The brave sons of Scotia – and their wives: Andrew and Rebecca Kennedy

Andrew Kennedy died of heart failure between three and four in the afternoon –

‘…upon a foot path heading through the gardens upon the southside of the old town of Stonehaven opposite to the Episcopal Chapel – in the Parish of Dunnottar and County of Kincardine.”

He had survived the Battle of Waterloo. And so had his wife, Rebecca, who died of phthisis (pulmonary tuberculosis) at five in the afternoon at St. James Place, Stonehaven, Dunnottar. 

Thirty-two-year-old Edward from Inverness-shire married twenty-one-year-old Rebecca at Stirling on 27 March 1814. He was a private soldier from the 2^nd battalion of the 79^th regiment, the Cameron Highlanders. I don’t know Rebecca’s occupation only that she was from Stirling. The 79^th was raised in 1793 by Allen Cameron of Erracht (a Lochiel) as alarm bells rung in Britain at the chopping off of the head of the King of France by French revolutionaries. The King of Great Britain and his parliament were determined to prevent any democratic nonsense breaching the British Channel (later English Channel once England got bored with pretending the Union was equal). The 2^nd battalion Andrew Kennedy enlisted in was a temporary recruiting unit to boost troop numbers after so many men died in the long years of the war with France. It was disbanded in 1815 and the men incorporated into the 1^st battalion. On 10 May 1815 the 79^th were shipped over to Belgium from Dublin. The Camerons were in Ireland because the British authorities imagined the French crisis over with the abdication of Napoleon in April. However, not so. Napoleon bounced back for a last throw of the dice and the regiment returned to the Continent to what turned out to be the final battles in the Napoleonic Wars. Their ship docked at Ostend and from there they were taken on the canals to Ghent and completed the journey on foot to Brussels.

At ten o’ clock in the evening the men of the 79^th and the regiment’s camp followers that included women were thinking of turning in for the night at their billets around Brussels when the order came through to prepare for marching. One trooper who had put his shirts to be washed found they were still being steeped so he just wrung them out and packed them wet. Others also packed their things quickly in the condition they found them. Packing didn’t take long. Unless you were an officer or officer’s wife you travelled light, mainly out of poverty. Then they waited. Fully dressed. At two in the morning the bugles sounded across the town. The drummers played a regular beat, as they would on the battlefield to signal the loading and firing of weapons. The bagpipers played The Gathering of the Camerons and War-Note of Lochiel. The whole of Brussels was left in no doubt the army was moving out to war. Men bade farewell to their local welcoming hosts who pronounced the Scots lions on the field and lambs in the house – meaning they were brave soldiers and respectful guests. Gifts were pressed into the hands of departing soldiers, the ‘brave sons of Scotia’, – bumpers of gin and loaves of bread.

The muster station was the centre of Brussels where three-days’ food rations were issued and a gin allowance. By four o’clock they had set out to march to Charleroi. Rebecca Ferguson was among several women making up the tail of the regiment on their hike to the battlefield. Until the end of the nineteenth century every European army on campaigns away from home had its camp followers who provided various essential services for a fighting body on the move such as cooking, washing clothing, nursing the sick and injured, even foraging for food when rations were scarce or non-existent. Wives and girlfriends would also provide sexual comfort for their partners and for single men there were often prostitutes ready to deliver intimacy at a price. Women camp followers were not welcomed by the Duke of Wellington, the British army commander at Waterloo, who regarded them as a distraction for the men but he did not discriminate between men and women when it came to punishment. Wellington’s discipline involved subjecting women camp followers accused of misdemeanours such as foraging for or stealing food to around thirty lashes of the whip across their ‘bare doups’ – although this did not occur at Waterloo. Officer’s women on manoeuvres with their men rode on horseback while the wives of rank-and-file men walked, frequently bare foot. Some women put on men’s clothing and fought alongside them in the field. Even non-combatant women could find themselves on the battlefield at times while battles raged, passing on whatever was needed – ammunition, sandbags, water – in order to relieve exhausted and injured men whose duties those were, and to help dress wounds and comfort the dying. In an earlier battle during the Napoleonic Wars Agnes Reston who was a sergeant’s wife relieved a drummer boy ordered to take water to a surgeon attending the injured while under fire from the incessant hail of cannonballs and vicious close combat. The young drummer boy was trembling with terror and Agnes took over from him. Her actions and bravery were recognised at the time by officers on the field but Agnes, like Rebecca, survived Waterloo and in old age when Agnes and her sergeant husband were too old to work (pre-old-age pensions) they became destitute and she died aged eighty-five in a Glasgow poorhouse. A common enough tragedy that sums up Britain’s cold indifference towards its bravest defenders.

Marriage and death certificates for
Andrew and Rebecca

For Andrew Kennedy and Rebecca Ferguson love must surely have kept them together for life on the roads to wars was tough – as it was for all the thousands of women who followed husbands and fathers across continents, walking hundreds of miles in all weathers, their lives in constant danger. Inevitably woman and children died as a consequence of being directly or indirectly involved in battles. Wives who lost their men on the field often remarried quickly for life far from home and in lands whose language they could not speak was fraught with threat, and while a soldier’s pay was tiny, women got nothing and would be left destitute. Possibly soldiers whose wives were killed on manoeuvres would also be keen to marry a spare woman who could cook for him and wash and mend his clothes, supply him with tobacco and clay pipes as well as care for him when wounded and as a sexual partner. 

The mood of men, women and sometimes children on long marches was galvanised by rousing tunes played on the pipes. Having left Brussels the 79^th found the going hard; it was hot and everyone had a thirst on them. A forest provided some relief from a blazing sun and an opportunity to eat and slake their thirst before continuing their four-hour march. As they passed through local villages they found relief for local people had filled tubs with water which they placed along the road so the Scots could help themselves from the wooden cups supplied.

The closeness of the battlefield was signalled by the thunder of cannon and passing them from its direction came a succession of bloodied and wounded Dutch and Belgian soldiers, many with stories of the horror that lay ahead. Then they were there. It was early afternoon. This was Quatre Bras where they would go into combat against the French in what would be the opening encounter of the Battle of Waterloo, to relieve the Belgian and Dutch forces being beaten back by Napoleon’s army. The Cameron Highlanders assembled on farmland – on meadow grass and in fields of rye. Once the order came to advance the 79^th found themselves on ground already strewn with dead and wounded. Instantly one of their company had his bonnet knocked off by a musket ball. He laughed it off. But around him man after man went down; killed outright or fatally wounded even before the order to fire was given. Then it was. Load! Fire! Charge! Men were dropping down dead or gravely wounded under a huge barrage of French artillery fire and then the French cavalry was upon them. Bodies were separated from limbs and heads. Combatants on their feet were spattered with the blood of their companions. A bayonet charge by the 79^th encouraged the French troops to turn and run, cursing ‘the men without breeches’ – the sans-culottes.

The engagement stopped at nightfall with both sides bivouacking overnight in the woods or cornfields but there was little rest for French drummers kept beating their drums through the night and in any case the groans and cries of the wounded and dying prevented sleep. Under cover of darkness some men and possibly women from among the camp followers went through the knapsacks of the slain stealing what possessions they could find. This, then, was Quatre Bras – the prequel to Waterloo. The toll of battle on the Camerons was terrible. About half their number were lost through death or injuries. Their colonel, John Cameron, was killed in the battle and hastily buried by the side of the Ghent road until his regiment was able to disinter his remains and take them back to Scotland for burial in his local churchyard at Kilmallie where his grave is marked by an obelisk and marble plaque containing words of praise from Sir Walter Scott.  

An ominous thunderstorm heralded morning on the 18^th June, drenching everyone and everything. Rum rations and an allowance of beef were distributed but there was little time to cook and eat anything. By 8 a.m. they were readying for the road again. At least the rain had eased. By 10.30 the 79^th came under a fierce a tremendous assault from French cannons. Again the British troops counter-attacked, again with bayonets to the fore, driving the French downhill. The air was thick with smoke and the reek of sulphur and pierced by the screams of the wounded. A shout went out from the Scots Greys entering the fray – “Scotland for ever!” The 79^th depleted by its losses at Quatre Bras two days earlier formed themselves into a square to try to fend off a French attack. Their piper, the muckle Kenneth Mackay, stirred courage with a pibroch, Cogadh no Sith (War or Peace). Those ‘devils in skirts’ as the French called them (the English described the kilt as a petticoat) were duly inspired to fight hard and bravely.  

Remains of a cannnon said to have been used at Waterloo, in Stonehaven

This was the Battle of Waterloo, decisive in defeating Napoleon and the French forces. Brief as the battle was the savagery of death and wounding over its nine hours was horrifying. The injured who could be moved were loaded onto waggons and taken to dressing stations – often local houses – so their injuries could be tended and mangled limbs severed but most were treated where they lay in the open air. It took days to clear the battlefield of its dead and by this time they had been stripped of clothing, boots and any items they possessed by fellow troops, women followers and local people for their own use or to sell for all were impoverished to some extent or another.  Finally, the dead were thrown onto waggons and taken away for burial.

House near Waterloo used as a billet

Thousands of Scots were involved at Waterloo. Of the 675 Cameron Highlanders who set out, 103 were killed and 353 wounded. The regiment was one of only four given specific mention by the Duke of Wellington in his Waterloo dispatch. The 79^th Camerons pursued the French reaching Paris on 8^th July 1815 and there they stayed until December during which time the regiment was inspected by Alexander I, Emperor of Russia, who took unusual interest in the regiment’s kilted ‘giants’, piper Kenneth Mackay and private John Fraser.  The 79^th were stationed in France for a further three years as part of the allied occupation before briefly returning to Britain and then on to Canada and Gibraltar. Andrew Kennedy retired from the 79^th aged 38 in 1823 by which time he was able to claim a pension from the regiment, as a Chelsea Pensioner. Where they went at this point, I don’t know. They were living on Castle brae (Hangman’s brae) in Aberdeen in 1851 and had a young grandson in the house with them then. Andrew was by then a shoemaker. At some later point they flitted to Stonehaven, south of Aberdeen, where the couple who survived Quatre Bras and Waterloo eventually died into their old age.

Castle or Hangman’s brae, Aberdeen

The Kennedy’s gravestone at Dunnottar cemetery

Erected by Andrew Kennedy Late of 79^th

or Cameron Highlanders

in Memory of his wife Rebecca Ferguson,

who accompanied him to the Battle of Waterloo

and Died in Peace at Stonehaven 25 Nov 1861 aged 68;

said Andrew Kennedy died 28 Jun 1865 aged 83 years.

I can scarcely remember my grandmother’s voice

I can scarcely remember my grandmother’s voice – neither of my grandmothers’ voices. Like everyone I had two grannies and in my case both my grannies are now long dead for they were born into a different world, in the late 1900s. I like having that link, however tenuous, with a Scotland that’s gone forever.

My paternal Granny, Harriet (Hetty), was a strong woman, and tall as befits a McHardy from Braemar. In common with lots of folk I didn’t take much interest in either of my grannies lives but filed away in my subconscious were the odd name and incident and these aided and abetted by a few photographs and internet access to census returns, marriage, birth and death certificates have meant I’m able to better place my grannies into their family settings preceding the years I knew them. A wee bit, at least.

