CHAPTER ELEVEN


HOMEWARD BOUND


‘Home is made for coming from,
And dreams for going to,
Which with any luck will never come true’

‘I Was Born Under A Wandering Star’




Scotland’s history is easy to find - most of it, at least. Even the distant past is there to be wondered at: Stone Age villages like Skara Brae and Knap of Howar, on Orkney, 5,000 or more years old; similarly ancient, enigmatic ritual sites like the standing stones of Calanais, on the island of Lewis, or the recumbent stone circle of East Aquhorthies, in Aberdeenshire.


The Romans, the first civilisation to write about the tribes living in the northern third of the landmass of the British Isles, left their seemingly indelible marks as well. Remnants of the great banks and ditches of the Antonine Wall, Rome’s most northerly border in these isles, are still plainly visible in the landscape of modern Scotland, along with forts, fortlets, roads and the rest of the infrastructure of empire. Within sight of East Aquhorthies is Bennachie, likely the scene of the legendary showdown between Agricola and Calgacus.


Traces of the so-called Dark Ages - the Early Medieval period that began after the Romans left - somehow survive into the light of the present day: Dunadd, fortress of the Gaels of Dalriada, is as impressive today as it was 1,300 years ago when the ancient kings made it the centre of a civilisation with trading links stretching as far as Afghanistan and the Mediterranean. The Pictish hillfort of Dundurn, too, stands as a silent witness to the centuries and millennia before Scotland even was Scotland. On and on through time it is the same: Iron Age brochs and medieval castles; ruined abbeys, grand palaces and mighty tower houses; sites of long-ago battles that still draw tourists from around the world by the busload; monuments to heroes, villains and rogues; caves and rocks assigned to this legendary name or that.


A visit to the city of Stirling can feel like a journey to the centre of the Scottish universe. All within a few miles of one another are some of the most revered touchstones of the nation’s identity - at least its mythical identity: the castle that was a refuge for the infant Mary Queen of Scots and home to all her Stewart forebears; the battlefields of Stirling Bridge, Bannockburn and Sherrifmuir. Standing sentinel over all of it is the 220-foot high tower of the National Wallace Monument. Built on top of Abbey Craig, from where William Wallace and Andrew Murray watched the advance of Edward’s army before descending to annihilate it with a rebel force at Stirling Bridge in 1297, it is a central point around which whirl the proudest thoughts and notions of many Scots, a place made at least as much of imagination as of history.


Glasgow’s cathedral, Provand’s Lordship, the Merchant City; Edinburgh’s castle, the Royal Mile, the Palace of Holyroodhouse; the battlefields of Culloden and Killiecrankie; Bothwell Brig and Drumclog; Aethelstaneford and Dunechtan. All over the country - north, south, east and west - the history is so thick in the air you almost have to waft it away from your face.


Invaders have come and gone or stayed to be swallowed whole. History has rumbled through it all like a battalion of tanks, through the Highland glens, across the flatland of the Carse of Stirling and on into the fertile Lowlands beyond and back again. One culture after another has been levelled to its foundations. Scotland - the rock of Scotland - has always been here, the same and not the same, but still Scotland to the ends of the roots of the very mountains themselves.


Until the time comes to look for the twentieth century, that is. Everyone of a certain age knows the names and the places that matter: the shipyards of Fairfield’s and John Brown’s; the steelworks of Motherwell and Coatbridge; iconic names like Bathgate, Linwood and Ravenscraig; the coal mines of Ayrshire, Stirlingshire and Fife. You might think there was plenty to see. Here in Scotland, after all, there are people still alive who saw every moment of the twentieth century. So you might expect there would be plenty of backdrops for filming the last episode of A History of Scotland. But you would be wrong. It has gone, almost the lot of it. Of the great cathedrals of twentieth-century endeavour and toil there is scarcely a trace. Visit John Brown’s shipyard now and all that remains is ‘Titan’, the massive cantilever crane that once lifted great engines into greater ships. It has been freshly painted and forms the showpiece of a visitor experience. But it is also a giant skeleton standing silhouetted against the sky, all that remains of an industry that died. Take the lift to the top and you can enjoy a grand view of Glasgow and of the rivers Clyde and Cart. You can also spot the outline, dizzyingly far below, of the slipway from which great ships like the Queen Mary were launched into legend. It has long since been filled in, of course, and now forms just a dark diagonal stripe across a recently laid walkway of lighter paving.


The once-familiar, giant blue tin can of Ravenscraig, emblazoned with the site’s name in huge white letters, is gone as well, demolished in July 1996. The coal mines are silent, the pumps long since switched off, allowing the caverns, shafts and tunnels to fill with water as dark as regret.


While the remains of every other period of Scotland’s history are dotted across the landscape, punctuation marks in a long story - carefully restored and maintained and fossilised for the edification of tourists - the physical evidence of the nation’s most recent past has been wiped away like chalk dust from a blackboard. It feels as though much of the twentieth century is a time Scotland would rather forget.


The Great War of 1914-18 has been described as forming railings that separate the past from the present. It is still possible to see through the railings, to glimpse the ways and mores of the past; but the barrier means there is no way for us to understand what it meant to live in the lost world before that maelstrom.


During the nineteenth century, Scotland was an important and influential part of Victorian Britain. The Queen herself declared her love of the Highlands and, with the purchase of Balmoral as a holiday home, restored the royal family to Scotland in a way that had been unknown, more or less, since the departure of James VI and I in 1603. It had been the century in which Scotland had either embraced or invented the technologies that would turn her into the engine, the workshop of the British Empire. The rise and rise of engineering works, and of Meccas to heavy industry like the Clyde shipyards, did more than just line the pockets of a few oligarchs. By completing the move away from work in the home - the way of the past - to massed workforces crowded into factories, mines, foundries and yards, the Industrial Revolution unwittingly created a ‘working class’. With so many men and women gathered together in the same places, sharing the indignities of appalling working conditions coupled with low wages, it was only a matter of time before some of their number would begin to demand something better for themselves and for their fellows.


The same forces that created a working class also shaped a middle class that had the aspiration, and more importantly the money, to distance themselves from those below them in the pecking order. While the managers and professionals built and occupied genteel suburbs on the fringes of the industrial centres, the workers were left behind in the overcrowded, filthy squalor that had characterised their existence from the start.


Scots, more than the inhabitants of many other countries, have long demonstrated an inbuilt acceptance, even an appreciation, of a clearly defined social hierarchy. While the working class mythologised the ‘lad o’ pairts’ - the self-made man (typified by Robert Burns, who rose through the social ranks armed with nothing more than an education and a guid Scots tongue in his head) - they were just as happy to live in a world in which each man and woman knew his or her place.


The Victorian era was also one in which the middle and upper classes indulged the notion that the poor and miserable had only themselves to blame for their various predicaments. If you were starving, scraping an existence in a filthy hovel, unemployed and hopeless, then it was because you were a moral and physical degenerate. Rather than improve the lives of the masses by building better homes for them to live in, or reforming employment so as to offer a living wage, the better-off set out to teach the poor the errors of their ways. Before they could be gifted any kind of practical help, they must first be taught to improve themselves. This was the heyday of the Temperance Movement that attracted many working-class people, notably women. Freed from the demon drink, the huddled masses would, it was thought, rise from the morass and become fine, upstanding, hard-working citizens.


It was also the last great flowering of the neat society-in-miniature that was the ‘big house’, when scores of servants were employed in the service of rich families, looking after their fine homes and grounds. The grand houses and estates of the wealthy provided respectable, sought-after positions for thousands of men and women - and imbued generations of them with an understanding that if they worked hard for the masters and mistresses, they in turn would be looked after by their betters. It was a strange symbiotic relationship, incomprehensible to us now, that worked in its own unique way in those years before the war that would change everything.


Victoria died in 1901 and it was therefore an Edwardian Scotland that was to endure the Great War. For men living lives of low-paid drudgery or struggling with the humiliation of unemployment, the chance to volunteer for service in a glorious crusade against an evil empire was irresistible. Working-class men tired of back-breaking labour; middle-class clerks and shop assistants tethered to the humdrum; upper-class husbands and sons desperate to emulate the glories of their ancestors - all were swept away by the tide. For the first time, Scots of all classes were united by a common cause and within weeks the recruitment centres in cities like Glasgow and Edinburgh were pushed to breaking point by the waves of volunteers.


