Love Scotland podcast – Season 10

Transcript

10 speakers: male voiceover [MV]; Jackie Bird [JB]; Derek Alexander [DA]; Ellen Fogel Walker [EFW]; Gary Craig [GC]; Lorne MacLeod [LM]; dig volunteer [DV]; Christine McPherson [CM]; Gail Boardman [GB]; Flora Fraser [FF]

[MV]
Love Scotland, brought to you from the National Trust for Scotland; presented by Jackie Bird.

[Bagpipes play]

[JB]
The morning was cold and stormy as we stood on the battlefield, snow and rain blowing against us. Before long we saw the red soldiers in battle formation in front of us, and although the day was wild and wet, we could see the red coats of the soldiers and the blue tartan of the Campbells in our presence. The battle began, and the pellets came at us like hailstones. The big guns were thundering, but we ran forward and Oh dear, oh, dear, what cutting and slicing there was, and many the brave deeds performed by the Gaels.

That was an account of the Battle of Culloden on 16 April 1746, written by eyewitness Donald Mackay and translated from Gaelic. It was a battle that lasted barely an hour but it changed Scotland forever.

And this is where you join me today. The moorland around me, with its clan markers and memorial cairn, is still haunting. On this land, it’s estimated 1,300 men were slain, about 1,250 of them Jacobites. Culloden was the last major battle fought on British soil, and it’s in the care of the National Trust for Scotland. But Culloden still holds its secrets and that is why we are here.

As the Trust continues to protect the sites, it’s the job of its archaeologists to try to unearth evidence that helps us understand what happened here on that snowy afternoon. Well, today is one of a number of organised digs run by the Head of Archaeology, Derek Alexander. So, let’s go and find him at work.

Hello, Derek. Now, you are organising your own troops today. So, what’s happening?

[DA]
Yeah, we’ve got a regiment of volunteers with us here at Culloden. It’s our fourth year of archaeological investigations on the battlefield, looking for battlefield archaeological remains but anything else that’s historical or prehistoric as well.

[JB]
I had no idea that these digs only restarted in the last few years after a gap of about 20 years?

[DA]
Yeah, often archaeology is a bit like that. It takes a wee while for the results of previous work to settle in, and then you go away, and of course you know what the Trust is like – we have lots of other priorities. The previous work was related about the development of the new visitor centre back there in 2006/2007.

[JB]
Because that unearthed the whole space for you.

[DA]
Yeah, exactly. And in fact, if you go into the visitor centre here, most of the artefacts that are on show, the musket balls and things like that, were recovered during that field work. So, it’s part of that process that we’ve been able to interpret the landscape better through the project.

[JB]
Well, before we get into the nuts and bolts of what’s happening today, sometimes literally, for those who don’t know much about Culloden, why is it so significant in British history?

[DA]
The most significant thing is it’s the last battle of the Jacobite uprisings. And after that, the Jacobites never again attempted to get James or any of his successors onto the throne. And by then we had what would be called, I suppose in government parlance, that pacifying of the Highlands.

So, they broke up the clan system. They made various things illegal: the wearing of tartan, the playing of pipes, that side of things. They cracked down heavily on Gaelic tradition. The reason for that was because the government at that time was very afraid of the clan system in general, because they could raise large amounts of troops at the drop of a hat, so they could get thousands of men into the field very, very quickly.

Now, if you want a modern state and you want it to be stable and you want to fight your wars abroad, which is what the British were doing at that time – a lot of fighting in France and the Netherlands – they want to free up troops to go and do that. They don’t want people rising in rebellion at home. So, they cracked down very, very heavily on the Highlands.

[JB]
I think another interesting thing is this was not England versus Scotland. This was a civil war and it involved troops from other countries too.

[DA]
Absolutely. Here at Culloden, we have troops from France, we have troops from Ireland, descended German troops and things like that in the British Army, and of course the Jacobites, there are Highland clans on both sides and there are Lowlanders on both sides. We have regiments …

[JB]
It split families, didn’t it?

[DA]
Absolutely. And so, it was really quite a fraught period and it was very unsettling for the entire country.

[JB]
Tell me about the sizes of the opposing forces on that April afternoon.

[DA]
We think that somewhere in the order of 4/5,000 Jacobites to about 6/7,000 Government troops. The Government troops had probably been better organised. They had gathered at Aberdeen and had made their way north-west-wards in the preceding month or so, and made their way all the way to Nairn by about 14 April 1746.

[JB]
And how many miles is Nairn away?

[DA]
From here it’s about probably about 20 miles, I think. The Jacobites were based around Culloden House on the outskirts of Inverness. Inverness for them was important because that’s where their supplies were – all their munitions and their food and all the paperwork and things that go with organising an army. They needed to protect Inverness, so they needed to block the route to Inverness.

[JB]
So, we are sitting here just sheltering outside the visitor centre from the notorious Culloden wind. How big was the battle site?

[DA]
The trouble with battlefields is that it’s difficult to draw a line around them because they’re mobile things. They’re happening all the time. You’ve got the advance of both armies coming out and forming up, and then you’ve got the battle itself, and then you’ve got the rout and retreat of those things. So how big do you say a battlefield is?

But where the main part of the battlefield is, we’ve marked out where the Government/British Army troops are lined out. There are four flags and they mark three regiments. The three regiments are probably about 80 yards/80 metres long with about 400 men that would have stood in each one, three ranks deep. And so, we’re looking at the bit that we’ve got on the Trust land is Barrel’s Regiment, Monroe’s Regiment and the Royal Scots Fusiliers.

[JB]
This dig is different from previous digs because you’re using a digger. What difference does it make?

[DA]
Seems daft, doesn’t it, that we wouldn’t do that before! In previous years, we’ve done small-scale test pitting and metal detecting. Because what you’re doing in battlefield archaeology is you’re looking for individual artefacts that relate to the battle. Most of those are munitions. Most of them are things like pistol shot, musket balls, grape shot, canister round shot – all the things that they were firing at each other, because those survive and they mark the concentrations of where the battle was at its fiercest.

We’re using test pitting because all we’re looking for is in the top soil. These fields have all been ploughed, so everything has been mixed up over years and years of ploughing. All we’re doing is digging down through the topsoil and metal detecting for artefacts around that. Now, this year we’re going a step further because we’ve got a big 360 tract excavator, which is an archaeological dream because it means you don’t have to dig all the top soil yourself.

[JB]
A labour-saving device?

[DA]
Absolutely a labour-saving device. The machine driver strips off, under archaeological supervision, the turf on the top and we metal detect before he top strips that. Then we metal detect once he’s stripped it, and then we strip down in 10cm goes – spits we call them – taking off a horizontal 10cm horizon until we get down to the underlying glacial subsoils, which is about 40 or 50cm deep here. And as we go down, we’re picking up more and more artefacts.

Now, this is a technique that Professor Tony Pollard has used at the Battle of Waterloo. Tony was the guy who did the original work here when we did the visitor centre.

[JB]
Yes, he’s out in the field just now, actually doing some work, unlike us, who’s sitting gabbling here! But we will be joining him!

[DA]
That’ll be the first time; it’s good to keep him working! So, it’s a technique that we haven’t used here before. We’re really excited to see what the results are going to be because it might be that in fact we’ll pick up more evidence that is buried further down, that previous metal detecting surveys haven’t been able to pick up.

[JB]
Or less, I suppose, because it’s important it tells you where not to look.

[DA]
Well, we have previously excavated in the second line of the Government/British Army troops where they deploy, and we got a couple of musket balls. We’ve excavated over on the left flank between where the infantry and the dragoons were, we found nothing. So, it’s good; you need to look in the blank areas too in order to understand where you’re getting concentrations of materials.

And by doing that over time, you won’t do all at once. People always say, why can’t you just go and dig it all? It’d take years to do that. And we find thousands of … So, by doing it in small chunks at a time and recording precisely where we find things, we can always build that picture up over time. One year you might find lots of things, and another year you might find nothing.

But you might go back to the same place in a couple of years, and there might be more showing, depending on the conditions of the soil and how good technology is. Technology has moved on. Metal detectors are much better now than they were in the 80s and the 90s, and even better than just back in 2006/2007 when they did the first survey here.

[JB]
And there’s so much more demand, I suppose, because it’s so popular now. This is day what of your week-long dig?

[DA]
This is day three.

[JB]
OK, now between us on the table you have a very small selection of what you have already found. It’s difficult just with audio only, but I’m sure you can do it. Give us a show and tell.

[DA]
We’re looking at a big ice cream tub here, aren’t we, of the nice things. But we’ve got something like 200 artefacts that have been recovered through the excavation and the test pits and the metal detecting. The thing that people get excited about straight away is our musket balls.

[JB]
A perfectly formed, rusty …

[DA]
It won’t be rusty because it’s lead.

[JB]
Oh! Just dirty, corroded musket ball. And that’s an exciting find. I was chatting to the volunteers earlier and I held a coin. Tell me about this coin you found.

[DA]
We find things obviously related to the battle, but we find … the Battle of Culloden lasted for an hour or so on 16 April 1746. But of course, there’s 10,000 years of history in this landscape going right back to the Mesolithic and through to modern farming. So, the coin that we recovered, which was recovered by Lorne, who was very excited, who’s one of the estate workers here and has worked here for years, is a small, silver, hammered, long cross penny of – we think – Edward I of England and it dates to probably the late 13th century.

[JB]
What a find. How exciting!

[DA]
What’s that doing here? So, you find background stuff as well.

[JB]
That’s the question. And that’s the joy of archaeology – you find something, it’s not necessarily answers; it throws up questions.

[DA]
And as you’ll see when we go and have a look at the site, when the machine’s revealing things on the ground, we’re finding pits and gullies and features. Now, those aren’t things that were dug at the time of the battle. Those are things that probably are maybe going to date back to the Bronze Age or the Iron Age, and they’re in the ground underneath and we’re just finding them purely by chance. So, it’s nice that we can build up not just a better picture of the battle, but a better picture of how people have lived at the Culloden landscape for thousands of years.

[JB]
Right, I could talk to you all day. So, we’d better crack on! One more question: what else have you found before we set off to see the real work being done?

[DA]
The musket balls are good because the musket balls – and this is largely on the basis of Tony’s work – come in two different calibres. The Brown Bess that the Government troops use is a larger calibre, .75 calibre. The smaller ones are .65 calibre and tend to be the French muskets, which the Irish and French troops and some of the Jacobites used. So, you can then differentiate between the two.

