Lenathehyena's Blog from Lorna Corall Dey

Mar 29, 2026

Dispossession and Abuse: the Crofter’s War and Land Reform – another tale of Westminster’s loathing of Scots

The Land

For generations Highland communities tended to occupy defined areas associated with a specific clan chief, perhaps taking his name, perhaps not, but loyal to him and protected by him and their fellow clan members. The largely self-sufficiency of clans included small-scale farming – crofting; modest crop growing and communal grazing areas for animals. Crofters also had to provide essential services for their fellow-clan members so some were skilled carpenters, tailors, soutars (shoe makers) and so on. Crofting was a hand-to-mouth existence with no security of tenure and land laws were written by and for landowners. The result from the late 18^th century was what today would be referred to as ethnic cleansing of thousands of men, women and children from the Highlands and Islands.

The late 18^th and 19^th centuries brought sweeping changes that destroyed whole townships with their kinship ties, drove people out of homes and off their traditional lands when landlords, lairds, who claimed legal ownership of the land sought to increase the income they could take from it. Tenant farmers paying tiny rents were regarded as barriers to profit so turfed out as sheep raised for mutton were introduced along with ‘hunting parks’ – deer forests in which for a charge ‘sportsmen and women’ were encouraged to shoot stags and hinds. Highland territory became an economic opportunity that attracted land speculators with disposable funds and so land came to be concentrated into the hands of a relatively small number of wealthy estate owners, often with little or no connection to the Highlands or even to Scotland. By 1872 90% of all of Scotland was owned by 1,380 individuals.

The Mathesons accumulated a vast fortune from smuggling opium out of British India and into China. When the Chinese government attempted to stop the illegal trade, war was declared between Britain and China. It didn’t end well for China but it did for the Jardine Matheson company. Their profits were eye-wateringly massive. All from the misery of others. Having created misery among the Chinese James Matheson turned his jaundiced eye to his native Scotland – buying up the Isle of Lewis in 1844 then promptly ordering over 500 families off their land and out of Scotland, shipped them off to Canada. James Matheson’s nephew and partner in Jardine Matheson was as bad as his uncle and swathes of Highland territory along with people who lived there were purchased with mere pocket money from the disposable incomes of these drug barons.

The language

Gaelic was the language of the Highland Gaels. Entirely Gaelic. Local knowledge and histories were passed from generation to generation through recitations of verse and song. English was the language of the enemy from the south. It was also the language of every newspaper in Scotland. In the time of the Clearances those people most affected got their information about discontent in other parts from visitors who set up meetings and attended social gatherings such as ceilidhs, not from newspapers. Land reform campaigners toured the Highlands and Islands spreading news of direct action and encouraged crofters and cottars (those without land) to resist the callous actions of their lairds. One such person was Mary Macpherson.

Born on Skye in 1821 Mary MacDonald later married and took the name MacPherson. She was also known as Màiri Mhòr nan Òran, translated as Great Mary of the Songs; great in stature at 5ft 9 in tall and weighing 17 stone in her later life but great also for the impact of her narratives that found admirers worldwide. Mary’s background on Skye was entirely Gaelic in language and culture. She could recite Gaelic narratives and sing traditional songs but she also came to compose her own mostly on the subject of the Clearances and the need for radical land reform. It wasn’t until she went to live on the mainland she learnt to read and write. From Inverness she went to Glasgow where she trained as a nurse and then to Greenock before returning to her native Skye in 1882 to champion resistance to landlordism.

Dispossession and Abuse

Generations of Highlanders and Islanders only knew a clan system based on obedience and deference, behaviour that was difficult to shift despite the predicaments they found themselves in during the Clearances, and quite different from responses in urban struggles of the time. The erosion of chiefs’ sense of duty to their land and clansfolk coupled with their aspiration to exploit their estates as well as the arrival of nouveau rich land grabbers did little to end crofters’ ingrained deference for authority systematically drilled into them every Sabbath. Mary condemned these Holy Willies who cared nothing for the people and their struggles and when a campaign group for crofters’ rights formed a political party, the Crofters’ Party, she went on the campaign trail with one of its candidate Charles Fraser-Mackintosh during the 1874 election. She was by then well-known for her political songs and poetry condemning avaricious landowners for their indifference to human suffering. Frequently accompanying her and Fraser-Macintosh was John Murdoch, a man who set up a bi-lingual newspaper in Gaelic and English that reflected lives in the Highlands and valued the culture in a way no other Scottish newspaper did.

These three individuals were representative of land campaigners who encouraged direct action among the crofting community to defend their livelihoods and traditions. They had their work cut out convincing pious Gaels resist the awful treatment of them by landlords not least because of Church of Scotland ministers active support of lairds while insisting anyone contemplating challenging authority should cease and show respect for their ‘betters’. The Free Kirk of Scotland was more sympathetic to the plight of crofters and cottars but both kirks warned against breaking the law – law that was always on the side of those represented in parliament – the landlords.

Some of the greatest political resistance to landlordism took place on Skye and Westminster responded with force – in February of 1882 a gunboat with troops landed to arrest Glendale crofters for defying the sheriff’s summonses ordering them to leave their land. Elsewhere on Skye Lord Macdonald’s doubling of rents and refusal to renew leases when they lapsed resulted in Blàr a’ Chumhaing’ translated as the Battle of the Braes. On 17 April his tenants went on rent strike and physically claimed possession of common grazing on Ben Lee. A Skye Vigilance Committee was setup to support and advise islanders on resistance. When a sheriff officer arrived with 70 eviction summonses he was intimidated by crofters who forced him to burn them in front of them. Government in London alarmed at the seriousness of the situation in the north ordered a public inquiry. The Napier Commission was established to investigate what became known as the Crofters’ War.

The Commission gathered evidence across the Highlands and Islands. It was told, “In Skye, they remembered, when they wanted the land there they were taken to Inverness prison for it. The marines came; the red coats came, gun-boats came, and fifty policemen from Glasgow, and was fought.” The British state met resistance with violent repression – police armed with revolvers and heavy wooden truncheons, arrests and imprisonment. The police brought in from Glasgow beat crofters, many of them women, two of whom, Mary Nicolson and Mrs Finlayson were so viciously assaulted one was reported to have died from her injuries and a third, elderly, woman badly injured. On the mainland at Clashmore in Sutherland and across Ross-shire people pulled up fences and broke down stone dykes that had been erected by lairds to redesignate land. That June eviction summonses were served on families in Lochcarron. They included the very old and infirm being thrown out of their homes and out of the area entirely. Families who had paid rent on land they had cultivated over decades were given 48 hours to quit the estate. Sheriff officers forced their way into homes and removed furniture and possessions. Occasionally resistance succeeded in preventing an eviction.

Continuing unrest across the Highlands and Islands resulted in government reprisals on behalf of lairds. Several gunboats with troops docked in Skye in 1884 to instil fear into the natives. There was some support and encouragement for beleaguered crofters from outside of the Highlands and Islands. A Highland Land League or Highland Land Law Reform Association along with the Crofters’ Party was formed which attracted huge support from among crofters some of whom benefitted from the 1884 change to the franchise that gave them a vote in elections. The following year a handful of Crofter Party members returned MPs under the name Independent Liberal, including Charles Fraser-Mackintosh. Into parliament strode that immense political figure of R.B. Cunninghame-Graham as part of the campaign for Scotland’s land reform. The Highland Land League had succeeded in raising the profile of the plight of crofters under siege by estate owners when previously there was little to no interest among British politicians. The HLL was pivotal to the success of the Crofter’s Party and the presence of crofter representatives in the Commons led to the creation of the Crofters’ Act of 1886 and a sense of optimism reflected in the saying, Is treasa tuath na tighearna – the people are mightier than a lord. That optimism was short-lived.

The Crofters’ Holdings (Scotland) Act 1886 confirmed the Skye crofters were justified in claiming possession of land but provided nothing for the landless in rural Highland and Island communities. Crofting was defined and security of tenure meant a tenant had the right to pass on tenancies to close family. It also led to a Crofters Commission; a land court with rent-fixing powers that generally led to lower rents and could rule on disputes between lairds and crofters. However, the big question of tenants’ access to land was not clarified and so rent strikes and demands for greater access to traditional grazings persisted across the Highlands and Islands with Westminster responding in the usual way sending in police and army to break up protests and weaken resistance. In August 1886 hundreds of armed military landed on Tiree. By the 1890s the Land League’s influence had fallen away to re-emerge in 1909 to fight more forced evictions and promote home rule for Scotland which was seen as crucial to proper representation of Scottish voices. Vitally important decisions for the men, women and children across the Highlands and Islands were being made by politicians in London – the absurdity that men who had no interest in, no understanding of, or sympathy with those being ejected from their homes wielding total power over vulnerable Highlanders – who were squeezed out of fertile land into areas with thin soil and poor grazing. In 1906-07 the Highland Crofters and Cottars Association said, “We cannot afford any longer to be dominated by a gang of obstructive Peers, most of them English, some of them Scots.” Politicians made promises in return for votes. The fledgling Labour Party pledged to the nationalisation of the land. This never happened.

Westminster has never had the interests of the people of Scotland at its heart, never mind the Highlands. Unionism has never valued substantial land reform. Scotland’s struggle for reform of who owned and controlled land reflected what was happening in Ireland. Again Westminster populated by landowners had little sympathy with tenants. MP Charles Parnell, president of the Irish National Land League visited Scotland, addressed crofters’ meetings and shared tactics with the HLL members. Neither country’s fight against land evictions got much sympathy from the unionist press that was invariably on the side of landlords and private property.

In the David/Goliath struggle of crofter versus landlord the repeated response from government in London was to send in armed military against men and women armed with sticks and stones. In 1886 lairds on Skye withheld their rates payments when their tenants refused to pay their share. At the appearance of gunboats off the island landlords paid up but the crofters held out but had their possessions seized in lieu of payments. The nineteenth-century Highlands to some extent mirrored the Highlands in the eighteenth-century with the poorest of the poor battered and intimidated by guns and bayonets and the force of law that protected landowners, flocks of sheep and deer hunting.

The Aberdeen Press and Journal in September 1886 described “sandy hair”, “Heelan” land reformers as “pothouse spouters, who, in the boil of land agitation, have come to the surface with the scum and remain there, because it is comfortable, and may bring them thirty shillings a week.”

That perpetual unionist mouthpiece The Scotsman in Edinburgh denounced land reformers for their “evil doings” . . . “There is nothing in the condition of Scotland to justify exceptional legislation such as Ireland has received …”. It opposed crofter rights and urged Westminster to resist them and urged landowners to evict their tenant farmers without any consultation with them.

To counter such abject bigotry John Murdoch published The Highlander in Inverness that was part Gaelic and part English. Murdoch lived both in the Highlands and in Ireland and was well-acquainted with the harmful impact of landlordism on fragile communities. He travelled extensively through glens and straths hearing firsthand the misfortunes of crofters as well as visiting America with his friend Parnell, spreading news of land campaigns in Scotland and raising funds for the movement. His newspaper published lyrics to Gaelic songs about the Clearances, historical pieces and name derivations but it wasn’t entirely dedicated to the Highlands and included snippets of world news. The Highlander encouraged Scotland’s rural poor to shake off their adherence to “servility and sycophancy” which respected men and women who deserved no such unquestioning respect. But a newspaper that was so squarely on the side of poor crofters and cottars was never going to have widespread appeal and given the geographic nature of Highland communities distribution was a huge problem. For eight years Murdoch provided a medium of communication for one of the least represented groups in the UK but its last edition came out in 1881.

Highland land holding was most relevant in the context of this blog but the nature of who owns Scotland is very much still an issue that the union has failed to address and will require total independence to resolve once and for all.

Posted in Black Isle, Clearances, Land Reform, politics, Scotland, Scottish history, Scottish Nationalism, Scottish Parliament, Uncategorized, Weird and Wonderful | 1 Comment »

Feb 9, 2026

Two Scots heroes and an English traitor

Scotsman Donald Caskie’s selflessness and bravery saved the lives of hundreds of men and women but his own life ended wretchedly. Fellow Scotsman Ian Garrow was also a hero that hundreds were grateful to for their lives and happily his own ended better than Caskie’s. Englishman Harold Cole was a good-for-nothing. Responsible for the deaths of thousands of people, he died like a dog.

Donald Caskie from a croft on the Gaelic-speaking island of Islay went out into the world via Edinburgh University as an ordained Church of Scotland minister. A modest and humane man Caskie who was proficient in Gaelic, English and French (familiar also with Greek, Hebrew and Latin) became minister of the Scots Kirk in Paris in 1935. He was a very sociable man with an easy manner and became popular in the French capital. But this was the 1930s and growing brutality and repression under Hitler’s regime in Germany cast an ominous shadow over Europe and Donald Caskie became an outspoken critic of Hitler’s totalitarianism, preaching against the scourge of fascism. Soon fascism turned up on his doorstep. One hot day in June 1940 German tanks rolled into France and into Caskie’s adopted city. Terrified Parisians flooded southwards to Vichy France by car, rail, bicycle and foot. The Vichy south was still unoccupied by the Germans though subject to Berlin’s authority. As a known critic of Hitler’s regime Caskie had little choice but to leave also. On 9 June 1940 he locked the door of the Scots Kirk, entrusted its key to the proprietor of a nearby café but instead of returning to Scotland and safety he joined the exodus south. He was determined to do what he could to help stranded allied soldiers and airmen fall into the hands of the enemy.