There were few Scots men and boys, if any, that summer of 1914, who thought the conflict would present them with any real danger. This was a generation that had grown up during the last exploits of Victoria’s imperial armies, and whose most recent ideas of what it was like to defend the empire had been shaped by reading about the trouble with the Boers in South Africa. Trench warfare dictated and defined by machine guns, barbed wire and high explosives was as yet unknown, and men of all classes imagined only that they would shortly be marching or galloping into glory, driving ‘the Hun’ before them with their righteous wrath.


Whole factory workforces, whole streets, whole schools joined up en masse. The entire first team of Heart of Midlothian Football Club signed up to serve in the 16th Royal Scots, created in a fit of patriotism by local businessman George McCrae. The only threat to the personal safety of professional sportsmen or anyone else, it seemed, came in the form of the neighbours, former friends, teachers and bosses - and to cap it all, women - who were lately making it plain that only cowards were to be seen out of uniform. There was a white feather or worse for any man between eighteen and forty-five still in civilian clothes. The nationwide enthusiasm and excitement, coupled with the prospect of personal advancement, led more than a third of a million Scotsmen to volunteer their services to the Armed Forces in the first year and a half of the war.


The reality of the situation in France was slow in coming, but arrived during the course of 1915 like a gust of cold, rain-bearing wind. By January 1916 the death toll on the Western Front had thoroughly dampened everyone’s enthusiasm for a spell in uniform and conscription became the only way to keep the numbers up. But by the end of it all, in 1918, nearly 700,000 Scotsmen had served their country.


The butchers’ yards of Arras, Loos, Passchendaele, Somme, Ypres and the rest would welcome the flower of Scotland along with the best of the young men of a score of nations. Definite figures are hard to come by but between 75,000 and 120,000 Scotsmen were dead by 11 a.m. on the morning of 11 November 1918. It can be hard to work out from the statistics what really happened, but many writers justifiably claim that Scotland lost an especially high percentage of its population. In the Highlands and Islands, certainly, the dead amounted to as much as a sixth of those who served.


Scotland’s war was book-ended by two desperate tragedies that claimed lives not in France but at home. A few minutes before seven in the morning on 22 May 1915 a troop train carrying nearly 500 soldiers, mostly men of the 1st Battalion, 7th Royal Scots, collided with a stationary coal train beside a set of points at Quintinshill, in Dumfriesshire. Within moments of the first crash, an express passenger train heading north from London ploughed into the burning wreckage at full speed. It was all the fault of two signalmen, James Tinsley and George Meakin, who had forgotten to clear the coal train off the southbound line in time to allow the troop train to pass by on its journey towards the docks at Liverpool. Their fatal error that day cost the lives of 227 soldiers. A further 246 were injured, some of them terribly. To this day Quintinshill stands as Britain’s worst rail disaster. The survivors, together with the rest of the regiment, would later see action in places like Achi Baba and Gully Ravine, during the Gallipoli campaign; but their greatest single loss of men - 42 per cent of the eventual total - was inflicted on 22 May 1915, while they were still in Scotland.


In the early hours of 1 January 1919, HMY Iolaire was en route to Stornoway when she collided with a cluster of rocks near the harbour mouth, a hazard known to the locals as ‘Biastan Thuilme’, ‘the Beasts of Holm’. The ship was crewed by Royal Navy men unfamiliar with navigating the waterway in darkness, but any one of the 280-odd passengers aboard could have warned them of the danger if they had been asked. They were Navy men too, but locals - Lewis men on their way home after surviving everything the war had had to throw at them. The Iolaire was not the ship normally used for the crossing from Mallaig to Stornoway in 1918. That was the job of the scheduled ferry, the SS Sheila, but she had been filled to capacity that night by yet more Servicemen. Rather than leave men stranded on the wrong side of the Minch on Hogmanay, a call had been made to summon a second vessel.


HMY Iolaire (the name is Gaelic for ‘eagle’) had only recently been assigned to service in Stornoway, and since she was a naval vessel rather than a passenger ship she only had enough lifeboats and life jackets for her crew. When she collided with the Beasts of Holm the men were pitched into the freezing water with scarcely any hope of rescue or survival. Given that it was Hogmanay and the men’s arrival had been expected, the harbour wall in Stornoway was crowded with family and friends. The Beasts were close to the harbour mouth and 205 husbands, sons and brothers drowned within sight of home, before their loved ones’ eyes.


The population of Lewis at the outbreak of the war had been around 30,000. During the course of the fighting over 6,000 men joined the Armed Forces and by 1918 1,000 of them were dead - one in six. All of the Western Isles had given conspicuously of their menfolk and every village and hamlet had known loss. The tragedy of the Iolaire was one wound too many.


William Hesketh Lever - Lord Leverhulme of the Western Isles - bought the whole island of Lewis in 1918. He was just the latest in a long line of would-be social engineers drawn to the north-west, determined to reinvigorate his resident population. His dream was to get their blood flowing again by introducing them to the business of fish-canning - on an industrial scale. But the people of Lewis were too badly hurt by war to take easily or kindly to the ambitions of another stranger. Leverhulme’s plans came to nothing and a community all but finished by the final tragedy of the Iolaire rolled into itself, like Fingal, and rose upon the wind. By some accounts the damage wrought between 1914 and 1 January 1919 has weakened the life force of the island to this day.


This, then, was the war that changed everything, fundamentally altering the structure of society and the relationships that had underpinned it for centuries. The slaughter of hundreds of thousands of working-class Scots during the Great War, a mechanical process overseen by commanders drawn from the country’s upper classes and aristocracy, finally severed age-old ties. Since time immemorial the poor had served the rich and in return the rich had been supposed to honour an obligation of paternal care to those below them in the scheme of things. That obligation had been on the wane since at least the seventeenth century, and all but snuffed out by the indifference and downright cruelty of the Clearances. But its unquiet ghost was laid to rest by the betrayal in Flanders, by the leaders, of the led.


In Scotland the years of upheaval between 1914 and 1919, when the men finally returned, had helped radicalise many among the working classes. As demand for the stuff of war grew by the day, thousands of workers had poured into cities like Glasgow to fill new jobs in the munitions plants. The already overcrowded and dilapidated housing stock was put under even greater strain and the situation was soon being exploited by the Rachmanite landlords. Rents were hiked up in some areas by as much as 23 per cent and soon the wives and children of men fighting at the front were being evicted from their homes for non-payment.


As 1915 wore on, the number of summary evictions rose to a point where the population could stomach it no more. As is often the case, it was the defiance of just one person - in this instance a working-class housewife called Mary Barbour - that triggered large-scale rebellion and demands for change. A campaign of rent strikes was organised by Mrs Barbour’s newly formed South Govan Woman’s Housing Association in November, and the tactic was quickly taken up across the city.


By the middle of 1916 thousands of tenants, in every one of Glasgow’s munitions districts - including Govan, Ibrox, Parkhead, Patrick and Shettleston - were withholding their rent. Whenever and wherever the sheriff ’s officers might attempt an eviction, hundreds of well-organised protesters would quickly gather, packing themselves into the doorways and closes to deny access to the myrmidons of the state. The Independent Labour Party took up the cudgels and soon Lloyd George’s government was forced to rush through legislation that not only fixed rents for the duration of the war but forced them back down to pre-1914 levels.


With half of Scotsmen under the age of forty-five away fighting in the war, women and girls had eventually been called upon to replace them in the workplace. They had not been the first choice. Before allowing women out of their homes and into the factories and shipyards, the authorities had first contemplated using men from the colonies and even male refugees from war-torn Belgium. Mrs Pankhurst led the ‘Right to Serve’ campaign that eventually persuaded Lloyd George that women should be allowed to take an active role in the war effort after all. That four-year stint making shells, bullets, sand bags, uniforms and the rest of the paraphernalia of war let a genie out of the bottle. Though women spent the war years being badly paid and generally exploited in the lowest positions, in whatever factories or yards that agreed to take them, it was still a liberation of sorts.


At the end of the fighting they had to vacate the jobs for the returning soldiers, but by then women had learned there was a world beyond the four walls of their fathers’ and husbands’ houses. Having experienced the right to work, they began to demand the right to vote with a stridency that would not be denied. The Suffragettes had begun their battle for equality in the years before 1914, but had agreed among themselves that they would set aside their demands while the country was at war. With the fighting ceased, the call was taken up with even greater passion and determination. Before 1918 was over, the right to vote had duly been extended to take in women over the age of thirty. This was the Representation of the People Act - which also gave the vote to all men over twenty-one - and at a stroke the electorate in Scotland was raised from fewer than 800,000 to over 2.2 million.