And then the other thing we’re finding: a smaller shot, which would maybe interpreted as musket balls. And of course, many of the Jacobites would have held pistols, and as they go in close range they’ll be firing. You can’t fire a pistol at long range. Once you start finding pistol balls, you know you’re close to where the hand-to-hand action is. You’re firing your pistol before you draw your broadsword, if you have one, and going in.

Most of the Jacobite gents would have had a couple of pistols, fire them and then draw their broadsword and go in from there. They’re probably firing those at a range of about 30–40 metres, enough that you have a good chance of hitting something, and then you’re screaming and you’re going in hard.

So, musket balls, coins, buttons … we’re finding a lot of buttons.

[JB]
Buckles. I think that’s one of the most significant finds. This was the last dig, wasn’t it?

[DA]
Yes. We found an impacted piece of a broken buckle, which we think is a shoe buckle, and a piece of grape shot. And the grape shot is, as I say, the stuff that’s fired out of the cannons – and that’s one that we found this year, not the one we found last year, but you can feel the weight of that.

[JB]
That’s about an inch and a half in diameter. I’m an imperial kind of gal. It’s heavy!

[DA]
It’s 3cm or something like that. Those are fired out of a cannon and would have been bound together in a canvas bag, tied around with rope. And that burns off and when it fires, it comes out like a shotgun almost. But those are very, very heavy and nasty. One of those hitting you, and you’d know all about it.

[JB]
And before I leave you, tell me the story of the buckle, because that filled in some fact to something that had just been potentially legend.

[DA]
Yeah, well, one of the stories of the attack on the right flank of the Jacobites as they come forward. We have the Appen Brigade and we have the Camerons. And leading the Camerons is Cameron of Lochiel, basically the clan chief. He gets his charges across the battlefield, running across that gap that’s about 400 metres to get to within about 50 yards of the Government position, Barrel’s Regiment.

And he fires his pistols like we were talking about. He’s drawing his broadsword, when he gets wounded in the ankles by grape shot. Now, we found last year in the same pit, side by side, in a metal detecting hole, a broken shoe buckle and an impacted piece of grape shot. Now, I can’t prove that that was the shot that hit Cameron of Lochiel, but it’s really nice just to tie those stories together graphically with the artefactual evidence. That’s not something you can ever prove, but it’s in the right position. It’s in the right part of the field. It’s currently within about 20 metres of where we think the British Army Barrel’s Regiment was. So, it’s in the right sort of the field. The more things like that we can tie together, the better our understanding is. It was a fantastic discovery and it’s a good story.

And actually, one of the other things we’ve been finding this year, which I think we’re maybe just more aware of because we’re doing it, is with metal detecting we’re finding lots of little curved, horseshoe-shaped iron pieces. They’re too small to be a horseshoe. These are the heel plates from shoes.

[JB]
I didn’t know shoes had metal heel plates.

[DA]
Yeah, just anything to stop them wearing down. Now, I would have to do exactly a lot of research into what 18th-century shoes were – they certainly had buckles on the front, but I would imagine they had heel plates on the back too. I’d be interested to see whether those were shoes that were lost in … can you imagine running across that open ground and people firing, and you’ve got slip-on buckled shoes. They’re going to come off, aren’t they? And even if you’re not a casualty, that’s the sort of thing that gets left behind.

We’re finding quite a few of those, so that’ll be interesting to start to plot where we’re finding those out on the map.

[JB]
Right. Listen, I better let you go out. All I think when I see this, and when I see the buckles, is the fact that although this is old rusting ammo from nearly 300 years ago, each one has a human story. These are tales of terrible, terrible conflicts and loss and terror and horror, and it brings it to life.

[DA]
It does. I mean, there’s something very gruesome about it, but it’s really important as well, I think, to understand. And not just to understand, it helps you understand what people on the day went through. It is horrific. You look at those impacted musket balls and that impacted grape shot, and the wounds must have been terrifying and horrible. You can imagine how scared you would have been charging on both sides. And that’s the thing: on both sides. It’s just so graphic, and you hold it in your hand, and you think, God, that happened on that day.

[JB]
That was a human being. Right, let’s go off and we’ll catch up with you later, Derek, and hopefully there’ll be a few equally exciting finds.

[Bagpipes play]

[EFW]
My name is Ellen Fogel Walker and I am the Estates & Conservation Manager here at Culloden Battlefield and Visitor Centre. The lure of taking part in a dig at Culloden is unlike any other opportunity that you’ll get. We are on a stage, so to speak, of a special place around the world.

People come to Culloden for a variety of different reasons. They come to us to connect with their heritage, to look at a landscape set in the Highlands, for 360° views of sweeping Highland landscape. They look to us for a way to connect with the not-so-distant past. And we’re a turning point in Scotland’s history. Culloden has been instrumental in what we’ve been doing here, as the National Trust for Scotland, and it brings together both the natural heritage and the cultural heritage that we have to share as an organisation.

[JB]
It also informs the visitor experience because you have a fabulous exhibition here, and Derek Alexander was just telling me that a lot of it has come from previous digs.

[EFW]
Absolutely. One of the main reasons why we wanted to reinvigorate our archaeological research here at Culloden was because we wanted to better understand the story itself. We have a very passionate team of people and network of people that we associate ourselves with and refer to for guidance. But one of the best sources of guidance that we can look to is the archaeological evidence.

While the historian Professor Christopher Duffy was alive, who researched Culloden for over 50 years, we were blessed in a way to take a forensic lens and look at the history here at Culloden using primary evidence, evidence from the people that were here at the time of the battle, and also look at the history beneath our feet.

You have big players here at Culloden. You have Hugh Mercer, who was here at 20 years old beside the Jacobites, who ends up being a pioneer – going out and finding refuge in the Americas and ends up being the physician to George Washington, saving his life on several occasions.

And on the side of the Government, you have a young James Wolfe who ends up being the hero of Quebec in the Seven Years War. So, really pivotal moments in history were forged here and to be a part of that unearthing, and really shaping the narrative as we understand it now, and to know that it’ll change even afterwards, is really incredible.

[JB]
And in terms of enhancing the visitor experience, the dig isn’t doing too badly at the moment because all the visitors are flocking around!

[EFW]
No, it’s been great. Each year we’ve been able to grow the visitation here at Culloden.

[JB]
How many people come here each year?

[EFW]
Each year we see about 300,000 visitors on the battlefield itself, into the visitor centre. And because we’re open all year long, onto the battlefield, we don’t restrict visitation, we estimate that it’s even more than that.

[JB]
It must be one of the most visited battle sites in the UK?

[EFW]
Not only is it one of the most visited, Jackie, it’s also one of the most complete battlefield landscapes that we have here in Britain. It is intact – and that integrity and authenticity is unlike any other place that we can see left in Great Britain.

[Bagpipes play]

[JB]
We are racing to a corner of the dig. Why?

[DA]
We’re going to see what Gary and Lorne have found. They’re working with the machine and they’re doing the metal detecting in the spits to see what’s come up. So, we don’t know what they’ve found, so we’ll just nip under this fence here.

[JB]
But, you think there’s some activity here?

[DA]
Well, there’s activity here and they always look excited. So, what have you got guys?

[JB]
Have you found anything in particular?

[LM]
Just a little bit of iron. Once it’s cleaned up, we’ll find out a bit more about it.

[DA]
Oh, excellent.

[JB]
Is this the most exciting find that you’ve found so far in this dig?

[LM]
Not for me, Jackie, no. I found a hammered coin about 900 years old; an Edward I.

[JB]
I was able to hold it and I was beyond excitement. How did it feel when you actually discovered it and knew what it was?

[LM]
Oh, fantastic. Yeah, really fantastic to be the first person to pull it out the ground since it was maybe dropped all those years ago. It’s, for me, a big highlight of the last few days.

[JB]
Now, you actually work here, but you’ve taken time off to be part of this dig; is that correct?

[LM]
I’ve taken holidays to come to work with archaeologists! I’ve done this for the last four years with them and I really enjoy it and it’s a big interest of mine.

[JB]
And, I suppose it adds to the experience of the whole battlefield that you are more informed, that you’re actually hands on.

[LM]
Definitely. I’ve been interested in Culloden and the battlefield since I was a child. And now that I’m working here and getting involved in this, it’s really bucket list stuff for me. It’s really filling in all the gaps for me.

[JB]
Well, talking of buckets, the bucket from the digger is perilously close, so I think we should move out of the way. Thank you.

[DA]
Brilliant, Lorne. Do you want a wee shot of the metal detector?

[JB]
I’d love it.

[DA]
Well, let’s go speak to Gary. Gary’s an experienced metal detectorist.

[JB]
Hello, Gary. I’m Jackie.

[DA]
He’s been working with Tony Pollard at Waterloo for how long?

[GC]
Well, nearly ten years on the Waterloo Battle site.

[JB]
So, this is your first time at Culloden, is it?

[GC]
This is my first time at Culloden, so we’re here to use the methodology that we used in Belgium on the trenches.

[JB]
So, you are detectoring just now – is that the right word, detectoring? Right. So, can I have a go?

[GC]
You certainly can.

[JB]
How do I do this?

[GC]
Just lift it about two inches off the ground and swing it left to right.

[JB]
Ooh, it’s going beep. I presume that … It’s important to swing it.

[GC]
Yes, you have to swing it. Usually when I’m doing it, I’ll swing it a metre one way and a metre the other way, so we can cover all of the ground.

[JB]
It’s going beep, but does that necessarily mean there’s something under there?

[GC]
No, no. It’s just a little bit of chattering because there’s a bit of mineralisation.

[JB]
Chattering. I like that. So, what am I looking for? Am I looking for it to go berserk?

[GC]
I’ll show you what I’m wanting. I have a button here, so if you go left to right … if you do it faster, it’ll go even faster. That’s the tone you’re looking for.

[JB]
So, then you know there’s something special.

[GC]
Yes, that’s when you start getting excited.

[JB]
And what have you found today?

[GC]
This morning I found some buttons, some musket balls, small buckles.

[JB]
You’re saying things like buttons and musket balls as if you find them all the time in places. That’s hugely exciting.

[GC]
I know it is hugely exciting, but I’ve been on the battle site in Belgium for 10 years so I’m finding them constantly. I like to see other people getting excited finding them when I’m teaching them.

[JB]
That’s the thing about this, you are unearthing rusted bits and bobs from the earth. But it’s human history in the main, isn’t it? Is that the lure for you?

[GC]
The lure for me is … the thing I like the most is if I’ve got veterans here. If I’m teaching veterans in the trench, they’ve got a connection with the stuff that’s coming …

[JB]
These are military veterans who are taking part, who are volunteers? Why?

[GC]
These guys are from Fort George, Royal Engineers, so they’ve been coming in. Yesterday when they were finding stuff, they were just getting so excited. It was just great to see.