Top row: Harriet as a child with her parents at Braemar; at home in Aberdeen, early 1930s; a day out on Deeside with Granda and dog Glen; McHardys at home at Tomintoul, Braemar late 1920s. Bottom row: Harriet with daughter Hetty on Union Street in Aberdeen, 1920s; at home in the 1950s; Braemar pipe band rehearsing; McHardys at the croft on Morrone

Harriet, let’s call her Granny 1, was born on the humble croft her parents worked on the slopes of Morrone, a hill behind Braemar. A bit lower than a Munro, Morrone is a Corbett, which means it’s between 2,500 ft and 3,000ft – an unlikely place to try to farm but somehow a community of five households did just that and they called their wee fermtoun, Tomintoul. This is a different Tomintoul from the well-known village of that name. The McHardys worked 7 acres of this the most elevated cultivated land in the whole of Scotland so it must have surprised a few people that in 1864 Braemar’s Tomintoul had the unlikely distinction of producing the country’s biggest golden yellow turnip – thirty-three inches in circumference and weighing in at a whopping 14 lbs – some achievement for land tilled from under heather, trees and boulders though as far as I know it had nothing to do with my family. For the area to sustain five families would have taken immense effort in clearing a stretch of the hillside of its heather, trees and boulders and neutralising its acid soil – they did this with lime produced from limestone in communal lime kilns. Life on Morrone would have been idyllic in spring, summer and autumn but a mighty struggle to survive in during winter in what is one of the coldest areas of Scotland. Granny’s children – my dad, aunty and uncle – spent childhood holidays on the old croft and retained strong attachment to the area. My husband and I climbed up Morrone one fine summer’s day and were astonished to discover my dad who had driven out to Braemar with us, and was then about seventy and in poor health, struggling up behind us. He made it up that purple remembered hill he’d scampered over all those decades earlier – made it up one last time.

The Tomintoul crofters were poor folk so that everyone had to do their bit. The young tended to go into service – girls became cooks or house servants while boys found work on the big estates of Balmoral and Invercauld or went into a trade. When no local jobs were available the connections made through these landed estates opened up jobs elsewhere in the UK. Granny became a cook to a wealthy London family and on her return to Scotland she cooked for a family in Stonehaven. One of her older sisters, Hellen, became the lifelong companion of ‘a lady’, a Miss Poole from Shepton Mallet, and the two young women travelled extensively abroad and in the UK. When Miss Poole died, as an old woman, the also elderly Hellen returned to Scotland, to Aberdeen near to Granny and the rest of her family.   

Census at Tomintoul, Braemar, 1881

But I’m getting ahead of myself. First there were two world wars to contend with. My grandfather, Granny’s young husband, joined the Royal Army Medical Corps (I have his notebooks from that time in which he scribbled down treatments for everything from shell shock to chilblains along with his wallet containing baby teeth from his children back home). I can only imagine the anxiety Granny suffered during the long years of the Great War guessing what her husband was enduring for he was a stretcher bearer in some of the worst fighting at the Battle of the Somme. But he survived it all. They lived in a tiny tenement flat in Skene Street in Aberdeen until the 1930s when bungalows were built on the west side of the town, off Mid-Stocket Road. It’s a mystery how they afforded to buy one but buy one they did and it remained in the family for over seventy years, nearly unchanged in all that time. It is in this house that I remember the only word spoken by Granny – whenever we arrived on holiday (when I was a bairn) she would pick me up to gauge how much heavier I’d got since our last meeting and call me Tina. I was Tina to no-one else but her. One word isn’t much of a vocal memory but there is a phrase that became something of a family legend though I can’t claim to have heard Granny speak it since I hadn’t then been born. It was during World War 2 when Granny expressed her resistance to the Nazis as the German Luftwaffe flew over Aberdeen dropping their bombs on the city, she’d be out the backdoor shaking a fist at them and shouting defiantly,

“Awa ye buggers!”

I think I take after Granny. Now I can’t claim to have heard her then but I recognise that spirit that stayed with her through her latter years. I don’t know what else Granny was doing through the war while her sons were abroad on military service and her daughter fulfilling her civic duty alerting Aberdonians to air raids but she appears to have made a point of stocking up on food for more than thirty years after her death we found tins of wartime food stored in her cellar. Unopened.

Unusually, my grandmother was ten years older than her husband, my Granda, and considerably taller, but for all their unconventionality theirs was a long, and as far as I am aware, a happy marriage that began in 1911 when my grandfather returned from a spell working in New York to marry his Hetty. He was 21 and she 31 and they had met when he was working as a young baker in Braemar.

Granny was a woman of her time – such a silly phrase as everyone is. She wore her skirts long, often to her ankles, over red flannel petticoats. The beautiful costumes I found in her wardrobe may not have been hers but her sister Hellen’s (though I don’t know for sure).

Harriet as a young woman and with some clothes found in her wardrobe

It is a pity photographs are silent. Sometimes it is a pity. Granny’s voice will always remain in my imagination, an odd word captured in a rather high-pitched, thin, reedy tone and a smile behind each one. If only I could capture more of them.

***

My other granny, my maternal granny (Granny 2), has also been more or less silenced since death. She was about ten years younger than Granny 1 and was also a daughter of a crofting family but hers lived in the Black Isle which enjoys one of the mildest climates in Scotland. A Highlander from Cromarty, Granny 2 was Isabella (Bella), a Miller (sometimes Millar) whose extended family included the geologist Hugh Miller. Like Granny I, Granny 2 was tallish but otherwise they were very different types of women. For one thing, Granny 2 would never have thought of much less uttered Granny 1’s immortal commands to the Luftwaffe.

While not being able to very clearly recall Granny 2’s voice I should because when she was old and had succembed to dementia she would near-endlessly recite rhymes remembered from her childhood or those she shared with her own children. “Here we go round the mulberry bush was often shortened to “on a cold a frosty morning” recited with gusto, as our daughter remembers. “Losh, losh” she’d repeat over and over again – losh being a Scots word for surprise though Granny didn’t say it with any sense of its meaning but more a lament, for what I can only wonder. It was a sad end to her life, drawn out over many years – she seated day-long with nothing to occupy her mind and slipping inevitably into a world of her own, living with her family but separately.

I imagine because I wasn’t there the night she called out in her sleep for her recently dead husband – “John!” was uttered urgently but softly in that light way people with the Gaelic have of talking with a soft palate so that words trickle from the front of the mouth. Bella’s vocabulary was well sprinkled with the Gaelic though she disdained Scots for her generation were encouraged to be ashamed of their own traditional language. A generation before young Bella was born her family were cleared (a polite term for being driven off their land) from Strathconon and ended up in the Black Isle and it was instilled into the people that progress equalled English and backwardness equalled Scots. So Bella venerated the English language and I recall her urging me to say ‘yes’ instead of ‘aye’ – but I cannot remember how she said it.

Bella’s wedding at the Glenalbyn Hotel in Inverness in 1912. Bella and her husband John are surrounded by family and friends – Bella’s sisters on her right. John’s father is the exhausted-looking man with beard fourth left of Bella. He died in 1914, the year following the death of one of his sons of blackwater fever in Mozambique. I don’t know if his son, Rod, is in the picture.

For all that she was a kind and gentle woman, more stoic than her appearance might suggest, encouraging her young farmer husband to take the plunge and rent a bigger farm and in time buy it. They were a team. In common with all farmers’ wives, Bella was responsible for some farm work as well as her domestic duties – eggs and dairy products which she sold at markets each week loading loading eggs, cheese, butter and cream onto the trap and driving the horse the twenty or so miles to Inverness for the weekly market – and presumably Dingwall and Muir of Ord, too.

She and my grandfather married in 1912. Like my Aberdeen grandparents they were 21 and 31 but unlike them the bride was younger than her husband. Unlike Harriet’s husband, Bella’s man was not active abroad during the Great War as farming was a reserved occupation and he had carried out pre-war training in England when he was introduced to the joys of motorcycling but couldn’t work out how to stop his bike so drove round and round the compound until it ran out of fuel. Family members who were at the front included Granny’s cousin whose letters from the trenches are shown here. Many Scottish women were forced to give up their jobs to travel to England to manufacture munitions during the Great War. Bella’s sister, Anne, was one of them conscripted by the government but she was allowed home towards the end of the war to take care of Bella and her children who were suffering from the deadly Spanish ‘flu of 1918. They all survived.

Top row: Bella as a young woman; Bella seated left with family including her mother at Rosemarkie beach in 1923; Bella with mother, daughter and granddaughter c. 1941; in her garden in 1971. Bottom row: Bella at home c.1961; air mail letter for German prisoners of war; on pillion of her younger son’s motorcycle c.1946.

Bella had a passion for auctions or maybe it was a passion driven by necessity. She and John moved into their final home and farm near Strathpeffer in the 1920s and the rambling old farmhouse took a lot of filling. Bella furnished it with all sorts of weird and wonderful pieces purchased from the Dingwall mart, including a large glass display case of stuffed birds I spent so much time staring at as a young child. The house was a magical playground for us children with more than fourteen rooms plus bathrooms. There was a pantry where Granny’s home-made jams, jellies, chutneys and wine (lethal) were stored, a laundry with an enormous timber sink and a dairy where Granny turned the farm’s milk into the butter, cream and cheese she sold at markets. The dairy was always cold irrespective of the heat outside for it was built as a short wing lit by a series of small windows along a single wall shielded from direct sunlight. A row of meat safes and metal presses sat on long wide shelves to keep food cool and insect free. A large room with ample space for food on one side while the other was stacked with decades worth of Ross-shire Journals and editions of the Scotsman. And now I cannot access Ross-shires of that time. I could write a whole blog on the different rooms, some grand and others basic and functional but the lovely building that was always open house to so many in the area, friends, family, visitors and strangers alike was mysteriously destroyed by fire shortly after the farm was sold.

Bella was said to have had the second sight, based on a single incident I believe. The second sight is a phenomenon some believe occurs when someone ‘sees’ an event happening either in some distant place or in the future. In Granny’s case her experience came during World War Two. Her young son who’d lied about his age to join the army disappeared in North Africa after his tank was destroyed. The family didn’t know if he was alive or dead. One morning Bella confidently announced that he was safe for she had dreamt of her son as a baby in a cradle that rocked back and fore, quicker and quicker, until it slowed to a stop. Her confidence was well-founded and her son did eventually return home after four years as a prisoner in Nazi labour camps in Germany and Poland.

Letters to Bella from her cousin thanking her for her parcels sent to him in the trenches during WW1 in 1916 and 1917

Both Bella and Hetty grew up at a time shanks’ pony was the most common means of getting around and horse and trap for longer journeys. They lived into the age of motor cars and motor cycles, the replacement of paraffin and town gas with electricity, from a world in which correspondence meant letters and telegrams to one with near instantaneous communication, the wireless and telephone and eventually television. They lived through a century of incredible societal changes. Of devastating world wars and numerous other wars and conflicts and the crumbling of the British empire. It would be wonderful to be able to sit down and talk to them both about the world’s momentous events and little domestic dramas but that’s just idle contemplation. Now it is easy to record grannies in full flow so their voices can accompany those who care about them into the future and that can only be a good thing.

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A Scot in Africa – victim of Blackwater Fever

This was once such a brisk little village: the northeast’s lost communities

The window is nailed and boarded through which I saw…

and will strike the deer that goes dizzily, sniffing at the grass-grown ruined homes…

(Hallaig, Sorley MacLean)

One by one northeast Scotland’s wee fishing communities gave up their struggle to eke a living out of the sea for the battle was proving hopeless – up against bigger, better equipped vessels that encroached on the waters off their townships. A separate battle, too, of the young’s discontent with their parents’ and grandparents’ way of life. A life of constant danger that gave little back in return.   

Before the days of the northeast’s millionaire trawler dynasties thousands of northeasters were dependent on the sea for a modest living. Their little brown-sail vessels were a common sight, bobbing up and down on the German Ocean (now north sea) fishing for skate, ling, turbot, whiting, flounders, cod and haddock.  But come the twentieth century those days were numbered. The old were left to maintain the tradition as best they could but penury drove many of them away from the place that had been home for generations. So, they stood to look out one   last time through the windows to the sea and sky not fearing the stirring of a storm, that harbinger of death, but to a capture a memory of times past. Those tiny windows in a wall of stone that engaged a stranger to peek into from outside when walking by deserted home after deserted home.