If working-class women had learned to fight their battles during the war, many of their returning menfolk were no less determined to see yet more social justice done. Time spent in the charnel houses of the Western Front and in Gallipoli had changed the way thousands of the soldiers viewed themselves and the wider world. Having had their eyes opened to inhumanity on an industrial scale, they came home to find the lives they had led before no longer made sense, and that the indignities they had put up with in the past were tolerable no longer.


The politicians had made rods for their own backs by promising that the lot of returning soldiers would be improved in the light of all they had done in the defence of king and country. Lloyd George had made noises about ‘homes for heroes’ and now Scots were back, in their dissatisfied thousands, to find the same old squalor and the prospect of the same old jobs.


A general election in December 1918 gave an unmistakable seal of approval to Lloyd George’s coalition government. But there was blood in the water and the workers could sense it. For as long as anyone could remember, Scotland had been a country dominated by the Liberal Party. Traditionally they had stood for free trade - which pleased the poor by keeping food prices down, and the businessmen by keeping open the international markets - and for improvements to education and housing. They had also backed the calls for Home Rule, although they saw it as a means to strengthen rather than weaken the union.


In the aftermath of the war, however, more and more people were listening to the Labour Party, whose members seemed to be shouting much louder about improving the living and working conditions of the poor. Furthermore, those members were, as often as not, drawn from the ranks of the poor themselves. For the first time working men and women were hearing their demands voiced by some of their own kind. If the rise of Labour was not enough of a problem for the Liberals, they also faced the challenge of an invigorated Conservative movement. Since 1912, the Scottish Conservatives and the Scottish Liberal Unionists had found a common cause in opposition to Irish Home Rule (and its Scottish offshoots) and had joined forces as the Scottish Unionist Party. These were Conservatives by any other name and in the aftermath of the Great War they emerged as a major force.


The Liberal Party in Scotland therefore faced a double whammy: working men and women found their demands for social justice better articulated by Labour, while the middle classes sought sanctuary from the rise of ‘Socialism’ in the arms of the Conservatives.


Before the end of 1919, those nervous middle classes would find plenty to worry about in the activities of the working poor. What with events in Russia in 1917, the Establishment were already jumpy about how Scotland’s workers might respond to the gains made by the Bolsheviks. As it turned out, Scotland’s working class had more modest ambitions. Simmering unrest about the same old bugbears - poor housing, low pay and crushingly hard working conditions - was brought to the boil in 1919 when workers in the engineering industry went on strike and demanded their working week be cut from over fifty hours to no more than forty. Emboldened and excited by this defiance, ordinary folk gathered in their tens of thousands in Glasgow’s George Square, on 31 January 1920, to voice their support for the strike. Soon other grievances were being aired as well, including the usual complaints about housing and rents.


It was all too much for the authorities and, amid fears that the protests emanating from ‘Red Clydeside’ were about to spin out of control and into full-scale revolution, the police and army were sent in to disperse the crowds and restore order. In time-honoured fashion, the police action was bungled and heavy-handed. Fighting broke out and many were injured on both sides. There were disgruntled ex-soldiers among the protesters and they gave as good as they got. The greater fear, however, that revolution was at hand, came to nothing. The crowds melted back towards their miserable homes and in little over a fortnight the strikers accepted a forty-seven-hour week and went back to work. That the authorities believed their society itself had been in peril, however, was made clear by the fact that tanks were put on standby and manned machine guns set up across the city.


Scottish Establishment and middle-class opposition to calls for change was hardly surprising: the Great War had been good for business in Scotland.


Hard to find though the remains of Scotland’s heavy industries undoubtedly are, it is still possible to walk among a few shattered stumps of their teeth. The Summerlee Ironworks, in Coatbridge, was only demolished in the 1930s after a working life of a little less than a hundred years. Despite that, archaeologists had to remove 6 metres of soil and rubble to reveal the relics of the great blast furnaces and kilns that made Summerlee one of Great Britain’s most important ironworks in the first half of the nineteenth century. It was here that James Beaumont Neilson, younger brother of John Neilson, who founded the works, pioneered the revolutionary ‘hot blast’ system of iron-smelting. Coatbridge was, for a few decades at least, Scotland’s ‘Iron Burgh’ until the rise of steel left the place behind shortly before the twentieth century.


By then, though, Scotland was established as the workshop of the British Empire, when a quarter of the world and its population were ‘British’. The central belt of Scotland housed the workshop’s beating heart and towns like Motherwell, in Lanarkshire, were transformed by industry. Once the water bubbling up from a natural spring there was so pure it was named after the mother of God herself - the mother well. By the time the ironworks were glowing red, however, the town’s rivers and streams were running black with filth and pollution.


Scotland was helping make the British Empire rich but hundreds of thousands of her people endured a kind of hell on earth to make that possible. Housing reports from just before the Great War make for distressing reading. Living conditions for the people toiling to produce the hardest metals the world had yet seen were nothing less than disgusting, degrading. In Lanarkshire as a whole the housing provided by the companies, for the workers and their families, was among the worst in Scotland: a single toilet for every seventy people; everywhere the stink of faeces and urine; children scavenging among the filth; water available only from standpipes in the street; at least four people living in every room.


The company owners, directors and their senior staff lived well. But those existing in the company housing knew a different story. Frightful though the conditions were, the tenants’ hold on their homes was tenuous. A fallout with the boss could see whole families put out into the street. If anyone fell sick - and disease and illness were rife in the brutalising, unsanitary conditions - then the only option was to call upon the services of the company doctor. Whatever the outcome for the patient, the father’s wages would be docked to pay for any treatment.


The statistics illuminating all this suffering are the shame of a nation - or at least of those who governed it. Overcrowding in many Scottish towns and cities was worse even than in the worst slums of London. One in every five children born into this misery was dead before his or her first birthday. And yet this reality was the essential ingredient for Great Britain’s industrial prosperity. There was a secret, invisible deal behind all the profit Scotland’s industries were capable of generating, and it might as well have been struck with the devil himself: if Scotland was to be the workshop of industry then most of her people had to live and die in misery to make it possible. Scottish industry was able to dominate the world for one reason, and one reason only - her workers were paid less than their equivalents elsewhere and lived in cheaply built hovels so that the bosses could reap the benefits.


David Colville, originally from Campbeltown, began producing malleable iron bars at his Dalzell Works in Motherwell in 1872. A small firm employing just 200 men to start with, Dalzell’s would eventually grow into a monster. Following the collapse of the Tay Bridge in Dundee in 1879, Colville won the contract to produce the iron for its replacement. The good reputation of his company grew steadily and soon, with the help of his three sons, John, Archibald and David, Colville made the crucial switch from iron-to steel-making. When work began on the construction of the Forth Bridge in 1883, it was with steel from Colville’s Dalzell Works.


At the time John Craig joined the company as a thirteen-year-old trainee office boy in the August of 1888, Dalzell’s was just one steelworks among several in the town. But Craig was the son of a furnace-man and leapt at the chance to follow his father into the booming trade. It was a decision that would have huge implications not just for the Dalzell Works in Motherwell, but for the entire Scottish iron and steel industry. He was to stay with the Colville family for the remaining 67 years of his life, entwining their fortunes and destiny - and those of Scotland - with his own.


If ever there was a lad o’ pairts, it was John Craig. When John Colville was elected as an MP in 1895, twenty-one-year-old Craig was promoted to represent the company’s interests at the Royal Exchange in Glasgow. In the years before telephones became vital to commerce, businessmen and merchants met in exchange buildings to strike deals face to face. By Craig’s time, Glasgow’s Royal Exchange occupied the building that had once been the lavish home of William Cunninghame, on Queen Street.


Having left school before completing his education, Craig felt the lack of personal polish. Now that he was mixing with accomplished men twice and three times his own age, he embarked on a programme of self-improvement. Rather than sit back and relax during his commutes between Motherwell and Glasgow, he used the time for reading and study instead. He was a driven man. Having learned his scripture at his mother’s knee, he employed her Presbyterian principles in the workplace. In Craig’s world, each man was responsible for his own destiny. Hard work and faith in God were all that anyone needed to get on in life, he thought; and the recipe certainly worked for him. By the time he was thirty-six he was an elder of his local Dalzell Free Church and a director of Colvilles, an astonishing achievement for the son of a manual worker. The Great War brought unprecedented opportunities for Scotland’s iron-and steel-makers and the Colvilles of Motherwell grabbed the lion’s share. When other companies faltered, the Colvilles were always ready to step in and add them to the empire. But great empires consume their children and the relentless pace of work proved too much for the hearts of the Colville brothers. The eldest, John, had died in 1901 aged forty-nine. David and Archibald followed within two months of each other in 1916, aged fifty-six and sixty-two respectively. They were simply worn out.