[JB]
That’s super. Right, I’ll let you get on with it. Give us a shout if you get anything.

[GC]
I will do. Nice speaking to you.

[JB]
And you began volunteering at digs about 15 years ago, and you liked it so much you changed career?

[DV]
Yeah, absolutely. I used to work in IT. I used to sit at a desk on a computer. And I started studying for a history degree, and then I found archaeology. It was a revelation to me.

[JB]
There are about, how many, 40 or so volunteers here. I’m surprised at how labour-intensive it still is. I thought technology would play a bigger part in archaeological digs.

[DV]
Yeah, it is a labour-intensive thing. That’s the tangible thing that people are touching history. If you’re using a machine that’s just reading the ground from above and telling us information, we can use that technology. It helps us decide where we’re going to put trenches and things like that. But actually kneeling down on the ground and scraping the soil and actually discovering what’s there is the only way you’re going to find out what’s underneath the ground. So, that labour-intensive thing in all weathers is still … it’s very cathartic. I find it a very fulfilling kind of job.

[JB]
And there’s great camaraderie here.

[DV]
Yeah, there absolutely is. We’ve got so many people that have maybe … we’ve got archaeology students here; we’ve got people who have never held a trowel before. We’ve got some serving personnel from Kinloss and Lossiemouth here today. We’ve got a group that’s just arrived, veterans; I’ll be giving a tour, and they’ll be doing some digging in a wee bit. We’ve got a very good mixture of people: ages, experience, backgrounds, distances that people have come from. And, it’s just like a family. It really is. And that’s why I now do archaeology.

[MV]
A donation to the National Trust for Scotland, no matter how small, will help to protect the places that make Scotland so special. With your help, we can respond quickly to mountain wildfires or fix damage from winter storms, and we can carry out vital work to ensure historical sites and fragile wildlife survive for future generations.
Just search National Trust for Scotland and click Donate.

[JB]
Most of the people here on this dig are Trust archaeologists and very interested volunteers. But there’s some extra help today from Tony Pollard. Now, Tony is Professor of Conflict History and Archaeology at Glasgow University and a man who knows this battlefield better than most. Tony, this is an area that you know very well. What’s your history here?

[TP]
Well, I guess I cut my teeth here at what is sometimes called battlefield archaeology. And in 2001 I did an episode of a series for the BBC called Two Men in a Trench. At that time, battlefield archaeology in the UK was quite a rare beast. But I stuck with it and started to develop it as an academic subject. And then in 2006, I was invited by the National Trust for Scotland to do a project here, because this was prior to what I still call the new visitor centre, and they wanted to basically update their interpretation of the battlefield.

By then we had established that that’s the sort of thing that archaeology could do – shed new light on old events. And so, we came up here with a team of local detectorists and archaeologists and students, and we worked away in the area behind us, which to this day is still known as the Field of the English – a Victorian label. We were amazed to find the evidence that we did, and we’ve had a real snapshot into the realities of the battle that was fought here in 1746 through the objects that we’d excavated.

[JB]
What I found really surprising when I was researching what had taken place here is that there have been so few digs.

[TP]
Certainly, when we first voiced an interest in doing some archaeology here, we weren’t welcomed with open arms. There was a lot of suspicion, a lot of uncertainty as to what exactly you’re doing with archaeology. You’re coming here to dig up the graves of the Highlanders that are just behind us again.

And we had to reassure that we were here to enhance our understanding, and we would do that with the least amount of disturbance possible, which we did. And it developed from there. And once certainly the National Trust for Scotland had got an insight into what could be done, they became very enthusiastic.

We were quite worried at the time. There are stories here that we debunked: the red barn, for instance, that was burned down. We discovered it was a Victorian vegetable garden. But yes, the interpretation panel that was there prior to that saying that Jacobites had been burned to death in this building, which wasn’t a building, that was taken away.

The National Trust for Scotland embraced this new path to reinterpretation. And what you see now – the footpaths, the position of the panels – quite a lot of that is based on the archaeological work that we did, obviously alongside the work of historians. I call myself a historian as much as I do with an archaeologist.

So, for me, Culloden is home turf. And to come back and see what Derek and the team and Ellen are doing here now is amazing, because Derek and I have been talking about doing what we’re doing today, which is stuff we developed while I was working in Waterloo.

[JB]
With a digger which is taking up much bigger areas than normal. And what I find astonishing is that yes, you are looking for less than an hour of activity over thousands of years of human habitation. That is needle in a haystack stuff.

[TP]
Well, to be quite frank, Jackie, that’s one of the great attractions that drew me to here. I was a prehistorian. I did my PhD on Mesolithic hunter gatherers and the Neolithic in Scotland. I then got a little tired of that, but I’d always had an interest in military history, and then learned from the Americans who were working at Little Bighorn what archaeology could add to our understanding of battles.

And the idea that we have these events that do take place in just a few hours, or even minutes, and are detectable archaeologically was a real appeal. And you’re right, the main thrust of the battle here probably lasts about half an hour, and to actually find the evidence is a huge challenge.

But as you say, this is a landscape which has seen activity for thousands of years. I describe a place, if you can read a place on an oscilloscope, where you’ve got just background noise, which is day-to-day activity going on for thousands of years, and then all of a sudden there’s a battle and it’s a blip.

[JB]
There’s a spike!

[TP]
That spike is what we’re looking for. And that spike, if you know what you’re doing and the circumstances are right, is detectable.

[JB]
You’ve also said that battlefield archaeology helps you determine the nuances of battle. What did you mean by that?

[TP]
Oh indeed, a parallel is crime scene investigation. I’ve done my share of work with the police on real crime scenes. What we do is we collect data and evidence and piece all of that together alongside, if we have them, historical accounts. And what it does is it adds an extra layer of evidence. A good example is I’ve just taken a group of military veterans around the battlefield on an hour-long tour. Now, a traditional battlefield tour would be based on the history, based on the landscape, and even at times with military input because they are used as training exercises. They’re called staff rights.

But we can also add the story that comes out of the ground. So, I can walk past there with these people. And yes, we’ve got the flags marking where Cumberland’s army was. But then we enter the area where people are using metal detectors. And even if that work wasn’t ongoing, I could say this is where we found this. This is where we found that. Exactly where you are standing, we found a cannon shot and a bit of broken Brown Bess musket. You can see those in the visitor centre.

Now, when we walked through there today, Gary gave me the nod and brought over a Jacobite musket ball and a button which had just been found.

[JB]
Thrilling!

[TP]
And I allowed them all to hold those objects, and they are the first time that anybody has held them since the day of the battle, 16 April 1746, which is phenomenal. Archaeology adds that physicality; well, I’ve always said that archaeology is the closest we will ever get to a time machine.

[JB]
And it’s also, I keep saying to everyone I chat to today, because this is done with respect. This is human history. Things like shoe buckles and there’s been Celtic crosses; someone maybe held that cross before they went into that battle.

[TP]
I was there – that was part of our project. I remember very well when that was found and I still, when I’m teaching my students about how to do this sort of archaeology, but also what the objects mean. With that, it’s a pewter take on a standing cross, transferred into a little medallion. What I tell my students in relation to that, it was found over on the Jacobite line. It’s got a hole in it where it’s been suspended around the neck. It may have come off a Jacobite who was killed either by cannon shot in the charge or perhaps the melee afterwards.

But what I say about that is, if we are looking at the way that people viewed the world and behaved in events like battles, we’ve got to consider their beliefs at the time. What that cross reminds us of is the religion that people held very dear. Now, I’m not saying there that the Jacobite wars were all about religion. That’s false, that’s a misconception; it’s just part of it. But the point is that the vast majority of people on this battlefield in 1746 would have believed in God and they would have believed in an afterlife – that makes you behave in a very different way than I would today.

So, a professed atheist, I don’t believe in any of that. And I think I might be a little more interested in saving my own skin than people who had that faith. And we have to make that leap of understanding that we don’t necessarily believe what they believe, but it’s there embedded perhaps in that object.

[JB]
And Culloden still holds its secrets.

[TP]
Oh, very much so. There are still things that we will never know. We cannot. And I never pretend that we are walking in the footsteps of those who fought and died here. I feel very humbled even walking around with military veterans. I’ve never been in the Forces. I almost joined the Army and then thought there’s too much organised sport and didn’t! But, some of these people have done what we call ‘seeing the elephant’. They’ve been in battle, and so I feel very humble showing them around this site, because in some respects they are far more connected to this hallowed ground than I am.

[Bagpipes play]

[JB]
Christine, you are a stalwart of archaeological digs. How long have you been doing this?

[CM]
I’ve been doing this for about 23 years.

[JB]
So, you must like it! You’re a volunteer. What do you get out of it?

[CM]
It’s entertaining and it makes you think. It teaches you about Scotland’s history and it informs Scotland’s history.

[JB]
And what has been your most exciting find?

[CM]
People ask me this and I always say it’s a bit of burnt daub. It was found on a roundhouse at Culzean, and it was about the only thing that we could use to date it because we could do carbon-dating on it because it’s been burnt.

[JB]
Excellent, I get it, and that is thrilling.

[CM]
I was right there from the beginning. We did the geophysics which showed us this beautiful round feature and then when we dug it down, there were occasional stone tools. But the only thing that really gave us information was that bit of burnt daub.

[JB]
Gail, what’s your back story?

[GB]
I’ve been volunteering for 20 years this year. My first dig was on Canna in 2004. And I’ve come back whenever the opportunity has arisen.

[JB]
It’s pretty physical work. We’re in a trench. You’ve got your trowels, you’re on your knees, you’re bent double. So, the finds must be worth it, and the experience.

[GB]
The experience is worth it because you are concentrating on what you’re doing. Nothing else can get in the way. You’re looking, you’re moving, and that’s all you’re doing. So, when you find something that’s evidence of another human being having been there all those years before, that’s quite a privilege, I think, and it’s one of the things that I really appreciate about doing it.

[JB]
And have you found anything of great interest? Because everything that’s found is of interest, but of great interest here at Culloden?

[GB]
No is the honest answer.

[JB]
But that’s part of it. It’s back-breaking and sometimes you come home and you have nothing.

[GB]
But you’re part of something that can find something of interest. And this dig, everyone thinks Culloden is 1746. That’s great. Over there is something that’s potentially thousands of years old and made by people. Culloden has been here for a lot longer than 300 years. People have been living here and cooking and eating and fighting and doing all of that forever.

[JB]
So both of you, bent double, on your knees, all sorts of weather for a week. How do you feel at the end of it?

[GB]
Very satisfied. You get a feeling of camaraderie. It’s just fun.

