A Nation in Want of a Grievance: Essays From Turn-of-the-Century Scotland

By Iain Fraser Grigor

A Nation in Want of a Grievance takes its name from a 19th century editorial in the Times newspaper. It consists of a collection of 35 essays written in Scotland around the end of the 20th century and the start of the present 21st century. Some of these are directly concerned with Scotland, some are not. Some are documentary in character, others are fictional. The first essay is a memoir, in a spirit of fictionised reportage, of the last herring-fishery on the west coast of Scotland – a fishery in which the author took part as a trawler deck-hand. A second piece in the collection is a re-jig of Lady Gregory's famous little one-act play, The Rising of the Moon, which has been re-written and located in the post-Jacobite Highlands of 1746. One piece of extended and research-intensive journalism examines in detail the long record of landlord chicanery relating to popular access to the waters of Loch Morar in western Lochaber. Another piece draws extensively on French and Spanish resources to tell the story – so far as it can be told – of Duncan Stewart of Balquidder, private doctor to Le Roi Christophe, the famous monarch of post-revolutionary Haiti. Oysters from Sweetings, meanwhile, is a fictional comment on modern Scotland in the style of John Buchan. The collection ends with two newspaper editorials. One, from a post-war edition of the Scotsman newspaper, is fictional, and relates to the forced merger of the churches of Scotland and England. The other is the Times editorial from the 19th century, in which Scotland is castigated as a nation in want of a grievance.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AUK Authors
• Release date: Jun 17, 2014
• ISBN: 9781849890427

Book preview

2010

Snow On High Ground

A memoir of the last herring-fishery on the Scottish west coast.

FIRST DAY of the week, last week of the fishing year; and so they cleared the harbour and put to sea, without hope, for the last few weeks had been blank, as if the herring for ever had gone from the ocean. On first watch, the Old Timer loafed in the wheelhouse; abaft it, the boy-Cook in his galley (mince, Gold Leaf and a new war comic) was making the tea; down aft, the Big Fella and the Skipper were in their curtained bunks, studying the newspapers of the previous week.

That night they got nothing, and they saw no marks till dusk the following day, close-in to an island, with a slash of wind screaming over its cliffs and shrouds of spindrift blasting into the growing night. They had a tow, tore the net, and left it in tatters aft. Later, in a sheltered bay, and just as it began to snow, they hauled the net forward and mended it. By the time they had finished the snow had stopped, though it was colder than ever. When they went to sea again, it was blowing harder than ever too.

The Cook produced a meal, which he described as venison chops, and which was even more of a disaster than usual. But the Skipper, poker-faced, said, ‘You’re fair coming on at the cooking, Cook"; for he too had once been a boy-cook at the fishing. And he knew that for pure nastiness the job would be hard to surpass, and was rendered possible only by the fierce intimidation offered by the crew to the slightest sign of independence on the part of the boy.

In the wheelhouse, the Old Timer turned the boat through the wind and she lurched violently. A basin of beans, a bag of sugar and the tomato sauce hurled themselves off the cabin table. Someone caught the sugar, but the beans exploded on the seat-locker, and the sauce lay smashed and bleeding at the foot of the heavy steel heating stove. No one said anything: speech was an effort, against the roar of the engine. The boy could clear it all up later, as usual.

The Big Fella suddenly roared at him across the table: What’s for pudding, Cook?

The boy threw himself waist-deep in an appropriate locker, reappeared, turned and shrieked, Peaches.

What kind?, screamed the Big Fella, incandescent with mock fury.

The Cook jumped visibly, gaped for a moment, and then, with split-second inspiration and perfect seriousness, bawled back, Sliced.

Later, at anchor somewhere, the men slept while the boy was left in the wheelhouse to get the forecast at the back of midnight.

"What was it?, asked the Skipper when he came up.

Em - just snow on high ground, said the Cook with confident precision.

There was a terrible silence on the Skipper for a moment, a terrible stillness, in the winking gloom of his wheelhouse.

But all he said was, That will be handy, Cook. You better give the boys a shout now.

And so they went to work again. Each knew that the weather promised gales and worse on the way, but the night was still clear and the tops of the hills on the mainland coast were indeed white with new snow. In the far north the northern lights were dancing weirdly, very high in the sky. The Old Timer was standing in the door of the casing watching them, with the Cook at his back, taking a break from brewing serious tea in the galley kettle.

