen 25, 187, 211

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INDEX

Wallace, William 15, 52–4 Waller, Rev. Horace 186 War Memorials (First World War) 51 War Office 50, 73, 144 Ward, Paul 160–1 Wardwha, G. J. 76 Waruhiu wa Kungu, Chief 162 Wavell, Lord 140–1 Webb, Keith 217–19 welfare state 4, 56, 89, 212 Wellington, Sheena 83 Welsh, Irvine 123, 214 West Dunbartonshire 18 Western Clarion 87 Wheatley, John 160 white labourism 94, 98, 102, 116 ‘whites only’ immigration policy, Australia 47–8 Williams, Gwyn Alf 122 Wilson, Gordon 209 Wilson, Dr H. 193 Wilson, Harold 202, 204 Wilson, Woodrow 53, 189 Wingate, John 142 Wingate, Orde 5 Wintour, Patrick 215 Wolfe, Billy 201, 208 Wolfe, William 49

Women and Girls Protection Act (1923) 97 Women’s Foreign Mission General Committee, 191 Wood, Wendy (Gwendoline Meacham) 28–9, 48, 55–6 Woolf, Leonard 79 Workers’ Economic Conference (1932) 99–100 Workers’ Unity League (WUL) 90 World Missionary Conference (1910) 187 Wright, Tom 91 Years of Homecoming (2009, 2014) 8–9, 59 York, Duchess of 188 York, Peter 213 Young Scots Society 119 Young, Douglas 48–9, 52 Young, G. K. 78 Young, James ‘Paraffin’ 186 Younger, George 146 Youngson, James 39 Yousaf, Humza 194–5 Zambia 32, 181–2, 190–3, 195 Zimbabwe 32, 36, 55, 181, 190

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