There was still hope in the 1920s among some in fishing communities that their decline might be stalled. But no. The family fishing boat crewed by fathers and sons and brothers and nephews and cousins could not compete with the big boys from bigger ports. Women were essential, if unacknowledged partners (junior, of course), in the family enterprise through their roles scranning for bait, baiting hooks on fishing lines, cleaning, curing and selling the fish – hard, hard work. Younger women increasingly chose to look for jobs elsewhere, with better pay and didn’t involve being half frozen to death. Women’s work. Traipsing mile upon mile over rough country, back straining under a wicker creel heavy with fish that had to be sold – to country folk. Little wonder, then, given a choice of a different life, there were women who opted for that – emancipation became a dirty word in the opinion of their older menfolk despairing over their lost source of cheap labour.   

Young men, too, were off. Some with a mind to carry on fishing lacked the disposable income needed to buy a share in a boat with gear constantly needing replacing. They also moved to towns, perhaps to the monotony of industrial labour or learn new skills such as quarrying.

Simple, tiny cottages with hardly a stick of furniture, their inhabitants bearded men in blue ganseys, caps and long boots and women in coarse skirts, long aprons, shawls and bonnets – as poor as church mice – yet so appealing. So picturesque. So quaint. They created a charming scene that was a novelty to toonsers from Aberdeen; day-trippers who would come to gawp at these curious natives. As more homes emptied some of the richer folk even bought up a former fisher’s cottage going for a song as a holiday home.

In the gran’ hooses in th’suburbs o’ Aiberdeen ye’ll find th’ money that should ha’e gaunt ae th’ line fishermen.

Bonnie Muchalls (formerly Stranathra) became a popular weekend resort – and Skateraw, now Newtonhill. From fishing villages to holiday resorts and in time they became dormitory towns for Aberdeen. In 1855 twenty-six Skateraw families fished out of the village. Thirty years later the decline set in. Findon, too, suffered the same fate. Findon where smoked haddock originated, Finnan haddies.

Nearby Downies perched above the cliffs with its tiny rocky shore once sent forty fishermen to sea in seven or eight boats but by the start of the twentieth century that life faltered and soon ceased entirely. Portlethen rubs up against Downies and here crab and lobster catches lingered after the village’s ten yawl fishers were forced to turn their backs on the sea.

Cowie, now absorbed into Steenhive (Stonehaven), operated twenty-three boats including nine herring vessels in 1855 but by the 1930s this has dropped to a single yawl. Stonehaven with its substantial harbour was the area’s centre for landing catches -boats from Cowie, Crawton, Skateraw, Shieldhall and Cove landed and sold their catches there, sometimes having them processed in the town before being sent to be sold in the south. Up to two hundred boats landed at Steenhive in the mid-eighteen hundreds providing plenty work for the town’s eight curing businesses. Stonehaven’s own fleet of fishing boats included sixty line boats in the late nineteenth century before the coming of steam trawlers put a lid on that.

Even at Steenhive the young looked to alternatives to the fishing. When unemployment benefit was introduced in 1920 older men in the town complained that the ‘cursed dole’ provided an alternative to youths otherwise compelled to carry on the fishing tradition. Steenhive’s line fishers were making between £2 and £5 a week – hardly a king’s ransom and while the ‘cursed dole’ was little enough (15 shillings a week for men, 12 shillings a week for women for a maximum of 15 weeks) it didn’t involve risking your neck every time you launched a boat into the north sea.

Most older folk had few expectations beyond scraping by on a paltry living. Days when prices were good were welcome bonuses. Sometimes catches exported to England made ‘a fabulous price’ – ten shillings a stone and for a year or two around the turn of the twentieth century. Stonehaven could probably have absorbed more fishers from its neighbouring villages where the trade was dying fast but for a shortage of housing in the town, but even here by 1928 the port was home to a mere twelve boats, providing work for about fifty men. Twenty years earlier there had been thirty-two big yawls each crewed by five men, eight small yawls and twenty-five herring drifters. Then they were gone.

The Great War of 1914-18 that changed so much in the world accelerated the decline of northeast fishing and the stagnant state of European markets pushed more men and women away from fishing and away from fishing villages. Echoes of the dead hand of Brexit.

The foonds of once thriving Crawton survive battered by a coarse wind off the north sea. The stones howked from the land to make homes for fisherfolk sink slowly back into that same ground. Crawton, about four miles south of Stonehaven, a waterfall dropping down to the sea on one side and a steep path leading down to the water’s edge at the other end of the ghost village. In the best of times Crawton provided a living for forty fishermen and their families with about twelve boats pulled up on its tiny shore but by 1900 the fleet was no more than six or seven yawls and three herring drifters for now larger vessels sailed into Crawton’s ‘turf’. By the 1920s the last of Crawton’s fishermen left, taking themselves off to Steenhive to live out their lives at Dawson’s Buildings. And the village fell into ruin.

The tiny village of Catterline with its white washed cottages strung out in a line along the clifftop, high above the small harbour, became home to farm hands not fishers by 1928. As with Crawton, being a distance from the main road became a costly stumbling block when adding transport costs to the margins made from selling small amounts of catches with boxes of fish and shellfish having to be sent for processing to Stonehaven (6d a box of fish, 4d a box of crab and lobster) and then to England by rail for marketing. Catterlines’ rocky coast made it ideal for lobster and crab fishing but the village also had fourteen line boats and seven herring vessels supplying work for forty men and innumerable women at one time.  But in common with other fishing villages the tradition died, the boats were sold and villagers left and the population dropped from about 100 at the start of the century to about thirty people in 1928, and the bulk of those left were aged over fifty.

Farther north lies Newburgh. Now a bird and seal sanctuary, famous for its long stretches of sandy beach, Newburgh once was a thriving fishing port at the mouth of the river Ythan. The river provided fisherwomen with plentiful supplies of bait for line fishing and the Braidsands a good source of mussels and lugworm. In the late 1880s a dozen boats each with a crew of five fished out of Newburgh, their catches carried deep into the countryside by women, to sell to cottagers and farmers around the area of Tarves, Belhelvie and Dyce, some fifteen miles away and buy farm produce, butter, eggs etc in return. Newburgh’s fishers complained about the encroachment of large vessels sailing in close to their village for its decline that begun around 1880 before a three-mile limit was introduced so there was nothing to prevent trawlers from as far afield as Hull gathering ‘like a forest along the coast.’ Large scale fishing by wealthy skippers was blamed for destroying Newburgh’s fishing grounds and lines and several legal disputes were fought between locals and English fishing companies. The imposition of a three-mile limit and ‘exclusive right to fish’ was enacted in 1883 and expanded in 1889 to ban trawling within three miles off the coast over concerns about dwindling fish catches, not declining villages.  However, next along came seine-net fishermen from Aberdeen, Gourdon and Montrose, again encroaching on inshore fishing.  

Collieston with its haphazard arrangement of tumble-down cottages was once a thriving fishing community. In the opening years of the new century Collieston sent out sixteen line vessels with crews of over sixty men to provide for their families from what they took from the sea – and some fifteen herring boats. But as catches fell away the young left for Aberdeen or to live abroad. Women stopped carrying fish inland, instead most of the fish caught here was transported to Auchmacoy railway station for export to England. Soon enough that trade dried up and as was happening elsewhere, Aberdeen folk, taken by the bonnie setting of the village bought up abandoned houses as second homes.

The name Slains lives on as the inspiration for Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Under the shadow of the old castle of Slains a village dependent on fishing for a living emerged. At one time twelve boats fished from here but only two remained by the late 1920s and the village suffered a similar fate to its illustrious castle.

Whinnyfold is perched above a little creek to the south of Cruden Bay. The railway station at Cruden Bay kept the village’s fish trade alive for a while into the twentieth century when it cost four shillings for a box or four, a substantial rate from a box of fish that might fetch ten or twelve shillings. The numbers of men willingly continuing to make a thin living from the sea waned. Where in 1900 there were eight crewed boats by the 1920s there were no more than four. The village’s young men with a taste for the sea looked farther afield, to Shetland, Lowestoft and other bigger ports.

In 1928 a fisherman from nearby Port Errol lamented the end of an era

Fishing will soon die out here . . . this was once such a brisk little village.

And so it was – fifteen big yawls manned by seventy men before WWI as well as up to thirty herring boats. By 1928 there were six motor boats with three or four crew each remaining. Aberdeen and Peterhead absorbed some families while others chose to emigrate.

If they would only give us a six-mile limit, we would make a success of it

observed one younger fisherman in the 1920s. But they didn’t. And Port Errol’s fishing paid the price.

Eighty-five herring and twenty haddock boats used to fish out of Boddam. The village supported thirteen curers. By the 1920s some twelve boats remained. Again trawling was seen as a major cause of their downfall. And what a downfall. On one day in 1928 a Boddam fisherman held up his catch for the day, he and his two crew having fished for two and a half hours – one small codling. A day’s catch usually comprised of one or two boxes of codlings worth thirty shillings – divided between three families.

A County Council report looking into the decline of fishing in the northeast’s coastal villages found that in the eleven places they investigated between 1890 and 1911 the number of fishing boats fell by about forty percent, and tonnage of catches by sixty percent. At Skateraw thirty-four boats catching 599 tons of fish in 1890 dropped to five boats taking in only 36 tons of fish in 1911; Downies eighteen boats dropped to five and fish from 133 tons to 23. At Stonehaven the drop was from 110 boats to fifty-two and about 1700 tons fish to 760 tons.

Were I but young an’ feel again –

An’ that can hardly be,

I’d like to mak’ a change or twa;

I widna seek the sea.

(The Choice, Peter Buchan)

Paper roses, Imperialism, Fascism, Franco and a Mysterious Scotsman

It was the 26^th of June 1924, Alexandra Rose Day. One or two women were gathered outside London’s swanky Ritz Hotel selling paper flowers to raise money for charity when they were approached by a well-dressed man who handed one of them a large sum of money. “For the hospital,” he said, and walked on as he had done each Alexandra Rose Day for several years, promising to see the flower sellers again the following year.

The women told a reporter who turned up they had no idea who the generous benefactor was – “He looked like a traveller to Russia or Africa or somewhere” one of them said.

I was curious. Who was this mysterious Scotsman? I began scranning through newspapers and books and found myself transported into a world of which I knew next to nothing. Did I uncover the identity of the Scotsman? If you have a few moments to spare I’ll explain what I found out.   

1924 London and the Rif

Staying in London at the time, in a west end hotel, was a Scotsman who was a technical adviser to Muhammad ibn al-Karim al-Khattabi, known as Abd el-Krim or Krim. Krim was President of the Republic of Rif – a mountainous region in northern Morocco. His people were Amazighs, a tribal group among the Berbers. Krim was one of several tribal leaders in the Rif and all were at war with the European power of Spain that held the Rif as a protectorate, having been granted it by France that colonised Morocco in 1912 and governed to the south.   

Why had Spain been attracted to this inhospitable though beautiful area on the other side of the Mediterranean? Not its stunning beauty, hills sweeping up from the sea washed yellow with corn and green from banks of olive trees and everywhere giant prickly pears. No, that wasn’t it. The Rif region of Morocco was rich in easily extracted high-grade iron. And Europe couldn’t get enough cheap iron. Britain and Germany were interested. So was Spain.

Extracting the iron ore was physically damaging to the landscape and to sites that were sacred to the Berbers. It also meant the eviction of people from their traditional homelands. What did the Berbers get in return? Nothing. No compensation although some were hired to mine the ore at half the rate paid to Europeans – 4-5 pesetas per day against European wages of 7-8 pesetas. Mining was carried out under American management.  

The people of the Rif resited the incursion of Europeans onto their land. But European powers still believed the world belonged to them and claimed territory they thought would be beneficial to them, if they had the power to impose themselves. So war came to the persecuted people of the Rif. A dreadful war of great cruelty and loss. The events in the Rif in the 1920s had consequences for mainland Europe over the next sixty years.

