Very English/British patriotism, Goebbels and the Russian, Zamyatin

The August rebellion demanding a return to British values seems like a lifetime away. Law and order resumed. Far from riots spreading through England into Wales and Scotland they were quickly snuffed out. Rioters and those who incited them had not factored in the recently adopted British value of cracking down on protests, including voicing opinions that don’t conform with those who get to define what is and is not acceptable to think. And so swift justice has been implemented – taking no prisoners – or rather taking lots of prisoners from among rioters with the sort of haste that would be recognisable to more insightful rioters of the past.

The people took over the streets of English towns in ‘protests’ according to the British press. Protests against what? Unlike their antecedents who rioted for food (trays of sausage rolls don’t count) during times when food was being hoarded by corn dealers until prices rose, when unemployment was rife and there were no social benefits provided by the state. Desperate times. Historically there have been riots over religion and the hiring of foreign labour that undercut wages and undermined the collective bargaining power of workers on inadequate pay. Similarities then with the summer rebellion? Well, hardly at all. The recent ‘protestors’ who wanted to ‘take back’ Britain/England for the British/English from their perceived threat of being swamped by ‘foreigners’ did so not because foreign doctors, pharmacists, nurses, care workers were taking jobs off rioters but because of some erroneous belief in a pure British/English existence that would otherwise exist in the sunny uplands that house their concrete estates.

Englishness sometimes couched as Britishness but essentially is always Englishness has been promoted by politicians and Britain’s overwhelmingly rightwing press for years. British good. Foreign bad. Goodness that’s what Brexit was all about – xenophobia. They don’t mean those foreigners who operate on you when you get cancer, or the ones who wipe your backside when you’re too infirm to do it yourself – well, probably they do, they did throw stones at Filipino nurses on their way to work – but needs must. That’s been the message time and time again. Them and Us.

Hatred and fear stirred up by journalists, politicians and social commentators has been entirely successful with ‘them’ – desperate, motivated people many of whom arrive with nothing but the clothes on their backs on arrival in the UK – are left in no doubt how despised and feared they are as demonstrated by the men and women of England and Northern Ireland and their looted plastic crocs, biscuits and sausage rolls. The targets of those incoherent and angry soap bombers were not unlike themselves except better educated in some cases and more lucid – the powerless and vulnerable. And so gullible working-class dupes are banged up for acting out the xenophobia whipped up by prominent hate-mongers who’ve retreated into the background until the current furore dies down; before they start it up all over again.

What we saw wasn’t a revolution. It was a reaction. The ‘reactionaries’ want everyone in their towns to be like them – look like them. Homogeneity – a very British aspiration was what struck Russian maritime engineer and author, Yevgeny Zamyatin, when he arrived in Britain in 1916 to oversee the building of Russian icebreakers. In Jesmond, a suburb of Newcastle, he found its people narrow in their outlook, distrustful of outsiders, craving for conformity and predictability – an automaton existence that he suspected had grown out of industrialisation and with its controlling influence over workers’ lives – they clock in, they clock out – morning, noon and night. In 1916 Britain was far more industrialised than Russia. Suspicion of outsiders and insularity wasn’t confined to the good people of Newcastle but the norm among communities across the UK and much of the world. Zamyatin, being the proverbial alien, felt this hostility – and remember this was in the middle of the First World War – even though Russia was an ally of Britain.

His loneliness possibly heightened the alienation the Russian felt. Everything in Britain he found strange and unfamiliar – and deadly dull. The locals, he concluded, were philistines whose god was banality. Unhappy, Zamyatin relieved the monotony of life in England by writing a novella based on his experiences. The Islanders is populated by Britishers who like what they know and don’t like what they don’t know. Sound familiar? Think British holidaymakers abroad who sneer at the foreign muck which they don’t recognise as food. Think England’s rioters. Did any of those who raided Greggs go for focaccia or Black Forest gateau or just British sausage rolls?

None of the recent events would have surprised Zamyatin. For he

“felt exactly like on an island, like Robinsons. All around is the gray North Sea, full of steel sharks. All around are strange, wonderful Fridays, who hear familiar English words, but understand them only externally – for ordinary Englishmen we are only a miracle of nature: talking seals”.

He found himself mixing with people who revelled in the tedium of their lives and monotony as an admirable British tradition.   

“…every Englishman is a Tory at heart”

As a foreigner looking in on Britain in the early years of the 20^th century Zamyatin feared the British fondness for the reactionary was a breeding ground for totalitarianism.

In The Islanders, Zamyatin, like a cartoonist, condenses individuals to their most striking features such as wriggling pink lips or a pair of pince-nez. In his later and best-known work, We, he further dehumanised his characters to mere numbers. We is the  futuristic dystopian novel that inspired Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s 1984.

Reflecting on his time in the UK, he was briefly in Glasgow as well as in England, Zamyatin conceded that British people did retain a morsel of their individuality but that this was dwarfed by their mindset and behaviour that was shaped by those they saw as their betters – society’s elites who thought nothing of provoking fear and loathing of them – invariably foreigners. Firing up emotions in the suckers who heeded the clarion call to action and took to the streets to face the consequences. Street activists one hardly distinguishable from another.  In The Islanders Zamyatin’s Britishers were uniformly turned out in formal wear of suits and ties. On the streets of England and Northern Ireland leisure wear was the uniform of choice underlining their uniformity of purpose, to wreck and intimidate.

Some of those arrested, charged and dispatched to prison are what might be described as poor souls – society’s losers. Their lives may have been blighted by lack of education, lack of work training, lack of life choices and a simple belief in sleazy, lying social and political influencers – the sort who spun a web of deceit over Brexit claims that has left the British economy badly damaged along with a sharp decline in international trade resulting in job losses and incomes. None of this has been down to any asylum seeker in a rubber dinghy. The inability to accept self-inflicted harm by self-appointed patriots wrapped in union flags finds a ready audience within the ranks of the bored, ill-educated xenophobes who blame foreigners for taking British jobs (despite this never being true), preventing access to the NHS (despite this never being true and the NHS being hugely dependent on overseas labour), not being able to pay to heat their homes (despite this being the result of greedy energy companies and government policies), for highly priced food (a consequence of Brexit that many protestors support) and so on.

Burning a library and Citizen’s Advice Bureau are the result of stupidity and are hooliganism. A library that rioters might have walked past every day of their lives without giving it a second glance becomes an object of hate when empowered by mass action. What would Zamyatin have thought about those faceless individuals breaking out of their everyday conformity to indulge in collective disorder of smashing up property and ransacking shops but not the library with its books full of radical and dangerous ideas? Despair, probably. Not that the rioters would care. Zamyatin was, after all, them, a foreigner, not an English/British patriot who own their own streets and neighbourhoods – even while trashing them.

Zamyatin witnessed similar rightwing rioters marauding through Germany’s streets in the 1930s, destroying property and attacking people, especially those they regarded as outsiders. They too, were egged on by rightwing politicians and a rightwing press. The more the world changes the more it remains the same.  

In 1932 Joseph Goebbels wrote,

“The street is now the primary feature of modern politics. Whoever can conquer the street can also conquer the masses, and whoever conquers the masses will thereby conquer the state.”

Many lessons were learnt from the 1930s, not least among Britain’s insular, far-right politicians and press that mainstream xenophobia. Every one of them would describe themselves as British or English patriots. Asylum seekers and refugees are scapegoats for governments failing the economy and implementing tighter and tighter restrictions over individual freedom as Britain eases into authoritarianism. Out on the streets the rioters pick up the gauntlet and throw stones at Filipino nurses.

Zamyatin saw it coming. I think many of us did.

Home Rule, Devolution, Independence – a never-ending journey

What we now know as devolution used to be called Home Rule.

“I’m a great believer in devolution” – Keir Starmer, 9 July 2024. He continued, “those that know their communities, make much better decisions than people sitting in Westminster and Whitehall.”

Starmer was talking about giving more power to towns in the north of England. Devolution is high on Starmer’s agenda following the general election by which he became Prime Minister. I think it’s probably also high on John Swinney’s agenda. Independence is as far from Swinney’s agenda as it is from Starmer’s. In 2020 Starmer said “no responsible Prime Minister would grant a fresh Scottish independence referendum in the early part of the next Holyrood term as favoured by the ruling SNP”. 

Starmer used to say that an SNP majority would be a mandate for another independence vote. But changed his mind when elections delivered that mandate. The man who’s known best for flip-flopping on what he believes now says, “the last thing Scotland needs now is more years of division”.

Labour Party MPs representing Scottish constituencies happily pose in front of the English national flag

Call me picky but years of division are what comes from the denial of a referendum. With increasing numbers of Scots in favour of independence, younger Scots especially, continuing interference from Westminster in Scottish life fosters division.

You want to witness division? Look no further than England to find deep divisions. The whole UK is polarised. Brexit has exacerbated divisions which have long existed – between the north and south of England, between poverty and prosperity, leftwing and rightwing ideologies, pro- and anti-immigration. Labour won the general election with only 33.7% of the vote under a political system that fuels unfairness and division. Starmer and Labour don’t care about that kind of division which has provided them with power and control at Westminster.  

This division argument is nonsensical and a cynical convenience for the likes of Starmer. The central principal comes down to whether or not the union is voluntary and equal or coercive. Post-independence Scotland would be no more divided politically, socially etc than it is now – that England is now – that every nation is now. Only totalitarian states make a pretence that the people are all of one mind.

Devolution or Home Rule (a term coined in the 1870s during Ireland’s struggle for independence) was seen as a compromise that the union might live with through the granting of limited powers while cutting the legs of demands for independence.  