John Craig, their trusted deputy, was therefore just forty-two when he rose to the position of chairman of the company that same year. In the Dalzell Works - and throughout the Colville empire - the foundries were churning out shell casings and tank armour without respite. King George V saw fit to visit the company and before the war’s end Craig was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire. Colvilles reigned supreme over steel production in Scotland and Craig sat at the very top.


It was an empire forged in the furnaces of worldwide war, however. The end of the hostilities in 1918 was hardly good news for the industries that had expanded to keep the shells and bullets flying. By the start of the third decade of the twentieth century, Colvilles alone owned six iron-and steelworks that consumed coal from twenty-four company-owned mines. Those pits were held up by props manufactured by Colvilles and the coal they produced was transported by Colvilles-owned wagons along railway lines built of Colvilles steel over bridges held up by even more Colvilles steel. More of the same was used to build ships on the Clyde which then exported Colville steel to the countries of the British Empire.


Something like 180,000 people were employed by Colvilles alone, and hundreds of thousands more similarly worked for other companies that had depended on wartime levels of iron and steel production. And, of course, it could not last. Peace for the world meant strife for those laid off as order books began to feature more and more empty pages. The most fortunate workers saw their hours and wages slashed, while tens of thousands of others were simply laid off. Motherwell was a town built almost exclusively on steel and the ranks of the unemployed there swelled from fewer than 2,000 during the war to over 12,000 soon afterwards. It was no exaggeration to say it was the worst hit town in Scotland.


In those years before the safety net of Unemployment Benefit, the jobless had few places to look for help. Poor Relief was a pot of money controlled by local councils and the guidelines governing its allocation were vague and open to interpretation. The Scottish working class of the 1920s were intensely proud, determined to live by their labour and horrified at the very thought of asking strangers for help. It was one thing to take a loan from family, or perhaps close friends; but the idea of going cap in hand to the authorities was anathema to almost all. Poor Relief - meagre though it was - required a means test and all but the most desperate baulked at such an intrusion into their private lives.


There was precious little from employers either. Despite coming from working-class stock, John Craig had little sympathy for those who fell on hard times. He believed only in self-improvement - the duty of a man to pull himself up by his bootstraps and make a life for himself and his family. Rather than increase wages or improve conditions, companies like Colvilles preferred to provide land for golf courses so their employees might spend their free time engaged in healthy pursuits. Needless to say, there was no alcohol in the clubhouse.


The situation regarding Poor Relief was complicated and aggravated, as the 1920s progressed, by growing numbers of striking workers. With hours being slashed and job cuts everywhere, workers began withholding their labour in hope of forcing the bosses to put down the axes and navigate a more kindly course through the economic storm. Increasingly, the local authorities had to consider applications for Poor Relief from men who, though fit and able to work, were refusing to do so. Were such men and their families entitled to the same sort of financial help normally reserved for those who had lost their jobs? For the poor - unemployed or striking, it made no difference - Scotland became impossibly hard. There were soup kitchens in Motherwell. The poor houses had never been so busy. Men queued up for their turn earning a few pence a day digging graves in the local cemeteries.


This was the Scotland from which Scots began to emigrate in huge numbers. In the decade between 1921 to 1931 around half a million Scots left the country. Something like 70,000 of them simply crossed the border into England in hope of work, but the rest left for North America, Canada and Australia. By 1931, one in every five Scots in the world was no longer living in Scotland.


The Clearances are the stuff of folklore and legend, but the voluntary exodus from Scotland in the first quarter of the twentieth century was more enervating by far. Most of those leaving the country in the 1920s were driven not by unemployment but by the fear of it. It was therefore the educated, the skilled - the very people a nation needs most if it is to make its way in the modern world - who were electing to board ships heading down the Clyde and towards new lives in the New World. Scotland was haemorrhaging its brightest and best.


Increasing numbers of those left behind began to ask why the country was in such a perilous state. More and more of them laid the blame squarely at the feet of government. The Liberal Party’s dominance of Scotland was a thing of the past. In 1924 a general election returned a Conservative government under Stanley Baldwin, but within two years the whole of Great Britain was to experience the phenomenon of the General Strike.


Led by miners angered at wage cuts and increased hours, it soon spread to take in thousands of workers in other sectors. Though it came to little in the end and was abandoned by all but the miners after just ten days in May 1926, it revealed deep divisions in Scottish society. These fractures were not just between the working and middle classes, but within the working class and the Labour movement itself. Those of a revolutionary frame of mind had had their dreams of national upheaval thwarted, while those of a more moderate leaning were more convinced than ever that change could only be achieved via the ballot box.


For an increasing number of Scots the atmosphere of discontent during the 1920s persuaded them that none of the existing political parties were focused enough on Scotland’s needs. Home Rule had been an article of faith for the Liberals - but Home Rule that might strengthen the union. Now voices were being raised in calls for a different sort of separation of powers altogether. The Scottish Home Rule Association had re-established itself in 1918 and from the time of the ‘Red Clydeside’ rising of 1919 its members had found much in common with firebrands of the Independent Labour Party, including John Maclean.


A Labour landslide in the general election of 1924 put many of the ILP leaders into government in London (though not Maclean, brightest of the Labour minds but dead at just forty-four, in 1923). Home Rule was soon on the agenda once more - and the subject of impassioned debates in the House - but failed yet again to make it onto the statute book. While Labour decided to turn away from the matter, the better to focus on building new houses and creating new jobs, the Home Rule thinking of the past mutated, north of the Border, into nationalism and even calls for independence.


Christopher Murray Grieve was a journalist living in Montrose but is better known by his pen name of Hugh MacDiarmid. A rabid hater of all things English, he sought to use poetry and self-published magazines to persuade his fellow Scots that extreme action was required if Scotland was ever again to find itself in the sunshine of optimism and prosperity. MacDiarmid was not alone among Scotland’s literati in thinking the country was in need of urgent measures to stem the haemorrhage of her people and restore a sense of self and of identity. His house became a meeting place for the leading lights of what became known as a Scottish Renaissance and writers like Lewis Grassic Gibbon and Compton Mackenzie were soon drawn into MacDiarmid’s orbit, along with the socialist Edwin Muir.


Muir was born in Deerness, on Mainland Orkney, in 1887. His father had lost the family farm in 1901, when Muir was fourteen, and moved to the heart of industrialised Glasgow. What a shock it must have been for a boy who had known only the rural isolation of the Orkney Islands to find himself thrown into the crucible of industrial revolution. He later described the move as akin to stepping out of the eighteenth century straight into the twentieth with nothing in between.


Not long after the end of the Great War, Muir lived for a time in Prague. There he was swept up by the optimism and excitement among the Czechs as they reclaimed their independence and set out towards a new future; he returned to Great Britain convinced his countrymen should do the same. (The move from Prague to Montrose in the 1930s, where he and his wife became neighbours of MacDiarmid for a while, must surely have been as disorientating as his arrival in Glasgow from Orkney as a teenager.) In any event, Muir would look around Scotland and find that, like MacDiarmid, he did not like what he saw.


As the 1920s wore on, MacDiarmid gave vent to increasingly extremist views. For one thing he was obsessed with language and believed Scotland could neither reclaim nor live up to her true self until her people fully embraced the Scots tongue. And he was not talking about the Scots of Burns - rather he had it in mind to re-popularise a way of speaking and writing that had not been common currency since the time of makars like William Dunbar in the fifteenth century. His politics were just as challenging. Soon after Mussolini and his fascists seized power in Rome in 1922, MacDiarmid published a magazine article calling for the rise of fascism in Scotland. He also urged unemployed ex-Servicemen to march into the Highlands and Islands and there lay claim to unoccupied land for themselves.


By the time of the General Strike in 1926, the nationalist message from MacDiarmid and his fellow writers had begun to permeate the fabric of Scottish society. Newspapers and magazines were carrying articles, features and letters questioning why Scotland was failing as a nation, losing its population. More importantly, they were suggesting how the country might be changed for the better, by seeking independence.


The logic of their argument was hardly undermined by the way the government, and companies like Colvilles, responded to the strike action. With troops on standby and factories closing their doors even to those willing to work, the vexed question of whether men on strike were entitled to Poor Relief was being asked once again. The board of Colvilles plainly thought not, and used the full weight of the law to stop their local parish council doling out cash to strikers. They argued that ratepayers like themselves had no legal obligation to fund men who had deliberately downed tools, and the council had eventually to reimburse money it had already paid out to strikers from the public purse.