Mulai Ahmed er Raisuli was another Berber leader, of the Jebala in the north-western territory. To some he was the Desert King and to others the Rob Roy of Morocco. Raisuli’s early life seemed to promise a quiet existence. A teacher of law and theology, Raisuli’s love was books and writing. That all changed on the day he chanced upon a woman who had been assaulted by some men, apparently Europeans. Raisuli decided it was his duty to rid his country of the European Christians – the Spanish, British and Americans whom he regarded as his country’s oppressors. The Rif’s jails were filled with Rifs – put there by the Spanish colonists – beaten and denied trials Rif people were simply locked away for challenging Spain’s authority. Rifs were ordered to carry passports to move around their own country. The war that disrupted farming created Rif starvation on an immense scale. People were dropping down in the street from hunger so the Spanish authorities opened camps to contain them – picking them off the streets ‘like refuse’ to die away from the public eye. Spain complained of the cost of keeping their piece of Morocco. And yet they held it.  And taxed the people. Everything sold carried a tax and people were encouraged to pay up by tax collectors armed with machine guns. Resentment against the Spanish among the Rif tribes was huge. 

Raisuli used kidnap in his campaign of resistance to European colonists. In 1903 he kidnapped Walter Harris, a journalist from The Times, and exchanged him for fifteen of his Rif fighters held by the Sultan of Morocco who had submitted to France in a treaty that allowed him to retain his titles and position so becoming France’s puppet ruler in Morocco. When Spain came knocking on Morocco’s door France divied up Morocco under which France retained the southern portion and Spain was given the north. Raisuli’s men snatched a wealthy American and his son-in-law. Almost immediately British and American warships anchored in the Bay of Tangier. A deal was struck and the pair released but the guns were out for Raisuli and his people were driven deep into the mountains from where they pursued a guerrilla war against the European colonists. One of the intermediaries negotiating between the Berbers and the Europeans was a Scotsman called Kaid MacLean.

Kaid MacLean aka Sir Harry MacLean aka General Sir Harry Aubrey de Vere MacLean born in England to Scottish parents entered military service and served in Gibraltar and Tangier. Reputedly a debonaire larger-than-life character who was said to have ‘walked straight out of the pages of a novel’ MacLean came to the attention of the Sultan of Morocco who made him his counsellor, business adviser and envoy. MacLean lapped up the Moorish life except for its food. In the grand residence the Sultan provided for him MacLean employed a French chef and his musical needs were supplied by his own Italian orchestra. Classical strings can satisfy a Scotsman to a degree but a piper, himself, MacLean returned from a visit back to Britain with Aberdeen piper, John McDonald Mortimer. Soon the Sultan was won over and established his own Moroccan pipe band, attired in the MacLean tartan.

In his role as the Sultan’s envoy, MacLean was occasionally required to undertake long and arduous journeys including on horseback for up to fourteen hours a day for hundreds of miles. But he had less challenging missions. The Sultan, a shopaholic, bought a hansom cab that nobody could or would drive so MacLean took the reins and took it for a 120 mile trip to Fez. Roads in the Rif mountains were practically non-existent and mostly the cab’s wheels were removed and the cab of the hansom slung between two camels to negotiate the rocky terrain. Among the Sultan’s other purchases from Britain were several Coventry bicycles for the women in his harem to cycle. Apparently, they were none too keen.

In July 1907 the Sultan’s envoy, Kaid MacLean, was kidnapped by Raisuli’s men and held captive for seven months on demand of a ransom of £20,000 – about £200,0000 today. In the end Raisuli was only paid £5000 up front with a promise the remainder would be banked to ensure he ‘behaved’ over the next ten years. He never did get the remaining cash. In April 1922 an air bombing campaign in conjunction with a land attack by a Spanish force of 30,000 men forced his surrender. Raisuli later escaped captivity and made an uneasy alliance with Abd el-Krim to resist Spain’s grip on northern Morocco.   

By this time, Kaid MacLean, Scottish soldier of fortune, was dead. He died in February 1920 at the age of 72 so he could not have been the mysterious Scottish traveller who beguiled the paper flower sellers in 1924.

In September 1924, three months after the mysterious Scot donated a large sum to charity on Alexandra Rose Day British newspapers were reporting a plot to buy weapons and recruit former officers for the Berber campaign to oust the Spanish from Morocco. Two submarines from redundant stock were sought from an armaments company in the north of England at a cost of £30,000 to use in the Straits of Gibraltar to torpedo Spanish vessels supplying their Moroccan forces with food and arms. Payment for the submarines was being put up by Abd el-Krim.

The man who had Krim’s ear was Scottish – a former officer with the Scots Greys and fluent Arabic speakers – a “daring professional soldier to whom war and adventure is life itself” and perfectly placed to recruit British men, officers, fairly recently demobbed from the Great War. The Scot offered his mercenaries 30 shillings a day plus extras dependent on “the results they obtained, together with a big gratuity when the war was over.” As well as the submarines and men, Krim’s man was authorised to purchase machine guns and aeroplanes. The Scot was confident as he knew of plenty British former pilots keen to get involved.  

Despite talk of large arms the Berbers mainly depended on guerrilla tactics against Spain and later France. The Rif war reintroduced the medieval war craft of tunnelling into modern-day battle arenas – later picked up by Ho Chi Minh, Mao Zedong and Che Guevara.

By now Spain’s military force included the fascist Francisco Franco Bahamonde who took control of the Spanish army in Morocco. Franco and his legionnaires were notoriously savage. They delighted in mutilating Berbers and exhibiting their body parts to terrorise the local people into losing heart.

But still mighty Spain failed to overcome the Berbers of the Rif on their own and appealed to France for assistance. France provided large numbers of men under Marshal Pétain. Pétain would later become notorious for collaborating with the Nazis in Vichy France during WW2 and be convicted of treason but back in the 1920s he was a French hero who led a joint French/Spanish force against the tribes people of the Rif. France recruited sixteen American pilots to reinforce their air attacks on the Berbers in the summer of 1925. Their leader was Charley Sweeny, son of a rich industrialist who had served with the French foreign legion in WW1. Gertrude Stein criticised him for fighting on the wrong side in Morocco and for the bombing raids he led on people armed only with rifles to defend themselves with. The air action was widely condemned in the USA, especially by black groups, and 1925 became known as the year of the airplane.

Failing to make fast progress the western forces resorted to chemical warfare – attacking the Berbers with mustard gas, phosgene and diphosgene – deliberately targeting civilians shopping in markets and poisoning drinking water. This despite Spain and France having signed up to a ban on chemical and biological weapons in 1925. There was little outcry from the rest of the world over Spain’s use of chemical weapons since they weren’t used against white people.

Spanish atrocities against the Rif

But what of the mysterious Scotsman?

Captain Robert Gordon Canning, descendent of the Gordon’s of Cluny in Aberdeenshire, supported Arab nationalism. With strong links to Germany he organised German arms and field supplies be sent to Krim’s forces. He became Krim’s peace envoy when it was clear the Berber’s were losing the war against the combined powers of France and Spain and he left Morocco for Britain at the end of the war, in 1926.  Ten years later he was best man at the wedding of the British fascist leader, Oswald Mosley, and Diana Mitford. A fellow fascist, Canning was imprisoned for three years in 1940. Canning’s German connections included an Anglo-German organisation called The Link – a pro-Nazi group particularly popular in London. The Link was banned at the outbreak of war in 1939 but reportedly resurrected in 1940 by James Bond author, Ian Fleming, to lure Rudolf Hess to Britain in 1941.  

The combined forces of Spain and France and their dirty war spelled the end for the Berbers of Rif. On 26 May, 1926, Abd el-Krim surrendered to the French and was exiled. The Rif war of 1921-26 was regarded as a harbinger of the Algerian war and independence in 1963, which Krim just lived long enough to witness.  Morocco achieved independence in 1956 with the submissive role of its Sultans still being much criticised by the people of the Rif. While in exile in Cairo Krim had again appealed for help for his fellow Rifs but none came and many were slaughtered by the Sultan’s forces for their continuing opposition to him. Little has changed. The people of the Rif are still persecuted – by the Moroccan authorities. They still resist. They are also still dying too young of cancer, believed to be a legacy of Spain’s illegal used of deadly chemicals in the twenties.

The surrender 1926 – Krim is fourth left in the first picture

As for Franco – he and his legionaries gained valuable battle experience in the Rif mountains and within ten years they crossed the Med into Spain to carry out atrocities there in the Civil War of 1936 -39. Of that encounter the American journalist, Webb Miller wrote of Spain’s fascists –

I came out of Spain badly shaken by the atmosphere of blood, tears and terror, and profoundly discouraged about the future of Europe. What I saw and heard of the wide development of the use of terrorism as a definite weapon in warfare was sickening. Never in modern times has there been such a holocaust of cold-blooded slaughter of prisoners, of wounded and of helpless hostages in thousands. Terrorism of civilian populations by indiscriminate bombing from the air had largely wiped out the distinctions between combatants and non-combatants. Amongst the dead and wounded on both sides were many thousands of women and children. “We are fighting an idea,” and officer told me. “The idea is in the brain, and to kill it we have to kill the man.

(Waterford Standard 8 May 1937 )

And the Scotsman? Well I can’t say for certain. There was an Englishman, a photographer and trader called John Arnall. He was a socialist who sympathised with the Islamists of the Rif. Arnall formed the Anglo-Ottoman Society in 1914 and was a founder member of the Communist Party of Great Britain (but later turned against communism.) He and his wife lived for a time in Tangier and in early 1922 he visited the Rif with a plan to make money from selling mineral rights which is how he came to be involved as a spokesman for the Rifs in London, attempting to drum up support for their cause. Arnall was also a member of the Irish Socialist Republican Party and his various activities made him a target of the British Special Branch who intercepted his mail and generally kept an eye on his movements. It is believed he was killed by the Spanish in Morocco in 1924.

John Arnall extreme left, front row with members of the Irish Socialist Republican Party

In 1977 a British film was made based on the Rif war of 1921-26. Called March or Die it starred Gene Hackman as a heroic white man fighting for the heroic French against the villainous Berbers. Ian Holm played el-Krim.

In 2017 a film called Iperita was made about a former Spanish pilot, guilt-ridden because of his part in the bombing of Rif villages and his return to the area to find the landscape almost obliterated and its people gone. You can watch it here –

The Scotsman outside the Ritz in 1924? I don’t know. None of the above. But there are roses still – mentioned in a contemporary song aimed at informing the young of the Rif of the cruelties of the past which have never quite left them –

We know the whole truth
But we want you to confess and reveal everything
Just as the pain in my heart speaks of the many torments it has endured
Just as roses grow on the graves of the victims who fell from your crimes.

The Scots that built Russia’s army and navy

Why did so many men from northeast Scotland play such an important part in the development of Russia’s army and navy? According to the American writer, Washington Irving, it was down to the topography of their homeland – the flat coast, eastward-facing that produced

men of the clearest brains, the strongest arms, and the most determined wills, to a country in which these commodities have never been wanting.

Russia’s military and naval might might not be what it is today had it not been for a few Scotsmen. Quite a few Scotsmen as it turns out but one or two who were instrumental in reorganising the Russian empire’s defences (and lines of attack.)

Russian Imperial Navy 1700s

Since boats were boats Scots sailed to the Baltic from Aberdeen and Leith and points in-between to trade, to study and ply their crafts – including the arts of war. Mackenzies, Lindsays, Watsons, Farquhars, Hays, Elphinstones, MacLeods, Learmonths – George Mikhail Lermontov, ensign in the Russian army and descendant of Thomas the Rhymer, Gordons.

There are a lot of Gordons in Scotland and quite a lot were to be found in Russia over the past four hundred years.

