Almost exactly fifty years ago, I was given an essay assignment on André Gide’s novel Les Caves du Vatican. Being a young, earnest soul, I began by researching Gide himself, of whom I knew little apart from his great literary reputation and the rumours of his questionable sexual practices. In those distant pre-internet days this required quite a lot of beavering away in the Modern Languages library, a place enlivened by light from high windows and the presence of a clear majority of female students.
It was while doing this that I stumbled upon a foreword Gide had written for the French edition of a book called The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner by a certain James Hogg. I had heard of neither so was astonished by Gide declaring both his “stupefaction and admiration” for what I discovered was a thoroughly Scottish novel, both in setting and authorship.
My shameful ignorance was mitigated a bit by his own great surprise: “How (to) explain that a work so singular and so enlightening , so especially fitted to arouse passionate interest both in those who are attracted by religious and moral questions, and, for quite other reasons, in psychologists and artists, and above all in surrealists who are so particularly drawn by the demonic in every shape---how (to) explain that such a work should have failed to become famous?” (1) Gide then penned another seven pages or so of enthusiastic appreciation before concluding, “I consider it an extraordinary achievement and shall be happy if what I say of it awakens the belated glory to which I believe it has a right.”
I have to say in my defence at this point that I’m sure I was not alone in leaving school with a poor knowledge of Scottish literature (or history, for that matter). A lot depended on the personal enthusiasms of your English or history teacher in them days, and it is a depressing fact that a still significant number of the former still regard Scots as “slang” or its literature out of touch with the modern world and therefore largely irrelevant.
I remember that after reading Gide’s essay, I immediately went out to buy a copy of Hogg’s Confessions and started reading it on the train home. Within three days the novel had been devoured and my own amazement and confusion were added to Gide’s reaction to the book. Its Scottish settings, characters and language were a revelation to me but beyond that its structural and psychological sophistication along with its ambiguity and nagging questions about what constitutes reality made a deep impression on me.
As a result, I decided Scottish literature was a veritable living and breathing “thing” and John Galt’s Ringan Gilhaize, followed, a wonderful bookend to Hogg’s depiction of religious extremism and another brilliant psychological study. Galt’s The Entail was still to come, a fascinating epic of family obsession reputedly set in the Cathkin Braes between Rutherglen and East Kilbride, its Scots as thick as crowdie and its tense scenes of grasping materialism and social friction worthy of Dostoevsky, and as worthy of attention as Brown’s The House with The Green Shutters, Hay’s Gillespie, Shepherd’s The Weatherhouse and Gibbon’s Sunset Song. And all this because of the chance discovery of a Frenchman’s enthusiasm for an obscure Scottish work. Why were my school years silent on all these works, all of which I came to know as a result of Gide’s praise?
Just a few months after this welcome enlightenment, another was to follow. My widower uncle asked me if I fancied a cheap holiday in Skye since his old childhood friend was too ill to accompany him anymore. This was an experience of a different order for me. The landscapes of sea, mountain, moor and shore were quite stunning, as was the great variety of birds and plants, many of whom I was seeing up close for the first time. They have all brought me back to the island many times since 1974.
The township where we stayed still had a high number of native Sgitheanachs and Gaelic was heard commonly every day, although the locals were usually too polite to speak it in front of you. The mother of one of the middle-aged ladies I met knew no English at all and was probably one of the last of the Gaelic monoglot generation. It was strange to overhear fellow Scots speaking in a language of which I knew almost nothing. In those days, I think the only Gaelic on TV was ‘Se Ùr Beatha, often with the MacDonald sisters providing the music (one of the sisters had even visited my primary school and caused quite a stir, although not of Taylor Swift proportions). Nevertheless, I had brought a Gaelic grammar and dictionary with me and made a little progress while probably amusing the bodachs and cailleachs with my dire attempts. One old boy even tried to encourage me by saying, “Aye, son, Gaelic is a fine thing and easily carried!” (in English, for politeness, of course).
But perhaps the most important result of my first time there was when I returned to Lanarkshire. I suddenly realised that I was able to understand the previously strange old names of farms and natural features on the Ordnance Survey maps of East Kilbride and its environs. At one remote spot EK parish meets Renfrewshire and Ayrshire, and it was obvious from a quick survey of those counties that Gaelic was a common element in their place-names too. So much for the notion of the Highland/Lowland split in the oversimplified model of Scottish identity which has often been used in a typical “divide and rule” tactic in the propaganda wars over the question “Who are the Scots?”
It’s difficult to be precise about the timeline for the gradual disappearance of Gaelic from the Lowlands, mainly because so many of the historical documents required by scholars to create it are lacking, owing to the destruction or confiscation of these records by the regular waves of invasion by England over the centuries. King Edward I in particular realised the importance of destroying such documentary evidence to weaken a nation’s sense of itself and he was particularly brutal in his measures, a policy maintained by many of his successors.
A guess might be that this process was well underway by the middle of the 13th century, but it is unlikely to have been uniform in rate or extent. Gaelic is likely to have persisted in areas further away from Royal Burghs, where the early form of Middle English which gradually morphed into Scots made inroads via the trade and commerce which these feudal institutions fostered and where there was already English expertise amongst those encouraged to settle in Scotland from the time of King David I (died 1153) onwards.