Baldwin’s government had been well prepared for the strike. With all but the miners back at work within a fortnight, the authorities were able to dig in and use time as their weapon. Broken by hunger and disappointment, the miners called off the last of their action by the end of October 1926.


MacDiarmid, meanwhile, continued his own fight in his own way. Along with other Scottish writers he helped form the National Party of Scotland, dedicated to one thing only - independence. It was the most radical declaration of intent Scottish politics had yet seen - too radical, it seemed, for the Scottish people. At the next general election the new party fielded a modest two candidates and attracted only 3,000 votes. Home Rule, nationalism and independence might be good topics for conversation but were not the priorities of many voters.


Just as global events rocked Britain in 2008, so matters beyond the control of any single nation rolled around the world like a deadly virus in 1929. On Wall Street in New York on 25 October the value of stocks and shares plummeted. No one in Scotland realised the implications on the day, but soon the effects of the ‘Wall Street Crash’ were tearing around the world like a tsunami.


A bad economic situation for Scottish industry was made much worse. More companies collapsed, more factories closed, more men and women joined the ranks of the unemployed. Once again the soup kitchens were opening their doors to people with no hope, nowhere else to turn. Those who had the resources to leave the country did so in alarming numbers. Scots had had a tradition of emigration for centuries and by the twentieth century there was hardly a family north of the Border that did not have some sort of overseas connection. It was therefore relatively easy for many to make contact with those footholds in other parts of the world and to set out and try their own luck. Once again the boats sailing down the Clyde headed across the Atlantic, or towards Australia and New Zealand, were loaded with Scotland’s educated, skilled young workers.


During the 1930s, Edwin Muir collected material for an unusual travelogue. Rather than touring foreign lands, he travelled around Scotland to assess the state of the nation. He published Scottish Journey in 1935 and in it described, often in extremely unflattering terms, the depths to which many Scots had been driven by unemployment and despair. He spared no one’s blushes.


The nation’s lowest ebb, according to Muir, was to be found in Lanarkshire, around Motherwell and Airdrie. Looking into the faces of the young unemployed men he saw hanging listlessly around the labour exchange at Motherwell Cross, he saw only hopelessness and defeat. As far as he was concerned, nothing less than a socialist revolution could bring an end to the misery and rehabilitate an entire generation of Scots brought to their knees by unfeeling, uncaring government and employers. It was a view starkly contrasted by that of his friend MacDiarmid, who believed the solution lay in cutting all ties with England. Scotland had to change, it seemed; but should the country move in the direction of a poet’s nationalist dream, or towards a socialist workers’ Utopia?


The search for the answer to that question is further complicated by the personality and behaviour of MacDiarmid himself. Undoubtedly a great talent and an original thinker, his white-knuckled, lock-jawed Anglophobia made him hard for many to listen to, far less take seriously. His obsession with an archaic form of the Scots language also made much of his work unintelligible for many of those who might have listened more carefully to his sentiments if he had expressed them in a common tongue. For Nationalists it was unfortunate that MacDiarmid cast such a dark and disproportionately large shadow over so much of the recent past. It was hard enough to find a hearing for radical views, without being lumbered for so long with a wild-haired, chauvinist English-hater.


Scotland’s economy has long depended on the high temperatures only wars can generate. Shipbuilding first came to the Clyde during the American War of Independence because the Tobacco Lords found the fighting prevented them from getting vessels built in the North American colonies. Overnight the river was filled with ships bringing in Baltic timber to be fashioned into the schooners and cargo ships demanded by an industry for which war was merely a challenge for creative thinking. The Great War had created the boom that built the massive industrial concerns of families like the Colvilles and the Lithgows and its end had seeded only economic downturn and misery. Once World War II broke out in 1939 it was only a matter of time before the order books at the steelworks and in the shipyards would be full again. And so it proved.


Almost overlooked in the preparations for fighting was the opening of the doors of St Andrew’s House, in the shadow of Edinburgh’s Calton Hill. Britain declared war on Germany on 3 September, and the following day a first load of civil servants began to pass through the massive bronze front doors of Scotland’s brand new administrative centre. For the first time, the bureaucracy of governing the nation was to be housed in Scotland. Hailed as ‘Scotland’s Whitehall’, it was designed to at least partially appease those who wanted decisions about Scotland discussed in Scotland. At least now Scottish policies decided in London would be administered from a Scottish Office in Edinburgh. (People working there today will tell you that, due to the outbreak of war, St Andrew’s House was never formally ‘opened’. By the time peace was declared six years later, no one could be bothered with a ceremony.)


Scotland’s economic woes were quickly submerged beneath the rising tide of war. The need to ensure smooth and uninterrupted supplies of materials vital to the fight led to the development of a so-called ‘command economy’ in which goverment assumed control of all industry in Great Britain. It was a way of thinking that outlasted the conflict and helped shape post-war government policy.


Despite leading the country to victory, Winston Churchill was not the man most Britons wanted to see running the country in peacetime. The general election of July 1946 brought about a Labour landslide and Clement Attlee was Prime Minister.


A sense of what the new, post-war Scotland was supposed to look like can be gleaned from a visit to a ‘new town’ like Glenrothes, in Fife. After centuries of slums, Scots were finally being offered new three-bedroom homes with indoor bathrooms and gardens front and back. At last, a generation too late, soldiers who had fought for the liberty of the world could come home and move their families into ‘homes fit for heroes’. Lloyd George’s government had promised the same in 1918 but now, in 1948 in Glenrothes, they were a reality.


And there was to be more in Glenrothes than just new houses. The town was built for miners who would work at Rothes the ‘super pit’, a new state-of-the-art coal mine planned to employ 5,000 miners and produce 5,000 tonnes of coal a day. It was opened by the Queen in 1957 and was supposed to last for 100 years. In fact it encountered problems almost from day one. Miners who knew the area had warned that flooding would be a concern in the new pit - and were soon proved right. The flow of water into the mine could not be stemmed and the whole place was written off as a massive white elephant after just five years.


The problems of the Rothes Colliery aside, the Labour government elected in 1946 was committed to planning, planning and more planning. They were big on dreams and big on details. The National Health Service was established in 1948 and would be administered in Scotland by the Scottish Office in St Andrew’s House. Scotland seemed to be on the road to a workers’ Utopia of the sort that had been imagined by Edwin Muir and the foundations for it were laid during the course of just one Westminster parliament by a furiously dedicated group of Labour MPs.


The bar in Scotland had already been set high by Thomas Johnston, who served as Secretary of State during the war. He was a skilled Labour politician who kept Scotland’s needs on the agenda. He was also a talented administrator who simultaneously understood the benefits of large-scale planning while also having the kind of mind that could remain in control of the details. Johnston left government after the war to lead the way in setting up the Scottish Hydro-Electric Board, which would create 10,000 jobs and do much to revitalise the Highlands.


Among the new crop of Scottish Labour MPs who came to power in 1946 was an ex-Major named Willie Ross. The son of a train driver, he had attended Glasgow University before becoming a teacher. He learned his politics during the Depression years of the 1920s and 1930s, when he witnessed at first hand the effects of grinding poverty, particularly on children. With the war won, he was as determined as any of his colleagues to see Scotland transformed. But after that single term in power, Ross and the rest were ousted in 1951 when the general election put Churchill and his Conservatives back in power - with crucial help from the National Liberals. Ross and his grand plans would have to wait.


Though never finding quite enough strength of purpose to make any real political impact, the members of the various Scottish Nationalist parties and organisations managed to keep a flame of sorts burning throughout the post-war period. Calls for Home Rule or for independence were still to be heard and in 1949 the ‘National Covenant for Home Rule’ was launched by politician and activist John MacDonald MacCormick. In 1948 he had stood as a ‘National’ candidate at a by-election in Paisley, in a straight fight against Labour. He lost the election but secured the perpetual loathing of the Labour Party.


The National Covenant was a self-conscious borrowing of the emotions and sentiments of that other document of the same name. Like its 1638 predecessor, the new National Covenant was sent throughout the country in search of signatures. Perhaps as many as two million Scots would eventually put their names to it and, in the excited atmosphere generated by popular support for a political maverick, four Scottish students embarked on their bid to reclaim the Stone of Destiny.


Ian Hamilton, a twenty-five-year-old Glasgow University law student, cajoled three friends - Kay Matheson, Alan Stuart and Gavin Vernon - to join him on the quixotic mission and together they travelled to London and Westminster Abbey in two cars. In the early hours of Christmas Day 1950, they managed to free the stone from its seven centuries of incarceration in the Coronation Chair. By sheer luck they got it out of the Abbey, and all the way home to Scotland. The stone had been broken in two while they liberated it and they had to persuade a friendly Glasgow stonemason to carry out the necessary repairs.