Thousands of allied servicemen abandoned in France following the evacuations from Dunkirk were also attempting to evade German forces and reach the south of the country and the port of Marseilles, mostly by foot. Caskie succeeded in getting to Marseilles where he was put in charge of the British Seaman’s Mission. Immediately he used it to hide fugitives from the clutches of the Gestapo. Safety precautions were simple – three knocks on the Mission’s door and the password Donald Duck. Caskie provided the men with shelter and food, fake identity papers, travel documents and exchanged their military uniforms for civilian clothing to make escape less hazardous. His work was funded through donations within France but also by the British government by way of the offices of the American Consulate in Marseilles (the USA was not in the war then). Caskie’s participation was an important contribution to the French resistance with its network of safehouses and escape routes out of France. His activities at the Mission were an open secret but the Marseilles police rarely raided it and did not close it down. Not immediately at any rate. One day into the Mission walked Ian Garrow.

Ian Grant Garrow of the Seaforth Highlanders was one of the unfortunates left behind at Dunkirk. With German forces closing in on them Garrow’s company decided to split up to evade capture. He began the long walk from northern to southern France, eventually making it to Marseilles and to Caskie’s Mission. The two Scots joined forces in providing sanctuary and plotting guided escapes out of the country. Garrow, like Caskie, was a proficient French speaker, albeit with a strong Scottish accent, and he joined the ranks of so many men and women, notably Nancy Wake, in the highly dangerous work of accompanying escapees over the mountains to neutral Spain from where they could travel home. His involvement as a British military officer guaranteed healthy amounts of aid from the British government through MI9, a military branch of the British secret service.

In Marseilles Garrow encountered a young Albert-Marie Guérisse, a Belgian Officer, fluent French speaker and member of the French resistance – and possibly also involved with British Intelligence. Guérisse’s Belgian accent meant he could not pass for a native Frenchman so he adopted the persona of his Canadian friend, Patrick Albert O’Leary. Hold that thought.

Also involved helping allied service personnel and civilians escape the clutches of the Germans was Harold Cole. Harold Cole aka Paul was a bad lot. As a youth he was a convicted thief. On the eve of war he volunteered for the army. Cole was flashy, a braggart, a womaniser who splashed money to impress them. He was a confidence trickster with a flair for reinvention. Finding himself once again in jail he persuaded his guards to allow him to escape. They obliged and in 1940 he skipped across the channel to France where he passed himself of as a captain from British Intelligence. After the chaos of the Dunkirk evacuation with thousands of British and Commonwealth soldiers left behind in northern France Lille-based Cole became engaged procuring false documents, clothing, maps and money to aid their escape south. These were challenging and dangerous undertakings and he did play his part but not everyone was convinced about the man for he was always chiselling from his fellow escape colleagues.

Early in 1941 Cole, Garrow and Caskie were together in Marseilles. Caskie suspected Cole from that first encounter and soon his suspicions were shared by others in the network, nevertheless Cole was provided with hundreds of thousands of francs by Garrow to run the northern part of its escape routes. It quickly transpired Cole was pocketing much of that money. Tricksters succeed by persuading people they are credible and genuine but eventually Cole ran out of road when it became clear to more in the escape network he was working with the Gestapo; supplying them with secret information that led to arrests, imprisonment, torture and executions. He was challenged then locked in a bathroom with the intention of strangling him to death but the elusive conman escaped through a window.

Cole was possibly the Gestapo spy whose information led to the arrest of Ian Garrow who was imprisoned and due to be transported to Germany and probable death before Guérisse organised the bribing of a prison guard to provide him a guard’s uniform. Garrow walked out of prison and into a waiting car. He remained in temporary hiding until it was felt safe for him to be guided over country and across the mountains into Spain, to Barcelona from where he was flown to the UK. There he worked with MI9 to help other endangered allied personnel home.

Albert Guérisse replaced Garrow in running escape routes under the name of the Pat O’Leary Line or Pat Line. It operated on a larger scale the work Caskie had been doing out of the Mission – to provide safe houses, documents and clothing to stranded allied soldiers and airmen and guide them across the Pyrenees to Spain, or to Portugal or Switzerland.

The perilous work of hiding and guiding allied servicemen and civilians out of France continued and so, too, the duplicity of Cole. In spring 1942 Caskie was arrested, he suspected on information supplied by Cole. He turned down an offer to leave France but agreed to move away from Marseilles to Grenoble. Before he went he saw to it that those he was hiding were placed under the care of others before finally closing the Mission. Caskie had suspected Cole of being treacherous from his first encounter with him but others took more persuasion. The closure of the Mission and Caskie’s removal from the city was a big blow to the rescue operations for it removed a safe house as well as being a threat to Caskie’s life.

On the run Cole was traced and arrested as a double agent and charged with espionage by the Vichy in 1942. Initially given a death sentence this was commuted to life in jail but he spent only months in prison before being released. He headed north again and was recruited by the German SS. He next materialised as a British officer working for the secret services and handed himself into the Americans who gave him a US army uniform and a role in allied intelligence. Cole soon jumped ship, proverbially speaking, only to turn up in southern France as an American and was welcomed in by the Americans there to help them expose under-cover Germans. The Americans encouraged Cole to hire his own gang of heavies and this group beat up and executed Germans at will. They also looted, stealing from individuals and premises.

Throughout the dangers and fear and treachery the vital work of the Pat Line continued to help large numbers escape from France with Guérisse at the helm until he, too, was arrested by the Germans in March 1943. Despite being subjected to terrible torture he did not betray anyone and spent the rest of the war in various concentration camps.

In Grenoble Caskie’s official role was as a university chaplain to the British there but he was also very much involved still in helping the stranded on the run. He was rearrested the following year and detained at the Italian fortress of San Remo where he was held for a time in a ‘bottle cell’ built to force its victims to permanently squat. Eventually transferred from this hell into the hands of the Germans and transported by them to the Nazi slaughterhouse of Fresnes prison near Paris Caskie was put on trial with evidence provided by a double agent working for Britain and Germany. Death by firing squad was the verdict. Each morning at 5am prisoners were marched out to their death in the yard and each morning for six weeks Caskie expected to be one of them. He asked to speak to a priest and was provided with a German padre called Hans-Helmut Peters. Peters argued for a reprieve for the Scot and on 7 January 1944 one was granted – Caskie spent the remainder of the war as a prisoner and while a prisoner news reached him of the Normandy landings. It was apparent the war was taking a new course. His priest ally, Helmut Peters, recognised this change and sent his family back to Germany. The day the bells of Paris rang out in greeting to the allied forces sweeping into the city was the day Donald Caskie once again walked free. He returned to his church, the Scots Kirk of Paris and there in the dirt and dust lay the sprig of white heather he had left behind in June 1940.

Cole was tracked down by MI5 in June 1945 in Paris and again he was locked up in jail. Back in the city preaching was Donald Caskie who was also a prison chaplain. One day he was asked by a British camp commander to take a look at a prisoner passing himself of as an American but whom the Americans discovered was a fraud who was stealing art treasures the Nazis had shipped to Germany. He had been handed over to the British who were unsuccessfully attempting to get his real identity out of him. The prison governor described him to Caskie as “an interesting specimen” and said, “he’s a crook, all right. I’d like you to have a chat with him. We’ll find out who he is soon enough, and for his own sake the sooner the better.” Caskie stepped into the cell and came face to face with the man who had betrayed him to the Gestapo and it was clear to Caskie that the prisoner also recognised him.

“Hello, No.11,” said Caskie. “We meet in interesting circumstances. So many of our friends have been in jail, rather worse jails than this you will understand.”

The prisoner replied, “Name of Smith, Padre. You’ve made a mistake. What’s more, preaching’s not wanted here. Get out.”

Confronted by Cole, Caskie’s thoughts were on the victims of his treachery – the men and women arrested and killed, many in gas chambers, and many of them civilians, because of Cole’s traitorous activities while engaged with the Pat Line. He shouted at Cole, “You lie. You disgusting traitor. Are you quite without shame? You deserted your country. You sold your friends for money, accepted money from the Nazis – God help you.”

Cole maintained his silence and Caskie warned the prison authorities that Cole was one of the “trickiest scoundrels that have exploited this war. The devil is in the fellow. Watch him night and day.” Yet Cole escaped. He simply slipped on an American’s overcoat he found and walked away. A major search in Paris was organised. Caskie was thought to be at risk from Cole and he was very careful each time he left home until one evening the telephone rang. Cole had been gunned down during an exchange of fire with the French police – his body was identified by Guérisse. The man described by a member of MI9 as “a con man, thief and utter shit who betrayed his country to the highest bidder for money” was finally dead.

Donald Caskie was appointed chairman and administrative officer of the Council of Voluntary War Workers for Paris and the North Western Provinces and awarded an OBE. At the ceremony in Paris, his heroic actions under the eyes of the Germans was recognised as outstanding courage; but not so outstanding as to merit an award above an OBE. By the time he retired home to Scotland both his body and mind were badly damaged and he struggled in later life – without a home of his own and suffering debilitating depression. Donald Caskie died at Greenock in 1983 at the age of 81 and was buried at Bowmore on his home island of Islay. Ian Garrow received the DSO for the role he played in France. He remained a soldier. He rose to the rank of Major and later went into the TA Reserve as an honorary Lieutenant Colonel. He died at Lochearnhead in 1976 at the age of 67. In 1946 Albert-Marie Guérisse was appointed to the War Crime Commission at Nuremberg. He remained in military service until 1970 and died at Waterloo in Belgium in 1989 at the age of 77. Cole as you know got his comeuppance in 1946 in Paris at the age of 39.

Posted in Scotland, Scottish history, Uncategorized, Weird and Wonderful | 1 Comment »

Dec 28, 2025

“I am that fond o ma fiddle I could sit inside o’t an look oot” Peter Milne, a Scottish maestro

“I am that fond o ma fiddle I could sit inside o’t an look oot”.¹

The “I” in question was the highly skilled violinist or fiddler, Peter Milne. Peter’s life got off to an inauspicious start, the son of an Aboyne tailor and his wife born in 1824, the boy was put to herding cattle as a small child before an attempt by his father to train him in tailoring. But Peter would have none of it. He was obsessed with music and closely followed local fiddlers finger their bows as they entertained with lively renderings of strathspeys and reels.

“Our English neighbours, with that accurate and profound knowledge of Scotland for which they are famous . . . imagine that we on this side of the Border are so devoted to the bagpipes as to have neither time nor inclination for the study of any other instrument.”²

As popular as pipes have long been in Scotland it is the fiddle or violin that was commonly found occupying a corner in many a home both rich and poor throughout the nation. Aberdeenshire and Middle Deeside could boast exceptional players. You’ve probably heard of the ‘Strathspey King’ Scott Skinner – well, Peter Milne first taught Skinner. Over his lifetime he would mentor many talented musicians on what’s been described as the national instrument of Scotland. One commentator posing the question why eminent classical violinists never attempted playing strathspeys concluded “They cannot.” They are “made according to a certain pattern and must content themselves interpreting the works of Shovemoff, Dynamiti, and Her Von Blunderbuss.” ³

Young Peter absorbed the rhythms of fiddlers he heard around Tarland and when he was able to get his hands on an instrument he copied them and practised and practised, honing his technique and discovering he had a bent for it. His confidence grew and soon he was the one doing the entertaining. It was the incentive he needed to go out from his native Tarland but rather than running away to sea, Peter Milne made straight for Aberdeen’s theatres and linked up with blind Willie Grant, a fine pianist and vocalist. Peter was taken on as a violinist in the orchestra at the Theatre Royal in Marischal Street and quickly became its leader, employing the young Scott Skinner as a cello player. In 1862 Peter moved to Edinburgh, to lead orchestras at the capital’s Princess and Gaiety theatres. There were musical tours in England where he first tried laudanum to mask the pain of rheumatism in his hands and fingers. Soon he was addicted to the opiate. It may have been his opium addiction that led to him moving away from theatre work there again it may not have been but Milne next appears in an orchestra entertaining passengers on the Fife-Leith ferry crossing over the Forth. Perhaps it was hardship that forced the move for he did sell his favourite fiddle, the skate, to James Hardie, an Edinburgh violin maker around 1872 when Peter was staying in Leith. The skate had been made by Madrid luthier Joseph Contreras who learnt his trade in Italy and was known as the Spanish Stradivari – and one story led to another, as they do, that led to an assumption or a boast that the skate was a Strad. It was not but it was reputed to have had an exceptionally fine quality of tone and in Peter’s hands could produce a tune more eloquent than many bowing a Strad.

Ferries over the Forth had operated since at least the 12^th century carrying passengers including monarchs, pilgrims and troops, travelling circuses with camels, elephants and tigers, caravans, newspapers and every type of thing between north and south until a bridge was opened in 1890. In Peter’s time iron-hulled paddle steamers serviced the crossing between Granton and Burntisland with Peter employed on the John Sterling (named after a senior director of the North British Railway that ran the steamer service). Nearly 1000 passengers could be accommodated on the boat that could take several hours to complete the journey depending on weather conditions. Scottish ferries and controversy go together and so it was then for there was anger when the ferry service was stopped by the rail company who monopolised Forth crossings. There was no help from the area’s MPs who were more familiar with London than the Firth. The rail bridge provided North British Railways with greater profit from the far faster route but the loss of ferries was detrimental to locals moving between Fife and Linlithgowshire and for the hundreds thrown out of work on the dozen or so steamers, Peter included after 23 years aboard.