[JB]
I’ll let you get on with it. Thank you very much. Good luck. Good luck!

[Bagpipes play]

[JB]
It has been a fascinating day here at Culloden. It is living history, and you cannot overstate the impact of the battle fought on this land, both on the way of life in the Highlands and for Scotland as a whole. Historians are still debating Culloden’s legacy and while they do, the National Trust for Scotland has been acquiring and caring for parts of the battlefield since 1937.

But this field and the views around me are under increasing threat from development. If you’d like to support the Trust’s work to protect it, you can donate to the Culloden Fighting Fund. And as people come here from all over the world to visit Culloden, if you’re a resident of the USA, you can show your support through the National Trust for Scotland Foundation USA. All the information you may need is in our show notes.

Thank you for listening. Until next time, goodbye.

If you’d like to hear more about the aftermath of the Battle of Culloden, look out for our episode ‘Young Rebel’ and learn about the fascinating life of Flora MacDonald, who took her Bonnie Prince over the sea to Skye.

[FF]
Contrary to some people’s belief that Flora rode the Prince 30 nautical miles in the middle of the night in storms over to Skye, there was a crew of five. They could see it was a man, but they were told it was a Jacobite rebel who needed to escape.

[MV]
Love Scotland is brought to you by Think and Demus Productions on behalf of the National Trust for Scotland; presented by Jackie Bird. For show notes and more information, go to nts.org.uk and don’t forget to like, subscribe, review and share.

Transcript

Five speakers: male voiceover [MV]; Jackie Bird [JB]; Colin Martin [CM]; second male voiceover [MV2]; Derek Alexander [DA]

[MV]
Love Scotland; presented by Jackie Bird.

[QE]
‘I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England too. And think foul scorn that Parma, or Spain, or any prince of Europe should dare to invade the borders of my realm, to which, rather than any dishonour shall grow by me, I myself will take up arms. I myself will be your general judge and rewarder of everyone of your virtues in the field.’

[JB]
Many of you will recognise that call to arms made by Queen Elizabeth I clad in ceremonial armour and astride a horse at Tilbury in 1588. It was delivered in the face of some not-so-welcome seaborne guests from Spain: the Armada.

It was rousing stuff, but of course Elizabeth had no intention of taking part in any actual fighting. But as we say now, the optics were good. In fact, by the time Elizabeth made that rallying cry, many of the Spanish ships, beset by a combination of bad weather and superior English vessels and seamanship, were already fleeing.

And what a detour many were forced to take – up the east coast of England and Scotland, across the north of the British Isles and down past the Hebrides, Ireland and beyond, if they were lucky. So why are we, at Love Scotland, featuring a rollicking speech by Good Queen Bess and an English/Spanish battle?

Well, the answer lies in those fleeing ships. Bad weather meant many perished around the coastline, and one in particular, El Gran Grifón, met her watery grave off Fair Isle, that tiny dot in the North Sea which is in the care of the National Trust for Scotland. And as 2024 marks 70 years since the Trust acquired the island, we thought we’d take a dive into its history and that unlikely link with the Spanish Armada.

Now, the wreck was first explored in 1970 by Dr Colin Martin, a world-renowned marine archaeologist, and I’m delighted to say that I am with Colin in his book-lined study in his home near St Andrews. Colin, thank you very much for allowing us to come here.

[CM]
It’s a great pleasure.

[JB]
Now, I’m afraid, let’s go back to basics, as they say. The Spanish Armada wasn’t really front and centre in the history that I got at school. So, can we start by giving this a bit of context? The Armada sailed in 1588, but a year before, Mary, Queen of Scots had been executed. And that played a part, didn’t it?

[CM]
Yes, it did. The Armada was in fact planned some years before because, for a whole range of reasons – political, economic and most particularly because of religion – that Spain considered itself a key player under God; in both religious, economic and purely personal reasons that Spain was going to make England Catholic.

[JB]
So, Spain at that time was also the dominant military and political power in Europe, would you say?

[CM]
Yes indeed. Not just Spain, but all sorts of other countries in Europe that Spain had either under its direct control or in cahoots with.

[JB]
Because what I didn’t know was that the Armada sailed from Lisbon!

[CM]
Yes, Spain had annexed Portugal, and so Philip of Spain was also King of Portugal. Lisbon was the best harbour on the Atlantic Coast to assemble an enormous fleet under good protection and with lots and lots of resources. So, there it was the focus for ships coming in from all over Philip’s wide empire to sort themselves out, modify themselves, get more armament on board, get soldiers on board – a huge logistic operation.

It wasn’t a battle fleet like we think of – slugging it out with an enemy at sea; it was an invasion. It was the troops with all their equipment, weapons, ammunition, provisions, including a heavy siege artillery train that wasn’t there to fight other ships; it was there to beat down the gates of London when they landed there.

[JB]
So, they were pretty optimistic then, by the sound of that?

[CM]
Well, they were justifiably optimistic because the main military force wasn’t coming with the Armada. It was coming over from Flanders, where the Spaniards had a very strong army – the best army in the world – under the leading general, the Duke of Parma. If they’d got ashore, they’d have walked it.

[JB]
You’ve mentioned the scale. You’ve given us an indication. What about numbers? How many vessels? How many sailors? How many soldiers?

[CM]
Well, in round figures the Armada was just under 130 ships. There were 20,000 soldiers and about 10,000 sailors, and the soldiers were really back-up troops for the Duke of Parma’s army, which was coming across in small landing craft when they and the Armada had met up. And that was one of the reasons the Armada failed, because without good communications, bringing together two enormous forces like this, coordinating the time and place and all the rest of it, was very difficult.

[JB]
I think what we know from basic history is that the weather was against them. Was that the key player in it?

[CM]
The primary reason was the man who set it all off, Philip II of Spain. Now, he was a very extraordinary and complex character, but he was very much a micro-manager. He thought he knew everything – and in a way he did, because all the information was coming to his lonely little office in the middle of Spain. The difficulty of joining together the Duke of Parma’s army in Flanders, linking it with the Armada in the shallow water where most of the Armada ships couldn’t operate, was really impossible. A number of the senior officers in the Armada knew perfectly well what was going to happen and where it was all going to come apart.

The Spanish failed to make this vital link-up with the Duke of Parma and so they found themselves at the southern end of the North Sea. But unfortunately, the prevailing winds blow from the south and south-west, and the ships couldn’t sail against them. They couldn’t have another attempt at making the rendezvous with Parma or indeed sailing back to Spain, back through the English Channel.

So, they were forced up towards the north of the North Sea and round the British Isles, out into the Atlantic – and then they would be able to make a fair run towards Spain. And a good many of them made it, but not by any means all.

[JB]
So, let’s pick up the story then of El Gran Grifón. What sort of vessel was she?

[CM]
She wasn’t a Spanish vessel at all. She was really a German vessel. She came from Rostock and she was part of the Hanseatic League, a grouping of merchants from a number of countries who just were interested in commercial transport of goods by sea. One of their strong customers was Spain, and they wanted things like iron, rope, canvas, which you got lots of in the Baltic. And so these Baltic hulks, as they were called, would sail down to Spain with these cargoes of war stores, which were going to be used to help bring the Armada together.

[JB]
Again, you’re making the point, that I certainly didn’t know, that it wasn’t an Armada of warships. They basically used whatever they had.

[CM]
And it wasn’t really a Spanish Armada.

[JB]
Ok! Debunking so much history already!

[CM]
There was one Scottish ship in the Spanish Armada: the San Andres or St Andrews.

[JB]
Right, well, we can deal with that later. So, we’ve got El Gran Grifón. How many guns did she have? How was she fitted out for this new task?

[CM]
She had 38 guns. Most of them, probably about 30, were iron guns made not by casting but by a blacksmith putting them together on a forge. So, they were pretty old-fashioned and not very effective. But before she sailed, she got 8 new guns cast at Lisbon, and these were made of bronze. And they were supposedly, at any rate, top-of-the-range, good guns.

[JB]
So, El Gran Grifón had been kitted out with some new guns. What was the size of her crew?

[CM]
She had 43 sailors and 234 soldiers.

[JB]
And what route did she have to take? Was she damaged in the battle?

[CM]
She was, as I say, a hulk really, carrying stores and weapons. She was flagship of the hulk’s squadron, and as such she did actually take part in the battles. On one momentous occasion in which she was quite badly damaged, she fought against Sir Francis Drake.

[JB]
And is that the reason she fled?

[CM]
She didn’t flee on her own; she went with the main bulk of the fleet. To start off with, most of the Armada kept together. One of their great strengths was that, although there were a range of different kinds of ships with different sailing qualities, they kept their formation discipline remarkably well. Even when it was disrupted, they were able to get back into their defensive formation.

And for the beginning of the voyage home, most of them stuck together. Only after they had passed the north of Scotland did they begin to drift apart. El Gran Grifón did get round the north of Scotland in the first instance, but then she became dis-attached from the main body and driven back north towards the Shetland Islands.

[JB]
So, how did she end up being wrecked off Fair Isle?

[CM]
Well, when she lost contact with the fleet some way out into the Atlantic, she headed back north, probably intending to make for Norway. But she got mixed up with the Orkney Islands. And by great good luck, which they attributed to the divine hand of God, they went through the maze of the Orkney Islands. And then they sighted this little island, and by this time they were leaking badly. And so they thought, well, we’ll have to run aground wherever we can.

They went back round Fair Isle, to the east side of Fair Isle, late one night and then in the morning they ran her ashore. But they missed the beach that they were aiming at and instead ended up in a little rock cleft with overhanging cliffs. But by great good fortune, the masts leant against the cliffs and virtually all the crew were able to climb up the masts and step ashore onto Fair Isle.

[JB]
And is it correct that they had actually picked up some extra passengers from one of the other fleeing ships?

[CM]
Yes, they had.

[JB]
So, do you have any idea roughly how many we’re talking about?

[CM]
By that time they were losing people all the time, mainly from sickness – probably something like 200 came ashore on Fair Isle.

[JB]
And did they know where they were at that point?

[CM]
I think they did. They knew the name: they called it Farrell. And the story goes on Fair Isle that when the Spaniards got ashore, they lined themselves up, and they marched over the rough grassland that they were on. When the islanders saw them coming with their gleaming helmets and breastplates, they thought they were the angels of the Heavenly Host, and that the Day of Judgement had arrived.

[JB]
Well, they wouldn’t have seen anything like it, would they? [No!] How many people were living on Fair Isle at that time?

[CM]
I’m not sure how many people, but one of the Spaniards says there were 17 households, 17 crofts really. They and the islanders seemed to have got on quite well.