Whether they had predicted an excited response or not, the foursome certainly provoked one. They were practically Britain’s ‘most wanted’ before finally deciding to return the stone to the authorities - via the high altar at Arbroath Abbey, scene of the signing of the Declaration of Arbroath in 1320. Hamilton and his partners might have faced serious charges but for the ecstatic support they received from much of the Scottish public. The roars of approval for their actions, north of the Border, meant their prosecutions would be more trouble than they were worth. Their fame was assured but this, it seemed, was what Scottish Nationalism had been reduced to: good-natured pranks.


The problems of the Nationalist cause ran deep, too deep to be solved by gestures. Both during and after World War II, Scots, English, Irish and Welsh had come together under an unexpectedly warm blanket of Britishness. Nationalist urges had been set aside while the peoples of this island united to face a common enemy. That new feeling of togetherness had hardly been weakened in the years immediately following the war either, with the advent of a National Health Service and a welfare system that promised to take care of all.


Those Scottish politicians who actually held the mandate of the Scottish people continued to try to change the economy for the better. By the end of the 1950s, their planners were saying that shipbuilding on the Clyde was an industry without a future. Rather than produce heavy plate for ships, they said, it was time to invest in plants that would make light steel for cars and for luxury consumer products like fridges and washing machines. It was thinking like this that led to the creation of the steel-strip mill at Ravenscraig, in Motherwell, in 1962. None other than Colvilles were persuaded to get themselves into massive debt to build it - amid assurances that a massive new car plant at Linwood, near Paisley, and a similarly ambitious heavy vehicle factory at Bathgate, neat Livingston, would soon be consuming all the steel it could produce.


This was to be the future for Scottish industry - cars and fridges and washing machines and trucks. But the planners had got it wrong. While they poured money into the new industries, the old industries were left to die. In 1950 the Clyde shipyards produced something like 30 per cent of the world’s ships. Just ten years later this share of the global market had dropped to 5 per cent and would continue on a downward path. But while the planners said shipbuilding was an industry of the past, production of ever-larger and more advanced vessels was becoming a huge growth industry elsewhere.


Shipbuilding on the Clyde was dying for simple, home-grown reasons: the river was too narrow to allow the yards even to contemplate building the larger vessels that would be in demand around the world in future. Too busy to look up from their crowded order books during the war, the owners had also failed to see how old-fashioned their building traditions now appeared beyond the narrow confines of their shipyard walls.


Clyde ships were usually bespoke, built to order as unique vessels. In such a rarefied atmosphere, skilled tradesmen were accorded a value disproportionate to their economic worth, and individual unions jealously guarded their members’ specialist roles. The process of building a ship was broken down into a myriad of tasks, each the exclusive preserve of a select group of workers whose rights were strictly ringfenced and fiercely protected. On the Clyde, unions hated each other more than they hated management and woe betide any man who, keen to get ahead with a job, picked up and used a tool that fell under another union’s demarcation. But in the post-war world, time was money. Increasingly the appetite was for something akin to mass-production - of ships and everything else. Speed was vital for successful yards and a practice like demarcation of labour was an anachronism. Glasgow yards seemed - and were - slow and expensive by comparison to alternative producers elsewhere.


In 1961 a documentary about shipbuilding on the Clyde called ‘Seaward the Great Ships’ won Scotland its first Oscar for a live action short film. When it was made, the yards were still busy and the film portrayed a proud and thriving world. Yet as it turned out, none of what was on the screen was worth believing in. By 1961, the heyday of the Clyde was long past. It was just that most of the workers there did not know it yet. When the truth about Scottish shipbuilding became apparent, it played into the hands of the Nationalists. The Clyde was the beating heart of Scotland, and the ships it produced a huge source of national pride. If the Clyde was dying, what was the future for the nation? Was Scotland soon to be more accurately described as ‘Scotland-shire’, some sort of neglected backwater of a greater England ?


In 1964 the Queen officially opened the Forth Road Bridge. Thousands of Scots lined the river on both banks to watch traffic start to flow across the longest suspension bridge in Europe. New industries were coming on stream and, with great technological and engineering triumphs like a new bridge, Scotland had started to look different. But for most Scots it did not feel different. Change was not happening fast enough to stem the flow of emigrants and unemployment was spiralling out of control.


Just two weeks after the opening of the Forth Road Bridge the country went to the polls again, still hungry for improvement. A Labour government under Prime Minister Harold Wilson was duly elected and Willie Ross was made Secretary of State for Scotland. As he walked through the doors of St Andrew’s House in Edinburgh he may have taken the time to notice the inscription etched into their bronze. It reads: ‘And I shall make you fishers of men’. These were the first words of Jesus Christ to his first disciples, Andrew and Peter, when he found them fishing on the Sea of Galilee after he emerged from the wilderness. It is meant as a rallying cry calling upon those working within the building to look out for the welfare of their fellow men. Whether he read the words or not, Ross was determined to do as they said - in his own distinctive way. They still tell a story about a newly appointed junior minister approaching Ross to seek clarification about his role: ‘And what exactly will I do?’ asked the incomer. Ross replied: ‘You’ll do as you’re told!’


Ross was old school to his marrow, embodying all the unquestioning self-belief of a latter-day magnate. He was an ex-soldier and a Church elder. Beyond that, though, he was utterly convinced he knew what Scotland needed and how that was to be achieved. In Ross’s mind it was simple: ‘I know best. Listen to me and don’t ask stupid questions.’ More than anything else he understood that real power - the power to change things - lay in Westminster, in the hands of those who sat around the Cabinet table. He was one of them now and when he stood among his colleagues, banging that table and demanding more money for his patch - for Scotland - everybody listened. It was said even Harold Wilson was intimidated.


By 1966 Ross had what he wanted: an investment programme for Scotland worth thousands of millions of pounds. It was called the ‘Plan for Progress’ and it was Soviet-style state planning on a scale never before witnessed anywhere in Great Britain. It was big on ambition and obsessive about detail. Jobs, houses, roads, power supplies - nothing was overlooked and if it all came to fruition the country would be transformed. But in the manner of the best-laid plans, the ‘Plan for Progress’ was thrown hopelessly off-course by economic reality. In 1967 sterling was devalued and the government put a freeze on public spending - especially the sort of shopping spree Willie Ross had in mind. Instead of overseeing an optimistic time of inward investment he had to stand by, impotent, while thousands of miners and shipyard workers joined the dole queues instead.


Once he had been Scotland’s man in London. Increasingly he began to look like London’s man in Scotland - some sort of viceroy looking after the natives on behalf of his English bosses. Government from England started to feel like government by England and the Scottish Nationalists’ predictions of a ‘Scotland-shire’ seemed to be coming true. It was in this atmosphere that Scottish Nationalism - for so long a colourful but powerless fringe movement - began to take on a new relevance for many Scots. They had been told to forget the old Scotland of ships and heavy steel and to look forward instead to making cars and fridges and washing machines. But that was all about balance sheets and order books and … things.


More and more of the Scottish electorate grew frustrated with the two-party system. Tories and Labour were slugging it out in a repetitive performance of ‘Punch and Judy’ and nothing much of benefit was being created in the meantime. Scots - and increasingly it was young Scots in their teens and twenties - began to wonder how the Scotland they lived in had … happened.


During World War II and for decades afterwards, Britons had been too caught up in worrying about jobs, health, housing and education to bother much with any kind of Nationalist thinking. Centralised state planning and intervention had done much to improve the lives of people north and south of the Border and there had seemed little point in questioning what that state actually was. But as the 1960s wore on, there was a stagnation at the heart of Britain that was becoming palpable. If neither the Labour nor the Conservative parties could let in the fresh air of change, then maybe someone else would.


In 1967 Roy Williamson of the folk group The Corries presented his Scottish countrymen with ‘Flower of Scotland’. The lyrics were as simple as they were powerful. They recalled the spirit that Robert the Bruce had required of his men when they strode onto the Carse of Stirling on the morning of 24 June 1314 to confront the English army of King Edward II.


The hills are bare now,
And autumn leaves lie thick and still,
O’er land that is lost now,
Which those so dearly held,

That stood against him,
Proud Edward’s army,
And sent him homeward,
To think again.



Those days are past now,
And in the past they must remain,
But we can still rise now,
And be a nation again …

If the pledges of the established political parties must come to nothing, went the Nationalist thinking, then perhaps dreams of a different kind of future were more deserving of faith.