Patrick Gordon from Auchleuchries in Aberdeenshire was in danger as a Catholic from the religious civil wars that brought Cromwell to power so at the age of sixteen he was taken by his father and uncle to Aberdeen to purchase clothes and put him aboard a merchant ship sailing to Danzig. Danzig (now Gdańsk) then held within a union between Poland and Lithuania was an important Baltic port. There he found accommodation with another Scot, John Donaldson, before making his way across Europe, lodging as he went mainly with Scots with whom he was put in contact. For a time he travelled with fellow-countrymen, Thomas and Michael Menzies and a Jesuit priest, Father Blackhall.

Not familiar with the local languages and dialects young Gordon struggled at first to get by speaking Latin and a smattering of Dutch. One particular day it all got too much for Gordon and he sat down on the roadside and wept from desperation but on being comforted by a stranger the young lad found the determination to continue.   

In 1655 young Patrick Gordon, a capable swordsman, did what thousands of his compatriots did, he sold his battle skills to the highest bidder, as a mercenary soldier. He enlisted with the Swedish army as a cavalryman. Opportunities there were plenty for mercenaries with Europe in constant turmoil battling over land and power. Gordon’s allegiances switched about. He fought with the Swedes at times and at other times with the Poles, against his former comrades. It was while in the pay of the Swedes he found himself a prisoner of a Russian force led by Scot, Colonel John Crawford (Crawfurd). Crawford persuaded Gordon to cross to the Russian Imperial army where he was told he’d be in the company of many Scotsmen.  

Patrick Gordon proved himself again and again on the battlefield and he rose through the ranks becoming a Major General, later Lieutenant General and Chief of Command at Kiev (Kyiv in Ukraine). By this time Gordon had become Pyotr Ivanovich, a trusted adviser and friend to the Tsar, Peter the Great. Gordon was the first foreigner in Russian history that a Tsar visited privately, when eighteen-year old Peter went to Gordon’s house in Moscow’s German Quarter. Trusted implicitly by him, Gordon laid the foundations of Peter the Great’s army that became the strongest in Europe.

Gordon died in 1699 at the age of sixty-four having served under three Tsars. The young Scottish laddie broken by loneliness fifty years earlier ended his life deeply mourned by a Tsar who provided his friend with a state funeral.

By the Grace of God, We Peter the First, Tsar and Sole Monarch of all Russi …blah blah blah …Be it known to Every one, That We have Graciously Appointed and Constituted Thomas Gordon (Captain Commander in our Navy for his well recommended to us Experiences, Dilligence and Zeal for our Service) to be our Rear Admiral the first day of January, 1719…  blah blah etc etc.

*

Gordon’s namesake who made a career for himself with the Swedish and Polish armies in which he attained the rank of Lieutenant Colonel and earned the nickname, Steel Hand for his swordsmanship, is sometimes confused with the Auchleuchries Gordon.

*

Another Gordon was Thomas Gordon, sometime captain of a merchant ship, Margaret, that sailed out of the port of Aberdeen, and was in 1703 in charge of the Royal Scots Navy ship, Royal Mary. Until the Union in 1707 Scotland was often the target of English aggression and ambition – some incidents were deadly and others petty though revealing such as Scottish vessels being denied the right to fly the Scottish pennant when in English waters. Following Union with England the Scottish Navy was scrapped in favour of the continuation of England’s Royal Navy. Scottish vessels and crews were absorbed into it and where both navies included identically-named vessels Scottish ships were ordered to change names – a move that was unpopular with Scots crewmen. From the start of the Union it was clear Scotland would be an inferior partner.

Royal Scottish Navy vessel

Thomas Gordon tholed so much English high-handedness but he refused to take an oath to the newly-crowned George I and left the navy, sailing to France where he stayed for a time before joining the Russian navy in 1717. He was promoted to Admiral in 1727 and later made Chief Commander of the Russian maritime port of Kronstadt. 

In common with numerous other Scots of the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Thomas Gordon’s family settled in Russia, either marrying Russians or bringing up their families as Russian. Ann Young was Thomas Gordon’s granddaughter. She married Thomas Mackenzie (Mekenzi) a Rear-Admiral in the Russian Navy. Their son, Thomas, also became a Rear-Admiral in the Imperial navy and founder of the city of Sevastopol – the largest city in Crimea and principal port on the Black Sea, in 1783. Sevastopol under him became a vital station for naval supplies as well as developing its shipbuilding capacity. The Mekenzi mountains in Ukraine are named in honour of him.

*

The ’Father of the Russian Navy’

The Sevastopol Thomas Gordon served under another Scot, Samuel Greig. Greig, the son of a merchant captain from Inverkeithing in Fife, became an Admiral and then Grand Admiral during the period of Tsarina Catherine the Great, who tasked him with modernising the Imperial Navy. She was the godmother of Samuel Greig’s son, Aleksei Samuilovich Greig, who was given the rank of midshipman at his birth. Almost inevitably the younger Greig made the navy his life. In 1816 he was appointed Commander in Chief of the Black Sea Fleet and ports at a time when Russia had full control of the Black Sea. Other Greigs enjoyed status roles in both the Russian army and navy. This family were part of the elite of Russian society for a century and a half but the sons were educated in Edinburgh.  

When the ‘Father of the Russian Navy’, Samuel Carlovich Greig, died he was given a magnificent funeral. Laid out with full pomp Greig was dressed in his Admiral uniform, his many medals illustrating his service to Russia Governor of Kronstadt, Chevalier of the Order of St Andrew, St Alexander Newski, St George, St Vladimir, St Anne. A crown of laurel was placed on his head. At the foot of the black-draped bier in a silver urn were his bowels.  

If Great and Good Actions
Command the Respect of Mankind,
The name of Greig will live for Ever.
He deserved good Fortune,
And he found it under the Banners of Cath.II.
He scattered the Enemies of Russia . . .

*

James Keith from Inverugie in Aberdeenshire who became a General Field Marshall in the Prussian army, a major military leader in Europe and trusted friend and adviser to Frederick the Great was for a time responsible for the Russian forces in Finland then being fought over by Russia and Sweden. Keith was one of three Inspector Generals of the Russian forces – his responsibility being the frontier with Asia along the rivers Volga and Don and a section of the border with Poland. Keith, however, did not settle in Russia but transferred into the service of the Prussia’s Frederick the Great. Like so many fellow-Scots, Keith was forced to flee Scotland because of his religion and/or his support for the Jacobite cause. He did briefly return to Aberdeenshire once no longer branded an outlaw but couldn’t settle having lived so long on the Continent. He returned to the army and died, killed by cannon fire at the Battle of Hochkirch in 1758. He had been let down by the man whose ear he normally had, Frederick the Great. Keith had warned him his Prussian troops were in grave danger from the Austrians if they didn’t alter position. Frederick disagreed, and Keith paid the ultimate penalty, knocked out of his saddle, he was killed instantly. Generalfedlmarschall Jacob von Keith has a granite memorial at Hochkirch.

*

An earlier army reformer with Russia’s Imperial forces was Alexander Leslie of Auchintoul in Banffshire (now Aberdeenshire). Alexander Leslie fought for the Swedes and Poles before transferring to the Russians and becoming Russia’s first General. Leslie recruited men from Scotland as part of his army improvements. He returned to the British Isles and took up arms in the Civil Wars for the Duke of Montrose and was ultimately banished from Scotland. Returning to Russia he lived out his life there, dying in Smolensk in 1663. His son, John, was killed while a Colonel in the Russian cavalry. John was married into the Scot-Russo Crawfords mentioned above.

*

Thomas Dalyell (Dalziel) of Binns, West Lothian, Bluidy Tam, fought in the Scottish Royalist army. In the civil wars a price of 200 guineas was put on his head. Not unsurprisingly he fled to Russia, into the service of Tsar Alexis I where his brutal reputation earned him the nickname, Muscovite De’il. He did not remain in Russia but returned to Scotland to crack down on the Covenanters with such force he came to be known here as Bluidy Tam.

Russian Imperial Army in the 18th century

Robert Bruce, not that one but a later scion of the clan, whose family under James Daniel Bruce settled in Russia in the mid-1600s – Robert, Roman Vilimovich Bryusov, served in Peter I’s personal guard and he became the first Commander of St Petersburg. His army career lasted around thirty years and when he died in 1720 he was buried in the Peter and Paul Fortress in St Petersburg,

Other members of the Bruce family were prominent in Russian society. Robert’s son, Alexander Romanovich Bruce was a Lieutenant-General in Russia’s Imperial army. Alexander’s uncle, Jacob Bruce, was primarily a diplomat and scientist (astronomer and naturalist – and also an alchemist and magician) but he also did a stint in the Russian army during the Russo-Turkish war and the Great Northern War when he was promoted to Major-General of Artillery – and rewarded for his successes by being made a count, one of the first in Russia, almost exactly 300 years ago.  Other Scots would follow into the Russian nobility.

When they travelled Scots took with them their birth brieve – a birth certificate with details of their origins. Additional documentation was kept in the Propinquity Registers of Scotland. Aberdeen holds some of these among its unique collection of archives dating back to Robert the Bruce’s time. Propinquity Books provided early modern travel documents. There’s an entry on 9^th July 1725 relating to the family of the late James Gordon of Auchleuchries, ‘brigadier in the service of the Emperor of Russia’ that records the disposal of his property to his kin in Scotland.  

Aberdeen’s Propinquity Registers reveal the importance and extent of Scotland’s east coast maritime trade with Europe. Sailing from Scottish ports such as Aberdeen to Baltic ports “the path to the Baltic ports was easier, and the welcome greater, than the highway that led to England” it has been said. Europe provided opportunities for wealth and reputation and many a Scottish family counted their fortunes in Russian rubles.

The Union Dividend: emigrate if you know what’s good for you

     Scotland is gradually being emptied of its population, its spirit, its wealth, industry, art, intellect and innate character. If a country exports its most enterprising spirits and best minds year after year, for 50 or 100 or 200 years, some result will inevitably follow.

Edwin Muir, Scottish Journey, 1935:

Migrating Scots mother and children, 1911
(Library & Archives, Canada)

It is reprehensible that any government would regard its people as its main export but this was the fate of Scotland following the establishment of the Union – during the later 18 ^th century, 19^th century and even into the 20^th  century.

Without the broad shoulders of the Union, Scots are frequently told, Scotland would be a failing state – which begs the question, if Scotland has done so well from the Union how is it her population was compelled to abandon her in such huge numbers soon after the Union of 1707?

Either the Union has been devilishly good for Scotland and transformed her from a backward and struggling country into one both so innovative and confidently successful that she would have no trouble forging a bright future alone or it hasn’t. Which is it? We should be told.

Size seems to confound Unionists. Scotland’s population of about 5.5 million is too small, they argue. Successful nations with similar sized populations – Ireland, New Zealand, Kuwait, Denmark, Finland, Slovakia, Norway, Oman, Croatia might disagree and by now I’m getting into the 4 millions – Latvia, Bahrain, Estonia, Cyprus, Mauritius – below 2 million and could carry on to tiny Malta, Iceland, Barbados, Bermuda, Gibraltar – all of 33,000 inhabitants. But where was I? Scotland, unlike some of the above is richly endowed with potential for market-valuable renewables, is still an oil and gas producer, has unique and sought-after food and drink commodities, has an educated and skilled workforce and strong engineering pedigree.  If Scotland with all of this is not capable of standing on her own feet then the Union has failed Scotland and failed Scotland spectacularly, reducing our country to a pathetic dogsbody of a nation perpetually insulted and patronised and one whose interests are simply ignored by Westminster where the Union’s power is anchored.  

Bring on some goalposts. Not there. Over there. Where size is clearly not the issue it must be the economy that stops independence. Scotland isn’t rich enough. Remember the guffawing back in 2014-15 when oil prices collapsed? You’d be broke, Unionists crowed while simultaneously denying Scotland’s seabed was, in fact, Scottish. They aren’t laughing now with Brent crude prices back up in the 90s. Goalpost change. Climate change – you can’t open any more oil and gas fields – although this is a reserved matter and Unionist HQ, Westminster, is doing just that. Scotland’s large and expanding renewable energy sector is dismissed by Unionists who insist England will refuse to buy Scottish power and fresh water. Doesn’t sound like the actions of a friend never mind Union partner. But the Union has never been a partnership based on respect or trust.