Peter Milne left Leith and returned to the northeast, to Aberdeen, where he was employed at the city’s Alhambra in Exchange Street as well as earning a little teaching the violin. He went back to touring with Willie Grant and other northeast musicians often playing his own compositions such as John McNeill’s Reel, The Lass o’ Bon-Accord, the Muir o Gellan. He published music, his book on strathspeys and reels went to 5 editions, and he attempted a business as a music seller but the business failed yet the man’s reputation was solid and he remained well-respected. In 1884 a musical competition held in Silver Street in Aberdeen featured the man from Tarland who was still being described as Peter Milne of Edinburgh because of the length of time he lived in the south. The event celebrated Scotland’s musical heritage the style of which was “essentially a distinct expression of the art instinct of the people, which they have maintained and cultivated from the earliest times; and I believe it is a historical fact that Italy owes to Scotland the first germs of her modern opera, by the introduction there in the 15^th or 16^th century of the use which the Scottish musicians made of subdivision and accent in the intervals of time as well as of space in music…Scottish music, is expressive of the characteristics of our Scottish nation.” Peter was honoured for his “many qualities as a man and a musician of the old school, and as an exponent of Scotch music”. ⁴

Peter Milne eked out a rather poor existence toward the end of his days. His home was a humble room in a densely packed area of hovels that made up the closes and pends off Aberdeen’s Exchequer Row kent as Cheq’ra Wynd (once the site of the royal exchequer and mint) at 4 Exchequer Court. Aberdeen’s first model lodging house for the homeless was in Exchequer Court, perhaps this was Peter’s last home – well, not quite. While drinking in a nearby bar a friend thought it would be funny to pull Peter’s chair away when he was about to sit down. Peter was in his seventies and the damage that resulted to his body left him unable to walk and so he remained bed-ridden for a decade before he died, first at Aberdeen Hospital and then in the Oldmill Poorhouse. The man with so much talent, the entertainer and teacher who passed on a musical heritage to generations died alone in the poorhouse, just one other pauper interred into an unmarked grave in Nellfield cemetery.

But that is not the end of Peter Milne’s story. His reputation meant that he was not totally forgotten. I stumbled upon a stone that had been erected to his memory at Tarland in 1932. Ordinary members of the public raised funds for the fine granite gravestone. As Pipe Major Meldrum played Lochaber No More Lord Aberdeen unveiled the stone bearing a scroll and inscription

Dedicated to the memory of Peter Milne a famous violinist and composer of Scottish music 1824 – 1908 erected by a grateful public

Below is a carving of a violin and the words Riches denied, thy boon was purer joys. What wealth could never give nor take away, from a poem by Robert Burns, Sonnet on Hearing a Thrush Sing.

The crowd that gathered to pay homage to Peter heard Lord Aberdeen extoll the talents of the man who died in penury – to Peter’s and Scott Skinners’ contributions to Scottish music in reels and strathspeys “helping to exclude another type of music, so-called, generally known as jazz”. He praised Peter’s “rendering of many beautiful old melodies which were in danger of being forgotten”. They sang O God of Bethel and a prayer was said.

There was an intention to include some preserved Scottish music collected by Peter in an international exhibition and conference on folk music, lore and costume proposed for Berne in Switzerland in 1934 but it is not clear this ever went ahead. However in the year the Tarland stone was erected a concert was held in aid of the Peter Milne Memorial Endowment Fund in the village hall that featured several local violinists and fiddlers.

“Peter was never showy in his playing. But he was a fine player, accurate and clear in his notes”, said his pupil and lifelong friend Scott Skinner.⁵ It was Skinner’s opinion that few men had done more to keep up the best traditions of strathspey and reel playing in Scotland than Peter. Peter Milne the craftsman musician also described as “perhaps the very best interpreter of Highland Strathspey and reel Deeside could ever boast till the after days of the vastly popular Scott Skinner”. ⁶ While Skinner who knew Milne well insisted he was “one of the grandest Strathspey players that ever graced Scotland, and probably the finest native musician of any country in the world”. The master musician was a humble man who did not deserved his sad decline into infirmity and poverty.

“If you’re to write onything aboot me, be sure an’ pit doon that Peter Milne’s been a daft idiot!” ⁷insisted the unassuming maestro. Peter Milne may well have been a daft idiot at times but one that made a good deal of his talents. His put-me-down was made in conversation with Aberdeenshire polymath, William McCombie Smith, in 1906. Well, we’re a’ daft idiots at times. Aberdeen could have done more to mark the passing of a great and important conserver of Scotland’s northeast heritage. But that’s Aberdeen for you. One of today’s eminent traditional fiddlers, Paul Anderson, involved with Aberdeen University’s Elphinstone Institute dug around, not literally, and found the spot of Peter’s unmarked interment at Nellfield. A stone has now been placed there in recognition of one of Scotland’s most talented sons. If you find yourself in Aberdeen or Tarland take yourself along to the cemetery and give the man a moment of your time.

¹ J. Scott Skinner, From My Life and Adventures

²The Peoples’ Friend 27 February 1899

³ Ibid.

⁴Aberdeen Evening Gazette 29 December 1884

⁵The Peoples’ Friend 7 December 1896

⁶William Carnie, Reporting Reminiscences 1902

⁷William McCombie Smith, the Peoples’ Friend 7 December 1896

Posted in Aberdeen, Aberdeen City Council, Aberdeenshire, Doric, Granite, Poorhouse,, Scotland, Scottish history, Uncategorized, Weird and Wonderful | Leave a Comment »

Nov 2, 2025

They came for Scotland: Westminster’s Robber Barons

Big boys bash smaller boys. That’s the reality of life’s unfairness. Big powers bash smaller powers. Because they can. Empires are created in this way. Do this or else – it’s the language of the bully. It’s the language Trump uses against Palestinians and Ukrainians and Greenlanders. It’s always been the language of the tyrant, the oppressor.

Empires grow through economic exploitation of their colonies, possessions that they undermine in every way possible – denigrating and destroying indigenous culture, languages, laws – they wield political and social control. Sound familiar? It should. Welcome to the reality of life for Scots in the UK.

Power sits with the seat of government. In the UK this is in London. Decisions over Scotland’s resources; oil and gas, whisky, fishing, even the very air that powers our wind turbines and the Scottish water that powers our wave power is regulated in England. It is to England that tax revenues from our major industries disappear. Make or break decisions over the economy still lie with Westminster. Westminster made the choice to let Scotland’s last oil refinery shut down. Labour MPs fell over each other to insist this happened because Grangemouth was privately owned and there was nothing their government could do – then they fell silent when the same Westminster government stepped in to shore-up England-based Jaguar Land Rover to the tune of £1.5 billion despite being owned by the vast Indian-owned Tata Group that received an additional £500 million for its steel plant in Wales. Michael Shanks, a Scot in Starmer’s government, made a lot of noise about imminent government funding for Grangemouth. It is still to materialise. The Secretary of State for Scotland at Westminster, Douglas Alexander, has been crowing about £17.3million given to Scotland’s Energy Transition Zone in Aberdeen. Aberdeen where energy jobs are haemorrhaging quicker than Starmer’s popularity. £17.3 million as against £1.5 billion or even £500 million handed to Tata. And energy is an area of the economy under the direct control of Westminster. The same Westminster that refused to set up an oil wealth fund all those decades ago.

London has a long, long tradition of treating its colonies very badly, screwing everything it can from them and denying them the right to break free. Just this past week the UK government allocated its post-Brexit fishing fund allocating £28 million to Scotland and £304 million to England, £18 million to Wales and £10 million to Northern Ireland. When in the EU Scotland received 46% funding because its share of fishing was greater than England’s, with England taking just 36%. Under Westminster’s manipulation England gets the bulk – 84% of the fund and Scotland under 8% yet Scotland produces well over half of all catches in the UK. But this is what you get with the asymmetrical power relationship of the imperialist-minded union in the UK – the bully at Westminster wields the stick and holds the purse-strings.

It has become apparent to increasing numbers of Scots that the union is politically and economically oppressive to Scotland and does not provide fair representation of Scots in the UK parliament. Evidence that Scots would be far better off without being shackled to the union can be found by comparing Scotland with two very similar northern European nations – Norway and Denmark. Population sizes are near-identical and all three have been oil producers and in Scotland’s case her unique whisky export value amounts to some £4.249 billion (2023 – 24) – the bulk of which goes straight to the UK chancellor in London). Norway’s GDP is around $607billion (£1.1 trillion oil wealth fund). Denmark’s GDP is around $555 billion. Scotland’s GDP is around $298 billion (£223.4 billion) with Westminster deciding how much income Scotland can have annually, calculated this year at about £45.5 billion. Short-changed we are.

The vast £ trillion profits from what should have been Scotland’s oil and gas were drained off into private companies once Thatcher’s Tories sold off north-sea fields in 1982. £12 billion value was extracted between 1975 and 1985 and with fluctuations along the way the projection for 2021 to 2028 is £10.6 billion. No oil and gas money was spent in Aberdeen, the oil and gas capital of Europe for decades, while London and the southeast of England gained most with fortunes being poured into huge expensive infrastructure projects such as the Channel tunnel, Canary Wharf development, Docklands Light Railway, Crossrail, Thames Subway, London City Airport, Battersea Power Station development, Elizabeth Line and various commuter rail services across the southeast yet there is not even electrification of rail in Scotland north of the central belt.

For hundreds of years before the union England felt entitled to Scotland and battled hard to take the land. As a distinct political state Scotland is the elder; established in 843 with England following a century later in 927. By the 12^th century Scotland’s political boundaries were much as they are today. But seniority was never a consideration and England has repeatedly and determinedly made attempts to subsume Scotland’s territory and resources.

13^th century

Igitur de hac virtutis femina locturi quam caput Mulieris vir sicut viri Christus, ideo de viro suo tanquam de capite duximus aliquid praetermittendum, ut cius fuerit cordis quanti ne animi, unum opus eius hic exartum legentibus declaret. (Turgot: Dunfermline Vita)

English attacks and attempts to capture Scotland lead to the Wars of Independence.

14^th century

A! fredome is a noble thing!

Fredome mays man to haiff liking;

Fredome all solace to man giffis:

He levys at es that frely levys. (John Barbour: The Brus)

England attempts to annex Scotland, refuses to recognise Scotland’s separate monarchy.

15^th century

The extraordinary consensus of opinion (in Scotland) against the English on the score of their greed, stupidity, their cruelty, their snobbery… arises from the fact that the English, like their cousins, the Germans…are intolerably arrogant and overbearing. (Walter Bower: Scotichronicon)

English invasions lead to one of Scotland’s wealthiest towns, Berwick, becoming English.

Scota and Gaedel Glas from Walter Bower’s Scotichronicon

16^th century

The pawkie auld carle came o’er the lea,

Wi’ mony gude e’ens and days to me,

Saying, Gudewife, for your courtesie,

Will you lodge a silly poor man? (Anon [James V?]: The Gaburlunzie Man)

English invasions. The Treaty of Greenwich guaranteeing Scottish/English independence is followed by invasion. The English monarch’s Rough Wooing involves burning towns including Edinburgh with widespread rape, murder, devastation of land and food supplies and theft of ships. The Raid of the Redeswire marks the last battle between Scotland and England – fought in Northumberland over English thefts from Scotland. A small win for Scotland.

17^th century

N cuals sibbse ‘n tionndagh duineil

Thug an camp bha ‘n Cill Chuimein?

‘S fada chaidh ainm air an iomairt

Thug iad as an naimhdean iomain. (Iain Lom: La Inbhir Lochaidh)

English invasion of Scotland by Oliver Cromwell’s armies. Absorption of Scotland into the Commonwealth of England (1649-1660). Scotland was not consulted and the republic was proclaimed by London’s military governor of Scotland General Monck, Duke of Albermarle, an Englishman from Devon. This was the first version of union with England. Scotland retained its own parliament but, of course, Edinburgh was not consulted over the execution of Charles I and in defiance declared his son, Charles II. Twelve years later Charles II was recognised in England .

18^th century

Wha for Scotland’s king and law

Freedom’s sword will strongly draw,

Freeman stand, or freeman fa’

Let him follow me! (Robert Burns: Scots Wha Hae)

The English parliament legislated to bar Catholics from the monarchies of England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland. No consultation with Scotland (or Ireland). Scotland protested against England’s unilateral decision but attempted to play it as a bargaining chip towards agreement if England ceased its policy that prevented Scottish trade in England and the colonies. Westminster refused. Westminster then passed the Alien Act intended to destroy Scotland’s commerce and thrust the country into economic decline unless Scotland relinquished the Scottish parliament in Edinburgh and submitted to a joint parliament based at Westminster. The proposal was met with hostility in Scotland but enough parliamentarians were persuaded to accept bribes from London to assuage their consciences for selling out their country and the Treaty of Union was passed by 110 votes to 67.

The jaws of the trap of union snapped shut at the completion of a sordid behind-the-scenes deal. England no longer needed an army to try to defeat Scotland – turncoat Scots with their mouths stuffed with English gold cravenly extinguished Scotland’s long status as a free nation. Resistance through two Jacobite uprisings were unsuccessful and Scots paid a heavy price for defiance – death, rape, torture and humiliation. A hostile army was stationed throughout the country to protect English interests. Westminster passed the Act of Proscription to punish Highland Scots and erode their culture; native dress and pipes were outlawed – not totally as they were adopted by the very army subjugating the people in an act of spite that underlined Scotland’s weakness and lack of autonomy in union.