When union between England and Scotland was agreed, London became its de facto administrative centre, with total power and control reserved to Westminster and Whitehall, and a honcho in the shape of a Secretary for Scotland to represent London government in Scotland. With the Jacobite uprising in 1746 this role was taken over by the Lord Advocate, until 1827 when all pretence that Scotland was a separate nation was dropped and Scottish affairs were controlled directly by the Westminster Home Office. Naturally, this did not go down at all well in Scotland and in 1885 (until 1999) Scottish affairs were again managed by a Secretary for Scotland, within a Scottish Office – the title changed to Secretary of State for Scotland in 1926.   

The union has always been a ramshackle vehicle of coercion. With the growing clamour for Irish independence in the 19^th century Scots felt encouraged to argue for the same for Scotland. Independence was “sold” off by “Edinburgh lawyers and politicians” according to a man who once represented Labour values before it adopted Thatcherism – free market economics and privatisation, (John Maclean, All Hail, the Scottish Workers Republic!, Aug 1922).

“We lost oor Independence, but we’re gaun tae get it back” song Perfervidum Ingenium Scotorum from Homage to John Mclean (published by the John Maclean Society, 1973)

John Maclean, a Glasgow teacher who unsuccessfully stood for the Labour Party in the post-war election of 1918, would be expelled from today’s centre-right party. Maclean recognised that Scotland, like Ireland, would always be an afterthought, at best, at Westminster and so backed Home Rule until it became clear to him that devolution was a poor substitute for independence. Maclean died at just 44 years old, in 1923, the year he established the Scottish Workers Republican Party, killed through the actions of spiteful governments that harassed and imprisoned him for his political ideas.  

Unionist voices warned Ireland it was too poor to thrive as an independent state. The same warnings made about Scotland – too poor, too wee. What has size to do with anything? small, successive independent countries around the world might ask. While Ireland pushed ahead Scotland hesitated.

In 1886 the Scottish Land Reform Alliance at its conference in Aberdeen decided to go with Home Rule by which all four nations of the UK, England, Ireland, Wales and Scotland, had equal parliaments along with Westminster. Support for Home Rule strengthened and in 1912 Prime Minister Asquith declared the equivalent of, now is not the time. In 1913 a Scottish Home Rule Bill completed its second reading before grinding to a halt with the onset of the Great War. Following the end of that terrible war unhappiness with the inferior status of Scotland within the union attracted support.  

One hundred years ago, in 1924, Scottish Labour MP, George Buchanan, introduced a Scottish Home Rule draft Bill into the Commons recommending a Scottish parliament of 148 elected members from the union’s parliamentary constituencies, each returning two members.  And since Labour was then socialist, there would be no oath of allegiance to the monarch but acknowledgement they would serve the people. This devolved parliament would be responsible for most areas of government bar foreign affairs and defence. Scotland’s share of the UK national debt would be eleven eightieths and Scotland would receive the same percentage of the UK’s assets, or something similar arrived at through negotiations.

Five years later a proposition similar to the 1886 one was proposed by the Scottish Home Rule Association based on USA federalism whereby governmental powers in Scotland would be protected by law and not vulnerable to the political vicissitudes of Westminster – devolved powers as they currently are constituted could be partially or completely removed by a government in London.  As there is no written constitution in the UK, devolution powers are not protected by law. In 1929 the Liberals, Labour and Independent Labour Party supported the proposal prompting a jittery Conservative Party to add Unionists to their name as the Conservative and Unionist Party. Instrumental in the Scottish Home Rule Association were Keir Hardie, founding member of the Labour Party, and fellow Scot, Ramsay Macdonald, who would later go on to become the first Labour Prime Minister. Hardie was active in the Scottish Land Restoration League, the Scottish Land and Labour League, the Crofters Party and the Scottish Labour Party all of which promoted Home Rule for Scotland.

Thirteen motions for Scottish Home Rule were discussed at Westminster between the 1880s and 1914 when the STUC adopted the principle of Home Rule at its Congress. In 1920 the Scots National League for Scottish Independence was setup. The pro-independence National Party of Scotland of 1928 and the unionist Scottish Party of 1932 amalgamated to form the Scottish National Party in 1934. For a brief time the SNP called for a devolved assembly for Scotland before backing full independence.   

The current devolution settlement does nothing to heal differences between Scotland and London where the main power continues to lie and from that reality the inequalities of devolution are made stark and demonstrate the intrinsic inequality of the union. No equal union exists where one partner exerts power over another.

For as many Scots who have actively supported independence there are others who actively defend the union. Some see the union as a strength that protects Scotland and it is their voices that have carried more force since the union. Voices such as that of the grandly titled Lord Strathspey, the Strathspeys found positions within the British Empire and had strong links with New Zealand so had skin in the game, as might be said. In fact you have to go back to 1809 to find a Strathspey from Scotland – most of the later ones never seem to have set foot in the country so hardly surprising that one of a string of Lords Strathspey recommended Scotland’s brightest young people should move away to make their careers elsewhere because they wouldn’t find the same opportunities in Scotland – which strikes me as a strong argument against the union and its harmful impact on Scotland. For Strathspey – “Scotland, comparatively poor, is in partnership with a rich partner who finds no small share of the common burdens” – which is an earlier version of the too poor argument.

While Scotland followed the route of constitutional persuasion Ireland took up arms. By 1921 it achieved partial independence.

With Labour back in power at Westminster there will be no compromise with the half of Scotland that yearns for independence, Labour is a unionist organisation that will use the anachronistic Scottish Office to govern increasingly from London. When the Scottish parliament was reconvened in 1999 under Labour it was done under duress, to preserve the union, and made clear that devolution was always under the largesse of Westminster. The subordination of Scotland is not about to change. The Labour Party is implacably unionist nowadays. It is a sterile argument over whether Labour’s roots through the personage of Keir Hardie was or wasn’t an advocate of independence or just Home Rule. Hardie’s dead. Just how dead we only have to look at newly elected Labour MPs arranging themselves to be photographed along with strings of flags of St George of England. Many of these MPs representing Scottish constituencies don’t come from/don’t live in Scotland – they have more in common with Lord Strathspey than Keir Hardie.

And so it continues. The divisions. Until Scotland is independent there will be divisions. After Scotland is independent there will be divisions, as there are in every state around the world – except, remember, totalitarian ones where divisions there are – only their existence denied.

Starmer’s Labour Party sing-a-long to the UK national anthem that has division at its core but like the myth of happy, contented people in authoritarian regimes they choose to ignore THAT verse – you know the one where the English revel in crushing the Scots.  

It’s not fashionable to sing verse 6 nowadays and for more reasons than one it’s just as well for surely there’s not another national anthem as monotonous a dirge as God Save the King.  But the Labour Party like it. Who knows they might yet resurrect verse 6.

Unionists within the Labour Party and outwith who interpret Labour’s victories over nationalist candidates in the general election as an indication of support for independence is dead and buried, like Keir Hardie, will discover they are wrong. No one party represents independence in the same way as no one party represents unionism but for the present the Lord Strathspeys are back in the driving seat and the flag of St George flies triumphant.

The SNP – help! Calamitous careering careers

Who in the world am I? Ah, that’s the great puzzle.

Perhaps where in the world am I? the SNP leadership should be asking. But probably are not. They don’t do asking. Despite claims to be collaborative, they ain’t. Try Stalinist. Dissent isn’t tolerated. The SNP is ruled by an inner circle that demands obedience from party apparatchiks.

You might think the walloping the party received at the polls would encourage some reflection on why. Nothing of the kind. Senior SNP member, Tricia Marwick, took to twitterX to rage at Robin McAlpine for having the gall to criticise her party on grounds he isn’t a member. Isn’t a member? Very few Scots voting for her party are members and doesn’t her imperious blindness sum them up. I’ve never been a member of the party but I have chapped on doors for it, delivered leaflets for it, spoken up in defence of it and, Marwick, voted for it. But – if she’s only interested in SNP members their vote will sink to 70,000.

One of those dumped, David Linden, cannot understand why pro-independence supporters didn’t vote for him given he’s spent years at Westminster. Out of the mouths . . . The SNP career roadmap to easy-street includes a long pitstop at Westminster.

Nobody can sneer quite as adeptly as the odious ex-MP Stewart McDonald. Writing for the unionist rag, The Scotsman, he offered tips for his replacement at Westminster ‘as he starts his new career’. See what I mean? Career!!! So much for representing constituents in the SNP’s drive towards independence. Independence? Nah. It’s careers that mattered to the SNP troughers.

On the subject of troughers getting their jotters we find a few that by themselves lost thousands of votes from women and men who didn’t fall for their undisguised misogyny – Alyn Smith, the afore-mentioned Stewart McDonald, Hannah Bardell, Anne McLaughlin, Kirsten Oswald, John Nicolson, Tommy Sheppard (a few years ago I was an admirer of Sheppard and went to hear him in Alford but after asking a question [can’t remember the topic] I came away disillusioned. Just another out of touch party mouthpiece). Not every former SNP MP is a bigot. The admiral Joanna Cherry lost her seat because the party lost the peoples’ support following too many scandals and ineptitudes at Holyrood.  Casting an eye over the Holyrood ineptitudes we find Shirley-Anne Somerville, Angus Robertson, Shona Robison, Neil Gray, Jenny Gilruth, Angela Constance, Mairi McAllan, Emma Harper, Christina McKelvie, Kaukab Stewart, Emma Roddick, Joe Fitzpatrick, Keith Browne. STOP!!! You get the message. I almost forgot Humza Yousaf who is instantly forgettable when out of sight. Said to be a nice guy – well he wasn’t at all nice to Ash Regan following his leadership win in 2023. As the party’s man he was destined to succeeded. But even the party machine couldn’t prevent a dud from sinking into oblivion.   