The passion of MacDiarmid (mad or sad or visionary, who knew?) re-emerged then as well. From the impenetrable depths of his self-indulgent prattle came a clear, crisp note, audible as though for the first time. In amongst all his spleen and anti-English invective was something simple that suddenly made sense to many Scots. Scotland was not a region but a nation - and had been all along. Maybe Scotland really was different and in need of a different direction.


In November 1967 Winnie Ewing won the previously safe Labour seat of Hamilton for the Scottish National Party. It was a stunning upset and while the Party leadership were unable to use their single success to build a significant or lasting momentum, it showed everyone that there were more than two flavours of politics in Scotland.


Both Labour and Conservative responded to Hamilton in their own half-hearted ways. While still in opposition in 1968, Conservative leader Edward Heath told his party conference in Perth that devolution for Scotland was officially worth talking about; and the following year Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson appointed a Royal Commission to consider the same subject. The general election of 1970 replaced Wilson with Heath and while the SNP managed 11 per cent of the vote, it realised only one seat in Westminster: the Western Isles. Hamilton - which had seemed like the start of something - reverted to Labour once more.


In October 1970 British Petroleum struck ‘black gold’ in the form of the giant Forties oilfield in the North Sea off the coast of Aberdeen. Shell Expro found Brent in 1971 and suddenly a whole new possible future could be dangled before Scots’ eyes. The way the SNP told it, North Sea oil could right every wrong ever endured by Scotland. With the incalculable wealth promised by the ‘black gold’, Scots could look forward to the best health service in the world, the best education for their children - the best of everything. Scotland would at last be the true equal of England (at the very least) and the world would listen to what she had to say. But there was a catch, said the Nationalists: none of this would happen unless Scotland had control of her own destiny, and therefore of her new-found natural resources. Their calls for Scots to take charge of the oil by pushing for devolution did not, however, generate the kind of straightforward response that might have been expected.


Winnie Ewing’s brief hold on Hamilton began to look like what it had been all along - a protest vote in a by-election by a local electorate keen to put the wind up the old guard. Labour and Tories had duly responded by putting devolution on the agenda and the heat had been taken out of the Nationalists. Now their calls to tear up the union - to tear apart Britain - in the pursuit of oil money sounded like small-minded selfishness.


Scots in the 1970s still felt the strength of bonds forged with England during the war and afterwards. The British welfare system and the British National Health Service had looked after Scots as well as English. British government money had provided schools for Scots children and jobs for Scots men and women. The idea that Scots should now move out of the family home just because they had found a winning lottery ticket on their bedroom floor hardly seemed the right way to behave. It sounded churlish and offended the Scots’ sense of fair play.


Oil was a complication and a temptation, but it was not enough on its own to push the Scots into a demand for constitutional change. As it was, the so-called ‘black gold’ was to prove more of a bonanza for Texans than it was for Scots. Desperate to get the money in the bank as soon as possible, the Heath government could not or would not wait for domestic companies to develop the necessary technologies. Instead they opened the door to the multinationals and long-term prosperity was sacrificed on the altar of short-term gain.


All the while the opportunities of oil were being bungled, Scotland’s traditional industries continued to flounder. Shipbuilders, miners and steelworkers were dependent upon government subsidies for their survival. During the 1960s and 1970s both Tory and Labour administrations took their turns at propping up industries that were failing to compete in a global economy; industries that were no longer realistic in any economic sense. Awareness of the problems made workers in all of Scotland’s heavy industries increasingly fearful of cuts to wages or jobs or both; and they became increasingly militant as a result. The relationship between workers and managers (which had never been good) deteriorated steadily with faults on both sides. Days lost through strike action only added to the industries’ woes.


Having decided that new manufacturing industries were the best hope for creating alternative employment opportunities in Scotland, one government after another went out of its way to offer financial incentives to encourage foreign, often American, companies to set up shop. But they were effectively doing no more than finding a new way of making Scots workers dependent upon state subsidy. The foreign companies came into the country and opened their manufacturing units because British governments paid them over the odds to do so.


A deluded commitment to international bribery was not the only problem either. The traditional industries had relied for their profitability on low wages and long hours for the workers. Now new industries sought to take advantage of the same practices and the new jobs tended to be both dependent upon government cash and poorly paid. Any change in the contract - or the discovery of sources of cheaper labour elsewhere - would have the multinationals looking only for the door marked exit.


An overtime ban by miners in the winter of 1973 followed by full-scale strike action in February 1974 brought about the downfall of Heath’s government. Wilson was back in power, but by a slender majority. Willie Ross was restored to the Scottish Office and would have been quick to alert his boss to the fact that Scotland’s political landscape had changed completely while they had both been away. Steadily rising unemployment in the traditional sectors meant many communities in central Scotland were well on the way to becoming post-industrial. The exploitation of oil was transforming Aberdeen from a fishing port into the Dallas of the North.


Most pertinent of all for a Unionist politician like Ross, the talk everywhere, even in the Labour heartlands, was of Home Rule, or devolution - or independence. Convinced that devolution could boost his popularity in Scotland, Wilson was therefore dismayed to find many of his Scottish MPs were stubbornly opposed to it. Though they might have hated to admit it - especially within the hearing of Scottish Nationalists - they had at least one thing in common with the Conservative Party: they were Unionists. From a Socialist point of view, any notions of national identity were an unhelpful distraction. Workers the world over had to unite, across all boundaries, and build a world in which all men and women were equal. Any kind of separation along national lines would be an unhelpful complication. With all of that in mind, old Scottish Labour men had always treated the concept of devolution with contempt.


Wilson was undeterred, even in the face of Willie Ross, who made it abundantly clear he failed to understand why Scotland had any interest in an assembly of its own: ‘What use is a parliament’, he asked, ‘When you’ve got me?’ As pragmatic in the face of dogma as any self-preserving premier, Wilson sent his heavies north to negotiate and secure co-operation for the sake of the bigger picture. Aided by his trade union allies, Wilson got his way. Now the Party would have to contemplate the reality of devolution for the Scots. The agonies of the subsequent debate do not require repetition here - suffice to say opinions were polarised. There were those in the Cabinet who wanted simply to walk away from the whole mess, but Willie Ross reminded them it was too late. By 1976, devolution for Scotland was an official policy of the Labour Party.


The referendum, when it came, was like no other. Late in the day a London-based Scottish MP called George Cunningham had succeeded in winning support for a crucial amendment. At least 40 per cent of the electorate would have to vote ‘yes’ before the necessary Act of Parliament could come into effect. It meant that anyone failing to turn out and vote either way would be counted as a ‘No’. Of those who voted, on 1 March 1979, nearly 52 per cent wanted devolution while 48 per cent did not. The no-shows, however, made the crucial difference. In terms of proportion of the electorate, 33 per cent had voted ‘yes’ to devolution; 31 per cent had voted ‘no’ and 36 per cent had abstained. The 40 per cent required under the terms of the ‘Cunningham amendment’ had proven to be beyond the reach of the ‘yes’ campaign.


Scotland was a nation torn between notions of ‘Scottishness’ and ‘Britishness’. In any event the referendum had revealed the truth, or at least a persuasive version of it: most Scots in 1979 were disinclined to change the status quo.


Ironically it was the SNP who took the hardest hit. They had been in two minds about devolution all along. Moderates within the Party chose to see it as a useful stepping stone - a move that would nudge Scots towards full independence. The hardliners viewed it as a cop-out, a move that would distract the population from the primary objective of cutting all ties with England. But when the referendum returned a ‘no’ vote, it was the Nationalists who were somehow left holding the ball. Those who had wanted devolution felt most let down by the party who had been lukewarm about the prospect from the beginning. And then came Margaret Thatcher.


The very recent past, populated as it is by people still alive, is a hard world to write about in the context of a history book. Denied the filter of distance and time, the characters and events seem too close, too personal. The passage of years inserts a lens of sorts, enabling us to focus clearly. Until enough time has elapsed, the stuff of just a few years ago seems hopelessly blurred.


The so-called ‘Iron Lady’ is among the most demonised politicians of the modern era. As far as many Scots are concerned, she was nothing less than the devil incarnate. Yet when it came to Scotland there were two counts against her that mattered more than any others: the lesser crime of ignorance coupled with the greater wrong that was her inability to learn from experience. Mrs Thatcher simply could not and did not understand why a country that had produced Adam Smith (and given birth in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to a succession of oligarchs who had grown rich from the free market) was so stubbornly opposed to her own cold-blooded policies.