19^th century

Chuidich sud le neart nan Gaidheal,

Air taobh Thealaich Bhain gun mhearachd

Na sgeith an Courier de chlabar

‘S ann am fabhor ri Sir Coinneach. ( Mairi Nic a’Phearsain: Brosnachadh nan Gaidheal)

The ethnic cleansing of Highlanders carried on apace – driven mainly by absentee landlords both Scottish and English who regarded London, not Edinburgh, as the centre of their universe. Westminster created the office of Secretary of State for Scotland to ensure more efficient adherence to Westminster laws in Scotland.

20^th century

I’m a miner lad fra Mid-Calder Braes,

In a bog I’ the Laigh Countree

An’ I’m howkin here in a woman’s claes

Whaur I never aince thocht to be. (J. Logie Robertson: The Lang Whang Road, A miner’s wail from Flanders, 1916)

Continuing resistance to Westminster’s jurisdiction in Scotland develops into political organisations aimed at reinstating the Scottish parliament. Hydro power that began in Scotland the previous century increases in volume and importance. In 1950 Sloy becomes the largest conventional hydro electrical power station in Great Britain. Others followed with Highland hydro feeding the national grid. Scottish Hydro electricity is supplied to the UK. It becomes privatised on the stock market and merged with Southern Electric.

21^st century

The dead hand has too long hampered the freedom of the living. (James Robertson)

Scotland provides 85% of GB’s hydro-electricity but London controls energy. Feed-in tariffs for large-scale energy suppliers to the National Grid force Scottish sources to pay £millions while English suppliers receive payments from the NG. Electricity transmission charges are calculated to favour areas of greater demand not areas that produce the energy. This is a choice made in London where no energy is produced, to its advantage. Currently Scots in the north are charged 61 pence per day standing charge for electricity. In southern Scotland that’s 56.55 pence per day. In London it is 46.06 pence per day despite importing their power from other areas, notably Scotland whose customers subsidise them.

UK oil and gas production has mainly been in Scottish waters since the 1970s (Westminster did redraw north sea boundaries in favour of England, allocating itself a share of Scotland’s waters.) The £ billions taken in profits and tax from north-sea oil and gas over the past fifty years have not benefitted Scotland in the least. They have benefitted the southeast of England.

Whisky exports are counted as both Scottish and UK GDP. Whisky is a significant component of UK food and drink exports and exported whisky in 2022 provided £7.1 billion to the UK economy. It makes up around 77% Scottish and 26% of all UK food and drink exports.

At the time of union Scotland was a poor country but overseas trade, most notably with the Baltic and Scandinavia, was strong. Scotland’s merchant class was well-educated and even among the poorest Scots there was a good level of literacy. England was bigger and stronger with a strong navy that was sent to disrupt Scotland’s trade and commerce – less disrupt than destroy. Why would England push for union with a poor country that could become a burden? The same argument stands today with the independence debate. The reality then, as now, is that England wants certainty that its northern border is secure in the interests of England and its economic heft was/is used to control Scotland’s assets – as we have seen with hydro, gas and oil and now renewables. England/Westminster wants to retain control over Scotland to extract profit from Scotland, and Scots. The union was set up to administer Scotland and preserve her minor role set against the might of government at Westminster. Power and control. Westminster has always been a robber baron in terms of Scotland. In that respect nothing has changed since the 13th century. The union parliament at Westminster not only fails spectacularly to operate democratically across the UK (Scotland has just around 8% MPs making it all but voiceless) it is corrupt and bloated. Eight percent Scottish representation in the Commons, short of 8% funding for Scotland’s fishing fleets. There’s a symmetry to the exploitation. So typical of a robber baron.

Posted in politics, Scotland, Scottish history, Scottish Nationalism, Scottish Parliament, Uncategorized, Weird and Wonderful | 6 Comments »

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Oct 15, 2025

The Merciless Maiden

The sweetest maiden I ever kissed.

The laws of states alter over time. In 1631 Marion Astein of Burntisland was beheaded for adultery and 15 years later Margaret Thomson, wife of the minister of Balmaclellan, was also beheaded for adultery. Today in Scotland no-one is put to death by the state for adultery or any other crime but parliament changes and redefines crimes and determines their severity. I’m certain those living in the 17^th century would raise an eyebrow at what constitutes dangerous opinion in 21^st century Britain but still there is no danger of any cardboard sign holder being beheaded by the UK state now or in the near future – a form of punishment we regard as barbaric, which it is, but beheading by a machine was once considered to be less barbaric than other forms of beheading – by sword or axe which were notoriously difficult and messy. It was thought to be cruel and improper to hang women yet many women were hanged. One man whose punishment was as horrible as any woman’s was Major Thomas Weir who was tied to a stake and strangled, his body was then burnt for the crime of sexual deviant – he indulged in incest, bestiality and adultery (with what is not recorded). He was also a Covenanter which was possibly what did for him. Death by drowning was the awful fate of some women, also burning (so, too, were men) so hanging was the better option, the Maiden better still. The Maiden was an apparatus with a crossbar in which was set a blade that dropped when released by the executioner and sliced through the neck of its victim.

No doubt you have in your mind’s eye a vision of the French guillotine that did so much of the heavy lifting through the period of the French Revolution but la guillotine was late to the party and appeared two hundred years after Scotland’s Maiden was in active service. So it is a pity that the guillotine to be found in many an office in Scotland carries a French and not a Scottish name.

The Maiden was first constructed in the 1500s in Edinburgh as an instrument of state murder. All sorts of felons could be served by the Maiden from forgers to adulterers, as we have seen, but she was primarily used to execute high profile enemies of the state. The contraption was easel-shaped and about 10 feet high with uprights four inches broad and 12 inches apart from each other. The structure was held upright by brace and sole – the sole extended five feet at the back. The cross bar that held the blade was two feet long and braced by the side posts. A cavity in the bar housed a 75-pound lead weight and at the signal the executioner pushed down on a long lever allowing the heavy blade to drop. To keep the business of beheading as efficient as possible an adjustable iron bar was placed across the neck of the Maiden’s target to prevent the person pulling back their head at the last moment.

The Maiden; Halifax beheader; Continental beheader; Aberdeen Maiden

It used to be said by some that the Maiden was the first beheading machine – it wasn’t. Some claimed it was a copy of one used in Halifax in England – it probably wasn’t. Both the Maiden and the Halifax type did the same job but were quite different designs. The Halifax edition was fixed to a raised stone platform on which the victim lay down, the neck over a length of timber waiting for the drop of the blade that took its time for the executioner used a knife to cut through the rope securing it. Scotland’s Maiden was designed with a lever to release the axe head more quickly than slicing through tow and it was not fixed but a mobile unit, disassembled after use and stored away in the bowels of parliament.

The Maiden also known as the Madin and Mayden was often taken out to dispatch the rich and connected because of its efficiency – albeit with long-lasting consequences. The poor rarely deserved a quick death. And some folk deserved a double death and were heided having previously been executed by other means so their heads might be displayed in public as a deterrence to others. Sir John Gordon of Findlater captured at the Battle of Corrichie in 1562 was beheaded by Aberdeen’s Maiden. His father would have suffered the same fate had he not dropped dead during the battle – his body was taken to Aberdeen, disembowelled, salted and pickled then loaded onto a ship bound for Edinburgh where the corpse was tried for treason before parliament. In Aberdeen public executions were carried out at the Mercat Cross or Heading Hill and here in September 1595 John Donalson was ‘hedit’ for the killing of Robert Scherar.

Scotland perfected the art of a clean beheading with the invention of the Maiden. When the Covenanter Marquis of Argyll prepared for his execution in 1661 in Edinburgh for his part in the Wars of the Three Kingdoms he wrapped his arms around the timbers of the Maiden and uttered his final words, “This is the sweetest maiden I have ever kissed” before the blade separated his head from his shoulders. It was his good fortune that the steel-edged lead-weighted iron axe had been replaced the previous year by Alexander Davidson hired to maintain it for “all the dayis of his life”.

The aristocrat most associated with the Maiden was James Douglas, Earl of Morton, Regent of Scotland 1572-1578 during the minority of James VI. He was a nasty piece of work involved in the murders of Mary Queen of Scots’ lover, David Rizzio, and her husband, Lord Darnley. A tenacious enemy of the Queen he was an inveterate traitor to his country who tried to ingratiate himself with the English court. Found guilty of the lethal plot against Darnley he was condemned to be hanged but James VI demanded leniency so the sentence was commuted to death by the Maiden. There is an apocryphal story that Morton was behind the Maiden, that he had the Halifax heading machine adapted in Edinburgh but this has been widely disputed. On one of his tours abroad Morton witnessed the Mannaia (great knife) in Italy – beheading machines were common enough on the Continent and there is a famous woodcut by the German artist, Lucas Cranach, from 1539 of one used in the martyrdom of the apostles. The Continental machine was more like Scotland’s. It may be that Morton promoted the construction of the Maiden but as for the tale he ‘first hanselled it” with his execution – that is nonsense. He was one in a line of executees. But under the blade he went and his head once removed was fixed to a prick (spike) and displayed on the north gable of Edinburgh’s tolbooth for 18 months. That’s some legacy. And true.

Nearly twenty years earlier in 1564 Edinburgh Town Council recorded “The Compte of the Heding Axe maid the tyme of the comptaris office, as efter follwis, at command of the Provost, Baillies, & Counsale”, listing what went into its assembly – timber, stone, tow and so on – and “Item to Mongo Hunter for thre bandis of yrne” and “naillis”, “sawing of jeists”, “twa stane & half of leid on the Aix & tempering of it and for his laubors” (Androw Gottersoun). Any machine with moving parts needs maintenance and so did the Maiden from time to time – fresh towis (rope), its blade sharpened and timbers replaced. This was the Maiden.

Executions of Marquis of Argyll and John Hamilton; 17thC Highland chief; Edinburgh tolbooth

The first recorded reference to the Maiden as her dates from 1608 – though that doesn’t mean it wasn’t referred to as her earlier. The first mention of the merciless Maiden’s use was in 1565 when Robert Aitkyne found guilty of the murder of John Robertson in Aberdeen was heided at Edinburgh’s Mercat Cross. James Adamson met the same fate for piracy in 1567; Peter Hamilton for incest and murder that same year; John Leyis for treason, theft and spulzie (theft or plunder) in 1569. Jean Livingstone from Warristoun went under the Maiden in July 1600 for the murder of her husband. The following year 16-year-old Laurence Man was beheaded for committing murder while gambling with cards and dice in a kirk. In 1618 the minister of Craigie, Thomas Ross, felt the sweet embrace of the Maiden for producing an ‘infamous’ pasquill (satire or lampoon). Ross was in England where he nailed a statement to the door of St Mary’s Church at Oxford University containing a furious diatribe against Scots describing them, though not himself, as parasites on England – there are several among Scotland’s current media personnel of similar opinion but the vice-chancellor of the university was of sounder mind and had Ross arrested then dispatched to Edinburgh for trial. The hand that created the pasquill was lopped off and hung up on Edinburgh’s west port and his head followed except it went to the Netherbow.

While Aberdeen had its own Maiden not every community did and the Edinburgh Maiden was believed to have been transported to Dundee and St Andrews when required, such as in 1646 when the parliament granted a warrant to “transport the maiden from Dundee to St Androis” to execute royalists.

The Maiden’s last hurrah came in 1716 when John Hamilton was beheaded for murder. By the end of that century la guillotine was in constant demand during the days of revolution brought out to oust its corrupt and profligate monarchy and aristocracy. The machine de mort was ordered by the Legislative Assembly in 1792, built by a German living in Paris, a man called Schmitt. The construction was overseen by Dr Louis, Secretary of the Academy of Surgeons, and initially it was known as Louison or Luisette before the name guillotine was adopted, taken from Dr Joseph Guillotin, a French physician imprisoned during the reign of terror. The most striking difference between the guillotine and the Maiden lies in the blade – the Scottish one was horizontal and the French one slanting which made it still more efficient.

The abandoned Edinburgh Maiden was kept dismantled and in storage beneath parliament until claimed by the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland for their museum. The axe is all that remains of Aberdeen’s Maiden active from the 1500s to 1615. It is on display at the city’s Tolbooth museum. When I looked up the Maiden on Aberdeen City Council Galleries and Museums website up popped a page to register a death. Bizarre.

Posted in Aberdeen, Aberdeen City Council, Scotland, Scottish history, Uncategorized, Weird and Wonderful | Leave a Comment »

Sep 21, 2025

The first Scots movie stars and the one who gave Homer Simpson his d’oh!

If there’s one place that’s associated with glamour it’s Hollywood. Glamour, a Scottish word meaning magic or enchantment, coined in the 1700s. But Scotland didn’t only provide the descriptive noun it provided the early motion picture industry with some of its most abiding faces.

Recently I happened to see an online publication called Far Out claim Deborah Kerr was Scotland’s first and biggest Hollywood star – she most certainly was not the first as the author of this piece would have discovered had he researched his topic and it’s doubtful she has been the biggest.

Hollywood movie-making stretches back to 1912 when film makers moved west to escape the New York’s strangle-hold on their industry by the Thomas Edison’s Motion Picture Patents Company. Over in California it was Canadians who were behind the development of Hollywood, Tinseltown. Not just any Canadians but Canadians with Scotland running through their blood and in no time lots of Scots were arriving there fascinated by the idea of a career in film.