[JB]
Fair Isle is only about a mile wide and 3 miles long. It’s a tiny island. How do we know so much about the fact that they came over the hill and their gleaming breastplates and they got on well with the islanders?

[CM]
Well, over the hill and the breastplates is from local tradition, so you just don’t know where it ultimately comes from, but it rings true. We do have very good sources. First of all, we have somebody on El Gran Grifón, possibly her commander, Juan Gomez de Modena, but it’s anonymous. It describes the battle, the voyage, the attempt to get back home and the wrecking on Fair Isle.

And he also describes the people on Fair Isle. He’s the one who says there are 17 households. And he says something about their mode of life and how they were really treated quite well and they got on quite well together.

[JB]
So, we had 200 or so sailors and soldiers arriving on a tiny island with 17 households or so. How were they going to live? How were they going to feed themselves?

[CM]
With difficulty, but they probably fed themselves from seabirds, from their eggs and from the birds themselves, as the Fair Islanders did for many, many years. They were only on the island for about 6 weeks and then they managed to get on to mainland Shetland.

[JB]
And did they all survive? Because you said there were quite a few who had been ill on the ship already. So, what happened? How many perished on Fair Isle?

[CM]
We don’t know how many, but they certainly did perish on Fair Isle because they were buried in a spot nearby, which locally is called the Spaniards’ Graves. About 100 years ago, coastal erosion revealed a large number of bones which must be from the dead Spaniards.

[JB]
So, how did they manage eventually to get off Fair Isle?

[CM]
They got in touch with a laird in mainland Shetland, and he sent boats and they were taken to Shetland from where boats were arranged to take them back into Scotland. They landed at Anstruther in Fife, where the local minister greeted them, gave them a sermon on the wickedness of their Catholic ways, but otherwise behaved in an extremely charitable Christian manner. They were fed, looked after and eventually transported to Leith where, after further adventures and some difficulties – they had a big punch-up with some English sailors – they were sent to Flanders, which was part of the Spanish Empire.

[JB]
But before we send them off to Flanders, in terms of geopolitics they seem to have been treated rather well in Scotland. Now, England and Spain were effectively at war. Where was Scotland in all of this?

[CM]
Well, there was a very tense political situation in Scotland because, although the Protestant Reformation had effectively happened among the governing classes, there was still a lot of Catholic resistance to this. And those Catholics were starting to get at the Spaniards and said, ‘Look, you’re soldiers. Send back to Flanders for more arms and more soldiers, and we’ll get a good revolution going’.

And of course, the authorities, the legitimate regime under James VI of Scotland, who was lined up to become King of England, this is the very last thing he wanted. So, there was quite a bit of toing and froing and bad feeling and so on.

[JB]
So, they were put on a boat and sent off to Flanders.

[CM]
Yes, they waited for quite a long time because they needed a safe conduct from Queen Elizabeth that, if they were to put into English ports, they would be looked after and they wouldn’t be captured or whatever. Queen Elizabeth signed this thing; she gave them the safe conduct.

And as far as we know, on the few occasions when they put into English ports, it was honoured. However, the Queen had something up her sleeve. She had got in touch with her mates in the Low Countries who were in revolt against the Spaniards and told them there will be this lot of Spaniards arriving off your coast about such and such a time. And so, when these three boats full of survivors from the Grifón arrived, this bunch of wild Protestant Dutchmen overwhelmed them and quite a lot of them were killed.

[JB]
As if they hadn’t been through enough. Goodness, what a story. Well, what we’ll do now is take a break, because this is a very good point to take a break. Hopefully some of the sailors and soldiers are happily on their way back to Spain and Portugal, or wherever they came. And when we come back in Part 2, we will begin to talk about your almost lifelong involvement with El Gran Grifón and the adventures that you enjoyed. Back in a moment.

[MV]
You need to smell the flowers, said my bro. Turns out wild heather works just as well. We were up Ben Lomond like mountain goats. Couldn’t believe it was so close to home. At the top though, life was a million miles away. So, we signed up to help look after it. We all need looking after.

Since 1931, the National Trust for Scotland, a charity supported by you, has been looking after Scotland’s treasured places so we can all share in them. Support us at nts.org.uk

[JB]
Welcome back to Love Scotland. I’m with marine archaeologist Colin Martin, Dr Colin Martin, and we have spent the first half finding out about the events that led to the wrecking of El Gran Grifón off Fair Isle. Now, Colin, we’re coming up to date-ish. We’re in 1970 and I think that’s around when your involvement with El Gran Grifón began. Tell me about that.

[CM]
Well, I came into marine archaeology almost by accident. I’d worked with colleagues on a Spanish Armada wreck on the south-west tip of Ireland, and we didn’t find very much on it, but we found lots and lots of cannonballs. Now, you wouldn’t think that was very exciting, but it was really because all the historians said that one of the main reasons for the Armada failing was that it ran out of shot.

Well, at least on this wreck that we were investigating, there were hundreds and hundreds of cannonballs still obviously unfired against the English. So, we didn’t find any guns on this first Armada wreck because the top part of the wreck had broken away and drifted into very deep water. We thought, well, I wonder if we could find another wreck that would produce Armada guns that was easier to find and easier to work on.

We looked at various possibilities and came up with El Gran Grifón. So, we came to Fair Isle. It was a very easy dive. We just dived down and there were the guns that we were looking for.

[JB]
But how did you find it? Did everyone know that she was there?

[CM]
Well, they sort of knew. Many people said she was in a little creek called Swartz Geo, which is just next to the little creek where the Grifón was. That’s where on the Ordnance Survey maps and so forth the Spanish Armada wreck was labelled, but it wasn’t there.

I went up on my own to Fair Isle. You shouldn’t really dive on your own, but I was going to. And I started talking to the locals and I talked to the crofter whose croft included the probable site of El Gran Grifón. And he said, I’ll take you across and show you. So, we went across not to Swartz Geo, but to this little creek beside it. And he pointed down and he said, well, there’s a line of rocks in the middle of the creek and it’s on the south side, not on the north side; on the south side.

And you know, he was exactly right! I dived on the south side of the little creek and there were the cannons.

[JB]
The value of local knowledge! Now, I said in my introduction that you were the first to explore El Gran Grifón. You weren’t actually. Someone had been down there before you. And I find this extraordinary! Tell me the story.

[CM]
It wasn’t just before me; it was a long time before me! It was in 1728. A man called Jacob Rowe who had patented what he called a diving engine. He was a London man. And this diving engine was really a sort of barrel that was suspended horizontally, with the diver inside lying prone with his arms thrust out through leather sleeves and a little porthole that he could look down onto the sea bed from. And it misted up very regularly, so he said he had to clear it – the mist – away with his nose!

[JB]
How did they manage to get air into the barrel?

[CM]
They could breathe the air that was in the barrel.

[JB]
But it didn’t have an airline from the barrel?

[CM]
It didn’t have an airline to the surface, but they had the air that was in the barrel and that would last them about half an hour, as long as they weren’t exerting themselves too much. But after they had breathed as much as they could from what was there, they got the barrel hauled up again.

[JB]
How did they know to haul it up?

[CM]
He had a little line that he could signal with, and so they would haul it up and just let it come above the surface, so the back of the barrel was in the air. They would take two bungs out and they put a pair of bellows into one of the bungs and blow fresh air in and then send him back down again. Of course, the air in the barrel wasn’t compressed. It wasn’t compressed by the water because it was sealed in the barrel. So, the pressure on his arms coming out of the barrel would be enormously uncomfortable. That’s what limited the depth – they could go down to about 60 feet, but that was all. And it must have been horribly uncomfortable and indeed painful at that depth on the arms.

[JB]
But they were on the search for treasure then.

[CM]
He thought that El Gran Grifón had lots of treasure. Well, it didn’t. What little it carried belonged to personal people and they took it back home with them when they came off the wreck to Fair Isle. So, under the mistaken illusion that there was lots of treasure to be found, Captain Rowe and his men and their diving engine worked in Fair Isle on the Grifón site. They recovered 4 guns, so we didn’t get them in our findings. But then, they didn’t find any treasure.

And so when word came to them that another wreck, a Dutch East India Company wreck, had just that year been wrecked on the island of Barra, he up-sticked and away to Barra, where they did recover a large sum of money, though most of it evaporated into the pockets of the lawyers who defended the large case that erupted.

[JB]
But what a tale! I had no idea that Jacob Rowe and his incredible diving machine existed in the 1720s.

[CM]
We hoped we would find evidence of his diving machine, but we didn’t.

[JB]
So, move on 250 years and you found yourself really the first diver to be there since Jacob Rowe, and the first diver using our proper technical innovations in diving to have a really good look at a ship that was last used in anger in the 16th century. How did that feel?

[CM]
Well, it felt a great relief, of course, because that’s what we were looking for.

[JB]
Can you remember any of your personal thoughts?

[CM]
I don’t know; it’s a funny thing. You only make the personal thoughts gradually. I was more impressed by the seals that were cavorting around, that of course sailors believe are the reincarnations of drowned sailors. I didn’t really believe that, but it does give you a bit of a shiver down your spine! I was really just interested in what was there and what it was going to tell us.

[JB]
Was there any suggestion that there may well have been any bodies on board? I mean, what are we seeing down there? Was it very badly damaged?

[CM]
Well, I should say for a start, people looking at it wouldn’t think it was a wreck at all. There were really only the guns and a few cannonballs and some lead ingots. There was nothing relating to a ship at all. The only thing we ever found was part of one of the rudder hinges of iron. The ship had broken up completely.

And not only that, although most of the time it was quite safe to dive there – there weren’t strong currents or anything like that – this cleft that the wreck was in, at times when heavy seas were coming in, when you wouldn’t think of diving, particularly from the south-east, if you can imagine a triangular overhanging cleft and big waves coming in there and riding up almost to the top, almost 100 metres up and then dropping down, the weight of displaced water that would have forced the water through the gullies in which this wreckage was lying would be phenomenal and everything would be broken up. Anything light would either be swept away or, in the case of stuff like pottery, it’d be ground away in the moving shingle.

[JB]
But finding the anchor must have been thrilling?

[CM]
Yes, because the Spaniards told us that they dropped the anchor off the shore, and they must have dragged in and the anchor broke off. So, it was left some distance away from the main wreck site.

[JB]
So, you dive in this wreck. You want to find out about the ammunition. Did you find out?

[CM]
We did, and we found lots and lots of ammunition. She hadn’t fired very much. We knew how much she had started with, and we knew that there were obviously stuff that we didn’t find that’s still there. But particularly for the most effective guns she had, she was only able to fire about half of what she had. The true figure was probably much greater.