Do you know what that means, Cook?, he demanded, taking a cigarette uninvited from the boy’s mouth, to smoke it himself. Ice. When you see them like that, it means bad ice up north.

The boy, jaunty with pleasure at the recognition of his presence, lit another Gold Leaf and peered aft, over the boat’s wake, into the north - towards which, in due course, he spat with stylish expertise.

The hardest man I ever saw was up there, the Old Timer said. In Spitzy. A German. Just after the war. We were in four days sheltering from weather when this rust-bucket side-winder came in. Rust and ice from stem to stern. God knows how she had survived it. Her skipper came out on the bridge wing to have a look at the place. I was never nearer to him than fifty yards. But there was something queer about him. About the way he cocked his eye at the weather. He wasn’t afraid of it, somehow. Anyway, he was at sea up there right through the war. All that time, up there on a U-boat.

What kind’s a you-boat?, the Cook wondered.

The Old Timer flicked his cigarette over the transom and into the boiling wake. He had a lot of friends in those waters, the poor bastard, he said; and went down the trap at once, into his bunk, closed the curtains, and retrieved from its hiding-place a half-empty, half-bottle of sweet, black rum.

There was no herring found that night either, and after lying in the lee of the land for the following day, they put to sea again late in the afternoon - a clear and crisp day, with the shadows already on the hills in the east, and to the west the tops of the islands scattered like antique bonnets along the horizon.

The Big Fella, in good form, pointed to one of these far grey-blue tops, and told the Cook about a girl he once had known from its western side. The boy looked doubtful, as if fearful of complicity in something not entirely understood.

That night too there was nothing to be had, nor nothing throughout the following day and evening - by which time, down aft in the cabin, the gloom was tangible. Speculation began as to when they would turn for home and be done with if for the week, the year - with just the prospect of the Christmas break ashore to blunt the pointed injustice of it all.

What was her name anyway?, the Cook suddenly bawled at the Big Fella, over the roar of the engine.

The Big Fella leaned out from his bunk in his grimy vest and grinned, but shrugged that he just didn’t remember: and at that the Skipper was hammering on the cabin skylight and shouting them on deck to shot, in a blatter of rain and the best part of a gale.

But she had beautiful eyes, the Big Fella suddenly volunteered to no-one in particular: Aye, like an army with banners.

They manned the winch and shot away, the wires lashing the length of her and singing with wild hope in the turning blocks, and towed away into the night, with the odd sea climbing the rail of her and rolling solid over the deck of her, and the Old Timer grumbling to himself, Just a waste of time, just a waste of bloody time.

Close to some shore they began to haul, in a hurry, but the net unaccountably jammed somewhere: and before anyone could move, the entire sea right round the boat began to pulse with a sharp, translucent light. The Cook was visibly pale, even in the harsh brightness of the deck floods, as if he expected some creature from the world of his comics to climb calmly from the ocean and stand beside him on the deck. But the Big Fella was a founder-member of that society which fears little but human company and its wiles, so he leaned over the rail for a look with the tool-box torch, while the Old Timer held his legs for fear that a sea would carry him away.

It’s a mine, the Big Fella announced at length, as if the whole thing had nothing whatever to do with him, personally, like.

Don’t be stupid, the Skipper yelled hopefully from the starboard wheelhouse window, the peak of his tartan bonnet dancing for fear of what might happen to his boat at any moment.

With an air of wonderful nonchalance, the Big Fella heaved himself back over the rail, muttering darkly, and began to investigate the contents of the tool-box beside the cabin skylight. When he found what he sought, he snapped the wire-cutters threateningly at the Cook, who looked as if he might cry at any moment.

Boom Boom, Cook, he roared at the boy, who promptly jumped with fright. The Old Timer snarled with contempt for the boy’s fear - or maybe his own.

Stand free of everything, he growled, and don’t hold on, that way you might get nothing smashed but your ankles, with any luck.

The Cook opened his mouth: and before he could close it, or utter a sound, the Big Fella had snipped clinically through some wires attached to the mine, and which had been snagging it to the net. Then he stood back with a cool, experimental air, waiting for some sort of explosion: but there was none, though the neon rhythm of the sea went out at once. At that, with much grunting, the Big Fella dragged over the rail the offending mine, and laid it carefully on the deck. The Old Timer peered at it closely for a moment, and then snorted with profession disdain.

The Big Fella announced at the wheelhouse, It’s just a Navy practice mine. It has to be given back to them if anybody finds it.

The hell with the Navy, the Skipper screeched from his window: and the mine, along with the remains of the underwater flare to which it was connected, went over the side without further ado.