Aberdeen’s Margaret Mann was one of 10 children and put out to work as a child. Their poverty turned the family to become economic migrants in South Africa but after a few years Margaret migrated again, this time to the west coast of the USA. There Margaret found occasional work as an extra in the recently setup Universal and Triangle studios but by 1921 had secured the role of Mrs Blomefield in the silent version of Black Beauty. In 1928 she took a lead role in John Ford’s magnificent and hugely successful silent film drama set in Germany at the outbreak of the Great War, Four Sons. Margaret was cast in the star role of Mother Bernle because of her impressive performance as Mother Machree in the 1927 movie of that name. Four Sons provided her with her first proper paid employment as a movie actress at the age of 60,

“Fancy drawing a regular pay check, even when one isn’t working! It is the first time in my life I was ever paid without earning it,” she said.

https://youtu.be/eiZweY4aK_A?si=Ehl8QkoS6q6KnvFh

Four Sons top billing

The take-home pay of an extra was unpredictable – $5 or $7.50 per appearance and as she told reporters she worked as hard for that as she did in Four Sons. There were thousands like Margaret enrolled with the Central Casting Bureau looking for that breakthrough. Margaret’s lovely, kindly face and homely appearance tended to have her typecast in mother roles but it’s fair to say throughout her years in Hollywood she played a variety of characters for her filmography was vast. When Four Sons was released Margaret was showered with praise for the “masterpiece of naturalness” of her acting and she was described as Hollywood’s latest Cinderella. It was said she did not need a skilled makeup artist to create her old lady image as “Father Time was her makeup artist, etching in her face the lines of care, and the character and spirituality which can only come from an unembittered struggle of years.” At its premier on Broadway the audience rose to its feet, cheered and applauded the Scot who was presented with bouquets of flowers for her sterling performance. Described as a film masterpiece Margaret Mann earned international acclaim for her acting.

It’s an awful irony that while Margaret Mann epitomised the mother-type on the big screen none of her own children survived beyond birth. Her successes as an actress and the adulation that came to her must have been some little consolation. Her appearance plus that “delightful Scottish burr” led to directors noticing her. Four Sons won Photoplay’s Medal of Honor for best picture for 1928 but Hollywood’s love affair with elderly women was starting to decline and in that way older women struggled to retain their cinematic appeal (a plight that did not apply to men) roles grew scarcer.

Another Aberdonian and pioneer of Hollywood silent movies was William Gillespie. He was just 44 when he died in 1938 but had appeared in 180 films, many uncredited bit parts. He was a regular comic actor in Hal Roach films most notably alongside Laurel and Hardy in many of their pictures such as Do You Love Your Wife in which he played the unfaithful husband. He was also in 60 Harold Lloyd movies and turned up in supporting roles for Charlie Chaplin and was often cast as a stuffy official or manager.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=764G3tcR5HA Do You Love Your Wife as the faithless husband

Glasgow dressmaker Mary Gordon was a young widow in her thirties with a daughter and mother in tow when she emigrated to the States after the Great War. In California she found work as a waitress in the Robertson-Cole a studio but then she began to secure bit parts in movies which led to her friendship with the director John Ford. She made seven films with him starting with Hangman’s House in 1928, a step-up from the silent short of 1925 The Dome Doctor. Mary is best remembered for her later work in maternal roles, for example, as Mrs Hudson in Sherlock Holmes’ movies but the role that became significant to her career was a nanny in The Little Minister (a James Barrie story) along with Katharine Hepburn. From the crowd of hopefuls hanging around the casting office Katherine Hepburn noticed Mary and went over to speak to her. She was so taken with Mary’s rich Glasgow accent the star persuaded director Richard Wallace to give her a screen test and played opposite her to demonstrate how well they could work together. Wallace signed up Gordon there and then for the role of Babbie the nanny for the 1924 film. Other parts came her way as a result of the film but as she got older it got harder to find work. In 1935 she read one evening that director Lloyd Bacon was struggling to fill the role of the mother, Ma O’Hara, in his movie The Irish in Us with James Cagney and Olivia de Havilland. Mary wrote him there and then and went out and posted the letter by special delivery. In the morning she phoned him and was invited to the studio, auditioned and secured the role. Mary Gordon had a strong reputation in Hollywood circles. In all she appeared in some 300 films that included Frankenstein, The Power and the Glory, Bonnie Scotland, Mutiny on the Bounty, Mary of Scotland, Mr Smith goes to Washington and Fort Apache. Her benefactor Katharine Hepburn had a little part in Mary Gordon’s success. Hepburn was a real Scottophile; proud of her Scottish name the down-to-earth film star spent many holidays in Scotland and raved about the country so much she persuaded her mother and sisters to visit.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TgDl37dMB-0 The Irish In Us

The man who put the Doh! into Homer Simpson’s mouth was James Finlayson. Jimmy Finlayson or Fin as he was known to his friends was a prolific screen actor familiar to audiences with his bald head, big fake moustache, his characteristic squint and outraged double takes followed by a slow burn. He was the third man in a host of Laurel and Hardy movies; their foil known for his D’ooooooh! The long D’oooooooh! was shortened to Doh! in the Simpsons.

Jimmy as the Sgt Major in Bonnie Scotland https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7yh7bxj92zU

Born in Larbert in Stirlingshire 1887 teenager Jimmy Finlayson began training as a tinsmith but abandoned that to go to Edinburgh University where he caught the acting bug. Still only 24 Jimmy crossed the Atlantic in 1911 and took to the Broadway stage, in The Great Game he played a teuchter detective but the developing California movie business called and by 1916 he was in Hollywood. He worked for a couple of small studios before transferring to the Max Sennett outfit becoming one of the original Keystone Cops, usually the comic villain being pursued by the police,before moving across to Hal Roach – director of Laurel and Hardy films where his reputation was made. Jimmy Finlayson had acted in several movies with young Stan Laurel before Laurel teamed up with Oliver Hardy and when he did Jimmy was there, too, appearing in 33 of their pictures as the duo’s comic foil – for instance he was Sgt. Major Finlayson in Bonnie Scotland (Mary Gordon was Mrs Bickerdike and David Torrence was Mr Miggs). In the earliest years it was Laurel, Hardy and Finlayson, a comedy trio, but Roach decided the duo pairing was slicker as an attraction. They three remained firm friends.

Finlayson’s film career stretched from 1920 to 1951, one of his last roles was as a cabby in Royal Wedding, a bit part that was uncredited, as so many of his later appearances were. All a bit sad for a man who really was an icon of early cinema. As with many of his fellow actors he died fairly young, at 66 in 1953. He was a proud Scot and a talented piper, playing for friends. There’s a nice wee story of how one time Jimmy was returning from a holiday in Scotland – he stepped off the train at Pasadena to be greeted by his good pals Stan and Ollie dressed in kilts. Behind them a band of bagpipers who played the three amigos out of the station, a scene that created wild excitement among travellers there. Jimmy Finlayson’s attracted the headline “‘Kop’ dies”. Among those attending his funeral service at Chapel of the Pines in Los Angeles was the old Keystone Kops gang, their director Mack Sennett and Jimmy’s long-time friend from home in Scotland, Andy Clyde.

It was Jimmy Finlayson who persuaded Andy Clyde to move to America. Clyde from Blairgowrie made his screen debut in 1921 as the surveyor’s helper in On a Summer Day and soon was a regular in a host of Mack Sennett films. His filmography over the next 40 years amounted to about 300 pictures plus much television; he was California Carlson, Hopalong Cassidy’s sidekick in the series as well as being in a host of other westerns and the Lassie films. On-screen he usually appeared with a scruffy beard and mismatched clothes that belied the suave star off-screen.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bq72Rg7rWBE Hopalong Cassidy

Olaf Hytten from Glasgow started out in British silent movies before moving to the States where he acted in hundreds of silents and talkies – 27 in 1934 alone. A bit typecast as a butler Olaf but his roles took in all kinds of characters. He loved the movie industry despite the erratic nature of employment of actors who weren’t major names but he was prepared to plug away and take work where he could. He was on the set of Sir Walter Raleigh for 20^th Century Fox when he died, in 1955. His huge filmography includes many small uncredited appearances but he worked in some of the best movies of his day: Casablanca, A Study in Scarlet, Jane Eyre, What Every Woman Knows, The Last of the Mohicans, A Christmas Carol among his appearances in the thirties.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LjXII9gq3Nw&list=PLi5s3-YiYzffNtKp0enduNMFZulIky-0n Fu Manchu

One of the first of the Scots to break into Hollywood was Alfred Bardo from Troon in Ayrshire. Having become bored as a mariner Alfred joined the Klondike gold rush and when that didn’t turn out as he hoped he tried his hand as a trapper in America’s far northwest. Unsatisfied with that he took to the saddle as a cowboy for a time before heading to Los Angeles where he was persuaded by another Scot to try the movie business. Bardo was hardly in the first flush of youth by this time but with his distinctive bearded face the Scot secured roles from Highland crofter to Turkish admiral to Hindu priest and he loved it all. At long last having tried so many jobs he had found his forte. As with the others Alfred worked with the big stars of the day such as Mary Pickford, Charlie Chaplin, Rudolph Valentino and Lon Chaney with whom he remained friends. He played Dorothy Dalton’s gambler father in The Lady of Red Butte, a priest in Cecill B. DeMille’s epic story of Christ, King of Kings. His old life in the Klondike held him in good stead to play a prospector in the 1919 silent western Breed of Men for Paramount Pictures. A print of the film is preserved in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Bardo arrived in Hollywood when it was rough countryside with only a few buildings serving as studios but when he retired to Scotland to his ‘ain folk’ in 1927 Hollywood was already expanding into the huge industry that would dominate film production.

https://www.primevideo.com/detail/The-King-of-Kings/0QHQ3S60CL8WO6WOWXRKM4UHPK King of Kings

Also in at the beginning of Hollywood’s pre-talkie era was Frank Spottiswoode Aitken from Edinburgh. It was 1914 when Spottiswoode Aitken as he was known found himself one of a growing group of actors and actresses settling into the newly fledged movie community in Los Angeles. Maybe because the life didn’t offer much security Aitken took to buying land and orange groves around Los Angeles. His first film role came in a D. W. D. Griffith movie The Battle; a tale of the American Civil War. Griffith also cast him in the shamefully racist The Birth of a Nation, as Dr Cameron. Rightly condemned for its heroic portrayal of white supremacism the movie was nonetheless acclaimed for its technical innovations including its use of colour. It was the first motion picture screened in the White House. Spottiswoode’s final film appearance was as a sports writer in Frank Capra’s 1928 film The Power of the Press with Douglas Fairbanks Jr.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TeMUMvHgaOg The Power of the Press

Another Edinburgh man, David Torrence, was one of 11 children. Born in 1864 his Hollywood debut didn’t come until he was about 40 but he was straight into a leading role as Michael, Duke of Strelsau in The Prisoner of Zenda in 1913. Like so many of his fellow Scots his film appearances were numerous in roles that went uncredited and paid by the day for films completed in a matter of weeks. A big man Torrence was a favourite in the role of a heavy nevertheless over the years he enjoyed a huge variety of parts such as Lord Hood in Mutiny on the Bounty with Charles Laughton and Clark Gable in 1935. David’s younger brother Ernest Torrence set out in showbusiness as a singer with the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company before accompanying David to the States before the First World War. They both took to the New York stage for a few short years until lured west to Hollywood. Ernest Torrence’s films included The Night Boat (1920) and The Hunchback of Notre Dame with Lon Chaney three years later. In the Buster Keaton classic silent movie Steamboat Bill (1928) Ernest was Buster Keaton’s pipe-smoking father. Ernest Torrence died at 54, in 1933, of complications during surgery for gallstones shortly after playing Moriarty in the 1932 movie Sherlock Holmes. Brother David lived until he was 87 and died in Los Angeles in 1951.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJbYuFdMB3U Steamboat Bill, Jr

All things Scottish appealed to the Hollywood set. Los Angeles’ oldest restaurant the Tam o’ Shanter Inn and drive-in on Los Feliz Boulevard where waitresses dressed in tartan and Tam o’ Shanters was immensely popular with Hollywood’s elite who queued up in their fancy limousines for hamburgers (the Edinburgher) with the trimmings – onions and sauce – served in huge buns or for restaurant meals with a Scottish twist such as Scotch broth. It was at the Tam (opened in 1922) they turned out to celebrate Burns Nights to dine on haggis and drink toasts to the Immortal Memory while nibbling on shortbread flown in specially from Scotland.

Hogmanay was celebrated usually by driving from one star-filled mansion to another. Katherine Hepburn made a point of visiting her friend the Scottish actor Alec Craig whose wife’s ‘delicious’ scones were her favourites. As well as the Craig scone fame Mr Craig, Alexander, was a favourite with screen audiences, sometimes typecast as a Scotsman but not entirely. Craig was Mccoy in Mutiny on the Bounty (1935) and Donal in John Ford’s Mary of Scotland in which his friend Katharine Hepburn took the title role and Angus McBain in Northern Pursuit (1943). As a jobbing actor many of Alec Craig’s appearances went uncredited such as when he was Speaker in the great film Mr Smith goes to Washington. Much like Jimmy Finlayson he often adopted a wizened expression on screen and his bald head was instantly recognisable in movie after movie. Alec Craig was a pioneer of film noir playing a defence attorney in Stranger on the Third Floor. Born in Dunfermline in 1884 Alec Craig died in 1944 and was buried near his home at Grand View Memorial Park Cemetery in Glendale, California.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TmveQVTNd8A Northern Pursuit trailer

Six years older than Alec Craig was Donald Meek a Glaswegian who died in Los Angeles two years after Alec. Meek was another Scot who did a lot of work for Frank Capra including You Can’t Take it With You (1938), Stagecoach (1939) where he appeared as the diminutive whisky salesman, Samuel Peacock, and the very early Broken Dishes that featured a young Bette Davis (1929). As well as through his film roles Donald Meek left his mark in Hollowood’s Walk of Fame. He ended up in California via Canada after his parents emigrated there from Scotland. Donald lost his hair as a consequence of contracting yellow fever. His final movie was Magic Town starring James Stewart and Jane Wyman and during its filming Donald Meek died from leukaemia. A splendid and talented character actor he entertained in more than 800 stage and film roles.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OE-VWDsdkwM Whisky salesman in Stagecoach

Of a similar age to Donald was Joseph Ninnian Yule, born in Glasgow his parents emigrated to America when he was three months old. Yule became a burlesque and vaudeville actor under the name Joe Yule. You may have heard of his son, Ninnian Joseph Yule, whose stage name was Mickey Rooney. Yule senior was another jobbing actor who appeared in a host of uncredited character roles – The Great Ziegfeld (1936), the Thin Man series, For Me and My Gal starring Judy Garland and as Milton in the 1941 movie Billy the Kid and many more.