Having said that, the last native speaker of (Lowland) Carrick Gaelic is usually said to have been Margaret McMurray, who died around the time of the birth of Robert Burns in 1759 at a farm just west of Maybole called Cultezeon. (2) Since Burns’ own mother, Agnes Brown, was a resident of Maybole, it is quite possible she could have known Margaret. It may be that Gaelic lingered even longer in places unknown to us now, such as the area around Barr village, east of Girvan, according to some reports, and it seems that the last speaker of Arran Gaelic just across the water only died in the first decade of the 21st century.
For some reason the simple fact of Gaelic being spoken in southern Scotland seems to be very unwelcome amongst some Scots, despite places with Gaelic names extending right up to the present border with England (Ecclefechan being an obvious example). Their negative attitude surfaces in some rather peculiar ways, notably in The Great Signage Wars of the last two decades, where usually Tory council-tax payers turned purple at the costs of having bilingual Gaelic and English signs in the Highlands or, even worse for some reason, on Scottish railway platforms. Strangely, such types seemed quite happy to stump up oodles of cash to pay for various illegal wars abroad which our armed forces have taken part in over the years.
Proud Scots like Muriel Gray (who once boasted of having every OS map of Scotland, presumably in an attempt to convince us of her patriotism) and Andrew Marr have taken A Very Dim View of Gaelic, despite appearing depressingly ignorant on the subject. It seems to me they could both do with a copy of Glasgow’s Gaelic Place- Names by Whyte, Forsyth and Taylor, just to set them straight. They remind me of various members of the Scotch bourgeoisie whom I have met over the years who think they are achingly progressive and aware yet spout the same kind of anti-Gaelic tosh while saying without the slightest sense of irony how delightful and interesting they find the simply charming bilingual Catalan and French road signs while on holiday in Roussillon. It must be something in the wine which 'The Bunties' (3) drink down there…
I think myself that this strange but often vitriolic reaction is simply another manifestation of the famous Scottish Cringe. These people are essentially British nationalists who look up to Londinium and its attitudes and wish to ape those whom they probably subconsciously think of as their betters. Thus, Gaelic is regarded as an irrelevant and embarrassing anachronism, an unintelligible peasant language but with worrying memories of rebellion and Jacobitism. The Scots language probably makes them uneasy too if it strays beyond the yearly Burns Night celebrations where The Bard can be safely venerated in clubs that too often resemble the Literary Wing of The Scottish Masons, Loyal Toasts and all. I was even told at a Burns Club supper in 2014 that Burns would have voted No, a quite remarkable assertion which left me momentarily speechless and looking for a carpet to bite.
Unfortunately, the sad fact is that both our native languages suffered badly, indeed almost terminally, from the Scottish Education Act of 1872. Gaelic-medium teaching was outlawed and so only English was to be used in the classroom, with similarly harmful effects on the Scots language elsewhere. Stories of the tawse being used by teachers on stubbornly resistant speakers of either language are legion. Parents who wanted their children to “get on” often took the obvious hint and did not pass on their native language to their children. If Anglicisation was not the main motive of the act, it certainly was a very damaging consequence.
Gaelic has received belated legal recognition now in Scotland and is taught in some Gaelic-medium schools, but the overall number of its speakers is still small and the damage has long been done. Scots is not taught as a separate subject at all and its history, grammar and orthography, quite distinct from English, remain unknown by most Scots. Although it is spoken naturally to various extents in the home, the place of work, at the fitba’ or farmers’ market, it is largely shunned by the Scottish middle-classes beyond the safe confines of yet another rendition of Tam O’Shanter, washed down with lashings of haggis and malt whisky, before being largely ignored for another year.
Of course, The Collective West is now in the grip of a Globalist assault on all nations and their identities and the world in general seems an extremely unstable place with impending nuclear annihilation a distinct possibility. Our cultural problems may seem relatively trivial by comparison but Gaelic and Scots and their history represent an important part of the complex identity of Scotland, so surely we should never lose sight of this simple fact, and nor should we abandon them. If we don’t value them, who else will?
On my last visit to Skye I noticed that the last of the Gaelic speakers in the township I have known since 1974 had died. Many homes are now occupied by incomers from ablaw the dyke or are let as short-term holiday accommodation via Airbnb, with predictable effects on the local community and its cohesion. The young can learn Gaelic at school but when they grow up they will find it difficult to afford housing on the island and are likely to leave in search of a “better” life elsewhere.
And so Scotland’s cultural survival continues to be precarious while our distinctive languages are increasingly under threat. There are also serious concerns about how our history is taught in schools. Too often, it seems to me, that distinctly Unionist narratives regarding the “Union” of the Crowns, The Union of 1707, the Jacobite “rebellions” and its aftermath are presented to students rather than the grim realities of how many Scots felt about these events at the time. Too often these are depicted as an almost inevitable progress towards the bright, sunlit uplands of a united Great Britain about to embark upon the glorious adventure of the British Empire rather than the truer picture of cultural and political oppression, depopulation and mass emigration Scotland had to endure while trapped in a state which had little interest beyond exploiting and neglecting it once it had been “catch’d” as the English Speaker of the “new” parliament of Great Britain said after the Union of 1707.
Having now reached my Biblical span of years, I often look at my grand- children and wonder what will be left of our Scottish identity for them to appreciate by the time they are fifty. What will they have been taught about their country and indeed, will it even exist in a meaningful way beyond the usual shortbread-tin clichés?
Perhaps it’s just as well that I won’t be around to find out.
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