Cook!, the Big Fella howled in his most ferocious manner, and the boy jumped again with fright. Where’s the biscuits?

The Cook disappeared down into the Cabin while the Big Fella and the Old Timer watched him through a gap in the cabin skylight. When the boy had buried himself deep in a locker in search of the biscuits specified by the Big Fella, the Old Timer took the heavy wire-cutters and hammered explosively with them on the roof of the cabin; at which the Cook came out of his locker and up the trap like some well-greased sky-rocket. Both men howled with laughter, and ordered the boy below again: and when he had slunk down into the cabin and into his biscuit locker, they played the same trick on him, until the Cook utterly refused to go below again, and spent the rest of the night in his galley, quaking and smoking and trying hard to smile.

Towards dawn there were more stars in the sky than even the Old Timer had seen before, and when the day began to come in, the snow-covered hills of the mainland were smeared with early fire, till the sun itself rose and it was time to head for home - for no herring were likely to be taken in the light of that fine, bright winter’s day.

But they did not turn for home yet. With the engine eased right in, the warm soft beat of it dulled, they cruised south towards the land, and then turned north to thread their way along the edge of the skerries, hard in on the shore under the last towers and ruins of an old construction camp there.

At least it’s a Friday, the Big Fella was saying to the boys down aft, when the Skipper called them on deck - and they shot, and towed for an hour, laughing at the futile nonsense of it all.

When they started to haul the sea-birds began to gather, and when the bag closed the surface the birds suddenly were diving on it from the wing-tip, in a wheeling and murderous frenzy.

There’s something there anyway, the Big Fella at the winch observed with hungry weariness: and then a great tunnel of herring was laying alongside the boat, and all to come aboard: as long as nothing might go wrong. The began to take the stuff up over the rail, the best of stuff too, twenty, thirty, forty and more lifts, a greengold cascade of silverblue, against the angry squeal of the gilson and the scream of a thousand birds.

Then, as suddenly as they had come, there were no more - and the men on deck began to speak to each for the first time since they had seen that great tunnel of fortune alongside, still in hushed voices at the luck of the morning.

They turned for home, in for home and Christmas, through the islands, her bows well-down with the weight in her, and the Cook grinning expansively as he made the breakfast. Down aft, the Skipper slept after a sleepless week, and in the wheelhouse the Big Fella and the Old Timer talked in muted tones, stunned at the waywardness of fortune, stunned at their largest catch of that year, or of any year.

By late afternoon, they were home. At the head of the pier, the garish tinselled livery of the fairy-lit windows in the village shops was strangely welcoming. The got a buyer for the catch almost at once, for a good price, the best price of the year. They began to discharge; and soon small puffs of steam were observed to rise intermittently from the hold. By the time they were finished landing, it was raining heavily, but the Cook was standing quite happily on the pier, arms crossed on his lumberman’s shirt, two empty lemonade bottles at his feet, and a fresh packet of Gold Leaf wedged in the back-pocket of his jeans.

Suddenly, the buyer, oilskin-armoured, came out of the rain and stood looking down at the name-board of the boat bolted to the front of the wheelhouse.

He said, Why is she called that, Cook: after a pause in which he appeared to have been thinking deeply. That name didn’t come off a Christmas card.

The Cook grinned, as if party some great intimacy: and then he volunteered in a spirit of magical inspiration, Maybe it did. Or maybe there was another one first?

The buyer gave the boy a long, thoughtful look; and changed tack.

Where did you get them anyway?, he wondered.

In the daylight, the Cook said. Right in on the shore, at the old camp.

Oh, it’s still there, is it?, the buyer wondered.

it was this morning anyway, the Cook replied with some asperity.

Aye, aye, Cook. So that’s the way of it. Christmas again, eh? One more, one less. It’s a fair shot you have the day, though. That’s the biggest landing in here for years. The biggest price I’ve ever seen paid for them too. You’ll make a pound this week.

We will right enough, the Cook assented modestly. And we got a mine too.

Right enough, the buyer said, mightily impressed. A mine too!

Ach, it was just a wee one, the Cook replied with magnificent unconcern: and with every word edging closer to the coveted and elusive status that he so urgently sought.

A Clear Day Dawning

Timothy Neat’s biography of Hamish Henderson.