Someone who was slap bang in the middle of Hollywood’s motion picture phenomenon was Nora Low from Strichen in Aberdeenshire better known by the name Lorna Moon. Nora’s messy and complex life found her in Hollywood at the invitation of director Cecil B. DeMille following her candid appraisal of his silent movie starring Gloria Swanson, a society romance called Male and Female. Instead of ignoring her DeMille challenged her to write a better script for a film. She duly arrived in 1921 and was taken on to learn the craft of scripting and screenwriting at the studio that would become Paramount Pictures. Lorna took to the life like a duck to water. She enjoyed great success with screenplays for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer during the 1920s that earned the studio big bucks for movies such as the adaption of Anna Karenina in the 1927 movie, Love, starring Greta Garbo.

Lorna, having abandoned her two children on her travels, had a third child with Cecil B. DeMille’s brother William, also a movie director. The child, a boy called Richard, was brought up by Cecil and his wife as their adopted son. Lorna was a talented writer and her screen credits include Gloria Swanson’s early silent movie The Affairs of Anatol (1921) and Norma Shearer’s Upstage (1926).

Often in poor health Lorna died of tuberculosis. Her ashes were brought to Scotland and scattered on Mormond Hill near the town whose inhabitants she drew from for her series of short stories Doorways in Drumorty – a work that was banned from its local library for its biting satire of the local community. The film rights to her book Dark Star earned Lorna a great deal of money for the stories that formed the basis of the hugely successful comedy drama series Min and Bill, an early talkie, that was pre-code (Hay’s censorship code) and so more explicit than later movies were allowed to be and earned MGM a staggering $2million ($38,000,000 today) when premiered in 1930, the year Lorna died at the age of 43.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nWLeqAafUjk Min and Bill preview

There are many more stories about Scots in at the beginning of the age of Hollywood but for now – that’s all folks!

Posted in Aberdeen, Aberdeenshire, Scotland, Scottish history, Uncategorized, Weird and Wonderful | 5 Comments »

Tags: Aberdeen, Alec Craig, Alfred Bardo, Andy Clyde, Bette Davis, Blairgowrie, Bonnie Scotland, Breed of Men, Broken Dishes, California Carlson, Casablanca, Cecil B. DeMille, classic-movies, D'oh!, D.W.D.Griffith, Dark Star Doorways in Drumorty, David Torrence, Deborah Kerr, Donald Meek, Dunfermline, Edinburgh, Ernest torrence. Hunchback of Notre Dame, film, film noir, Four Sons, Frank Capra, Fu Manchu, Glamour, Glasgow, Greta Garbo, Hal Roach, Hangman's House, Hollywood, Home Simpson, Hopalong Cassidy, James Finlayson, Joe Yule, John Ford, Katharine Hepburn, Keystone Kops, King of Kings, Larbert, Lassie, Laurel and Hardy, Lon Chaney, Lorna Moon, Love, Mack Sennett, Male and Female, Margaret Mann, Mary Gordon, Mary of Scotland, MGM, Mickey Rooney, Mother Bernle, Mother Machree, movies, Mr Smith Goes to Washington, Mutiny on the Bounty. Lon Chaney, Olaf Hytten, Paramount Pictures, Prisoner of Zenda, Sherlock Holmes, Spottiswoode Aitken, Stagecoach, stranger on the Third Floor, The Birth of a Nation, The Little Minister, The Power of the Press, The Tam, tinseltown, whisky salesman, William Gillespie

Aug 16, 2025

The Doric v Wordsworth: a sad tale of a student who sued his university professor

In March 1928 the Court of Session at Edinburgh rejected v appeal against a decision at Aberdeen Sheriff Court to dismiss a student’s claim for damages against his university professor. Lewis Coutts was the student and the academic at the centre of the storm was Adolphus Jack, Professor of English Literature at Aberdeen University. The living experiences of the two men could hardly have been greater; Jack a formidable and conservative don from an esteemed family of academics and Coutts son of an Aberdeenshire sanitary inspector with an ambition to write. Coutts was bristly and uncompromising in his insistence he write in his local vernacular, the Doric – a dialect rooted in culture with a strong literary heritage. But Wordsworth didn’t write in the Doric and the Professor would have none of it.

Jack and Coutts had a spectacular falling out in the early 1920s during Coutts’ time at university. Coutts suffered four years of hell, a Gordon Highlander in the Great War he was badly wounded when the trench he was in was blown up. Later in the war his brother, William, was killed. The Professor had avoided service in the war but no doubt had heard of it.

Charge!

“Old Corky’s down and dying!

Did you hear the splinter flying

It’s blown away the side of his face

And most of his jaw below …”

(Scotch Hotch Potch; Lewis Coutts, 1923)

When Lewis (Loo-ey) Coutts was prevented from taking the senior Honours year in 1923-24 he sued Professor Adolphus Jack for £5,500 damages for the ban and alleged slander – declaring Jack called him “mad, ignorant, and silly” as justification for banning him from the course and so damaging his prospects of becoming a teacher or journalist. Jack denied every accusation against him.

The Professor had a team of expensive solicitors to fight his case. Coutts defended himself. He had no money for legal fees but despite his confidence in his case he was not a match for a professional legal team or the conservatism of the bench. It should be said Coutts was not in the best state of mind for the demanding impact of what turned out to be a protracted legal battle. His mental state was fragile as a result of his war experiences, the loss of his brother and then in 1923 the sudden death of both parents.

War – Springtime 1917

Evening

The sun set terrible, bathed in blood,

Guns growled for their human fodder,

…

For death had sown the land with dead –

To reap a hell upon earth.”

The Dead

Two deaders lay clasped like frightened kids,

One face grinned neath a rakish helmet,

In grotesque hilarity at war;

another stared in terror …”

(Lyrics, Ballads, and Satires; Lewis Coutts, 1926)

Turning up late to a lecture as the roll was called Coutts heard when his name was called Professor Jack say, “Oh, yes, he is not coming back” – later denied by Jack – at which point Coutts walked away. He later challenged Jack and words were exchanged. In court it emerged that the Professor regarded Coutts’ work as “too downright” – that Coutts was very outspoken and critical of many established poets, including the Bard himself, Rabbie Burns, and he had no time for Wordsworth which shocked and infuriated the English department. Then, again, Lord Byron also had no time for Wordsworth whom he referred to as Turdsworth. Other department staff supported the Professor’s remarks about Coutts being difficult and resistant to undertake work he thought unworthy of him. As for Coutts he maintained some students such as other ex-servicemen were offered preferential treatment and permitted to sit Honours with six out of seven subjects but when he requested the same special dispensation he was told he was too late by almost two weeks. The university refused to reveal if this was true which it surely was for then it was said each case for sitting the degree was judged on its merits. Throughout the initial Sheriff Court case and then at the Court of Session Jack’s team of solicitors did their best to belittle and ridicule Coutts, to the amusement of the public.

The local man had made himself unpopular with the English Department by refusing to conform to its orthodoxy. For a working-class man suffering the grief of his lost family and trying to cope with the unfamiliar environment of university life – and it should be said, a man with challenging opinions – the inevitable happened and he suffered a mental breakdown that resulted in a period in a mental hospital in 1923; throughout his life he would be in and out of these institutions. University life did not start out too badly; some of his course writing impressed the Professor who described how it “blazed up like a fire” but with Coutts’ persistent questioning and dismissal of the department’s canon of poetry’s hierarchy such as calling Wordsworth “merely a stick-in-the-mud” a red flag was raised and not one supported by the socialist Coutts. Soon relations between the two men broke down entirely.

It emerged in Coutts’ evidence the university tried to silence him by offering him money but when asked about this not one of the Senate members could remember such an arrangement. Which all sounds like institutional circling of the wagons and collusion among university staff.

The ‘intemperate’ language Coutts used in his work was brought up as evidence he didn’t belong in the Honours class but when it was pointed out he had used the same language in his early years at university and that work passed it was argued that was because an exception was made for him as an ex-serviceman with disabilities. Coutts had been twentieth out of one hundred and sixty students in his first year but the Professor claimed his work deteriorated after this which is possible given Coutts’ mental breakdown. The court heard Coutts questioned his lecturers’ ability to judge his writing. Lewis Coutts was on a hiding to nothing against the formidable united strength of the university hierarchy. There is no doubt he was testy but there is little doubt his questioning of the academic establishment antagonised it.

Professor Adolphus Jack was the quintessential absent-minded professor whose existence was more ethereal than that of the majority of mere earth-bound mortals. Bumping into one of his students he asked what books he had with him. “Oh, you wouldn’t be interested, Professor. They’re just rubbish. I bought them at Woolworth’s,” replied the student. “Woolworth’s,” pondered the Professor, “I haven’t heard of that bookshop.”

A larger-than-life figure with wild ginger hair under a tatty black bowler and dressed in a long-caped ulster coat Jack occasionally appeared in three waistcoats, having lost count while dressing. He was a familiar sight on the trams that carried him between his home in Aberdeen’s west end to the university four times daily. One time when asked by the tram inspector for his ticket he pulled about 150 of them crumpled up out of a pocket and told him, “It must be one of these.” He didn’t drive and travel to his holiday home in Perthshire was by taxi from Aberdeen – two taxis, actually – one for the man and his wife, Lucy, and the other for their luggage, a cook and housemaid.

Jack was admired by many of his students several of whom went on to have successful writing careers. They called him Dolphie, though probably not to his face. Agnes Mure Mackenzie was nervous about forwarding her latest book on English Renaissance Drama to Jack for comment – “Dare I send A.A.J. a copy?” she asks her friend the novelist and poet and former fellow-student of Jack’s, Nan Shepherd, in 1926. Mackenzie added – “I said what was gie’d me about Ford & Co and he [Jack] will probably faint in coils + put the book in the ashes.” She and Jack held different opinions on English literature, his being “à la Dolphy”, but when it came to Coutts’ trial her sympathies lay with the Professor – “Poor old Dolphin! . . . who is financing Coutts?” ^1.

Lewis Coutts lost his case against Professor Jack and Aberdeen University. He published a handful of books of poetry and wrote plays that were performed locally but in the end his living was earned as a market gardener in Ellon. Some of his poetry is very good, some drifts into doggerel. He was described as “the great Scots poet of to-day” in the Motherwell Times in 1927. It picked out his “facility for rhyming, a rather gloomy outlook at times, but ever a fighter and one determined to be master of his fate in spite of anyone or anything.” The piece cites his book Lyrics, Ballads, and Satires as “full of fine poetry – finer than the Jacob [Violet Jacob] . . . and on a par with Robert Burns.” That opinion was not widely shared. Coutts’ forthright language continued to give offence to some – so, too, did his antipathy to religion –

“The psalmist snivels, silly ass!”

And to authority –

“Rank is jist an empty blaw,

Wealth taks wings and flees away”.

(Scotch Hotch Potch)

Four years at university but Coutts left without a degree in the end. His intransigence and the intransigence of the university department – both unbending traditionalists in their own ways maintained their differences to the end. Coutts refused to pull his punches and the university of Aberdeen was a citadel that could absorb his hits. The series of court cases eventually ended, in 1929. The Lords of the Court of Session came down on the side of the Professor. Coutts was criticised for refusing to accept the standards of teaching at the university – “tuition would be reduced to a farce if everyone assumed that attitude…a university might as well close its doors”.

Coutts, the country loon (lad) who never lost his passion for the land, for nature and for humanity was not always raging. His eye was keen and his emotions charged. He wrote the most tender verse –

The Lass o’ Logie

O, cushie, crooin’ love se sweet,

An’ gently flowin’ bogie,

O, gie me o’ yir magic meet

Te woo the Lass o’ Logie

…

(Lyrics, Ballads, and Satires)

Heartfelt words probably written for his wife. They married in 1927 and she was dead by 1934, of childbed fever, tragedy that set off another bout of terrible depression that led to his confinement in Kingseat Mental Hospital. Just one month before his incarceration his region was lauded as the new literary centre of Scotland because of the northeast’s bounty of talented authors – Charles Murray, Violet Jacob, Marion Angus, Helen Cruickshank, Agnes Mure Mackenzie, Nan Shepherd, Willa Muir, Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Neil Gunn, Lewis Coutts and on and on in appreciation of the literary pre-eminence of the vernacular and Gaelic.