From the inception of the Union government in Westminster operated on the principle that England’s industries and trade took precedence over Scotland’s. And in case we didn’t get the message Scots were told their country was poor and barbaric and we should sling our hooks and leave Scotland, the worthless nation, to rot. And many did. Some were forcibly displaced. Some chose to leave. The British Empire had spaces that needed filling with Europeans – so to Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa – ousting their native populations. Like so many of today’s migrants, Scots moved abroad in the hope of making a a better future for themselves and their families than was possible at home – because the Union dividend has always been a myth. Or they had no choice but to leave. Because the Union has been a disaster for Scotland.

One hundred years ago, in 1912, in the month of April 9,000 people left Scotland – just under 3,000 in a single week. In another week, in May of 1912,  3,520 Scots migrated to Canada or America from the Clyde alone. Other ports were available. On 1^st June, again from the Clyde, a further 2,000 were shipped west. On 6^th June 1912, a report claimed emigration from Scotland was running twice as fast as from England.

Canada was the favoured destination for Scots. Before the Union, Scotland established a colony in Canada in 1621. It was called Nova Scotia (New Scotland.) This colonisation proved brief, being surrendered to the French in 1632. Two centuries later, under the Union, the Canadian authorities employed squads of agents to sell Canada to Scots – to entice the brightest and best to settle there where farm land could be bought for the price of a year’s rent in Scotland and where industries required skilled men and women. Leaflets were pressed into hands and colourful posters pinned up in public places promising everything that was great and everything that was different from failed Scotland bogged down by hardship, low pay, high rents, filthy slums and poor food – the Union dividend.  

Lord Strathcona, a Scot who became a Canadian High Commissioner to the United Kingdom and a big shot in Canada, enthused about the vast territory of Canada able to maintain 150,000,000 people – he wasn’t talking about Canada’s own indigenous peoples, you understand, he wanted Scots to up sticks and settle there where everything was “the best.”

“Anyone – even a lady – could succeed on the land there” Strathcona said by way of encouragement. He knew ‘ladies’ from Russia who were farming. 

Back in Scotland the Union had so run down the country Scots took little persuading to leave. In 1912 a flood of humanity boarded vessels, mainly for Canada and America, but also for South Africa, Australia and New Zealand. This flood was a continuation of the one the year before. In 1911, about 90,000 Scots packed up and left the old country. Across the rest of Europe emigration to America and Canada was slowing down but not from Scotland where it was accelerating because Scots could see no future in Scotland in the Union. In 1906 Scottish exceeded Irish emigration for the first time and did so again in 1911-12.   

In 1911 Scotland recorded its lowest death rate since 1855 (when records began) and lowest birth rate since 1873 except for 1890. The low birth rate might be explained by the drainage of young men, sometimes abandoning wives, and young women moving abroad. Scotland’s population depletion was only regarded with concern once rate payers discovered they were being asked to provide poor relief for deserted families. But emigration provided excellent business opportunities for shipping lines.

American bound from Aberdeen

Between 1830 and 1914 around 2 million Scots emigrated abroad and a similar number are believed to have moved to other parts of the UK. Throughout the 20^th century Scotland’s population decline continued. Since 1851 the proportion of Scotland’s population to the population of the UK as a whole has diminished by 25%.

People, industries and company headquarters have moved away from Scotland. The oil and gas sector off the northeast of Scotland ran counter to this long-term trend and had a major impact on population, jobs and wage levels. Unfortunately, the immense wealth produced off Scotland’s coast failed to benefit Scotland. Instead, Thatcher ensured that London and the southeast of England profited with vast building and infrastructure spending there. Compare Europe’s oil and gas capital, Aberdeen, with London. You would never know Aberdeen was the hub of so much multinational activity. Scotland was prevented from benefitting from this klondike which is an odd sort of dividend – aka no dividend at all but cynical exploitation by a greedy partner.

James Annand, an Aberdeenshire journalist and soon-to-be Liberal MP (the shortest serving MP, dying within a couple of weeks of winning and never taking his seat) was campaigning in 1903. He buttered up his audience in St Fergus with references to townies who had no idea how tough life and work were for country folk and complained about the lack of affordable farms for rent. He reminded his audience that Scotland was a poor country – a poor country? Surely some mistake – after two hundred years of that Union dividend how come Scotland was still poor? The Unionist never explained but he did emphasise just how poor Scotland was and how it was understandable that so very many Scots migrated because they could not make a decent living at home. Annand supported Scots getting out of Scotland to Canada – the land of opportunity.

Canada still tempting Scots away in its quest for “suitable men and women to go there.’  Annand mentioned Texas with its “three million acres of land, owned by a single company, that was being offered in lots for sale at £1000 each” and Australia with its “incalculable opportunities for enterprise in connection with unoccupied territory” – where indigenous people didn’t appear to matter.

And so Scotland continued to be drained of many of its most “suitable men and women” – from countryside and cities – the populations of Edinburgh and Glasgow were also in decline. The tide of migration that swept “the best young men and women of Scotland” ashore in North America was detrimental to the economy back home as well as reinforcing how Scotland was failing its own people following years of underinvestment, attacks on its manufacturing, lack of opportunities, lack of hope and ambition over generations. The coming of the Great War placed a temporary halt on Scotland’s population depletion by emigration, replacing it with another loss, of many of its fine young people, in that disastrous bloodbath.

Early in the twentieth century when England’s population was about five times greater than Scotland’s its wealth was about thirty-six times greater than Scotland’s. That Union dividend, again.

Two hundred years of the Union, of the Union dividend, and the message was – emigrate if you know what’s good for you.                   

Westminster government statistics income 2014-16

For centuries England repeatedly attacked Scotland, in an attempt to annex it. It did not succeed until 1707 when a handful of Scottish nobles sold out their country for personal gain. That was the point that Scotland became an irrelevance in the eyes of the British monarchy and government except for the money it could raise from Scots taxpayers to help pay for England’s near continuing wars and her young men to sacrifice themselves as cannon fodder – for wars have a habit of eliminating people at a fearful rate. Peacetime taxes levied by Westminster favoured English industries to the detriment of Scottish ones. The Union was an English protectionist measure set up by the monarchy and Westminster. The myth it has been good for Scotland is just that. Westminster operates to benefit the city of London and this is why present talk of ‘levelling up’ is just talk. Ireland was treated in a similar manner to Scotland. The Irish woollen trade was destroyed to protect England’s and during the terrible famine years of the 1840s while 400,000 Irish people were starving to death the grain they grew on their land was carted away to fill British bellies. Destitute Irish could see no future at home and so left. Likewise in Scotland. Between 1840 and 1940 a little short of a million Scots went to live in other parts of the UK while more than two million emigrated abroad.

The Highlands and Islands Emigration Society encouraged Scots escape starvation during the Highland Potato Famine of 1846 by emigrating to Australia. In Westminster the Emigration Act of 1851 provided subsidies to landlords to ship people abroad like so much livestock. Queen Victoria and assorted aristocrats contributed to the costs to rid Scotland of Scots, though she, herself, decided to use the country as a holiday retreat.   

At the Union Scotland’s population was about 20% of the UK’s population. Today Scotland’s 5.5 million make up 8.2% of the UK’s overall population. According to the James Hutton Institute Scotland’s rural populations could decline by 33% in little more than 20 years.

While I was able to find sources that looked at the impact of emigration on Ireland I found none on the impact of emigration from Scotland on Scotland. Although not identical emigration from Ireland has comparisons with Scotland but in Ireland’s case destitution drove emigration much more than occurred in Scotland. The perception that migrants are always poor and low skilled has never been true. Of course people emigrate for different reasons and some impoverished and low skilled will take their chances moving abroad, often under duress, but these groups are those least likely to migrate while the educated, skilled and ambitious are more likely to voluntarily emigrate.

Migrants have also moved to Scotland. Through the 19^th and 20^th centuries they came mainly from Ireland, the Baltic countries and northern Europe (a reversal of 16^th and 17^th century Scots moving abroad to trade), Italians and, of course, people from Wales and England. With increasing global migration, the number of Scots born outwith Scotland continues to increase; in 2018-19 just under 40,000 moved to Scotland from overseas – 20,000 greater than left.

Fraser of Allander gross disposable household income across UK 2018

The return of some autonomy to Scotland through the partial resurrection of a parliament in Edinburgh provided hope for the future of the country. However, Westminster jealously guards its overall control of the whole UK and will chip away at Edinburgh’s authority and will as far as possible implement policies that protect and support that southeast corner of England, as it has done since 1707. These are dangerous times for Scots. If Westminster succeeds in extinguishing Scotland’s recently found confidence and optimism the country will again be plunged into a state of hopelessness that led to people leaving over three hundred years. The Union that needed heavily armed fortifications to ensure compliance in its early days, that ran down Scotland and drained it of “its best men and women” might have proved a dividend for Westminster but at a terrible cost for Scotland.

Oncology – Scottish impact on cancer treatment and the perils of radium

Very many of us have had all too close experience of cancer either in our own lives or in those of family and friends. Cancer is not a new disease and historically surgeons cut out malignant growths to try to prevent their spread. It wasn’t until the very end of the 19^th century and into the early part of the 20^th century that there were major scientific developments that would revolutionise the treatment of malignant tumours – with the discovery of radium and x-rays.

Nowadays we bundle cancer treatments under the label oncology, an umbrella term for medical, radiation and surgical methods of dealing with cancers; the intensity of treatments dependent on the severity and stage of illness – frequently surgery is followed by radiotherapy or chemotherapy.

X-rays were discovered at the very end of the 19th century, in 1895, by the German engineer and physicist, Wilhelm Röntgen.  This must have seemed like magic. In 1896 the first patient with a cancer of the throat was irradiated in an attempt to stem the growth of his tumour. The following year Henri Becquerel discovered that uranium salts emitted rays similar to x-rays. That same year Marie and Pierre Curie announced to the world an element they called radium, extracted from radioactive uranite or pitchblende and in 1902 they isolated radioactive radium salts from the mineral.

In 1910 John R. Levack at Foresterhill Hospital in Aberdeen in Scotland sought out a supply of the much talked-about, radium. His request was turned down by the hospital board and then the Great War was upon them so it was not until 1922 that Aberdeen Royal Infirmary obtained a small stock of radium salts, as did a few other hospitals in the UK, which led for instance to their use treating women with cancer of the uterus.

A quantity of radium was provided to the University of Aberdeen’s science hub at Marischal College’s Department of Natural Philosophy (Physics). There radium was turned into radioactive gas, radon, and needles were loaded with radium for medical interventions. Given the hazardous nature of these radioactive substances a radium officer was identified who was given responsibility for their safety. In 1922 this was John Cruickshank, a lecturer in malignant disease. As well as the radium officer, several other new roles were created at the hospital and university relating to the handling of radioactive substances and in order to develop appropriate methods for dispensing radium treatments to the sick.  

Loaded needles were inserted into malignant tumours

New academic and medical departments were created along with a raft of national and international organisations on the back of radioactivity. The British Association for the Advancement of Radiology and Physiotherapy was formed in 1917, later known as the British Institute of Radiology. A UK radium commission was set up in 1929 to regulate the use of radium in Britain, leading to a handful of radium centres and local radium officers. ^1. 

Radium requires very careful handling for it is inherently dangerous and at the onset of WWII a new problem arose – where to store the hospital’s supplies safely in the event of Aberdeen being bombed. It was. Aberdeen was the most bombed Scottish city during WW II. On the 21^st April 1943 127 bombs fell in just 44 minutes killing 125 people and destroying and damaging a huge amount of property. Any direct hit on the city’s store of radioactive material would have spelled death to many more, to thousands potentially, and for years to come with lethal radioactive dust finding its way into people’s and animal’s bodies the nightmare would be long-lasting. What to do? The answer had to come quickly.