THE THREE GIANTS of twentieth-century Scottish culture were Hugh MacDiarmid, Somhairle MacGill-Eain (Sorley Maclean), and Hamish Henderson. It is Henderson – poet, translator, song-writer, radical nationalist and world-class folklorist – who is the subject of Timothy Neat’s insistently readable and profoundly well-informed biography. The book is the first volume of a projected two-volume work, and represents a major contribution to the cultural history of Scotland, as well as to cultural and political debate in the Scotland of today and tomorrow.

Neat’s preface quickly establishes the tone of his work. Henderson was much more than an extremely talented poet and translator, for he set in train – was indeed part of - many of the cultural and political forces that have transformed modern Scotland. He understood poets and ‘seers’ to be artists who could direct the future, and had long foreseen that the historical apostasy of the Scottish elite made new forms of cultural and political activism absolute necessities.

Neat’s early chapters remind us of just how talented the young Henderson was. Born in Gaelic-speaking Glenshee, he would spend most of the next 20 years at school and university in England and on active military service in North Africa and Italy. It was clear early that Henderson would go far: by the age of 17 he had contrived to meet Yeats in Dublin, watch Hitler drive through Berlin’s Tiergarten, view Picasso’s Guernica in Paris (long years before return to its rightful home), and direct his own production of Lady Gregory’s great little one-acter, The Rising of the Moon.

At Cambridge, to which he went on a State Scholarship, he quickly made the acquaintance of Frank and Queenie Leavis (and was intimidated by neither), and in 1939 – on the eve of war in Europe – he went on undercover work to Germany for the Quakers. In Gottingen, he overheard the view that Scotland was that part of England where Chamberlain goes fishing.

By the autumn of 1940, he was a private in the Pioneer Corps, and training for extended military service in North Africa, Sicily and Italy. It was in Sicily – in the space of thirty minutes – that he drafted his great Banks o’ Sicily (the ballad of The D-Day Dodgers would follow shortly) while putting his command of German and Italian to good use alternately as an Allied intelligence officer and anti-fascist partisan in the Italian mountains.

But in May 1945 the Germans surrendered in Italy. And almost at once British Labour won a landslide victory in the General Election. Of this new government, Henderson (among many others) expected much. As Neat puts it, without a tremor of presentiment, he was confident that it would commit itself not just to coherent socialist policies but to a serious review of the ‘Scottish Problem’ and devolved government in Scotland.

Back in Scotland, Henderson soon encountered MacLean (who had been wounded at El Alamein) in Edinburgh and MacDiarmid in Glasgow, and started training as a teacher (teaching being one of the few professions open to those judged to be communists). Henderson also became involved in the National Assembly of the Scottish Convention, in preparations for a People’s Festival, and generally in nationalist and leftist politics.

But the post-war world was a nasty one, and Scotland was no stranger to the vicious eddies and deeps of the Cold War tides. While the communists in Scotland conducted themselves admirably with regard to Scottish culture, Labour in Scotland slunk into the embrace of Anglo-American imperialism. In this endeavour, were many friends. One journalist on the Scotsman, for instance, was in fact a British Intelligence agent with responsibility for recruiting students at Edinburgh University. (How many others of these, one wonders, oozed then – and since - in the sleekit citadels of Unionist hegemony in the stateless nation of Cold War Scotland?)

By the early 1950s, most radical organisations in Scottish politics and culture had been infiltrated by informers and agents-provocateur. And in the winter of 1952-1953, the (British) Labour Party and the (Scottish) Trades Union Congress placed the Edinburgh People’s Festival on its list of proscribed organisations.

Still, there was work to do. Henderson translated Gramsci, though he could not find a publisher until 1974, in the form of New Edinburgh Review, published by the Edinburgh University Students’ Union (to their eternal credit). And throughout it all - in the wake of Erskine of Marr and Willie Gillies half a century earlier - he saw Gaelic culture as the cornerstone of Scots culture and a crucial component of the wider National Question.

In this period he also wrote the John Maclean March (the BBC banned it), which was first sung (by William Noble) in 1948 at a meeting to commemorate Maclean, and that autumn Henderson was supporting the Knoydart land raid with his ballad of the Men of Knoydart.

And he was quick to applaud the recovery of the Stone of Scone from Westminster: an event which was at the time regarded by the British Establishment, as a despicable act of treachery. Indeed, King George VI believed that its non-return would presage the end of the Hanoverian dynasty (and who is to say that His Majesty, in the long run, was wrong?)