Coutts’ love and understanding of his native Buchan is never in doubt – its folk “orra loons” and “kitchie deems” and “yalla troots” fished out the river. His critics appreciated his ability to capture the romance of poetry but ranted at his audacity to poke through life’s seedy undercurrents what was referred to as “the stench of the gutters”. One contributor to the Perthshire Advertiser dismissed Coutts’ sombre and edgy lines as “drivel” because “youth’s rightful place is the mountain-top, not the farmyard”. The critic also sneered at Coutts’ Doric – native to Coutts but probably not to the man in Perth. Coutts knew them both –

July

I’ll meet ye on the Logie Hill

Afore the bloom is aff the whin,

Faur curlews are aye cryin shrill

An harebells ring in ilka win.”

(Lyrics, Ballads, and Satires)

Despite his concerns that university had wrecked his career prospects, Lewis Coutts did write and did publish and he did become a journalist. In the end it was his fragile mental health that derailed his ambitions in that direction.

Adolphus Jack died an old man. Lewis Coutts died at only 57 years; hardship and tragedy his closest companions.

“Dust I am!

…

Life’s not the snare religions screech!

Life is the joy the pagans preach!”

(Scotch Hotch Potch)

^1.Nan Shepherd’s Correspondence 1920 – 1980, Edited by Kerri Andrews, 2024.

Posted in Aberdeen, Aberdeenshire, Doric, journalism, politics, Scotland, Scottish history, socialism, Uncategorized, Weird and Wonderful | 3 Comments »

Jun 19, 2025

The Accidental Death of an Anarchist

A short foreign-looking young man in a brown coat and hat appeared preoccupied as he ascended the steep path to Greenwich Royal Observatory on the afternoon of 15^th February 1894. He had been observed making his way across London, passing over Westminster Bridge, purchasing a tram ticket for the Observatory. The tram passed the Observatory but the man didn’t get off. At the terminus he seemed preoccupied and edgy asking the tram conductor for directions back to Greenwich Park.

A park-keeper noticed him and joked he should have a porter carry the heavy package wrapped in brown paper he carried so awkwardly. A group of schoolboys making their way through the park noticed the solitary figure. Someone reported seeing him unwrapping the package and pouring liquid from a small glass bottle onto the object in his hand. Some reported seeing him trip over tree roots. Some said he was in a state of panic and hesitated in his actions. The true chain of events will never be known but what did happen was the device exploded blowing off his left hand and blasting over three pounds of shattered glass and fragments of metal into his body, shredding his organs. Incredibly he didn’t die immediately but attempted to get away despite bleeding badly. After just a few strides he dropped to his knees. He was like that when the schoolboys found him – conscious, urging them to fetch him a cab and pleading, “Take me home, take me home.” The park keeper, Patrick Sullivan, was on the scene by now but on asking where his home was the man was unable to speak. Sullivan raised the alarm and a doctor quickly arrived armed with brandy which was offered but the young man refused it. Swiftly he was transferred to nearby Seaman’s Hospital though it was clear nothing could be done to save his life for his injuries were catastrophic and he died at 5.40 pm without uttering another word. The police were now at the scene gathering up body parts and pieces of the explosive.

The bomber and victim was identified as twenty-six-year-old Martial Bourdin by his brother and a cabinet-maker called Ernest Delebecque, like the bomber and his brother a refugee from France. All three were anarchists.

Why would anyone want to blow-up England’s Royal Observatory? A decade before in 1884 Greenwich prime meridian – a geographical reference line passing through the Observatory – was accepted as the prime meridian for the whole world – a geographic coordination on longitude that divided Earth into two hemispheres and established a global standard for timekeeping and navigation that enabled international capitalism to flourish.

Across Europe anarchist groups were resisting brutal unaccountable authorities and unscrupulous exploitation of workers with their own versions of violence. The attempted bombing of the Observatory was immediately suspected as being an anarchist act which shouldn’t have been too difficult to establish given Scotland Yard and Special Branch were well-acquainted with British anarchists and foreign anarchists who sought sanctuary in the UK. In Martial Bourdin’s jacket pocket was his membership card for the anarchist Club Autonomie in London but then the police were possibly well-aware who he was without this little piece of evidence.

Whatever the police knew from the beginning did not stop speculation and conspiracy theories over the actions of Bourdin by the press and individuals – the bombing was a statement about international capitalism; it was a police ploy to justify increasing police powers; he did not intend the Observatory to be his target but was about to leave the UK for France with the explosive when he realised he was being tailed by Special Branch and panicked. He was carrying more than enough money to travel home to France (money never returned to the family by the police). However, that explanation sounds ridiculous especially given what later emerged.

The inquest into Bourdin’s death identified him as a ladies’ tailor from France living in Tottenham with his brother-in-law, H. B. Samuels. It concluded Bourdin was not on his way to Paris but intended bombing the Observatory having boarded a tram for Greenwich at Westminster Bridge in the company of another man. Between Westminster and Greenwich his companion had melted away leaving Bourdin alone. It was noted how nervous Bourdin was while speaking to the tram conductor which strongly suggested his intentions. The inquest jury heard how he carefully unwrapped the explosive device and poured sulphuric acid out of a small glass bottle onto the fuse causing the bomb to detonate, blowing off his left hand and sending shards of metal and glass into his body, killing him. Given that Boudin was carrying an explosive into Greenwich Park it was concluded his aim was to damage the Observatory. The inquest heard from Colonel Majendie, Chief Inspector of Explosives, a pioneer of bomb disposal and the ultimate cool head in scary situations, argue that the device could not have gone off as the result of a fall but due to Bourdin’s bungling or miscalculation causing it to explode prematurely. The jury returned a verdict of felo de se – that the act was suicide (illegal then) and consequently Bourdin should be buried in unconsecrated ground with no or few mourners present.

Although anarchism is mainly associated with the nineteenth-century some of its basic beliefs stretch back to the middle-ages – rejection of established authority and religious and political hierarchies while championing individualism and collective action. The movement of the 1800s in the UK was influenced by Edmund Burke (Whig MP), philosopher journalist, William Godwin (husband of the 18^th century feminist Mary Wollstonecraft), and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon from France, the first man to describe himself as an anarchist and whose writings shaped much of the modern anarchist movement. He defined anarchy as “the absence of a master, of a sovereign”. A child of post-revolutionary France Proudhon argued that authority is always a usurper of freedom and a tyrant.

So active were France’s anarchist bombing campaigns in Paris a special vehicle was constructed to removed bombs to the nearest police station. The wheeled wagon was lozenge-shaped with open sides and drawn by ‘an old ambling horse’ and driven by a coachman accompanied by his wee dog Nip on the box seat. Chemical bombs such as the one Bourdin made were feared most for their unpredictability and often left in position for hours before being carted away, very slowly, through the quietest streets.

A boost to the British movement came with an influx of refugees escaping social and political persecution across Europe in the 1870s and 1880s that included many French tailors active in anarchism who had formed an association known as The Needles. Once in London they gravitated to the anarchist Club Autonomie of which Bourdin was a member. Of the Club’s 80 or so members several were suspected police spies.

Tensions were high in London on the day of Bourdin’s funeral, the previous day the windows of the Club Autonomie had been smashed. Tens of thousands of spectators lined the streets, the vast majority hostile with shouts of “Down with bomb throwers”, hissing and booing as the two-vehicle procession rushed by. Only a handful of people were permitted to participate and any red and black anarchist flags were quickly confiscated and their owners dragged away. With emotions boiling over police struggled to prevent the funeral car being overwhelmed, the coffin stolen and Bourdin’s corpse torn to pieces. Once at the Finchley Road cemetery the polished elm coffin inscribed Martial Bourdin – Died Feb 15, 1894 – Aged 26 years was swiftly lowered into a fairly shallow grave under an ash tree in unconsecrated ground at the edge of the graveyard. A comrade of Bourdin’s, the Christian-anarchist Carl Quinn, attempted to give an oration but got as far as “Friends, anarchists…” when he was shouted down by police Inspector Pearne’s order, “No speaking here!” The crowd gathering around pushed and shoved and there were shouts of “hang him”. Quinn was led away by police for his own safety; the greatest threats to the funeral party came from a large group of medical students.

Those of Bourdin’s family and friends permitted to attend travelled in a single coach. They included his two sisters-in-law; brother Henri; Scottish anarchist and Socialist League member, Thomas Fauset MacDonald; Carl Quinn; a Monsieur Alber; H. B. Samuels, Martial’s brother-in-law, looking the part in red necktie. Another brother-in-law carried a wreath with a card that read, “With deepest sympathy from Fanny”.

“Buried like a dog”, snarled the Hartlepool Northern Daily Mail.

It transpired the man accompanying Bourdin across London on the fateful afternoon was Samuels who openly admitted giving the young Frenchman materials for the bomb but despite this he was never even interviewed by the police. Samuels was described by the anarchist, Louise Bevington, as “about the most rubishy character possible”; vain, vindictive and the keeper of a stock of sulphuric acid that he encouraged others to take to make bombs. It was widely reported following the bombing, mainly out of the mouth of Samuels himself, that he had persuaded his brother-in-law to accept the bottle of sulphuric acid to construct and make a test bomb. Martial Bourdin agreed but wanted to explode it safely in Epping Forest but was urged by Samuels to go to the Observatory. The loud-mouthed Yorkshireman Samuels was suspected by fellow anarchists of being a police mole for the police never went near him while other anarchists and their families were frequently subjected to police raids, arrests and imprisonment with hard-labour. Just two days after being given bomb-making materials by Samuels one French anarchist’s home was again raided but so certain were the police of finding something they ripped up his floorboards. In the immediate aftermath of the Observatory bombing there was no police urgency to investigate allowing evidence to be destroyed . No explosives were found at the tailoring shop of Martial and his brother, Henri, and threats by outsiders to blow up the property proved unfounded. When, eventually Club Autonomie was raided police Inspector Melville was said to have gained entry by giving the ‘secret knock’.

Samuels was at the time editor of The Commonweal, an anarchist periodical. The Commonweal had been setup by the Socialist League and backed by the League’s founder the socialist artist William Morris to disseminate socialist ideas across the UK. It ceased publication in the wake of the bombing in May 1894 following a series of police raids and arrests – though not of Samuels.

Suspicions over Samuels’ role in the movement led to editorship of the journal reverting to David Nicholl once he was released from a spell in jail. Nicholl was convinced Samuels was a police spy. When Samuels was the paper’s editor it plainly promoted political violence. Yet Samuels led a charmed life never attracting police attention which seemed to support the suspicion he worked for Special Branch who used him as an agent-provocateur. That was Nicholl’s theory and he said as much in a pamphlet he wrote called The Greenwich Mystery: Letters from the Dead. The pamphlet motivated Joseph Conrad to write The Secret Agent, a novel that explores political violence and terrorism, the murky links between authority and political activism and consequences of a chain of terrible events. As a result of the novel Conrad was criticised for the ‘moral squalor’ of his story which is now regarded as a classic. The author’s Polish background lent him an understanding of the tribulations of the foreigner given refuge in a country riddled with class prejudice and xenophobia.

What Martial Bourdin’s bombing succeeded in doing was to shatter the anarchist movement in the UK. His brother-in-law Samuels’ involvement – his advocacy of violence against people and property irrespective of innocent casualties did him no harm at all. The year after he gave young Bourdin the sulphuric acid that blew him to pieces Samuels turned his back on anarchism and joined the Independent Labour Party.

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May 25, 2025

The Woman in Red: a red menace

“Woman in Red” gets nine months

For a few short months back in 1921 in Aberdeen the city’s most notorious criminal was a diminutive twenty-five-year-old woman. Dressed in a brick-red coat and red torque pull-on hat she might have stood out more had red not been quite so popular with the women of Aberdeen in the early twenties. However, she was sufficiently conspicuous for her appearance to be mentioned as someone of interest seen in areas where tenants suffered thefts from their tenement flats.

The Woman in Red was an opportunist thief. Until the 1960s it was unusual for folk in Scotland to lock their outside doors partly because people tended to live within the same communities for generations so trusted their neighbours and partly because they had little in their homes to steal. Aberdeen was a city of tenements; anyone could walk in the front door, along the lobby and upstairs to any flat. This is precisely what the woman dressed in red did. She knocked at doors on each landing making on she was looking for a Mrs Ross. If an actual Mrs Ross ever did answer her knock she would claim it wasn’t her but I don’t think any did. When a householder explained no-one of that name stayed there the young woman ‘apologised profusely for the trouble she had given’ and turned away. Turned away but did not always leave the multi-tenanted block of tiny apartments instead she tried each of the remaining flats hoping that no-one was at home and a door unlocked. When this happened in she would go searching through pockets of coats and jackets that hung in the lobby stealthily venturing into rooms that she would ransack, learning from experience where people tended to hide money, watches and the like. Occasionally after speaking to a tenant who was at home and fancying they might have something worth stealing she would appear to leave the premises but go into the toilet on the stair landing (some tenements had a lavatory on each floor shared by the tenants living on that floor – other tenements had outside toilets). There in the lavatory she waited hoping for the tenant to leave on an errand so she could slip into their home. On at least one occasion she discovered a housekey under the doormat and let herself in which amounted to housebreaking as opposed to gaining entry through an unsecured door.

This was happening early in the 1920s and just a few years since the Great War of 1914-18 during which the woman had worked for a time in a munitions factory at Gretna Green and had become accustomed to having ‘good wages’. At the end of the war she left with a certificate of good character and unemployment benefit of 25 shillings. She returned to Aberdeen, to Woodside, where she lived with her grandparents in two rooms at 1 Bridge Street; the 3-roomed property was shared with a young couple and their child. These people were poor. The woman struggled to find work in Aberdeen so went south to Dundee and found a job in a jute mill. Soon, however, the mill struggled for contracts so put its employees on short time; pay was halved and she found herself with just 18 shillings a week plus 6 shillings unemployment benefit. Cutting her losses she returned to Aberdeen and to thieving in an audacious spree of badness that lasted three months during which time she gained notoriety in the city. She was poor but the people she stole from were also poor, some very poor. When eventually caught she showed her victims no compassion whatsoever – these were folk who had survived a truly awful war, invariably having lost loved ones to it.