She looked at a land where industry was dependent upon government support, saw only ‘subsidy junkies’, and cut off the supply at the source. Moribund dinosaurs like shipbuilding, coalmining and steel, living on state finance, starved to death in no time. Even now, a generation of Scots talks bitterly about ‘what Margaret Thatcher did to Scotland’. But the truth is that in many respects she did nothing. When the old industries held out their hands for help - as they had done, to successive governments, since the end of World War II - she did absolutely nothing. By simply turning her back on the decades-old practice of state intervention to support tragically lame ducks, she let them die. And quickly. The only industries that survived were those fit enough to stand on their own two feet.


While England voted Tory in 1983 and 1987, Scotland sought solace by voting Labour, in futile protest. As the decade drew to a close, Scots felt sure they were more likely to spot a white tiger prowling Princes Street Gardens than an elected Conservative MP.


In 1988 Mrs Thatcher ventured north and on 21 May, in a speech to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, delivered on the Mound in Edinburgh, she equated her policies with Christian values:

… abundance rather than poverty has a legitimacy which derives from the nature of Creation. Nevertheless, the Tenth Commandment - thou shall not covet - recognises that making money and owning things could become selfish activities. But it is not the creation of wealth that is wrong but love of money for its own sake … What is certain, however, is that any set of social and economic arrangements which is not founded on the acceptance of individual responsibility will do nothing but harm. We are all responsible for our own actions. We can’t blame society if we disobey the law. We simply can’t delegate the exercise of mercy and generosity to others.



By any standards, the so-called ‘Sermon on the Mound’ was a breath-taking display of arrogance and deluded self-belief. To add insult to injury, she even attended the Scottish Cup Final, only to be booed and have specially prepared red cards waved at her by the thousands from the stands. She was as out of touch with Scotland’s sense of right and wrong as if she had been governing the country from Mars.


In 1989 Mrs Thatcher introduced the Community Charge to Scotland - the infamous ‘Poll Tax’ - a year before England and Wales. For many it was the final insult from a government that had accepted Scotland was beyond its reach for all time. Riots and protests in England, after the introduction of the charge there in 1990, began to persuade the Tories they had gone a step too far. Thatcher was ousted as leader of her party in November that year and the reviled Poll Tax was consigned to history soon thereafter.


Throughout all the agonies and travails of ‘Thatcherism’, plans and plots to achieve Home Rule - or devolution, or independence - remained alive. Roundly neglected by many, the stubbornly rooted seedling was cared for during the 1980s by the Campaign for a Scottish Assembly. In 1988 this cross-party organisation published A Claim of Right for Scotland, calling for a Constitutional Convention to consider clearing the way towards devolution. The Tories shunned the very idea - as did the SNP, who feared that a Scotland appeased by such a halfway measure would be distracted from the Party’s prime objective of full independence. Labour, however, backed the calls; so too the Liberal Democrats, the trade unions, many local councils, and the Church of Scotland.


It was a strange beast, the CSA. With such a broad spectrum of support it clearly represented at least some part of the will of the Scottish people. It was unelected and therefore held no power, but it mattered. In many ways it may be regarded as a parliament by any other name: a parliament in exile in its own country.


Contrary to the hopes of many north of the Border, the general election of 1992 returned a victory for the Conservatives under their new leader, John Major. He had been written off as a hopeless underdog, henpecked by his predecessor, but at the polls the electorate of Great Britain remained to be persuaded that Labour had their best interests at heart.


In 1996, in a move widely derided by Scots as a dismally transparent public relations exercise, the Stone of Destiny was returned to Scotland, after seven centuries. If it was supposed to undo any of the hurt of the Thatcher years, it failed.


In 1997 the Conservative Party’s luck ran out. A Labour Party led by Tony Blair was carried into power by a massive landslide. Two months later, Secretary of State for Scotland Donald Dewar published A Scottish Parliament , a White Paper on the subject of devolution. The resultant referendum, on 11 September 1997, found Scots had shaken off most of the self-doubt of 1979. Of those who voted, 74 per cent were in favour of a Scottish parliament while 63 per cent accepted that such an assembly should have tax-raising powers.


Elections were held on 6 May 1999 and the 129 seats allocated by a combination of first-past-the-post and a form of proportional representation. Labour emerged as the largest single party, taking 56 of them. The SNP managed 35, the Conservatives 18, Liberal Democrats 17, Scottish Green Party one, the Socialist Party of Scotland one. One seat was taken by an independent candidate.


The new parliament was opened by the Queen on 1 July 1999. Until the completion of its permanent residence on a site at the foot of the Royal Mile, opposite the Palace of Holyroodhouse, it was situated in the Assembly Hall of the Church of Scotland, just below Edinburgh Castle. A decade later, the new parliament of Scotland is still in its infancy: a youngster in an old country. The aftermath of the troubled twentieth century is still being addressed in the twenty-first.


The industries that depended upon state handouts for their very survival are gone now but too many Scots are still employed in low-paid jobs provided by foreign multinationals; the people have swapped one kind of dependency for another. Scotland still awaits the rise of enough home-grown, entrepreneurial businesses and industries to free her people from the enervating burden of reliance upon help from beyond her borders.


Richard Finlay has argued there is still a lack of national confidence - not least the sort that inspires risk-taking and entrepreneurial spirit. There have been individual exceptions, like Tom Farmer and Ann Gloag and others, but they stand out because their kind are few and far between. There is also a Scots tendency to dismiss success stories, or to try to overlook them. Scotland is home to the world’s most successful author of all time, in the form of J.K. Rowling, and yet the critics sniff and huff about her work. Jack Vettriano is the most popular artist in Scotland - copies of his work adorn the walls of homes up and down the country - and yet he is denied a place in the national galleries. Rooted deep in the Scottish consciousness is the urge to get a good safe job and keep the head down.


As a people, Scots still mourn the passing of the shipyards on the Clyde, the mines and the steelworks - nearly three decades after any of them mattered. For longer than anyone can remember Scotland’s pride in herself was attached, as though by an umbilical cord, to the notion that only by making and building great ships, and by exporting coal, and iron and steel could she make her way in the world - or an honest way, at least.


While many of the neighbours south of the Border, especially those in the south-east were setting themselves up in every kind of business and growing rich in the process during the 1980s, too many Scots fought shy of taking the same chances. Maybe some of that hesitation was understandable, even laudable - the result of hard lessons, well learned during a century haunted by unemployment and other hardships. Perhaps some of it was a product of the Calvinist Presbyterianism that bit so deeply into the nation four centuries and more ago. Easy money made by chancers was not deemed as valuable as the coins earned by hard graft. ‘You’re not here to enjoy yourself,’ after all.


Scotland is a small country on the edge of Europe, facing west into the harsh Atlantic Ocean. Life has been hard there for most of the people, most of the time. The Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries led to unprecedented population growth, so that a land short of natural resources was soon home to five million people. It was a lot to ask of a nation that had supported rather less than a fifth of that number for almost all of its existence.


A people who had been wanderers by nature became wanderers by necessity. Hundreds of thousands, then millions of Scots found the only solution to problems real or imagined was to leave these shores and make futures in every other corner of the globe. A flow of people that was a trickle in the late seventeenth century became a haemorrhage in the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth. The loss of population has not stopped and it remains to be seen whether Scotland can find a way to keep its children at home, the best and the brightest of them included. The year 2009 has been billed as the year of ‘homecoming’ for all Scotland’s sons and daughters, wherever they may be. At the time of writing, the Clan Donald alone claims at least twelve million descendants around the world. For much of her history Scotland has been a home for leaving, in search of dreams. It remains to be seen whether devolution and a new parliament - or perhaps full independence and the break-up of the union - could change all that for the better.


Maybe Scotland will always be a country that rears a breed of people who find the need to leave the land of their birth and improve the rest of the world just by settling there. Ultimately, though, the challenge for Scotland will be to see if she can make of herself the kind of place in which her people can realise their hopes and dreams.


If the recent past is too close to focus on, then the present and the near future are just as hazy. From the point of view of a book called A History of Scotland they must be left well alone.


To me, Scotland is an astonishing country. I have loved the place all my life and I always will. It is older than old and something of that permanence has imparted to those that live upon it the will to survive against all the odds. Scots have left their little land and made the wider world the way it is today - as entrepreneurs, merchants, churchmen, engineers, governors, prime ministers, warriors and simple citizens of other nations. As a people Scots have been, and are, an international success story without parallel.


Scotland has been made and unmade and made again a thousand times. In 120 years or less, all of us alive today will be gone, along with our hopes and crimes and troubles and dreams. In a million years the rock that has been Scotland will have moved on once more, to make somewhere new, and everything will be different.


None of this will matter then. Only the rock lasts for ever.