[JB]
And how technically difficult was your expedition? You say you found guns. How big were the guns that you found?

[CM]
Well, the biggest one was about a ton and a half.

[JB]
And you had to heave those from the seabed up a cliff face?

[CM]
No, we did it a different way. We were able to use airbags which are just like back-to-front parachutes, which you attach – they’re just a bag with a harness. You attach it to the gun and then you fill it with air, and it floats to the surface.

[JB]
That’s why you’re a marine archaeologist and I’m not, because I’d have gone about that in a different way! What was the most thrilling find for you?

[CM]
I think it was really the two big bronze guns. They were interesting not in the way that most people would find them interesting. One of them, the big one, the demi-culverin, was not properly bored. It was off-centre.

If you imagine a gun off-centre, with the bore off-centre, not only is it going to fire the gun and the shot in the wrong direction, but also if you imagine yourself that if it’s off-centre, by the time it gets to the end, one side is much thinner than the other side. And that’s where the highest pressure occurs in the explosion. And so probably that gun could never have been fired.

[JB]
Gosh.

[CM]
And we did find other evidence, there and on other Armada wrecks, that they had a double problem. They had a problem with inadequate guns, guns that were likely to blow up instead of shooting the enemy.

[JB]
And does this tell us more about the general history of the Armada, and perhaps the rush to get it to sea?

[CM]
Very much so, very much so.

[JB]
You went back in 1977. Was this for any specific reason or just to finish off the job?

[CM]
Just to finish off the job. The big gun was recovered in the second season. We’d found the muzzle end; the bit that you could see that it wasn’t bored straight. That was found in the first season, and then we found the rest of the gun in the second season.

[JB]
And where are the guns now?

[CM]
They’re in the County Museum of Shetland in Lerwick, along with everything else from the wreck, which doesn’t amount to very much, I have to say. It was one of those instances where the finds were not numerous, not particularly exciting in themselves, but in terms of the information they imparted, that was exactly what we’d come to find.

[JB]
And that’s what it’s all about, and that’s what your job is. So, basically, if anyone out there is listening to this, is it worth a dive down? What would you see if you went down today?

[CM]
There have been dives. For some reason, it’s not a wreck that’s been protected by scheduling, probably because there isn’t really very much more to do there. But there is one very interesting thing, and I saw on the web some photographs that subsequent visitors took. Most of the guns, and particularly the lead shot, which is very heavy, had moved down through the shingle to the very bottom of the gully, and there it sort of stabilised.

But when these big storm events moved the shingle around, it eroded the surface of this concretion, which is the way iron mainly goes, with rust forming an adhesive for all the stones and sand, etc. It’s almost like a seam of coal.

Anyway, what we saw here at the surface of this seam of concretion was the sectioned outline of an iron gun. And so, as it rusted and the erosion, it just went on and on, going down until it left this beautiful section. You could see the bore and everything going through it. We didn’t try and lift that; we just left it where it was. And these subsequent divers were amazed to see it.

[JB]
What about the local community on Fair Isle? Are they aware of what they have?

[CM]
Yes, very much, very much.

[JB]
They are aware of the story? [Yes] Because I take it there was something else that happened after the graves or the bones that were found.

There was a delegation from Spain that came over to mark it.

[CM]
They came, I think it was in 1984. They were a military order of Spain that re-enacted the glory days of the 16th century and they dressed up in the appropriate uniforms. They had their little cannon that they trundled around with them.

Anyway, they came to Scotland not just to visit Fair Isle; they visited Anstruther where the Spaniards had been well received and sent on their way homewards. They went to Ayr, because some – not these Spaniards but other Spanish survivors – had arrived from Ireland in a very dilapidated state and in bare feet, and the good folk of Ayr furnished them with shoes. So, these 20th-century Spaniards brought with them a large quantity of the finest Spanish-made fashion shoes to deliver and give to the people of Ayr in recognition of the kindness they’d shown in 1588.

[JB]
That’s a happy ending to a story that certainly has its ups and downs, especially for the crew of El Gran Grifón. Dr Colin Martin, thank you so much for telling me all about it, and I can see why it’s absorbed you for so long. Thank you.

[CM]
And thank you for asking all the right questions.

[JB]
You’re very kind! Well, Fair Isle, now you know – famed for its seabirds, its knitwear and the Spanish Armada. And as the Trust celebrates 70 years of acquiring Fair Isle, it’s also benefitted from new funding raised by players of People’s Postcode Lottery. This support is being used to expand ongoing research into Fair Isle’s natural heritage and assessing the health of its marine environment and the secrets that we now know it holds. For more information on the project, click the link in this episode’s show notes.

That’s it from Love Scotland for now. Until next time, goodbye.

And if you’re interested in archaeology, look out for another episode of Love Scotland, where we investigate the archaeological finds that take us back to World War II.

[DA]
Looking at the Arran site we know 6 crash sites on Glen Rosa and Goat Fell and Beinn Nuis; and just on our ground on Arran, 55 people were killed as a result of Second World War plane crashes.

[MV]
Love Scotland is brought to you by Think and Demus Productions on behalf of the National Trust for Scotland; presented by Jackie Bird.

For show notes and more information, go to nts.org.uk and don’t forget to like, subscribe, review and share.

Transcript

Six speakers: male voiceover [MV]; Jackie Bird [JB]; Siobhan Synnot [SS]; Lesley Mackie [LM]; second male voiceover [MV2]; Anna Rathband [AR]

[MV]
Love Scotland, brought to you from the National Trust for Scotland; presented by Jackie Bird.

[JB]
Hello and welcome. Over the years, many National Trust for Scotland landscapes and properties have found themselves with a starring role on the big and small screens. So, for this Halloween edition of the podcast, we thought we’d celebrate the supernatural settings for a movie that’s gathered a cult following since it was released just over 50 years ago.

The movie is The Wicker Man, made as a very low budget mix of horror, thriller and musical. And that unlikely fusion of genres gives you an indication of the unorthodox style of this piece of cinema, which has had an afterlife almost as bizarre as its storyline.

Nonetheless, over the decades, fans of all ages have and still flock to Trust locations like the picturesque village of Plockton in the North West Highlands and to the imposing clifftop Culzean Castle to walk in the footsteps of characters like raunchy Pagan locals, who, when they’re not singing questionable songs down the pub, are dressing in animal heads and are partial to a bit of human sacrifice.

The movie also contains a menacing island overlord with big hair, a plethora of malevolent weans, a fair bit of nudity – this is definitely not one for all the family to share – and a lead actor from London’s Croydon who has one of the best Scottish accents I’ve ever heard. So, there are many more peculiarities to discuss and the movie’s enduring appeal, of course.

And I’m going to do that with my guests today. Welcome firstly to movie and TV critic Siobhan Synnot. Siobhan, how many times have you seen The Wicker Man?

[SS]
Well, of course, the real question is how many different versions of The Wicker Man have we all seen? Because of course there have been a few. But yeah, I think I first saw The Wicker Man as a still in a big book of horror movies, which I was given when I was 7. That’s the kind of parenting that we had in those days! And it was Edward Woodward looking rather askance at a hand by his bedside. And I thought, oh, I want to know about that, but then had to wait another 10 years before I was able to see it.

[JB]
Well, let me just reaffirm, if any 7-year-olds are listening to this, it is not for the children. I’m particularly thrilled to say we have one of the aforementioned malevolent youngsters who appeared in the movie which was released in 1973: the actress Lesley Mackie. Now, Lesley, you weren’t exactly a child back in the day. We’ll explain more of that later, but I wouldn’t have wanted to meet you on a dark night.

[LM]
Really? I thought I was maybe just cute?

[JB]
No, you were decidedly scary!

[LM]
Well, I think malevolent probably was a good word for it. I was just told I had to be a naughty girl. I don’t think I even understood what I was saying at that time. That ‘the little old beetle goes round and round’ was actually about Edward Woodward. ‘Always the same way ’til he ends up right up tight to the nail. Poor old thing.’

But I didn’t know, and even as Daisy I wouldn’t have known, but that’s the sort of thing we were taught to do on the isle of Summerisle, and I was only told that afterwards. I was just told I was naughty.

[JB]
So, Daisy was your character. It was set on the fictional island of Summerisle and Edward Woodward was the star and you were torturing a beetle. I think that’s enough to be going on with at the moment! Now, anyone listening to this who hasn’t seen the film, can I say there will be spoilers. And even if you haven’t, I’m pretty sure our chat will have you racing to a streaming source to make sure we’re not making half of this up.

Let’s set the scene by listening to the trailer for the movie. This was released for the remastered 50th anniversary edition.

[Trailer]
I have come here from the mainland to investigate the disappearance of a young girl, Rowan Morrison. That’s her name. You know her?

No, never seen her before.

You suspect foul play.

I suspect murder.

We don’t commit murder up here. We’re a deeply religious people.

Where is Rowan Morrison?

[children singing]

You wouldn’t want to be around here on May Day; not the way you feel.

Where is Rowan Morrison?

It is time to keep your appointment with the Wicker Man.

Hail, the Queen of the May.

You simply never understand the true nature of sacrifice.

[children singing]

[JB]
I think that had everything bar the kitchen sink, Siobhan. That trailer tells a bit of the story. Any relevant gaps you need to fill in?

[SS]
Well, yeah, I mean it’s odd isn’t it, that there are a few things about The Wicker Man back story. The movie itself is fairly straightforward – we heard Edward Woodward as Sergeant Howie; he’s a God-fearing cop from the mainland. He’s been asked to investigate the disappearance of a schoolgirl called Rowan. He flies over to a lush island that’s famous for its fruit and veg and is presided over by Christopher Hair.

[JB]
Christopher Hair!

[SS]
There you go! Christopher LEE and his very big hair – clearly on my mind – and discovers that the disappearance of Rowan is not straightforward and he gets teased by the locals. There’s a lot of stonewalling and eventually, of course, the island yields up its secret.

[JB]
And he has been lured to the island.

[SS]
He has been lured, yes.

[JB]
And meets with a rather unsavoury end. We said there will be spoilers and we’ll go into detail about that later. Lesley, how old were you when you got involved with the film and what were you playing and what age were you playing? Who were you playing? What age were you playing?

[LM]
I was playing a character in the schoolroom called Daisy Pringle, and I didn’t know until afterwards really that Daisy’s date of birth was 8 October 1959. Now, I like that date of birth and I’m happy to accept the birthday cards that sometimes the occasional nice fan sends on that date.

[JB]
They still do?

[LM]
Well, there’s one in particular who sends me lovely cards, actually. He’s called Ian and he lives down in the north of England. But he’s very, very … They know a whole lot more about the film than I do.