And John Swinney. What can you say? I remember him as leader first time around from 2000 to his resignation after the EU election of 2004. He was eye-rollingly dull back then, failing to connect with the public and giving ditchwater a run for its money. To think that Kate Forbes was diddled out of the leadership by the two mediocrities – Swinney and Yousaf.

The party that put ridiculous niche interests, gender recognition and porn drama, before essential services such as the NHS, education, transport, local services is a party that has stopped listening to its grass roots. A lineup of incompetent ministers has tested the patience of weary Scots for so long willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.  

I am not crazy; my reality is just different from yours.

The NHS. Don’t run down the SNHS, I hear some of you shout. I’m not. The SNP government is. Where I live in the NHS Grampian region, GP surgeries are shutting and hospital waiting times are terrifyingly long – not because of the nurses and doctors but because of how the service is run. A few years ago, if you had cancer or were suspected of having cancer referrals to hospital and treatments happened in days. Now in Grampian the waits are scary. One patient is recorded as waiting 8 months to begin treatment with only 54% patients starting treatment 2 months after referral at the end of last year. Look at the current waiting times – bladder and bowel specialist nursing – 42 weeks; cardiology 45 weeks with urgent referrals waiting 21 weeks – that’s 6 months – FOR URGENT – I know I’m one of them. Dermatology waiting times 97 weeks and those with suspicion of cancer are waiting 26 weeks (used to be days back in the 1990s – I know I was one of them); urgent cases of suspected breast cancer are waiting 8 weeks. Ear Nose and Throat urgent cases wait 47 weeks and non-urgent 87 weeks; podiatry 135 weeks; urology 129 weeks and so it goes on in this depressing and disquieting manner.

Centralisation. A major criticism folk in Scotland – and the SNP – make about the UK government is the concentration of institutions, wealth and power in London yet are blind to the concentration of institutions, wealth and power in the central belt; this really angers people in the rest of Scotland. When Police Scotland and the Fire Service were centralised, there were battles to retain some local input but local call centres were closed and with them important local knowledge that led to dangerous emergency situations with emergency vehicles sent to wrong destinations. Police Scotland have 3 call centres – all in the central belt at Motherwell, Edinburgh and Glasgow. The farthest north Fire Services call centre is in Dundee – for readers in the central belt that ain’t the north.

Don’t mention the –

Ferries – don’t mention ferries shout SNP supporters who live in towns and cities with plenty transport systems. They point to the UK government’s catastrophic fiasco with their warships – late, hugely expensive and always breaking down. Comparisons with another inept government to make your point isn’t a strong argument. People in Scotland’s islands depend on ferries like many of you depend on buses and cars – more so for food and goods and health care are dependent on ferries to island communities. The CalMac contracts were incompetently written and while warships don’t create major issues for locals and visitors on islands, the lack of ferries does. Building bridges would be a more permanent solution in some circumstances but the SNP government are not even capable of dualling the A96 and A9. Of course, being outside the central belt these two vital roads are not a priority.  

Covid – all those daily presentations. Many of us did find it essential listening. If only the government listened to their own advice. But they didn’t and transferred untested people from hospitals into care homes – a deadly and tragic mistake. Unforgivable. And you didn’t have to be in government or a health expert to know back then this was reprehensible action.

Gender Recognition Reform. Truly a horrendous piece of legislation that alienated almost every woman in the country and signalled to girls and women that their lives and safety are of lesser value than those of a group of demanding, aggressive and narcissistic men. Ushering it through parliament the hapless Shona Robison notoriously commented that “There is no evidence that predatory and abusive men have ever had to pretend to be anything else to carry out abusive and predatory behaviour.” Except they have. She and every MSP (not only SNP but it’s them I’m writing about) – wanted to let trans people feel valued. There was no questioning of the concept of trans with its roots in sex stereotypes. There was no interest in ensuring women and girls felt valued. Consultation was confined to pro-trans organisations, most of them funded by the Scottish government. Abuse was hurled at women and men by party hacks who criticised this offensive legislation designed to empower trans. But not women.

Council tax freezes. Advocating the freezing of council taxes over years has led already underfunded local authorities shutting down local services because there simply is not the money to keep them operating. A ridiculous policy that really hurts communities.

The Scottish National Investment Bank to fund commercial projects. £460 million invested into projects has yielded only around £10 million. Just £1 million of the £9 million loaned to Circulatory Scotland has been repaid. The Green Party-led scheme Circulatory Scotland collapsed with debts and liabilities of more than £86 million. And allowing for Westminster dirty tricks used to undermine this scheme its organisation was poor.

Money – phooey pooey – the public will provide. Oh, how the party machine dug its wheels in trying to save the ‘career’ of Michael Matheson of the £11,000 data roaming bill on his official iPad for watching football while on holiday in Morocco. But what about!!  – scream the usual suspects – never mind whataboutery. Campervangate. Independence fund. We haven’t got to the end of that movie. Quite honestly I wouldn’t know where to start with Sturgeon and Murrell so it’s probably best leaving that unsavoury topic to someone else. If your immediate reaction is to compare with the lowest common denominator at Westminster then I’ve been supporting the wrong party for years.

Independence. Independence matters. It is the only way Scotland will thrive into the future but there’s precious little appetite for independence among the careerists in the SNP. Where were they over the years Scots were marching for independence? Aloof, in their ivory tower comparing notes on career strategies while the poor bloody infantry was defending the cause on the streets of Scotland.

It’s no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then.

Quackocracy – the Great British Rake Off

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.”

Yes, despair. Forget the French Revolution to which Charles Dickens was referring – think 21^st century UK but without the wisdom, belief, light and hope.

The UK political system cannot in all seriousness be described as a democracy. No democracy includes a legislative chamber comprised of placemen and women –a melange of those rejected at the polls, crooks, the corrupted and cronies.

Quackocracy was Thomas Carlyle’s judgement on post-revolutionary government in France. For Carlyle at least there was optimism that in the long-term democracy might be achieved there. His term, quackocracy, was adopted by the 19^th century press as aptly descriptive of their politicians – stupid and ignorant. If the coming election in the UK demonstrates anything it is that very little has changed, if anything. We are living through the worst of times, the age of foolishness, the epoch of incredulity, the season of darkness and the summer of despair.

Quackocracy derived from quack: a charlatan possibly Dutch origin from kwakzalver or hawker of ointments; a swindler, hustler, fraud, a cheat and the suffix  cracy from the Greek meaning rule or government.

Was there ever a more perfect definition of our politics and politicians? They promise the earth – and cost us the earth.

“Democracy is nothing more than the quackocracy of persons who undertake to cure the nation’s ailments”, observed a writer in The Clarion in 1896.

Thirty years later Truth publication took a swipe both at swaggering politicians, the duplicitous fourth estate, the press, in the form of The Daily Clatter and its owner and political influencer, Lord Quackington, driven by profits not patriotism. The criticism of the press is applicable to the majority of politicians. Not mincing its words a 19^th century Australian journal dismissed the UK, England actually, but probably meant the UK, as “The Paradise of Quacks” – puff and plunder. And didn’t Covid harbinger of so much misery and death to far too many demonstrate how much plunder of public funds there was by members of the Westminster government and their pals, now very rich pals.

If Carlyle thought the French revolutionaries lacked ambition what on earth would he have made of the UK Labour Party and its election pledge to fix up to a million pot holes in England. England – it means the UK. No wait, it means England. The party that defends a union that none can escape from that begins and ends with England. Angela (look I’m wearing a Scotland football top) Rayner alongside Starmer and the woman with the helmet for hair, Reeves is it? – touting a Great British Energy company with it sop to Scotland – you can have a nameplate on a door. Just what Scotland needs. More tokenism from Westminster and a little bit of England. Pigswash, as Carlyle will no doubt be bellowing down from heaven, or up from the other place. You’re offering pigswash, Starmer, Rayner, the woman with stahlhelm hair The British people are stupid, observed Carlyle, just look at who they support in government. But surely they were never as stupid as they are now, their brain cells zapped by mindless pap such as Loose Women and Love Island.

On the subject of pigswash and mindless pap the Scottish Labour leader the multi-millionaire Anas Sarwar and son of a former governor of Punjab has an odd fascination with hanging around litter-strewn streets with the odd abandoned mattress promising highly paid jobs for Scots (odd given his family’s business shocking record on low pay) and re-skilling. Re-skilling occurs when an industry shuts down and workers lose their jobs. Scotland has a long, long history of industries shutting down. Glasgow, Sarwar’s home town, has a long history of Labour Party rule and an equally long history of appalling deprivation, political corruption, slum housing, ill health and premature deaths. In the early 2000s Glasgow’s premature mortality was around 30% higher than in comparable English cities such as Liverpool and Manchester (those comparisons are there because Labour likes to compare Scotland with England). This dreadful statistic is curious because for over forty years, nearly half a century, the fossil fuel industries off the coast of Scotland have been a major contributor to the UK’s GDP, including periods when Labour was in government. So why did a Labour government and Labour council in Glasgow not reduce poverty, deprivation, ill health and premature death at a stroke? Political quackery is the answer to that conundrum.

For all those forty plus years Westminster ministers and their cronies at the Daily Clatters have predicted the imminent decline of oil and gas off Scotland but just in case it didn’t decline quickly enough the Labour government under Tony (illegal war) Blair redesignated part of the north sea – reducing Scottish water to increase England’s share. Why? Fear of Scotland becoming an independent state in receipt of the $trillions from oil and gas off Scotland’s east coast instead of revenues from these offshore industries being pooled across the UK. Sort of.