In anticipation of this arrangements were made to protect radium supplies. Burying the material underground, to a depth of 50 feet or more was recommended but given Aberdeenshire sits on fairly impenetrable granite this was problematic so where could a place of real depth but still within the vicinity of the city be found? Anyone with any knowledge of Aberdeen will know what comes next – Rubislaw quarry. Rubislaw is 142 metres (465 feet) deep and one of the largest man-made holes in Europe. Local supplies of radium in solution were taken out of their glass containers, dried and restored. (Supplies from Inverness were included.) They were protected with lead and steel and placed in part of the quarry wall that had been specially prepared and the opening plugged with heavy timbers. Gaining access to the hospital’s supplies during the years of the war involved someone being lowered deep into the quarry on a Blondin  – an aerial ropeway. Not for the fainthearted. None of the handling of these toxic substances was for the fainthearted. As it happened the Germany Luftwaffe did manage to find Rubislaw quarry with a bomb but fortunately little damage was done to the borehole containing the hospital’s deadly supplies, and so the good folk of Aberdeen lived to fight another day.  An additional small quantity of radium was also preserved west of Aberdeen at Torphins hospital. Why I don’t know. Could it be that was closer to Balmoral and potential needs of royalty?

The ‘laboratory’ at Cove quarry

Although it was risky having radium right in the heart of the city there was little option if it was to be available for delivering medical treatments given the very limited life of radon gas. It had to be produced near Foresterhill. This couldn’t take place in Rubislaw quarry and the place chosen was at Cove on the southern edge of Aberdeen. Here both electricity and water were available and the railway ran close-by which was to prove valuable. Cove’s Blackhill’s quarry had a face excavated to store glass bulbs filled with dried radium for making into radon gas when needed. In the same way as it was protected at Rubislaw what became the little laboratory at Cove consisted of the mineral, steel, lead and in addition sandbags and a shed. One bad winter a south-bound train carrying the university’s H.D. Griffith (its first medical physicist) and his staff was stopped close to the site so they could more easily get through the snow drifts to make up essential medical supplies.  

Each time radon was needed liquid oxygen and gas cylinders had to be carried in to the ad hoc lab at Cove. But it worked and between March 1940 and September1945 Cove’s little workroom supplied not only Aberdeen but Edinburgh, Glasgow and Newcastle hospitals with radon gas.

Every care was taken to protect and preserve this potentially lethal but medically beneficial substance but still radium did go missing: seven filled needles of it disappeared in 1932; years later a 50 mg tube was flushed down a toilet by a hospital patient and despite valiant attempts to trace the radium through the sewer system to its outlet at the Bay of Nigg nothing was found; a further 50 mg tube was inadvertently incinerated at Woodend Hospital which must have resulted in radioactive smoke getting out into the atmosphere in west Aberdeen but there were no reports of associated health impacts.

Aberdeen’s early foray into nuclear medicine led in 1950 to Britain’s first oncology unit being established at the city’s Royal Infirmary under Professor James F. Philip who had been the hospital’s radium officer from 1939 till then and was a founding member of the British Association of Surgical Oncology. The department initially known as the malignant diseases unit built on Aberdeen’s ground-breaking joined-up approach to nuclear medicine that would influence cancer therapies across Scotland. By the 1970s all Scottish hospitals were encouraged to setup their own units based on what had been operating at Foresterhill for 20 years.

The most stable radium isotope is radium-226 which has a half-life of 1600 years. Radon 222’s half-life by contrast lasts only 3.8 days. Needles of radium salts were able to be used indefinitely but radon within them built up and leakages were likely. Radon needles were designed for fast application and needed constant replacement but their radiation hazard declined quickly. Needles were inserted directly into tumours as opposed to irradiation from outside. Radium or radon are no longer used. In 1980 caesium-137 replaced radium in the treatment of cervical cancer and iridium wire replaced radium for solid tumours.

Establishing safe and effective doses of radium isotopes became the source of many conversations in the scientific world, as among everyone else. Their impact on patients must have been significant.

Finally, a number of years ago I found myself in Würzburg where Roëntgen carried out many of his x-ray experiments and having read there was a small museum dedicated to the great man I tracked down what I thought was the place. Everyone must have been hard at work in labs or offices for it took me quite a time to find anyone there and none of whom seemed to know about displays so I left as disappointed as they were confused. No idea where I was but it doesn’t seem it was the right place because there is a Roëntgen museum which is, thankfully, available online. Nothing to do with this whatsoever but the small private hotel I stayed in for a couple of nights offered the best breakfasts of any hotels I’ve been to. And I’ve been to lots.

https://wilhelmconradroentgen.de/en/

Finally, finally.  The perils of exposure to radium were not understood at the end of the 19^th and start of the 20^th centuries and even when its hazards were beginning to be apparent its potential for industrial applications were too great for commercial enterprises to ignore. Staff and customer safety were of no concern and very young women employed in the USA to paint numbers and hands onto watches and military instruments so they could be seen in the dark involved the women licking the paintbrushes to form delicate points. The women were not told of the dangers of handling this curious paint that glowed in the dark and happily messed about painting it onto their fingernails and even their teeth as they kidded about while working. They became known as the Radium Girls and they developed cancers and many died as a consequence.

Radium ‘girls’

A craze for all things radium early in the 1900s led manufacturers to lace all sorts of products with the stuff, for no reason other than they could – chocolate, cosmetics, playing cards, clothing, health tonics. Bizarrely radium was added to hen feed with the idea irradiated eggs would self-cook and perhaps self-incubate.  Sounds nuts to us today but it was all new then. On the subject of nuts – Brazil nuts contain radium, naturally. Two to three nuts daily is not a health risk but go canny with those moreish chocolate Brazils.

*

^1.One eminent doctor whose name is permanently linked with the early years of radiology is Professor James Mackenzie Davidson one-time president of the British Association of Radiology (BAR) and the British Institute of Radiology (BIR).

Mackenzie Davidson’s parents were among the earliest Scots to emigrate to Argentina, in 1830. At least that was when his father went out there, aged 21, from St Martin’s in Perthshire. Don’t know about his mother because details about women are usually regarded as unimportant – I do know she was from Argyll. The Davidsons bought up pieces of land around the River Platte to farm sheep and cattle and did that successfully. Davidson senior survived many an adventure, including an attack by three gauchos who thought they’d killed him but it was Davidson’s horse that died, on top of him. When he was eventually able to extract himself from under the poor beast he was able, eventually, to find help and lived to experience several more adventures, apparently. The family were related to Marshall Mackenzie, the eminent architect from Elgin and Scotland remained important to the Davidsons who frequently sailed back from South America for visits. Their son, James, was educated at the Scottish School at Buones Aires and studied medicine at Aberdeen, Edinburgh and London. He graduated from the University of Aberdeen in 1882 and opened a medical clinic at West North Street in the city. From there, in 1886, he was appointed Professor of Surgery and lecturer in Ophthalmology at Aberdeen Royal Infirmary, the Sick Kid’s hospital and Blind Asylum. James Mackenzie Davidson became fascinated by the newly discovered x-rays and visited him at his workshop in Würzburg in Germany to learn more about x-rays and radiation and was able to carry out his own x-ray of a foot that had been pierced with a broken needle.  He devised the cross-thread method of localization to trace foreign bodies in the eye which proved of immense value for treating horrific eye injuries in WWI. Mackenzie Davidson was by this time in London, working with x-rays at Charing Cross Hospital’s Roëntgen Ray department. Following his death in 1919 an annual lecture in his honour was established by the British Radiological Society and a medal is presented for outstanding work in the field of radiological medicine.

H D Griffith Physicist ARI Zodiac Journal of Aberdeen University Medical Society Vol 1 p 190, Jan 1950.

Aberdeen Royal Infirmary: The People’s Hospital of the North-East. Iain Levack and Hugh Dudley, 1992.

https://lenathehyena.wordpress.com/2017/11/05/the-making-of-the-nhs-from-tannochbrae-to-the-highlands-and-islands/

The Great Hair Cut Riots

While hard-nosed peace negotiations were taking place at Versailles in France at the end of the Great War. While 74 ships of the German fleet were scuttled at Scapa Flow in Scotland. While Greeks and Turks fought over territory, encouraged by Britain. While rioting by Canadian troops stationed in England and Wales resulted in brutal murder. While all this was happening in 1919, a year the world was plunged into crises – uprisings, mutinies, riots and revolution – the Spartacists in Germany, reds versus whites in Russia, rebellion against British imperialism just about everywhere – always viciously repressed – in Egypt, Malta, Belize, Trinidad, Jamaica, India – and closer to home tanks and military turning their firepower on civilians in Ireland and in Glasgow. 1919 while the world tottered on its axis Aberdeen was rocked by rioting over haircuts. It happened like this.

Frederick Street School with its rooftop playground

In 1919 young girls usually wore their hair long and loose, no less so in pockets of the city where desperate poverty meant large families lived cheek-by-jowl in tenement rooms with limited access to soap and water – cold water from a communal tap on a stair landing or outside. Never hot water on tap. These were the homes for heroes promised by Lloyd George during WWI. In 1919 seriously deprived families, their men-folk just returning (if they were lucky) from serving in one of the most horrific wars ever, were no doubt struggling to contend with adjusting to life, attempting to find work, trying to keep the wolf from the door and possibly one of the last things on their minds were nits (head lice.)

Nits are little insects that crawl from one head of hair to another. There they set up home and lay their eggs until another head of hair comes close, in which case they may decide to jump ship and infest a different head. Nits are blood-suckers. And they itch like mad. Getting from head A to head B is easier on long hair that effortlessly comes into contact with other long hair. In 1919 the Health Committee of Aberdeen Burgh Education Authority decided to tackle an outbreak of nits among school pupils with action taken in the case of schoolgirls whose parents persistently failed to take responsibility for the problem themselves. Dr George Rose, the schools medical officer took it upon himself to deal with verminous heads and if parents would not cut their child’s hair, he would arrange for it to be done.  

In fact incidence of head lice was not an enormous problem in Aberdeen and Dr Rose found only one girl with ‘filthy hair’ at the Middle School when he inspected children there in June 1919 and when an appeal to her parents was ignored the doctor took matters into his own hands. His insensitive handling of the case was misjudged. All hell broke loose.

Several pupils from the Middle School went on strike, their number boosted by youths already skiving (truanting) who when they heard of the hair-cutting incident readily joined the collective action. STRIKE was chalked over the school’s playgrounds to underline their protest. Word got out and pupils from schools across the east end joined the protesters or rioters as they were identified, mainly but not exclusively, teenage boys. They went from school to school drumming up support. More playgrounds were chalked to indicate strike in those schools and school buildings were pelted with stones. Windows were smashed; scarcely a pane of glass remained intact at the Middle School. Marywell Street and Ferryhill suffered similar attacks. Some rioters turned their attention on Union Terrace, gathering outside the education authority offices they booed their disapproval of the committee that sanctioned cutting girls’ hair. Loud protests carried on into the nights of the third week of July 1919 and there was consternation among the citizens of the town about where it would all end. The local authority fought back.

At the root of this Middle School fracas there seems to be the contempt for and insubordination to authority which are characteristics of the times among certain classes of the community.

I think the city fathers feared rebellion against authority affecting both Britain and the rest of the world that year had permeated through to the lower classes in Aberdeen. The haircut riots had become class riots. Working class parents complained of being given no or too little warning to have their girls’ hair cut and heads treated for lice while middle class critics sneered that –

The working-classes are all for State control of everything…glass was smashed because they dislike the medicine they themselves demand.

These were harsh times. A correspondent to Aberdeen Weekly Journal had little patience for treating children with kid gloves and on the subject of punishing school pupils for misbehaviour had this to say,

A few children may have died as the result of corporal punishment, but they were exceptional cases, and furnish not reason for its abolition. 