But I’m glad to hear you, Siobhan, saying Rowan, because it’s always bothered me that they said Roan and that nobody connected that in the film – because we say Rowan, don’t we? The rowan tree. It’s a shame.

[JB]
How old were you in reality?

[LM]
Well, 1959. So about 13, about 13.

[JB]
And you were?

[LM]
I was 21.

[JB]
Oh, that’s a good thing to be able to do, to play that young.

[LM]
Well, I don’t know. When I watch it now myself, I think a lot of people believed that we were all little girls in that scene and that I wouldn’t have even seen the film for another few years. All that came out at the 50 years. So, everybody knows now my age I was, because I would have gone along with saying I’m happy with Daisy’s birthday!

[JB]
Did you have to audition for the part?

[LM]
Yes, I strapped my bust down because I knew it was 13, and it was all taking place in the agent in Glasgow’s home, which was also her office. Freddie Young. I think everybody that she had on her books was up for it. And it just kind of happened and disappeared.

At that time, it was a great year. I just came out of drama school, so it seemed just another job, but exciting because it was a film and I had never obviously been in a film. I thought it was just ‘come and go’, and because of events that took place, it was a very unusual situation. Even I felt a sense of chaos filming there, the things that were going on on the site.

It was only because of a party, when somebody said: ‘You sing – sing a song!’ When I got up and sang ‘Summertime’ and Edward Woodward got up and he does a brilliant impersonation of the trumpet. If you go online, it talks about it, that he does these things. And he was behind me doing this song. I thought this is exciting and fun, and because of that and singing an Edith Piaf song, the director said, ‘Do you want to sing in in the film?’ And I went, yeah, that’d be grand, and then it all came about.

I went and sang the Highland Lament and then on the record, the release, the Britt song, and just various things happened because of it. So, it echoed down the years for me, that film. And I’m really so thrilled that I was in it.

[JB]
Siobhan, lots of Scottish actors in it, but in terms of the star cast, the main players, pretty eclectic.

[SS]
Yes, I mean, it’s a great pleasure to watch as a Scot, to see people like Juliet Cadzow and Lesley of course, and Tony Roper and Barbara Rafferty. Barbara Rafferty’s got her first screen role, I think; one of her very early ones.

[LM]
With her baby!

[SS]
She brought her own prop, yes! She’s ‘Woman with baby’ and that baby is Barbara Rafferty’s daughter Amy that she brought along. And Amy, I understand, comes to the convention.

[LM]
Well, she came for the first time to the 50th one, the 50th anniversary, and the fans were delighted to say this is the baby from the graveyard. She was really enjoying it and she’s coming back to the one next May. They’re holding another meeting down at Newton Stewart, Kirkcudbright. They’re hoping somebody will donate a wicker man to burn again.

[JB]
So, Christopher Lee, how big a star was he at the time?

[SS]
Well, he was Dracula, wasn’t he? He was a huge star, but he was also a bit fed up of being Dracula and the schlock that was involved. He was really the engine, if you like, for The Wicker Man. He said that he wanted to do a frightening movie that didn’t involve women who looked like Barbara Windsor being chased by papier mâché tunnels anymore.

Robin Hardy and the script writer Anthony Shaffer came up with this intriguing premise that wasn’t about monsters and vampires. It was about paganism and rituals. And really, it says things about beware of religious zealotry. That’s probably one of the reasons why the film still resonates with us, because it still feels so very relevant now.

[JB]
Was it aimed at being mainstream or was it always art-housey?

[SS]
Yeah, that’s an interesting one. I think it was. I think Robin Hardy wanted it to be art-housey …

[JB]
That was the director?

[SS]
He’s the director. He was a first-time director. Actually, Shaffer, of course a very well-known and respected playwright, he, I think, wanted to say something a bit deeper than usual. What do you think, Lesley?

[LM]
Yes, I do. I think that Robin, as you say, he’d done mainly commercials. I think there’s all sorts of different reports about those that respected Robin and those that didn’t. I was just a newbie and it was all very straightforward what I had to do.

But Anthony Shaffer, when he couldn’t come, Peter Shaffer [his twin brother] was there occasionally, on the set supervising. I think Anthony had done Sleuth by that point.

[SS]
Yes, yes, so he had heat.

[LM]
He did, and he married Diane Cilento. All the entanglements that were going on. I find all that fascinating as well. But Robin was … yes, it was a first day for him.

[SS]
He was under a lot of pressure because he was a first-time director. So, he thought, oh, I know; I’ll do it on budget and I’ll do it fast. And that will show what an efficient director I am.

Now, the budget that they gave was under £500,000. That’s the kind of budget you actually allocate for Carry On Camping. And he was trying to film something much more ambitious, much more complex, shot over 25 locations in Scotland.

[LM]
Having got all the Scots very cheap … because I remember I was given £50 for playing Daisy, and I was handed a £20 note for singing the Highland Lament. It was just all …

[JB]
So, you didn’t take a cut of the profits? 50 years of profits!

[LM]
I got 30!

[SS]
Christopher Lee says he never got paid!

[LM]
He said he never got paid for it. He said he just gave it up because he thought it was one of the best things he’d ever, ever done.

[JB]
And Edward Woodward, who was the star, who was Sergeant Howie, he also says it was one of the best things that he’s ever been involved in.

[LM]
I wish he’d lived to actually see the cult following really that it’s got.

[SS]
Yes. He was certainly very supportive alongside Christopher Lee. Christopher Lee of course was the one who led the campaign to try and find all the missing bits of The Wicker Man over the years. Both of them, I think, very invested.

Not so sure Britt Ekland has fond memories of The Wicker Man …

[JB]
For those of you of a certain age, how do we describe Britt Ekland? A very, very beautiful woman; a young actress at the time; Swedish and sounded it, who was supposed to be playing a Scottish barmaid.

[LM]
There was a lot of shock in the village at the antics that were going on because they didn’t know what the film was about. They were wearing animal heads, but that didn’t tell them that they were actually ritualistic killers! It was quite an extraordinary carry on; the whole atmosphere was.

[JB]
And Lesley, you were asked to teach Britt in a day how to speak with a Scottish accent.

[LM]
Yes, I went to London, probably to do one of the songs at the same time. Stayed the night at Robin Hardy’s with one of his wives, Caroline. It was the only wife he had it at the time! And one of his sons was there, who I’ve never actually met him again. He was the oldest son. And she made a meal and her old father was there. It was very sweet and welcoming.

Next day we went to work with Britt. Robin was there and he just said, just do it exactly right and see if we can get this lady to copy exactly because she’s foreign. And I couldn’t blame anybody who was Swedish not being able to speak Scots, but she was sweet. And I remember her saying, you’ve been doing theatre. How do you live on? How much money do you get, she said. And I said, at the moment I’ve been getting £20 a week with working for Jimmy Logan. She went £20! How’d you live on that amount of money?

So, she was very sweet. And then we tried it and said ‘Good morning Sergeant’, and she’d go ‘Good morning Sar-jant’. Is that it? Am I getting near? And she’s probably much nearer now than she was then because she was young and still very Swedish.

But at the end of the day, she seemed delighted and said I’ll get to put on my spotlight ‘Speak Scots’. And then, of course, it just wasn’t.

[JB]
Tell me what happened. It didn’t end well, did it, in terms of Britt’s accent?

[LM]
No, it was dubbed. We were all told we’d to keep it a secret.

[JB]
They did not tell Britt Ekland until it was done.

[LM]
I don’t know whether she knew before it went, but she’s taken very little interest. She’s complained over the years. I mean, she put her foot in it right away by complaining about the climate.

Whereas now, last year on 1 May, when they were showing it in London at a cinema in Piccadilly – in Leicester Square – she turned up. And Gary Carpenter, the assistant musical director of the film, who’s still around and writing things, he actually said she was really sweet. He says she got up and she’s able now to have a laugh about it, because I think for many years she just felt cheated of that film.

[SS]
She didn’t get treated well, did she? They dubbed her voice with Annie Ross, Jimmy Logan’s jazz-singing sister.

And of course, there’s the business about the stunt doubles for her. Because on the first night that Sergeant Howie arrives on Summerisle, the landlord’s daughter tries to seduce him and Britt goes into a song and dance number. But there was some nudity involved and understandably she wasn’t keen on that. So, they got a stunt double in. There’s different versions. You hear that she says, ‘oh, my bottom’s not good enough’. I can’t believe that of Britt Ekland, but whatever! They got in somebody who was a different shape. And that was really distracting.

[LM]
Well, it is because suddenly, is this really Britt’s bottom? And Britt herself has said in an interview, ‘my bottom’s not as big as that’. So, she really knew it was happening. But the big mystery is who was the body double? Because two people lay claim to it, possibly because it was filmed with two different people. They didn’t know what was going to work the best against … There was one – that was very openly Gary Carpenter – he maintains Lorraine Peters was the one; whereas somebody in Kirkcudbright told me it was their wife’s hairdresser!

[JB]
You see what I was saying about the bizarre back story to this film?! Let’s get back on track a little then, from lots of bottoms. It was low budget, as we’ve said: big ideas, low budget; shot in real life locations like Plockton and at Culzean Castle. Siobhan, it was made at a very difficult time for the British film industry and for the studios who made it.

[SS]
Yes, the British film industry stuttered through the 1970s and at the time that The Wicker Man was being made, it was largely struggling from lack of tax credits or any sort of support from the British government. The Americans who had come and filmed in the UK in the 60s had all but packed up and gone home.

So, it was a difficult time for the British film industry in general; a particularly difficult time, I think, to be a young director who has never worked on a feature film before. He chose to film in Scotland a story about spring and summer, but shot in October. Freezing! Was it true that you had to suck on ice cubes to stop your breath vaporising and showing up on screen?

[LM]
Apparently, they did. I was in the schoolroom, so I was OK, but yes they did.

[SS]
It can still be pretty cold. I suppose when we’re talking about locations, it’s interesting, isn’t it, that this is a story of going to a remote Scottish island – and the only island you see in this film is the Isle of Skye. When Sergeant Howie’s flying in, you see that dramatic fall away cliff of Skye, and of course you see the old Man of Hoy. But all the locations for this remote island are … the mainland!

[LM]
And fake blossoms all shoved up.

[SS]
Yes, that was in order to make it look summery.

[LM]
To make it look summery. But the beautiful pink stuff that was all over the place, was that in Plockton that that happened?

[JB]
The opening scenes where the aircraft is flying, I think that is the West Highlands certainly. And then when he lands the seaplane, it’s the beautiful scenery of Plockton and its famous palm trees.