North sea oil and gas contributed £12 billion to Westminster’s coffers in 2008-09. Income from north sea extractions has always varied according to the price of oil and in 2021 -22 receipts were £9.4 billion. Last year, 2022-23, tax revenue generated in Scotland amounted to £87.5 billion (8.6% of UK total – Scottish population is 8.2% UK total) including that £9.4 billion coming from oil and gas.  The average annual block grant from Westminster to Scotland (because Scotland is in a ‘voluntary’ union it can never leave) is £41 billion. Lots of numbers – simply put, compare Scotland’s fossil fuel industries and income with Norway – similar population size of around 5 million, that went from agriculture, forestry and fishing in the 1980s (Scotland had more heavy industries) to exploiting offshore oil and gas. Since then the fortunes of Scotland and Norway have diverged greatly. Scotland is still plagued with inequality and dreadful poverty with all that entails while Norway has become one of the richest countries in the world with a high standard of living, an efficient social security system that spends 22% GDP on social needs – in the UK it is 11% GDP. It is democratic, unlike the UK with the House of Lords. Norway is run by a single elected constitutional chamber. Education is free and their universal health care system is mainly funded through taxation. Norway is among the least corrupt countries – far ahead of the UK which is not surprising. Public spending in Norway is 56.6% GDP – in UK it is 45.3%. And to enable its high living standards, taxes are high – 45% GDP – UK 33.5%.  But are they happy? I hear you ask. Norway is in the top 10 happiest countries while the UK languishes at 20th.

Instead of squandering its north sea bonanza Norway invested part of it for the future, a nest egg worth $1.4 trillion. Scotland has seen virtually nothing from industries in its waters. There has been no corresponding improvements to the health, welfare and education of Scots (or evidence of this happening anywhere in the UK). Of course, Norway didn’t have a Thatcher who chose to enrich the few not the many. Some of them quack ministers. Free marketeers fast-tracked profits from north sea oil and gas into their pockets. London boomed. It was, after all the oil capital of Europe -oh wait, that was Aberdeen. Aberdeen saw none of it. Labour Prime Minister, James Callaghan, gleefully described the discovery of oil and gas off Scotland as “God’s gift to the British economy”.  Hu-bloody – rah.

And Labour – Starmer, Rayner and the woman with the helmet haircut are back at it again – eyeing up Scotland’s wind and water renewable energy for their Great British Rake Off. Scotland will be fleeced. Again. Back in the 1980s the once nationalised Britoil and BP were privatised. In the 2020s Labour’s union jack wrapper will say UK on the outside while inside the small print will read reassuring messages to private investors that putting cash into Scotland’s natural resources will reap them huge returns. Directly. Scotland will get a nameplate.

For many Scots the lesson has been learnt by looking at Norway and its collective approach to energy riches to make a “qualitatively better society”. Thatcher denied there is any such thing as society only individuals. And so the revenue that could have/ should have been available for Scotland to provide a well-resourced welfare state, enhance health and education into the far future was denied. No part of the UK, least of all the poorest, has benefitted to any extent from our fossil fuel extraction. High earners have. In 1991 tax for top earners was lowered from 60% to 40% and corporation tax from 52% to 33%. That’s what comes of electing quacks.

Trickle down economics

The inequality gap in the UK is a disgrace. While the rich grew richer on the backs of oil and gas workers the most vulnerable found life got harder. There was a surge of 33% in inequality between rich and poor in the 1980s when oil and gas were gushing out of the north sea. Trickle-down economics was spouted ad nauseam – a joke played by the rich and powerful on the rest of us. In 2022-23 the poverty figure shot up to 12 million -18 % people in the UK.

You get what you vote for in a quackocracy. Free market billionaires see Labour as the   party that most shares their “values and principles” … “in complete alignment with my views as a commercial capitalist” (John Caudwell BBC Newsnight, 18 June 2024). Vying to be most rightwing and cosying up to private capital Labour and Tories are competing to be the party of lowest taxes. 12 million living in dire straits and they choose to lower taxes. So Sunak, Starmer, Rayner and the woman with stahlhelm hair where will the money come from to save the NHS, essential services and prevent rural dwellers being stranded with no transport available and town centres becoming wastelands? The wheels have fallen off the UK handcart that’s hurtling towards hell which takes us back to roads and Labour’s pot hole promise.

Norway is off and running once more – into the future investing in renewable energy. It has the cash to invest in these vital industries. Quackocracy UK misses one opportunity after another. Norway’s future looks rosy. In drab, dreary, broken Britain it is the worst of times dear voter. There is no light. There is no hope. It might be summer but not summer as we know it – a summer of despair.

A Scottish doctor, an English Tory Lord and a British oil syndicate walked into Persia …

Why?

The Bakhtiari people of Persia (Iran) were nomads from the west of the country.  Bakhtiari I’ve read means fortunate (as in escaping danger) or the name might allude to their geographic location. The Bakhtiari were very active during Persia’s revolution of 1905-11 which resulted in the first parliamentary constitution in the Islamic world – until Russia smothered this infant democracy. In 1914, at the outbreak of the Great War, the Russian authorities in Persia instructed a young Scottish doctor, Elizabeth Ross, to abandon her work as a physician to Bakhtiari women and take over the running of a military hospital in Serbia – where she contracted typhus from her patients and died.  

Russia was one of the European powers that had been sniffing around Persia for about a century to extend its influence in the east. Another was Britain for Persia provided a shortcut to that jewel in its imperial crown, India. Among other things. By 1905 the majority of Persians were desperate to be rid of foreigners speculating on how best to strip their land of anything profitable, including oil, but the Russian-backed shah did not share the peoples’ frustration, instead he encouraged foreign speculation with incentive tax breaks and private deals. He accumulated a fortune from selling off Persia’s assets; encouraging Russia and Britain to divvy up Persia (Iran) into three regions. In 1907 Britain took over the south of the country including the Persian Gulf, Russia got the north while the middle of this economic sandwich was classified as neutral.

It had been suspected for many years that oil could be found under Persian soil and confirmation from geological surveys led to secret negotiations between the shah’s inner circle and a British-based syndicate resulting in it being given drilling rights for several decades into the future. Rights to the country’s natural gas, petroleum and asphalt. The oil to be extracted lay in the territory of the Bakhtiari at Masjed Soleiman and an agreement was hammered out that gave the British group 16% of the profits and just 3% to the Bakhtiari. Naturally the Bakhtiari felt fleeced by this arrangement. One positive for them it might be argued was that with so much water contaminated with oil there were fewer breeding areas for mosquitos. Small compensation as polluted water wasn’t great for humans and animals either.

In 1909 a Scottish company, Burmah Oil, created the Anglo-Persian Oil Company. Burmah’s founder was David Sime Cargill from Maryton, Montrose who had been scouring the east for oil for several decades. Just five years before its start world war was looking very likely and the British navy sought to transfer from coal to oil. Burmah Oil won the supply contract. Then in 1914 the British government bought up 51% of Anglo-Persian Oil’s shares, effectively nationalising it. In 1954 Anglo-Persian became the British Petroleum Company, the forerunner of B.P.

Some people made vast fortunes out of Persia’s oil. Not many of them were Persians. The shah working hand in glove with Russia and Britain sucked wealth and economic opportunities away from the native majority. While the new oil industry provided jobs for some, many more were detrimentally impacted. Handicrafts long a source of income for Persians especially women who were highly skilled carpet makers were sacrificed on the altar of western capitalist trade. The lifeblood of Persia (Iran)was drained. Farms and villages reduced to sand disappeared altogether.

Corruption wasn’t confined to the shah and his family. Bribery and fraud were rife amongst the country’s tribal chiefs. Persia was a dangerous place to travel through with highway robbery endemic. Caravans of goods were frequently raided, villages and towns plundered. Every faction was armed to the teeth. Life was perilous. Rival tribes stole from each other. They in turn were robbed by regional governors who were robbed by the shah’s men. Britian knew which side its bread was buttered and backed the Bakhtiari holders of the land rich in oil but the chaotic state of affairs in the country gravely concerned the British government and commerce because lawlessness was an ever-present threat to their trade such as the movement of cotton and silver.

Dr Elizabeth Ross was working in Persia during the time oil was discovered. She had graduated in medicine in 1901, one of the first women in Britain to do so. She took up a few different posts in Colonsay, Oronsay, Tain and London but her sense of adventure and curiosity about the world, probably reflected in her speciality of tropical medicine, led to her taking up an appointment as a ‘Lady Doctor for the East’.

A sea voyage to Russia followed by hundreds of miles overland by horse-drawn carriages delivered Elizabeth to mystical and enchanting Tehran and then on to the medieval walled town of Julfa in difficult wintry weather conditions. In her memoir, A Lady Doctor in Bakhtiari Land, Elizabeth Ross draws comparisons between this exotic land and her homeland as, for example, similarities between the Bakhtiari tribal chief Samasam-os-Saltaneh and highland chiefs she had known back in Scotland. It struck her that in her part of Scotland two languages were widely spoken – Gaelic and English – while the Bakhtiari also communicated in dual languages, their own and Persian. The importance of education, both for girls and boys to some level, was shared by Scots and the Bakhtiari. As for Scotland’s reputed cold climate, Elizabeth had never at home encountered the freezing cold that froze her hot water bottle as she lay in bed or turn a cup of tea to ice that happened in Persia. On the other hand daytime temperatures soared as high as 160 degrees Fahrenheit under the Persian sun and nothing in Scotland comes close to that either.   