The school medical authorities justified their behaviour by pointing to powers under the Scottish Act of 1908 that enabled them to act if after 24 hours written notice to a parent to

…cleanse the child within 24 hours…[if] this notice is not complied with, the medical officer…may remove the children…and cause their persons and clothing to be cleansed.

The school strikes spread. Pupils from Skene Square school abandoned lessons and headed to the beach noisily shouting and cheering. At Frederick Street school the appearance of a nurse at a window led to a rumour that the vilified medical officer, Dr Rose, was about to wield his scissors there. In no time local mothers and children assembled by the school gates. The police were called and tried to assure them Dr Rose was not inside but the crowd were in no mood to be pacified. Missiles were thrown. A janitor was struck. At the end of the school day, at four o’clock, pupils were dismissed with no sign of Dr Rose. The crowd waited; certain the now notorious doctor would emerge. He did not.

Head lice

Some striking youths hanging about the nearby Links decided to seek out Dr Rose at his house in the city’s west end, at Rubislaw Terrace. They lined up outside it, shouting and waving union Jacks before pelting it with stones, breaking one window. When the police turned up a group of rioters disappeared round to the rear of the property where the police didn’t think to follow.  Stones rained down on a garage thought to belong to Dr Rose. It was his unfortunate neighbour who lost 19 panes of glass from his garage. From the west end they turned their attention again to Skene Square School which received volley after volley of rocks.   

One of the lads was dressed in soldier’s trousers and puttees and seemed to be in command. He was carrying a banner and shouting his orders to his ‘troops.’ He was considered a great hero that night, and imagined himself as such. His mother stated that he came home that night without his collar and tie; and thinking he had done a great thing.

Eventually the hair cut riots petered out. Then came the aftermath with punishments taking the form of the scud (the tawse or belt) or an appearance at the Children’s Court which resulted in 12 months probation for all the youths who appeared before it, for glass breaking.

Dr Rose was criticised for acting without tact over the few cases he had to deal with; one or two girls in a thousand had their hair cut by the school authorities. Just nine percent of the city’s girls had what was classified as dirty hair compared with forty percent found ten years earlier. So the problem was waning.

A proposed increase in Dr Rose’s salary was turned down by the Staffing, Salaries and Bursaries Committee and remained at £650. The doctor was backed by the BMA who said his salary should be £800, describing him as one of the best school medical officers not only in Scotland but ‘in the kingdom’ and called the local authority members who failed to support Dr Rose, ‘unfair and cowardly.’

It might be supposed Dr Rose would have decided to move on but in 1920 he was still in his position reporting on the usual childhood ailments: whooping cough, measles, scarlet fever and diphtheria – all on the increase. He also noted a resurgence in city children’s ‘fetish’ for sugar – which had been interrupted during the war years when supplies couldn’t get through. Schoolchildren’s teeth were in bad shape. Some schoolchildren were still verminous – from about 93 city families.

1919 the year of revolt and riot. Few protesters came out on top. Authority everywhere had come though four years of terrible bloody conflict and were in no mood to compromise although in a way Aberdeen’s school authorities did by rapping Dr Rose across the knuckles in denying him a promised salary increase and they did ensure that in future parents would be more courteously treated when asked to keep their children’s heads clean and clear of nits.

The Headless Ghost

Jack’s Brae

It was the winter of 1842 and two thin and poorly-clad girls pulled their shawls closer about their spare bodies in an effort to keep from shivering in the raw cold of a dark November morning. It was early, about five o’clock, a time when better-off children were still fast asleep under feather quilts, but for eleven-year-old Bell Moore and her thirteen-year-old sister the mill bell was ringing as they hurried to work in Spring Garden in Aberdeen.  As they descended Jack’s Brae, Bell uttered a cry and in her terror she stumbled into the icy waters of a burn running along the roadside – for there by the Gilcomston brewery the ghostly figure of a man towered over them – a man with no head. The terrified girl turned and ran back home, abandoning her sister who had also seen the apparition to carry on to work; for their parents were sore in need of their earnings. Young Bell was so distressed she daren’t leave her home for several days for her nerves were shredded and she sighed constantly from anxiety. Eventually Bell was persuaded to return to her work at the mill and she found the courage to set foot outside but that scary apparition was always on her mind and a day or two later, one Friday morning, she could stand it no longer and crept out of the mill to return home. All the time she imagined the apparition jumping out at her and as she approached Gilcomston from John Street her fear was such that she collapsed in a faint in the street. People dashed to her aid and carried the child home where she suffered several seizures.

By the Monday Bell’s extreme distress passed on to her sister who had no sooner finished her supper and gone to bed than she jumped back out of it complaining to their mother,

“Na, mither, I’m as ill as Bell.”

Neither child was capable of standing upright for their legs were weak with fright. Their teeth chattered and when they attempted to drink out of their wooden cogs they bit at them, gripping the rims with their teeth. They talked of the ghostly figure at the brewery and admitted to having seen it several times over the past two or three years but had never been unduly frightened by it for it appeared with a snowy white cap on its head, unlike that unlucky day they saw it, headless. The monster, they said, was known to sometime stand and sometimes sit down, next to the black drinking fountain on the brae.

The phenomenon was the talk of the town. Other people admitted to having seen the ghostly man such as a fellow called MacKenzie and the girls’ aunt. People grew fearful, suspicious of passing down Jack’s Brae by dark. Local doctors put their heads together to explain the appearance but were left mystified.

A week or two later one Tuesday in early December two men were ascending Jack’s Brae. It was between ten and eleven o’clock at night and the two were deep in conversation. Just as they approached the brewery their discussion became so animated they stood still to clear the air when mid-sentence one of them happened to glance to the side and to his astonishment he saw a shape, perhaps a man, slowly emerge from the ground and uncoil upwards. The man, if that is what it was, was dressed all in white but for a broad black stripe up each of his legs. On his head was a white nightcap.

The two friends were momentarily stupefied and stared at the apparition. The apparition stared back at them. Then the ghost took a few steps to the north. One of the companions croaked, “The Ghost!” His friend cried, “We’ll chairge him! We’ll chairge him!” On hearing that the ghost took off at full speed. It ran helter-skelter with the pair of intrepid ghost hunters at his heels.

Along the burn, the lead-side, they ran and into Short Loanings. The phantom turned right. The pair turned right. At the brae head they turned into Back Loanings and down to Skene Square. On and on they sprinted, the ghost never daring to falter and his pursuers gaining on him all the time – along Caroline Place and up into Berryden. The ghost turned back then scaled the high stone dyke into the Barkmill wood where he was swallowed up amidst the trees. The exhausted friends pulled up. They had chased the nimble spectre for about two miles and one had even got a hand onto the ghostly shoulder but couldn’t keep a grip of it.

And that is a true story of the headless ghost of Aberdeen. Some people said the mystery of the spectre had been solved – that the mischievous spirit was someone in high spirits who set out to terrify folk out of their wits because of his cantrips and was not a late-deceased owner of Gilcomston brewery come back to check on how it was getting on.

The Moore girls admission of having seen a ghostly figure for at least two years including on early mornings meant it was not likely it was an impish youth intent on scaring honest folk but that, too, was explained when it was told that during cold weather the outside iron waterpipes attached to the brewery were wrapped with straw ropes which when frosted could appear to be a tall unearthly goblin wearing a snowy white cap.  

If you ever have cause to find yourself on Jack’s Brae on a cold and dark winter night, or even very early in the morning, don’t stop. Walk on, as fast as you can because you just never know.  

The Book of Deer . . . my response to Zbigniew Tycienski’s response to it

Firstly, many thanks for commenting on the blog. I did enjoy your own blog response – an excellent rejoinder to my rather glib piece on the Book of Deer.

Allow me to address some of the points made by you.

The question of where the Book of Deer should be housed – at Cambridge University Library in whose collection it has lain for so long or closer to the area whose name it takes and where it is likely it was compiled.

I’m not sure your phrase, “… to consign the Book of Deer to Aberdeen would have been unreasonable” is fair. Aberdeen has for over 500 years been the centre of learning for northeastern and northern Scotland with an excellent reputation across the areas of learning for being innovative and outward-looking. The implication in your response to me that scholars interested in the book would be forced to travel to a remote Scottish city – Aberdeen – to carry out their researches is a bit insulting. For a start Aberdeen is not a remote backwater and if you insist it is remote, then remote from what and where? Many assumptions are carried in the term remote. It may surprise you to learn that even in a remote city there can be found academics who are more than capable of appreciating, understanding and researching the manuscript. That they should be content with a high-quality copy is a strange argument that can be turned on its head. If a facsimile is good enough for Scottish researchers at Aberdeen then it must be equally good enough for researchers south of the Border. As Walter Benjamin might have said – as wonderful as a reproduction of the Book of Deer might be there is something wonderfully evocative being up and close to the original and the sensory experience of working with a manuscript dating from the 10^th century enhances the researcher’s experience, albeit separated by touch by a cotton glove.  

Of course the initial importance of the Book of Deer was as a Christian book. But the perception of any item can change with time. Think of a pair of ploughman’s boots. When worn by an early 20^th century ploughman they are just work boots but when acquired by a museum they are instantly reinvented as objects of cultural historical significance and so treated with respect, tended and protected and they attain a life story surrounding their initial existence; the boots that during their natural lifetime would have been casually pushed aside take on an artificial life in a museum where they become treasured artefacts displayed behind glass with a card alongside explaining their relevance. And so, too, the Christian Book of Deer that evolved during its own lifetime into more than a gospel book when two centuries later it was used as a notebook in which formal Latin gave way to the vernacular language of the time, Gaelic. While appreciating that for Christians the Book of Deer is as a religious script for me the fascination lies in the insights it provides into the cultural life of Scotland of around the 12^th century. The world is filled with religious texts but the Book of Deer is unique in its marginalia and accounts of land deeds. And that, to my mind, is absolutely breathtakingly wonderful. Now I don’t expect anyone in Cambridge to get quite as excited about this aspect of the book as some Scots will. And there is the nub of the matter. Where does the book rightfully belong?

Your flippant dismissal of Scots caring where the Book of Deer is kept as ‘paranoid’ is unworthy. Why must Scots have to travel to England, or elsewhere, to appreciate artefacts that relate to Scotland and/or derive from Scotland – and this one is unique as the earliest surviving document created in Scotland. Surely, surely there is a strong case for it to be given back to Scotland?

Tychy’s argument that Scottish relics displayed outside Scotland can help non-Scots appreciate Scotland is neither here nor there and not a strong argument for having Scotland’s treasures kept in places outside the country. If having Scotland’s artefacts kept in places outside the country where they can be better appreciated and through them greater appreciation of Scotland as a nation then why not apply this to all and everything in Scotland’s museums and galleries? What other country in the world would the argument be – it is better that we spread our cultural treasures here there and everywhere than house them close to the people whose ancestors created them and who are the people they are because of them? Scotland is no different from any other nation in recognising that objects that add to our understanding and appreciation of our own past should be readily available to the people they best represent. Artefacts have greater relevance in or close to their own place of origin. London Bridge dismantled and shipped to Arizona lost its English historical resonance and became just another bridge in its new setting.  

As for the argument that artefacts should be housed where they can be accessed by the greatest numbers then let’s see how popular that is when the British crown jewels are removed from the Tower of London and sent to a museum in Tokyo which has the largest population in the world. And if that is convincing then send every artefact from everywhere to Tokyo for the very same reason.

I don’t advocate Aberdeen refuse to return the book but given the current propensity for returning national cultural assets there is surely a case for Cambridge returning this one.

Tychy’s blog response to mine:

https://tychy.wordpress.com/2021/12/07/where-is-home-for-the-book-of-deer/?unapproved=17873&moderation-hash=20ee89447ac37c7254ce1667de21ec58#comment-17873