When brought to justice the Woman in Red pleaded guilty to 18 charges of thieving. It was pointed out in court she carefully selected the streets to target and went for many of the most impoverished of folk who couldn’t afford to lose money. She was the menace who caused anxiety among the city’s working folk for she robbed them of their small earnings, any savings and family possessions.

At widow Mary Simpson’s home in Bedford Road the sneak thief in red stole a purse. There was less than £3 in it. Nearby on George Street she let herself into the home of another widow, Barbara Ellison, and took her gold bangle, ring, a silver watch and six shillings. Police constable Alexander Barron lived in Holland Street. In his flat she found £6. At James MacKenzie’s home in Hutcheon Street she took all he had there – 8 shillings and his pair of gloves. She relieved John Bruce a baker on Lilybank Place of his silver watch while gardener, George Sherriffs had 15 shillings and 9 pence pinched from his home in Great Northern Road – didn’t even leave him the 9 pence. In Alexander Duncan’s home she found he had less than £2 – which she helped herself to – he was a labourer earning very little.

Those victims lived fairly close to her grandparents’ home at Woodside but the red menace spread her wings. Making her way across town to Torry’s Grampian Road she walked into the home of marine engine driver Alexander Keith making off with two purses containing a small sum of money. She moved back over town to slightly wealthier working-class areas targeting tenants in Willowbank Place and Union Grove and over to Rosemount where she found cash and postage stamps in a house in Mount Street. At Henry Pirie’s tenement flat in Wallfield Crescent she scooped the huge sum of £17. Discovering his loss must have been a heart-stopping moment for him for this was his entire savings worth about £700 in current value. Back towards Woodside she walked into the flat rented by warehouseman James Gordon in Lamond Place and hurriedly left with £10 belonging to him. Labourer John Benzie’s home must have been a disappointment by comparison for she only gathered up 2 shillings and 6 pence there. The following day another poor labourer became her victim when she stole £3 belonging to him.

Newspapers warned that a sneak thief was operating in the city and was thought to be a young woman dressed in a brick-red coat and red pull-on hat – distinctive you might imagine had not that shade been the vogue with women in Aberdeen so apprehending her was as difficult as searching for the proverbial needle in a haystack. A picture of the suspected robber came from one of her victims a housewife who had nipped out to the front door to polish the brass bell. She was able to provide the police with a description of a young woman in a red coat and bonnet who came downstairs and walked past her without speaking which was unusual enough but on returning to her apartment the housewife discovered her handbag had been opened and its contents taken.

The bold thief was eventually spotted by police chief-inspector Gordon who followed her back to 1 Bridge Street, Woodside where he recovered £20 – £17 of which had been recently stolen from ‘a poor woman who had sold her entire household furniture in order to go abroad’. The robber had already spent £3 of that £20 so all that was gathered was £17 plus £3 that remained from her other thefts.

As a result of the find two women at the property were arrested on suspicion of a string of thefts and remanded in custody for further inquiries but the first court appearance cleared the older woman, Ann Anderson the young woman’s granny, and she was released.

The trial of the Woman in Red was the speak of the town. A large crowd of mostly women gathered trying to get into the courthouse but so many turned up several were turned away as there was insufficient capacity in the courtroom to seat them all. When the charged emerged she appeared very nervous, her head bent down, she cried and bit on her nails throughout proceedings. There was the usual defence story – previously good character and ‘the only explanation was that she was short of cash’ – er, yes. Then, again, I don’t suppose the widows and labourers she stole from were exactly flush with it either.

The Woman in Red’s haul for three months effort amounted to more than £60 in cash along with jewellery and various items taken from her victims valued at over £18 amounting to a grand total just shy of £80 – £3000 in today’s money – all from poor folk who had scarcely two pennies to rub together. Okay, so you have to feel sorry for her, she was struggling, too, but the people she took from were no better off than she was and were easy targets – the sort of people had she asked would have been sympathetic and even inclined to give her a few pennies but she didn’t and it was reported that all she did with their hard-earned money was to squander it. Certainly, there was no mention of her helping out her grandmother with whom she was living instead her behaviour led to her 70-year-old granny spending time locked up in a police cell.

The sheriff expressed sympathy for the accused because of her youth and having never been in trouble before but he pointed out he had a duty to protect the public and she was ‘a menace’ that created anxiety among the city’s poor targeting their savings and hard-gotten gains. He rejected a suggestion from friends of the woman that she be put into a Catholic Home in Glasgow instead of jail for he told them her wrongdoings were such that only a hard person could carry them out so she should pay a penalty for her crimes. He sentenced her to nine months in prison. The ‘accused left the dock weeping.’

No longer the Woman in Red having ditched her smart clothing for prison garb she became simply convicted thief Helen Morgan. There was another Morgan girl living at 1 Bridge Street with the Andersons – Ann and her husband John aged 72 a retired metal breaker with Aberdeen Corporation roads department – that is he broke stones for building roads – 16-year-old Annie Morgan, presumably Helen’s sister. Annie worked in the storeroom of Crombie wool mill near their home. The episode must have been a truly disturbing time for them. As for the public and the press they revelled in the episode of the Woman in Red once the perpetrator was safely behind bars. One journalist wag thought the affair merited a novel à la Wilkie Collins, author of The Woman in White along the lines of

Part 1: mysterious house visits and thefts by the woman in a ‘brick-red’ coat.
Part 2: the detective hunt and arrest
Part 3: court proceedings
Part 4: The Woman in Red’s fate

In the end it didn’t and you’ll have to be satisfied with my humble blog instead.

Posted in Aberdeen, Aberdeenshire, Scotland, Scottish history, Uncategorized, Weird and Wonderful | Leave a Comment »

May 6, 2025

Hospitalfield in Arbroath with echoes of the Declaration of Scotland’s sovereignty

Aberbrothok (Aberbrothock) became Arbroath in the mid-19^th century, adopting its locally popular name that was less of a mouthful. This, of course, means that that most significant of Scottish documents, the Declaration of Arbroath was originally the Declaration of Aberbrothok. But that’s all by the by. Well, not quite.

The Declaration was made at the Abbey in Aberbrothok in 1320. At a time when Scotland was under constant attacks from an aggressive England intent on appropriating her the 1320 letter from Scots barons and freeholders to Pope John XXII sought his acknowledgement of Scotland as an independent and sovereign nation, and Robert the Bruce as King of Scots. Robert’s chancellor, Abbot Bernard of Aberbrothok, was its most likely author and the man who included the words –

“It is in truth not for glory, nor riches, nor honours that we are fighting, but for freedom – for that alone, which no honest man gives up but with life itself.”

The Benedictine Abbey from where these words emerged was founded by King William I the Lion of Scotland in 1178 and completed early into the 1200s. William the Lion was buried at the high alter in 1214. The Abbey at Aberbrothok complex was large and included an infirmarium for its monks and a hospitium – a sort of hotel – for visiting pilgrims. Aberbrothok proved to be a popular destination for 13^th century pilgrims but with increasing numbers of the devout travelling there from far and near came greater risks of them also bringing those terrible diseases that were rife in the outside community such as plague and leprosy. With this in mind additional overnight accommodation was built about a mile distant from the Abbey at a site that became known as Hospitalfield where the visiting masses could be accommodated with bed and food and where they could worship at its chapel dedicated to St John the Baptist without becoming intrusive on the monks at the Abbey.

Feeding both monks and visitors required the lands around the Abbey to be farmed and granaries built to store grain that would be used in making bread. With the Abbey thriving and pressure of visitors the humble guesthouse of Hospitalfield became reserved for more eminent ecclesiastics and its surroundings were enhanced with flower gardens and fruit orchards. The complex flourished for centuries until the Reformation.

The Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century dealt the illustrious Abbey its deathblow and Aberbrothok’s existence as an important Christian centre ceased. The fine red sandstone buildings were partly demolished and the stone carted away for building elsewhere.

David Beaton, later Cardinal and a principal statesman during the reign of James V was for a time Scotland’s ambassador in France. But more relevant for us he was the last Abbot of Aberbrothok and as Lord Abbot of the Abbey he had a seat in the Scottish Parliament also serving as Lord Privy Seal – a role that provided its holder access to considerable power and money. Beaton was a spendthrift, perhaps appropriate for the son of Isobel Monypenny. His lavish lifestyle attracted criticism from some of his contemporaries comparing it to the excesses of the Borgias and Medici. Perhaps he did not go as far as them in some ways but he was corrupt and immoral, One of his several mistresses was Mariota Ogilvy, daughter of the first Lord Ogilvy of Airlie, and mother of his eight children. Beaton rewarded her fecundity by handing over to her properties belonging to the Abbey, including the Hospital and in the 1560s she found herself proprietrix of desirable Hospitalfield.

By the turn of the seventeenth century the Abbey had lost its religious status entirely; its buildings, lands and possessions passing into secular hands and with these emerged the title Lord Aberbrothock. A century later during the 1715 Jacobite uprising the estate was forfeited to the British crown but bought back fifty or so years later by which time a James Fraser had arrived in the area to take on the ministry of Strathmartine. Not short of cash he bought up property including a large chunk of the Hospitalfield grounds and its former Hospital now a mansion to which he later retired to enjoy his rather lovely earthly estate. Walter Scott was so taken with the house that he based Monkbarns on it – the home of his leading character Oldbuck in The Antiquary.

A descendant of Reverend Fraser was Major John Fraser whose sole child, a daughter called Elizabeth, inherited the Hospitalfield estate. Several years following, in 1843, she married a local artist, Patrick Allan of Arbroath – Aberbrothok was pretty well confined to antiquity by now. In 1851 he attached his wife’s name to his own which wasn’t unusual in the case of men marrying heiresses. Allan-Fraser began to play about with the mansion house, expanding and altering it to incorporate architectural styles he admired on his travels across Europe and England. And in the family home he established an art school.

As an aside – Elizabeth’s father, Major Fraser, raised a regiment during the French Revolutionary Wars – the Angus Fencibles. The Fencibles were in Dumfries when the great bard Robert Burns died in 1796 and men from the regiment formed part of the guard at his funeral at the end of which Major Fraser was given the honour of being first to drop earth onto the poet’s coffin.

The mansion that stands today is the upshot of Allan-Fraser’s adaptations. The area’s distinctive red sandstone is familiar and what is in a sense a Scottish Baronial building is also familiar but Hospitalfield House goes further than most in that it is a curious melange – a veritable fusion cuisine of architectural styles with turrets and niches and all manner of additions and ornamentation. That’s what strikes visitors – its sheer variety of features. Fragments of the old Abbey hospital walls and several doors remain of the medieval building but overall it has been hugely changed over the centuries, most recently by Allan-Fraser.

The old doorway of the ancient Hospitium apparently stands as the entrance to Allan-Fraser’s extensive building of picture galleries, dining room, drawing room, saloon, library, bedrooms, balconied alcoves and the broad staircase lit from the roof. Two talbots stood guarding the main doorway. There are two hounds there now which I took for black labradors. Maybe they are. There are dog heads all around the exterior walls. Since the early 19^th century Hospitalfield House has been a place for artists to study and learn, initially dedicated to the Arts and Crafts movement. Allan-Fraser’s works are displayed here along with many by illustrious artists some of whom were his friends in a London-based artistic circle called the Clique. The Clique broke up in 1843 when one of its members, Richard Dadd, was imprisoned for the murder of his father. The Aberdeen artist John Phillip was a member and close friend of Allan-Fraser. There are paintings of his here, too, and work by the sculptor William Calder Marshall among many British and overseas artists. At Allan-Fraser’s death in 1890 Hospitalfield was left in trust to support artists, a role that continues to this day. In 1902 Hospitalfield issued invitations to young men with ambition to master the forms of art taught there but

‘…not having sufficient means of their own, who shall be desirous of following out one or more of the professions of painting, sculpture, carving in wood, architecture and engraving.’

In an echo of the ancient tradition of the hospitium of 700 years earlier the art school was also a temporary home for those artists, one encouraging them to look outward to art across the world.

You don’t have to be involved in the arts business to visit Hospitalfield. It is a place that can be enjoyed by all. There’s its 800-year-old garden that currently displays an elaborate bronze sculpture by Paolozzi on loan from the Hunterian. There is Allan-Fraser’s tiny fernery originally designed by him for his collection of New Zealand tree ferns that has been completely restored having fallen into ruin through neglect. Next to it is a popular café with an excellent selection of food available inside and out. Tours of the Hospitalfield House are also on offer but you have to book these in advance.

If you are on your own pilgrimage to the source of the Declaration of Arbroath take a dander across town to Hospitalfield for a fine piece and a peek at this quite unusual but attractive building.

Posted in Art, Scotland, Scottish history, Uncategorized, Weird and Wonderful | 3 Comments »

Lenathehyena's Blog from Lorna Corall Dey

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FICTION and assorted writing

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The Merciless Maiden

The sweetest maiden I ever kissed.

The first Scots movie stars and the one who gave Homer Simpson his d’oh!

The Doric v Wordsworth: a sad tale of a student who sued his university professor

The Accidental Death of an Anarchist

The Woman in Red: a red menace

Hospitalfield in Arbroath with echoes of the Declaration of Scotland’s sovereignty

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The sweetest maiden I ever kissed.

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