At Dehkord, “a dreary little townlet in the midst of a desolate district” she settled. The town made up mostly of mud houses had few gardens to soften the landscape and there was little in the way of agriculture but the surrounding countryside was thick with nut trees and figs. Out among the Bakhtiari hills ancient forts reminded Elizabeth of Knockfarrel, the iron age hill fort on the Cat’s Back, the distinctive range between Dingwall and Strathpeffer. Unlike Knockfarrel the Persian hill forts were only accessible by ladders and ropes and yet accessed they were by Bakhtiari shepherds for up there the land provided excellent fertile grazing for their herds. So rich were those eyrie pastures that sheep would sometimes have two seasons of lamb in a year. Here, then, was where the woman they called Bibi Golafrus (blazing flower) or Bibi Doctoor (Bibi being a polite title for a woman) settled into her work with the women of the Bakhtiari.

While Elizabeth Ross’ experiences of Persia are little known those of the 1^st Marquis of Kedleston, George Curzon, a British aristocrat and Tory MP who was in the country for a mere three months attracted lots of attention. While Elizabeth had gone to Persia to help its people Curzon set out to civilise them with British values. While Elizabeth recognised much to admire in Persia’s people Curzon dismissed them as “consummate hypocrites, very corrupt, and lamentably deficient in stability and courage” – and it was the work of the British to transform them into a race of gentlemen. Dr Elizabeth Ross condemned his views as ignorant.

Polygamy was practised among the Bakhtiari and it might be surprising that the devoted Christian Elizabeth Ross far from condemning it saw how it might provide care and shelter for older women, that polygamy did not involve the hypocrisy of much monogamy that vilified children born outside marriage as illegitimate and turned a blind eye to married men taking multiple sexual partners in the form of paid prostitutes.   

With Bakhtiari men often away from their families their women tended to take on greater responsibilities than their British counterparts. At the time Elizabeth lived among them the Bakhtiari were less nomadic than previously but men were often away such as on military campaigns or other business. Women, too, were important economically to the tribe through their expertise as carpet weavers – carpets were a major source of revenue for the Bakhtiari – and because of their status Bakhtiari women enjoyed greater freedom than their urban counterparts who endured considerable patriarchal control and were universally veiled.  

Elizabeth provides detailed descriptions of the appearance of the Bakhtiari women she lived among – how they had  

“long, dark silky hair parted in the centre and the front half of hair tied under the chin with the rest plaited down the back.”

Hair was decorated with strings of beads and gold coins strung across the forehead – heavy to bear, depending on their number. A silk scarf of scarlet, green, cerise or purple was wound around the head and neck and on top of this they wore a black handkerchief and veil (chador). Hair was highly prized, the darker the better, so blonds both adult and children, had their hair darkened with henna or indigo and hair was lengthened with what we call hair extensions.   

Women’s appearance was highly colourful. Their silk shirts, like their scarves, in strong shades of colour were topped with waistcoats and coats for warmth. Trousers were close-fitting and worn under embroidered linen petticoats, “pleated and fastened around the hips.” As we’ve seen nights could be very cold and clothes were worn all the time, day and night, but khan’s wives at the very least, changed their outfits weekly, following a bath.

Men’s dress was more monochrome. Their shirts not silk but muslin or linen and their coats usually sheepskin, not brocaded velvet that was favoured by women. While most Persian men wore black hats the Bakhtiari’s hats were tall, oval and white. As for children their clothes were smaller versions of adults; girls and boys dressing the same until about the age of 11 so girls weren’t restricted by skirts when travelling through the region.  

Dr Elizabeth found opium addiction and dependency on morphia pills to be rife among the Bakhtiari and whooping cough, for some reason, affected boys more than girls. Elizabeth’s work was mainly limited to the wives of khans so, of course, there were other doctors administering to the people – native healers known as hakims who were experts in herbal medicine.   

While the life of the Bakhtiari might seem drawn from a past age the tribe were significant players in the drama of Persian politics and government into the 20^th century. With the discovery of oil in their land they gained international prominence for a time but the growing power of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company proved too much for the Bakhtiari to contain. Their khans were inveigled into complex financial deals that were their undoing. Their tribal lands came to be ravaged by industry with the sinking of oil wells, an oil refinery and one-hundred-and-forty-mile pipeline to the Persian Gulf. Within 30 years Persia would be officially known as Iran. By then several of the tribe’s leaders were dead, executed to curtail their influence by competing interests. The Bakhtiari that Dr Elizabeth Ross had known would be swept away. She, too, would be gone.

Elizabeth left Persia for a short time because of her failing health. She worked briefly as a ship’s doctor but was back in Isaphan in April 1914. The following year and into the Great War, the Russian authorities pressurised her to go to Serbia to take charge of the Scottish Women’s Hospital in Kragujevac where she volunteered to work in the typhus wards and soon Dr. Elizabeth Ross herself contracted the disease and died on her 37^th birthday, on 14 February 1915.

The answer to the title question is of course they all wanted something Persia had to offer. The good doctor went to be an asset to Persians. Curzon and BP’s forerunner went to divest Persia of its assets.

The Female Midshipman

The twenty-year-old worked at the latch until it broke. She pushed the window open and squeezed through, dropping to the ground and giving herself a “sair clyte” in the process. She was either desperate or foolish for she was approaching the end of a six-month sentence for theft – not her first offences – her jail term on this occasion being for stealing from drapers’ shops in Aberdeen.  The temptation when left alone for a few minutes by the jail’s washerwoman proved too inviting and so out the window of Aberdeen’s east prison at Lodge Walk she clambered and once collecting herself after her fall off she ran in a bid for freedom. And so she succeeded. For a time at least. When next she turned up in Aberdeen, she was a he.

She was Isabella Knowles; the day 4 February 1869. Isabella’s flight from justice took her south to Stonehaven initially and from there she made her way into England to Newcastle. Somewhere during her travels she had her long hair cut short and took to wearing breeches, probably stolen. Perhaps a stint in Edinburgh’s Theatre Royal inspired her transformation from Isabella to a sailor called John Brown rigged out in typical seaman’s gear of light tweed trousers, light grey vest and blue silk necktie, sailor’s jacket with anchor studded buttons and a peaked cap and so midshipman Brown was created. Just like that. Gender switch so to speak.  Could she/he pass muster was the question? Away from her home territory the answer was yes but she grew homesick for Newhills just outside Aberdeen and was drawn back north.

In the granite city the midshipman boldly smiled at every police constable she encountered without being recognised and so continued westwards from the town, perhaps to the family home. It was her bad luck and his good luck that one day in April a local shoemaker suffering badly from depression went to a quarry at Hilton intending to drown himself when he noticed a bundle of good quality clothing lying abandoned. Distracted from his purpose and being an honest man, he went off to the police station at Buxburn (Bucksburn) to report the finding. Because the items were of high value a search of the area was undertaken by the police who found more bundles hidden in whin (gorse) bushes. The items had obviously been stolen and so the police set up an overnight watch in case the thief showed up. Around 8 o’clock in the evening they saw a figure approaching – a 

Philip Richard Morris, Two young midshipmen in sight of home

“dashing young midshipman with fine blue suit, and shining yellow buttons, with cap set jauntily on his head, with seaman-like carelessness, and carrying under his arm a bundle”

(Aberdeen Journal, 14 April, 1869)

The man retrieved one of the bales hidden in a bush and was walking away with it when the two watching constables sprang into action and caught hold of the thief. Searching the tall, good-looking stranger they found him in possession of several household articles including pairs of curtains, which later were identified as having been stolen from the lobby of Aberdeen’s Lemon Tree Hotel. A further search of the quarry area turned up nearly 200 articles of stolen property including a riding habit. The estimated value of the goods was about £30, in today’s terms around £5,000. A large proportion of the items belonged to the wife of the owner of the Stoneywood Paper Mill, Mrs Pirie, and had been packed into a trunk left overnight in a room at the mill. The trunk itself was missing, having been emptied and thrown into the nearby river Don.

At the police station the suspected thief identified himself as a seaman from Stonehaven called John Brown but the sergeant’s wife had only to take one look at the person under arrest to declare ‘him’ a her, at which point the prisoner owned up to her deception. It was then the bobbies realised they had unwittingly nabbed the escaped thief, Isabella Knowles, and returned her to Aberdeen to complete her previous sentence and await trial on a fresh set of charges for prison-breaking and theft when the circuit court convened in the city. The press revelled in being able to report on what they dubbed the cross-dressing miscreant, the ‘female midshipman’.

At her trial before Sheriff Comrie Thomson in July 1869 Knowles maintained her innocence over the theft of a chest or trunk and a large quantity of women’s and baby clothing and household linen from a room at Stoneywood Paper Works. Having been previously employed at the paper mill and so familiar with its layout did not help her case and she was found guilty and sentenced to 15 months in prison.

Donside mill before Isabella’s time there

Hardly was that jail term behind her when Knowles was hauled again before the courts when in April 1871 she was accused of stealing a carpetbag filled with clothing from Aberdeen’s steamboat wharf. She deposited the bag in the left luggage office at the nearby railway station but her reputation as a sneak thief was such that Aberdeen’s police had been on the lookout for her and when she returned to the station to retrieve the bag they lifted her. But not for long. Knowles made a run for it pursued by a constable. As he drew close she tripped him up by throwing herself in front of him and made off again but where John Brown might have succeeded in his breeches, Isabella’s skirt caught on a paling (fence). She pulled it free but the delay allowed the police constable to finally catch his quarry. Knowles snatched a knife out of her pocket and threatened him with it but he overpowered her. Back at police headquarters at Lodge Walk it was confirmed he had apprehended the ‘“notorious” female midshipman’. Isabella is listed among prisoners in Aberdeen’s east prison census that year.