Henderson was also involved in the small-scale bombing campaign against post-boxes which alleged that the present queen was Elizabeth II of Scotland (an historical impossibility) - levels of surveillance were stepped-up and a host of informers and agents-provocateur recruited – as well as in the subsequent Scottish Treason Trial, which led to four men being gaoled.

But by now, as the first volume of Neat’s biography draws to a close, the School of Scottish Studies has been established at Edinburgh University, with Henderson as one of its first researchers. In the coming years, Henderson was to be one of the School’s distinguished corps of folklorists.

We must await a detailed account of his contribution in that field. Already, however, Henderson, had achieved much. Still in his early ‘thirties, he had already reminded Scotland of how much it looks culturally to the European mainland; already, he had illuminated Scotland’s ragged 20th century quest for a rebirth of national identity.

But the real work was still to come. For Henderson, if not yet for his country, it was indeed the start of A Clear Day Dawning: and the chronicle of that dawn we may confidently expect to encounter in the second volume of Neat’s triumphant biography.

English Takes Over

Will English become the official language of the enlarged 27-nation European Union?

CONSIDER THIS. The United Nations (membership: just about the whole world) makes do with 5 official languages. The European Union (membership already fifteen, and rising) needs that number of official languages in the cause of pleasing those members whose mother tongue is something other than English. But with 27 members within the next decade or two, the need in the Union for a single working language will become more and more pressing. And that language - without any shadow of doubt - must be English. On an unofficial basis, after all, English is already the working language of Europe; and as in Europe, so in growing areas of the wider world.

English is used as an official or semi-official language in over 60 countries, and has a prominent place in a further 20. A quarter of the world’s population speaks it; for half of them, it is a first or second language; for all of them, it is the principal language of commerce and tourism and technology. Mother-tongue speakers, according to minimum estimates, have now reached 300 million; another 350 million use English as a second language; and a further 400 million employ it competently as a foreign language. This is an increase of over 40% since the Second World War. More generous estimates, meantime, put the overall total at something closer to two billion users rather than one.

Over two-thirds of the world’s scientists write in English. Three-quarters of the world’s mail is written in English. Of all the information in the world’s electronic retrieval systems, 80% is stored in English. It is the language (in the shape of Seaspeak) of maritime transport, of Hollywood, of international aviation, of television news networks, increasingly of the world’s stock exchanges, largely of the Internet - and also of an awful lot of popular music.

This globalisation of English is not everywhere met with approval, of course, notably among the European and North American speakers of French. But while they attempt to stem the flood of English words into their language, the rest of the world has been voting with its mouths. It’s a very long time, after all, since French was the chosen language of the Tsarist (and other) ruling-class: even longer since it was the language of international diplomacy.

And in recent years, the rest of the world has caught-on to this decline. In the early 1980s, the Spanish switched wholesale from French to English as the principal foreign language taught in their schools. Rather more recently, Francophone states in Africa such as Algeria and Zaire have been doing the same - an unspectacular but eloquent comment on the way the wind blows. And something over a year ago, the French themselves followed suit, making a small virtue of a large necessity by announcing a major overhaul of the teaching of English in their own schools.

This resistance to English may be laudable on grounds of linguistic diversity. It is certainly comical in the land of le Big Mac (from which land English took at least 10,000 words in the wake of the Norman invasion all those years ago). For instance, last March the French finance ministry wanted to ban everyday franglais expressions like les start-up, stock-options and e-mail - though in this respect the finance ministry might as well go jump in the Seine.

Not that the French are alone. Even the Poles are in on the purity act, with a strong new law last autumn to combat the spread of Polglish. A language police from the new Polish Language Council would enforce the spirit of the new legislation with heavy fines. (Its parliamentary supporters initially wanted to penalise Poles for using English in private conversations!) Out then, go those grand old Polish expressions like sex-shop, music-club, computer, internet and e-mail - and in come manufactured and cumbersome equivalents that not too many people will actually use.

Even the Italians are in on the anti-English act. Last September, for the third time in three years, politicians tried to roll-back the three thousand English (Italish? Englian?) expressions now common in everyday Italian. Among others, the purists cited: outing, transgender, new-economy, blockbuster, call-centre, newsgroup, grunge, megastore, hairdresser, new-age and squatter.

But meantime, in the real world, the demand for English just keeps growing - as is evidenced by the pages and pages of TEFL (teaching English as a foreign language) jobs in the education press every week. As well as an insatiable demand from Japan and Turkey, scores of advertisements solicit teachers for every part of - Poland!

Much of this is driven by the demand of