When the case came to court Knowles’ long record of prior misdemeanours was read out including her imprisonment for stealing from Borland’s Temperance Hotel in Greenock and the Prince of Wales in Port Glasgow when she was convicted under the name, Jane Robertson (one of a number of her aliases). Her solicitor argued that none of the thefts was deliberate but the mere playfulness of moving articles from one place to another. The jury and sheriff were not persuaded and she was sentenced to 20 months.

On her release, Knowles resumed a criminal career that took her across Scotland and into England. Whatever motivated her – poverty or a mental condition – Knowles was simply not very good at thieving and quickly arrested once more, this time on a charge of stealing poultry and a pair of trousers from a house at Woodside close to the home of her long-suffering and respectable parents. Isabella Knowles, the female midshipman, lived a life of uncertainty and obvious privation. Perhaps something that happened early in her life drove her to follow her bizarre and largely unsuccessful criminal calling. Who’s to say? Her family in Newhills were apparently unremarkable, hard-working folk. Isabella’s father was a master cartwright, her mother didn’t appear to work when the children were growing up. A brother followed his father into the joinery/cartwright trade. A younger son, Alexander, worked in the Woodside mill where Isabella was once employed – she was a mill worker at thirteen and possibly younger. It is likely her younger sisters would have followed them into the mill as it was a major employer in their area. It’s awful to think of these children having to labour long hours in a noisy and dangerous factory where accidents were common occurrences. Isabella is believed to have been badly hurt in an accident. I haven’t found evidence of this but a girl around the same age as Isabella was horribly killed at the Stoneywood mill at the time Isabella was there. The seventeen-year-old’s skirt caught on a revolving machine and despite a young man’s desperate attempt to keep hold of the poor girl the power of the engine dragged her in and she died, crushed between enormous rollers. Whether Isabella witnessed the incident or not she would have known about it. Being around the same age they may have been friends. This is pure speculation, of course.

Nethergate, Dundee where Isabella died

We know that Isabella Knowles was a plucky young woman who survived on her wits when her wits didn’t let her down. Her 1871 sentence in April that year was about the time her father died of Phthisis or tuberculosis aged just 55 years. It’s likely this horrible wasting and contagious disease was passed to his wife during his short illness and she died of the same in 1874 also at the age of 55. Earlier that year their daughter Isabella was once more up in court charged with a series of thefts.  Found guilty she was sentenced to seven years penal servitude.

Isabella’s death certificate and correction certificate

Isabella Knowles would have been released from prison in 1881. With her parents dead there was little to keep her at Newhills and when I next found her, she too had died – still single now a millworker in Dundee she was a jute repairer which sounds like fairly unpleasant work. On 28 February 1899 Isabella was found dead at 74 Nethergate, at 8 am, it was assumed of heart disease at 51. The sometimes comical but tragic life of the ‘romantic prison breaker’, ‘notorious girl’, ‘female midshipman’ had come to a close.

The Corrosive Banality of Misogyny: International Women’s Day

As International Women’s Day rolls around again we shouldn’t kid ourselves that women in the 21^st century are anything but still marginalised and victimised – differently from in the past for many but experiencing the sort of misogyny that’s impacted women’s lives for millennia. Oh sure, legislation has been passed over the past one hundred years to eliminate inequalities between the sexes but look at where we are now – in some parts of the world men still dictate what women can and cannot wear, where they can go, who they can speak with. Women are killed for disobeying men who regard them as property. And not very valuable property at that. Sex has always created divisions and power struggles but currently in western countries it’s sex that’s under attack with some questioning the definition of what constitutes a woman to the extent that men can claim to be women, occupy roles that are designated as women’s and redefine what feminism is – it’s not what women say it is, according to them.

In 1908 International Women’s Day was inaugurated as a protest against sexism and misogyny. However despicable were men’s working conditions, and they were, women’s were often worse. Women and girls faced every kind of unfair treatment purely because of their sex from employment rights to the franchise. The once collective suffrage movement, the Chartists, dropped women from the demand of voting rights because the men thought they had a better chance of success without them. They were still fighting for votes for men over 21 almost 100 years later and by then women had realised if they wanted something they had to do it for themselves.

Hundreds of thousands of women took to the streets worldwide to mark International Women’s Day in 1908. By then a whole slew of women’s organisations demonstrated women’s fury and impatience at their treatment in every facet of their lives purely on grounds of sex. Poor and working-class women and girls fared worst of all and women were drawn to socialist and communist organisations to accelerate positive changes. However when the International Women’s Congress opened that September in Geneva it was under the presidency of Lord and Lady Aberdeen, Scottish aristocrats, but aristocrats with a strong sense of social justice – or at least she had. Lady Aberdeen was an outspoken campaigner for women. She setup the Onward and Upward Association to improve the material, mental and moral position of women, ensuring her own servants at the family seat Haddo House in Aberdeenshire were provided with a range of classes to attend from language to crafts. The main preoccupation at the time for the UK’s middle-class women was their lack of voting rights to influence opinion in parliament. This was also important for working class women whose existence was blighted by unfairness, prejudice and deprivation.  

In those countries where women’s lives are constrained and limited by men flogging religion, law or tradition to justify murdering women for their disobedience nothing short of uprising and revolution will do. In the west the harm to women is more subtle and insidious with the attempt to erode sex as a definition of woman based in science and logic and replace it with gender that is being redefined as a fluctuating fancy. If an erstwhile man can merely state he is a woman to be legally accepted as one what is there to stop penis bearers replacing women in everything women want to do? Other than childbearing – the point where the penis bearer discovers he’s not woman enough and must exploit a woman to provide a child for him. It is extraordinary that women in governments, in health institutions and all manner of organisations go along with this. But there have always been women willing to sell out their sisters.  

Penis-bearers now want their inclusion in Women’s Day. Did I write want? A loud, aggressive testosterone, hectoring, insistent demand that comes of the male trait of not taking no for answer.  Male entitlement that we used to equate with differential pay grades and the like has moved onto stripping away from women any sense of womanhood beyond the most ridiculous parodies of what it is to be a girl or woman – parodies steeped in sex stereotyping. The entitled male often adopts a cartoon-like name, has a penchant for photographing himself in a women’s lavatory and employs a lexicon of abusive, sexist language against women who question his new identity. Heavy duty misogyny. There’s the notorious case of Adam Graham, a double rapist, who decided he was Isla not Adam after being charged. Initially he was sent to a women’s prison and only placed in the male estate after a huge public outcry. The idea that the correct place for a rapist to be is in a woman’s prison beggars belief. As for that risible statement made by the deputy First Minister of Scotland, Shona Robison, that there a is

“. . . no evidence that predatory and abusive men have ever had to pretend to be anything else to carry out abusive and predatory behaviour”

Not only is there proof but the instances of it are increasing. And that can only be bad for women. In 2023 Pink News ran a story about a women, a ‘cis’ woman because women cannot be women nowadays without a prefix we are assured by men, murdered because her killer took her to be trans. The implication being this was an attack on a trans person not the tragedy that a woman lost her life at the hands of a brutal man. That’s misogyny.

Women victims of crime have long been subject to contemptuous comment. Press and police behaviour over the murder of a young woman called Emma Caldwell is nothing short of abhorrent misogyny. Emma’s life was reduced to being a prostitute. Such foul prejudices have not moved on one iota from the days of Jack the Ripper in the 19^th century and his 20^th century equivalent the Yorkshire Ripper, Peter Sutcliffe. At Sutcliffe’s trial the Attorney-General said

“Some were prostitutes, but perhaps the saddest part of the case is that some were not. The last six attacks were on totally respectable women”.  

For years we have witnessed a never-ending stream of male officers employed at the Met known to be sex pests at the very least. The organisation has shown itself to be incapable of tackling hatred of women. Among its ranks the humiliation and belittling of women has been treated as funny, a game. Wayne Couzens was known to his Met colleagues as a guy who targeted women but got away with his bestiality for so long because his behaviour was regarded as normal among his colleagues. The force was stunned at the public reaction to their officer’s abduction, rape and murder of Sarah Everard. It promises, again, to learn lessons.

Misogyny is as old as the hills. Those ancient Greeks liked their monsters to be female so they could be tamed and kept in line by men. The ancients had a thing about women. Aristotle dismissed them as irrational and intellectually weak on a par with children or slaves – and slaves were reviled.  Dismissing women as weak in the head as well as body hasn’t quite been eradicated as a source of misogyny. The philosopher Socrates was an outlier in that he didn’t reckon there was much to separate the sexes except in physical strength. Far too many current sports organisations disagree with old Socrates for now they bow to needy men’s demands to access women’s places in sport. Well, to do otherwise would hurt a male participant’s feelings and we know through experience that female feelings carry less weight – or no weight.

There’s never been a time, surely, when women have not been as capable as men when given the opportunity. – philosophers, rulers, blacksmiths, authors, painters, goods carriers, composers – but still folk are surprised to discover there ever were women capable of any of the above. Expectations of women’s abilities have always been low, achievements often dismissed as second rate and unworthy of comment. It’s a talent women have – of being invisible.

Highlighting the plight of women has differed since 1908. In 1927 in Hankow in China factory women hobbled the streets in bound feet to mark International Women’s Day, accompanied by hundreds of young girl factory workers who toiled 12 hour days for miniscule wages. In the west in the 1960s the Day’s issue focused on sexuality, reproductive rights (the pill and abortion), domestic roles as well as the ongoing battle of sex discrimination in the workplace. Thirty years after the 1970 Equal Pay Act came into force in the UK that useful invention to justify lower pay for women, ‘women’s work’, was given by the Labour Party run Glasgow council as the reason its lowest paid women employees earned less than their male counterparts. The council fought them for over a decade and spent over £2 million to deny women justice but in the end lost that disgraceful misogynist argument. The Equal Pay Act was brought in because male-dominated trades unions colluded with employers to keep women’s pay lower than men’s. Even those earnings were not deemed a woman’s own until 1990 in the UK. Until then a married woman’s pay was considered part of her husband’s income. If a wife paid too much tax her rebate was paid to her husband not her.

From highlighting pay discrimination to lack of enfranchisement to sex rights to gender fluidity International Women’s Day emerges with different emphasis over the hundred plus years of its existence. One thing that never changes is the loathing and disrespect that characterises the experience of so many women. The United Nations Commission on the Status of Women bows down to the male echo chamber by enabling men who identify as women to speak for women. Make no mistake women are well and truly under the cosh of misogyny now so deeply institutionalised. Wherever you look men are pictured representing women. These people irrespective of how they identify have no idea what it is to be a girl or woman. None at all. Slipping into a dress is not the same as living as a woman. They live as men imagining what life is for a woman. In 1996 the International Olympic Committee altered its charter to promote equality in sport through enabling women to advance at all levels. In 2024 it turned the clock back by opening the door to any male athlete claiming to be a woman to complete alongside women and to take up places meant for women in female competitions. The antithesis of equality. Undermining women negatively impacts on their lives and is one facet of misogyny.

International Women’s Day has witnessed the best of times and the worst of times. It began as an outlet for women to give voice to their mistreatment in a hostile world and offer hope to each other through collective action. The trope of gender equality that has sneaked into conversations surrounding women’s lives detracts from what should be positive action by women for women.  Sex is now a four-letter word and gender rules – that shape shifter with a penis. Men are welcome to act collectively alongside women but not speak for women. Women are quite capable of speaking for themselves. Men’s views of what’s good and what isn’t for women is not acceptable when it is a man insisting women wear a veil or a man insisting he is a woman and so can represent women, often aggressively. Every woman and girl I know has grown up experiencing sexism and misogyny to varying degrees. Girls and women learn to deal with it. It’s the kind of experience no man identifying as a woman has or can ever have.  Psychology Today, 12 February, 2014 published an article How Men Bully Women: Bad Tempers and Tantrums. On aggressive men

 “these men are more focused on their own feelings and image of self-importance and power than they are focused on how anyone in a relationship with them feels.” 

When the president of West Yorkshire Federation of the National Association of Schoolmasters argued in 1952 against equal pay for men and women teachers his misogyny slipped effortlessly out of his gob –

“ …the women on the staffs (of some schools) did their work successfully because there were men on the staffs whose presence maintained an over-all discipline necessary to successful teaching…”

Given that sort of pervading nonsense it is hardly surprising that three years later when a mere woman had the audacity to imagine she was capable of reading the news on television she lasted less than a year before the forces of reaction had her sacked. This was Barbara Mandell on ITV in 1955. In 1960 the radical experiment was repeated by the BBC with Nan Winton but she fared no better and was dropped because viewers asked how they were meant to take news seriously when being told it by a woman, after all a BBC spokesman explained –

“It was felt that a woman could not remain impartial when talking about disasters and tragedies”

It wasn’t until 1974 that women were judged to be capable of reading off an idiot board without bursting into tears and distracting viewers with their clothing and hairstyles with the appearance of Angela Rippon on the BBC.

This year while women celebrate (or don’t) International Women’s Day there will be men who use it as a vehicle for their obsessive bullying of women. Women must stand strong and not be defined by men. Those women who took to the streets to mark the first International Women’s Day in 1908 were not submissive, were not deferential towards men with their rapacious appetite for controlling women’s lives. The marchers in 1908 were confident of what they and women like them needed, deserved – empowered through equal access to work, equal pay, education, suffrage, property rights and respect. While women’s lives have been transformed in so many ways over the past century misogyny has never gone away. It probably never will. Stay strong sisters. Remember those women who over time have struggled to be heard, struggled to be taken seriously, struggled against the tide of misogyny. It’s ever-present in our day-to-day lives – the corrosive banality of misogyny that creeps into everything. Resist. Resist. Misogynists are never your allies.

You may kill me, but you can never frighten me

“You may kill me, but you can never frighten me.”

The last words of George Grant as he faced a firing squad of twenty Mongols (and perhaps one Russian). George Grant died along with the four Chinese men he refused to abandon to the lineup of executioners.

Peking as it was known in 1913. Now Beijing.

That summer of 1913 George Grant left Peking at the behest of the Chinese government to track down problems with the telegraph system in Mongolia. Effective far-reaching communications had become essential to the expansion of global capital and to enable empires maintain links with their outlying colonies and territories and the telegraph provided an ear to what was happening in these areas often distant from the seat of power. From the 1840s telegraphic networks brought the world closer together. Several European states developed their own systems including Russia, erecting telegraph lines across its vast region from west to east with an intention to connect to Japan and China via underwater cables. But it was a Danish business, The Great Northern China and Japan Extension Telegraph Company that undertook this work, from 1870.

In 1870 George Grant was not even a glint in his parents’ eyes for he was born at the village of Skelmorlie in North Ayrshire in Scotland in 1876 to Jane and John Grant, a railway carrier (no mention of his mother’s occupation.) The boy joined the 11^th Glasgow Company of the Boys Brigade – a Christian club for boys started in and popular in Scotland (which preceded and influenced the creation of the Boy Scouts.) Following his death the Brigade struck a medal, the George Grant Medal for any activity chosen by Brigaders, and presented annually. I have no idea if it still exists.

Between then and the early years of the twentieth century (possibly towards the end of the nineteenth) Grant sailed to China where he worked as a telegraphist. For a time he was employed  by the Eastern Extension Australia and China Telegraph Company (GB) before transferring to the Danish Great Northern Telegraph Company.

China was at the time brutally resisting Mongolian independence. The situation between Mongolia and China was extremely dangerous with atrocities being perpetrated on both sides. In June 1913 the superintendent of telegraph in Peking, Henningsen, a Dane, his fellow countryman, Langeback, and Grant from Scotland along with Chinese colleagues, described as three merchants and a servant, set out at the behest of the Chinese government to ascertain damage to telegraph lines, poles and stations inside Mongolia because of concerns from telegraph staffers of damage and missing supplies.

The major threats to the lines came at two points – in the vicinity of the Gobi Desert in northern China and southern Mongolia – at Pang Kian Station. There Grant remained with three Chinese men and their servant while Langback and his assistants went on to inspect the situation at Tuerin. Henningsen then returned to Peking. Grant reported the loss of a caravan of supplies, stolen by Mongolian raiders, and he was given permission to obtain replacement goods from Kalgan. On 17^th June he left in search of these items. Five days later Reuter’s Kalgan correspondent telegraphed that a foreigner, three Chinese merchants and a servant had been captured a couple of days earlier by Mongols some 80 miles from Pang Kian.

Eastern Telegraph Company Network 1901

 Immediately a search party was organised by George Grant’s close friend, Jacob Henningsen, who was accompanied by inevitably nameless Chinese and a fellow Dane, Dr Wolff and an English journalist called Giles. They set off from Peking on 3 July, on ponies instead of camels since the Mongols might be more acquisitive of their camels, enquiring of everyone they encountered the whereabouts of the missing Grant. One night a group of eight Mongols rode into their camp. The Europeans seized their rifles and questioned them to ascertain if they were friends or enemies. Believing them to be friendly enough Henningsen agreed to return with them to their camp in his desperate effort to trace Grant. It was decided Wolff and Giles should continue with their journey. A description of George Grant was shared with the Mongolians and he was told that   

“Such a man is at the camp of the Great Chief. He has joined us, and will not leave.”

A full day’s ride into the hills took Henningsen close to the Chief’s camp by early evening. It was surrounded by other camps with several hundred men protecting the area. At one camp Henningsen was interrogated as it was suspected he was a Chinese government spy. He was ordered to send for Wolff and Giles and in his message he warned them to be careful as the situation was precarious. They too were closely questioned when they arrived at the camp and confirmed to the Mongols the man they were looking for was about thirty-six years old, short and sturdy, bald-headed with a full red beard.  They were told that such a man lived in another camp.

Henningsen, Wolff, Giles and their party were escorted by Mongol warriors to the camp of their Great Chief who was about 45 years old and quite friendly. He told the Europeans he had received a telegram instructing Grant’s release but explained to Henningsen the foreigner in question volunteered to stay in the camp, as a commander of 50 men. Henningsen was at liberty to ask if he wanted to leave but must not try to persuade him. When the foreigner was brought before Henningsen he discovered a man of vaguely similar appearance to Grant but not a Scotsman at all. This European was a Russian who told the Dane he’d come across Grant who had been very kind to him and allowed him to stay with him at Pang Kian. 

Mongolia 1913 from Wikicommons

The Russian was barefoot when the Europeans found him and when asked if he had boots he showed them several pairs along with his clothes and a saddle. Henningsen recognised the saddle as the one he had given Grant when they set off from Peking. The Russian claimed the saddle and other items belonging to Grant had been taken by Mongols. Looking around Henningsen also recognised the cart George Grant used for the journey. Inside were many of his things including his pipe and tobacco pouch. A furious Henningsen shouted at the Russian and Mongols and threatened to report them to their Great Chief but he was warned if he did his own party’s lives would be at risk – that Grant was dead and he and his party should “go away in peace” or risk being killed. They were told that if Grant had done so his life would have been spared. Some claimed it had been the Russian who had shot Grant but the Europeans did not believe them for the Russian appeared kindly – a peasant who travelled widely across the Far East. (It transpired that a Russian government attempt to secure the release of George Grant came too late to save him.)

Grant was an enthusiastic photographer and his camera had been confiscated by his captors who offered to let him go without it – and his Chinese colleagues. Grant refused to agree and argued for the lives of the Chinese men he had travelled with. When this was denied he stood in front of the firing squad, a group of around twenty men, and laughed at them – at the number of them it took to tie him up – at their cowardice as he put it. The last words spoken by George Grant the small Scotsman with a bushy red beard to his killers were “You may kill me, but you can never frighten me.”

As for the Russian he told Henningsen he had been captured by some Chinese troops, stripped, shot in three places and left for dead. He was saved by chance when a party of Mongols found him and nursed him back to health at which point he decided he would stay with them and

“kill every Chinese that comes my way – I shall rid the earth of a few Chinese before I die.”

So was the Russian behind the killing of Grant and the Chinese men George Grant tried to protect? We don’t know. Grant was said to be popular with those who knew him – popularity that aroused distrust among Mongols in the area.

Reports of George Grant’s death found their way into Britain’s newspapers. In its inimitable way Aberdeen Press and Journal contrived to describe the red-bearded Scot as an Englishman (I suppose Ayrshire is quite far south from Aberdeen.)

The Grant family’s MP in North Ayrshire, Captain Duncan Campbell* asked a question in the UK parliament regarding compensation and in a written answer was told by the foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey, that the matter of compensation had been referred to the British Charge d’Affairs at Peking.  In China its government said it recognised Grant’s loyalty to their people and arranged a ‘handsome’ payment to his mother back in Scotland.

Telegraph, the first electrical telecommunications system, provided a messaging service for nearly two hundred years, from the 1840s. Their essential nature to global as well as local connections made them a target for attack not only by Mongolians who regarded the Chinese network across their territory as an incursion on their independence but by various individuals and groups including Russian revolutionaries who as part of their struggle against Tsarism in 1906 cut the lines connecting Peking with Irkutsk in Siberia that fed into European Russia. This line was operated by the company Grant worked for when he died, the Danish Great Northern Telegraph Company that, incidentally, had telegraph stations at Aberdeen and Newcastle. The nature of the great telegraph network criss-crossing often remote areas sometimes the subject of national rivalries created dangerous working environments for employees such as George Grant. Their bravery in undertaking this work is unquestionable.

*Captain Campbell was injured at the Battle of Ypres in the First World War a year after George Grant’s death and his question in the Commons. His injuries included the loss of an arm and following his return to military service he was further wounded by a mine and as a consequence died in 1916.

https://atlantic-cable.com/Books/GNT/index.htm

John Munro’s War: Part 7 – 1946

In May John’s name again appears in the farm diary being paid the same rate as Roy, now on 76 shillings per week. He was finally released from military service in July. He was described on his army testimonial as a reliable type, a good driver who carried out his duties in a hard working manner. The tank commander who went on to spend 3 years in enemy labour camps never drove again, except the farm’s tractors. The enthusiastic, rebellious teenager who enlisted without his parents knowledge in May 1939 returned home a thoughtful, fairly reserved man. Always affable and sociable when required he never pursued much of a social life outside the family, unlike his young brother, Roy. Never dated. Never married. He was a voracious reader and his extended knowledge and intelligence meant he was always engaging to talk with. Quick to laugh and anger in equal measure he could be insensitive at times but was considerate and kindly for all that. While his mind remained sharp his body was crippled by arthritis and he suffered greatly but a friendly vet was on hand to prescribe painkillers for John as well as for the animals on the farm.

There was symmetry to John Munro’s war. He enlisted as an 18-year-old on 9 May 1939 and was freed from his prison camp around 9 May 1945. In May 2011 with his health deteriorating John one day decided he’d endured enough, went upstairs, climbed into bed, turned his face to the wall, refused food and drink and waited for death which came on the 12 May, at the age of ninety.  

John Munro’s War: Part 6 – 1945

Agricultural difficulties intensified at home and regular crop rotations were stopped mainly because of government demands on farmers to overwork the land so it had no time to revive fertility because the soil’s minerals were so depleted from constant cropping. The work on the family farm was shared between John’s father and seven full-time men and three women: the grieve (gaffer), foreman ploughman, second ploughman, shepherd, cattleman, second cattleman, tractor driver*, dairymaid, poultry woman* and part-time clerkess*. Those marked * lived in the farmhouse with the family and other labourers were accommodated in farm cottages, receiving the usual perks in addition to wages of 4 pints of milk daily, a half-ton of potatoes, 6 bolls of meal and 3 ton of coal plus firewood every six months. Women always received less pay than the men except when John’s sisters were employed during busy times such as tattie planting when they were paid at the same rate as their brother, Roy (before Roy’s earnings rose to 71 shilling per week). POW labour on the family farm cost £12. 14s. in February and again in March but there is no record how many were employed or how much each man earned. The POWs employed on John’s family’s farm probably were living a mile or two away at Brahan. Local children used to play with wooden toys made by POWs such as dancing figures made out of wood and string.

Throughout the war the retention of skilled farm labour continued to cause major problems. Farming can’t be done by just anyone but requires high levels of familiarity with land or animals, changing seasons and crop developments and that is why agricultural labourers were the last to be called up. In 1945 only four horses were part of the farm’s workforce.

By the end of 1945 one million former old grassy areas of Scotland had been ploughed for additional cultivation. Between 1941 and 1944 the production of top-quality beef improved. So, too, did yields of barley, wheat and potatoes and milk.

The winter of 1944/45 was severe across mainland Europe. Conditions within the camps was deteriorating for POWs and German camp guards. Hunger and starvation affected almost everyone and Red Cross parcels became an even greater target for the malnourished and sick trying to survive freezing conditions in the long winter.

Between the 13th and 15th February 1945 Dresden was one of several large German cities targeted by allied bombers. It’s relative proximity to John’s camp probably meant he saw some of the results of it being blitzed with incendiary devices that lit up the sky and were visible for almost 100 miles around. It must have appeared to many allied prisoners that the tide was turning for the German government. And indeed it was. A second wave of bombing followed about three hours after the first to confuse and hinder rescue personnel on the ground trying to put out fires. A group of 254 Lancaster bombers with 500 tons of high explosives and 375 tons of fire bombs devastated the city, blowing off roofs and blowing out doors and windows exposing building interiors to the flow of air that drove fires across the city. Ruptured water mains meant there was nothing available to fight the flames of the thousands of fires that blazed for hours. In the resultant firestorm much of the city was destroyed and the dead which numbered between 25,000 and 30,000, including POWs and fleeing refugees.

Allied POWs, including those from nearby camps, were put to work clearing up and retrieving bodies from the ruins for mass burial. The American writer, Kurt Vonnegut, a POW there are the time, recalled that there were

“too many corpses to bury. So instead the Nazis sent in troops with flamethrowers. All these civilians’ remains were burned to ashes.”

“We saw terrible things: cremated adults shrunk to the size of small children, pieces of arms and legs, dead people, whole families burnt to death, burning people ran to and fro, burnt coaches filled with civilian refugees, dead rescuers and soldiers, many were calling and looking for their children and families, and fire everywhere, everywhere fire, and all the time the hot wind of the firestorm threw people back into the burning houses they were trying to escape from.”

“I cannot forget these terrible details. I can never forget them.”

(Lothar Metzger, survivor)

While industrial targets were said to be the targets, the intention behind the bombing of Dresden was to create confusion for the German government by forcing tens of thousands of people to try to escape from the region so choking up the east’s communication and travel infrastructure. Other raid followed in March and April – action that suited the ally from the east, the Soviet Union, whose troops were advancing towards Berlin and welcomed disruption in eastern Germany that wrecked any plans the German government might have had of concentrating its authority in this part of the country.

The destruction of Dresden in February destroyed so many of the region’s transport links that any supplies including food became extremely scarce. Stalag POWs were drafted into the city to help clear it of bodies, many victims were elderly or mothers and their children along with POWs and refugees who were unlucky enough to be caught up in the bombing.

With the breakdown in infrastructure towards the end of the war there were greater food shortages than ever with an increase in food parcel thefts but on 12 April 1945 John wrote –

“Dear Mam, Hope you are all well at home. I am all right at present as a supply of Red Cross parcels came through although the cigarettes were short owning to looting. I had a letter from you dated 12th Nov now this week and I am looking forward to more letters and cig or personal parcels if I am lucky enough. I am your loving son, John.”

Two days later, on 14 April, POWs, often weak from hunger and sick, were marched in cold and wet weather south towards the Sudetenland to avoid falling into hands of the Red Army but they came under constant attack from the Soviet air forces on their enforced march. The German armed forces in the west surrendered unconditionally on 7^th May. On 8 May German guards abandoned their posts leaving POWs to walk away, heading towards American lines.

Back home John’s father unaware of his son’s liberation was concerned with that season’s crop of Golden Wonder potatoes and oats. An experienced farm valuator he travelled to Leckmelm on the 7^th to carry out a valuation there. It was rogation day and a bank holiday in Scotland. An additional horse had been purchased for the farm bringing the number back up to five and perhaps this was a consequence of continuing labour shortages and recently introduced shorter hours for farm labourers that made organising the work more tricky although POW labour was still available. The weather that summer was good and as a result the oat crop was heavy but barley less good. Potatoes, too, were disappointing because of late ground frosts that stalled growth. The cattle herd was doing fairly well but lacking in protein because of ongoing scarcity of animal feed. Sheep faired better with good lambing numbers.