So, they did manage to get this rather unusual arthouse-y movie finished at the end of the day.

[LM]
With a brilliant end.

[JB]
With the iconic end again. Poor Edward Woodward. There’s a huge, huge burning. Now, this is the spoiler alert. They stick poor Edward Woodward into a huge wicker man. How tall was it? Do you know, off the top of your head?

[LM]
I mean, massive.

[SS]
Massive. The legs were still standing until about 2006, when a couple of souvenir hunters made off with them.

[LM]
In fact I was given a little piece. I was singing. There was a Wicker thing at the Barbican last year. And I was part of this group, which I can’t remember what we were all called, but it was to do with Summerisle. And this man at the end came up and said ‘this is my final piece of the Wicker Man’s legs’. Because there was a second one that they didn’t need; I don’t know what happened to that. The way it worked with the fabulous sunset and things at the end.

[JB]
So, they burned him to death within the wicker man as the sun set. And it is a fantastic, memorable scene.

[LM]
It was brilliant, wasn’t it?

[SS]
Yes. But it frightened the goat that was in the wicker man, alongside Edward Woodward, so much that he got weed on.

[LM]
Yes. Terrible really!

[JB]
When you saw the cut of the film – and there have been many cuts of it – did you like it?

[LM]
The first time I saw it, not really. I didn’t think it was that impressive because I think it was uneven. There were moments of total brilliance and then there was kind of hammy bits, like a lot of the stuff on the mainland when they were laughing about his sexual prowess and things was so corny and almost embarrassing.

However, all that’s become part of the cult now: the fabulous bits, the bits that are not so. But the fans make very little discrimination about it now. They just think it’s a piece of brilliance, and it was great for Robin because a lot of the people who were actually the film, the cameramen and that, would probably not have such good things to say about Robin. He wasn’t an actors’ director. He just didn’t give you many proper directions.

[SS]
Yes, I think these are the struggles that you’re alluding to, that he wasn’t necessarily experienced in getting a film to work as a community, unfortunately.

[LM]
That’s right, yeah.

[SS]
It was an expensive film for him, not just in terms of budget, but also in terms of emotional and personal cost too, because when they showed it to British Lion, they hated it.

[JB]
These were the studios?

[SS]
This was the studios. It got butchered into an 83-minute version and released as the bottom half of a bill with …

[LM]
Don’t Look Now

[SS]
… with Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie …

[JB]
… which has gone on to become a classic in itself.

[LM]
It was a great film. I just thought that The Wicker Man was a poor relation at that time because they wanted it to be an A feature but it had become a B feature.

[SS]
Because they lost faith in it very quickly, but it was really showing it in America three or four years later.

[LM]
And then it got an award in France as a kind of fantasy film.

[JB]
OK, well, let’s stop there. Before we go on to the afterlife, which is perhaps even more bizarre, can I just take you back to that final scene of the wicker man burning on the cliff edge? Even though the film itself may have had mixed reviews and there were certainly cheesy bits, was that viewed as an iconic ending at the time?

[SS]
Oh yeah, yeah. It goes against everything that you expect from a horror movie, because the people who get punished in horror movies are the people who are sexually active, whereas ironically Edward Woodward stayed a virgin right through to the end. And if he’d only given in to Britt Ekland on his first night, yes, it would be the Wicker Man without the man!

[LM]
But would she have had to be fruitful? They would have had to have been … that was part of it, wasn’t it?

[SS]
There’s always a clause, isn’t there!

[JB]
I’m calling a halt there on a literal cliffhanger for poor Edward Woodward. Let’s take a break, and when we return, we’ll talk about that afterlife of The Wicker Man and how, unlike poor Sergeant Howie, it rose from the ashes.

[MV]
A donation to the National Trust for Scotland, no matter how small, will help to protect the places that make Scotland so special. With your help, we can respond quickly to mountain wildfires or fix damage from winter storms, and we can carry out vital work to ensure historical sites and fragile wildlife survive for future generations.
Just search National Trust for Scotland and click Donate.

[JB]
Welcome back to the Love Scotland podcast. I’m joined by film critic Siobhan Synnot and actress Lesley Mackie, and we are discussing the movie The Wicker Man. Someone somewhere must have offered up a pretty big sacrifice to the gods regarding the fortunes of The Wicker Man because it didn’t become a forgotten B movie of the 1970s. Can you take up the story, Siobhan?

[SS]
Well, it was released in America and got a much more favourable reception. Christopher Lee, who of course doggedly supported The Wicker Man, paid out of his own pocket to go over and support the film. He flew over to America. He went to every dog-and-bone town in America to talk up the film.

But beyond that, people in America felt actually this is a really interesting movie. It says transgressive things, things that we haven’t seen in a movie. One publication called it horror’s equivalent of Citizen Kane. From then on, I think the reputation underwent some revising. Plus of course the stories that Lesley is talking about help feed that myth. I mean, it is as fascinating off screen as it is on screen.

[JB]
It certainly is. Lesley, when did it become a good thing to have on your CV as a young actress?

[LM]
Well, I didn’t even realise it until probably a couple of years ago. My son said: ‘I just asked Alexa who you were!’ And he says, I just said, who is this Lesley Mackie? And Alexa only knew about two things: Judy Garland and Daisy; Daisy Pringle and The Wicker Man, something that had just gone by the end of 72.

[JB]
Because it has to be said, your career did nosedive after Wicker Man … you became an Olivier Award-winning actress playing Judy Garland! So, it didn’t hamper you that much then?!

[LM]
No, I didn't realise really until much later on though. But everybody was asking questions about it, and I thought this is great fun, and last year was just lovely.

[JB]
How did this cult status start to build?

[LM]
Maybe you can answer that one, because how does it happen that suddenly folk were saying this is a piece of brilliance?

[SS]
I think eminent people started to champion it. Christopher Lee and Edward Woodward never gave up on it. And there was the ongoing mystery of where are the missing scenes.

[JB]
Because there’s a story that, according to Christopher Lee, they were being stored at the studios or something like that. And they were built or they were clearing the studios …

[SS]
They were clearing out and they just chucked them away, in those acts of vandalism that seemed to stud the 60s and 70s. When you think about the amount of tapes that the BBC wiped or chucked as well. That seems to have been some of The Wicker Man’s fate.

But they have found material. Yes, they found material in attics and material hidden away, mislabelled. So, The Wicker Man has come back as a restored version. You know that you’re looking at a full-length version if you see a scene with snails mating; that’s your watch word. Because there are, as I said, several versions.

[JB]
You couldn’t make this up! People will be rushing to see this movie!

[SS]
It remains, even in its butchered version, such a fascinating horror movie that’s also a musical, for goodness sake. A movie with Christopher Lee where he doesn’t have fangs. A movie about a remote island that’s shot on mainland Scotland. And a movie with Rod Stewart’s girlfriend in it.

[LM]
And people are still doing documentaries. There’s the Irish man that’s doing his Return to Summerisle; the two brothers Hardy, theirs is just coming out as well – Children of the Wicker Man.

And then Robin went on Wicker-bound for so many years because then he did The Wicker Tree. I was in The Wicker Tree as well and he was about to do Wrath of the Gods. I met him in Perth just before he died, and he said I’ve got another part for you.

He was very loyal to me because the one in The Wicker Tree – this is, sorry, a bit of a diversion but very quick – The Wicker Tree, I’d read the book, he’d done it and it’d been called various things like Cowboys for Christ. The film, they had so many ideas. And then I said, but you’re describing your cook in it as Daisy. It says she’s very chubby. And he said, I’ll get you a fat suit. Now, I had a little fat suit for The Wicker Tree and The Wrath of the Gods. He said you’re going to have to be huge in it. He said you’re called Sister Firebrace. And he says you’ll have a huge headdress to make you huge.

I said, but I’m 5 foot nothing! But Robin – well, I’ll say that for him – had imagination, because directors usually want exactly what their description is.

[JB]
So, was The Wicker Tree going to be a follow-up to The Wicker Man?

[LM]
Yes, unfortunately it was going to be a sort of sequel. It has a very similar story and everything, and it’s got music in it. But you probably know, and you probably saw it, did you? It wasn’t very good.

[SS]
Well, it’s very difficult to go back home again, isn’t it? But you can see how influential The Wicker Man is from the many copycat versions. The fact that Nicolas Cage tried a remake in 2006, which the less said about, the better …

[LM]
There was rage about that.

[SS]
Oh, I can quite imagine. But I suppose, Robin Hardy, who of course died aged 86, to be remembered for any movie, a movie that’s celebrating its 50th anniversary is quite an achievement.

[LM]
He would have loved that.

[SS]
And it was a movie that he sacrificed a lot for. I went to film school with his son, and his son said that it cost him his marriage and it cost him his house. He said ‘my dad came back and said I’m going away for a while; I’m leaving your mother. It’s the film, darling. It’s not done very well. And he disappeared out of Justin’s life for four or five years.

[JB]
And Lesley, when you go to gatherings, screenings of various anniversaries, what do the fans want to know?

[LM]
They know most things. The die-hard fans actually know almost every shot. There’s a man in America who has been over just once, but COVID made him just sit in his place, his room, and he just waits for moments. He sends messages. He sends messages to the other people who are fans and says, I’m trying to trace a shot of this. I found a cast list that was done, and so-and-so was cast in this part, but now it’s somebody else that played it.

He’s totally wrapped up in the film. It’s become his major hobby as he gets older. And so, I think the fans though, in the main, they want to have fun. They’re very nice and friendly. A lot of them make their own costumes, make their own headgear, and they know a lot more than I do.

[JB]
Well, I was chatting to one of the guides at Culzean Castle who was saying there are still groups of people who come, who say ‘can I get into the dining room?’ Can you tell me where this particular scene was shot?

[SS]
Because of course this is Lord Summerisle’s stately pile.

[JB]
And it’s a very impressive grand one. What a stately pile to have. And even at the weekend I was reading one of the Sunday supplements about the actor Matt Smith, his new movie, and it was described as Wicker Man-ish.

[SS]
Yes, it does still resonate. You find people in Kirkcudbright who still remember when The Wicker Man came to town and put all their phallic imagery around town, which they were quite relaxed about, which says great things about the people of Kirkcudbright and Creetown, of course.

[LM]
And folk making postcards. That’s connected. Amanda Sunderland does that in Newton Stewart and has a wee art gallery place where she sells her stuff. She built the wicker man for the 50th anniversary. Not as big as the original, but it was pretty impressive. I don’t know, I just think it’s going to go on. The 50th has revitalised it.

But I just hope these documentaries now, because I’ve never seen the bits and I’ve been interviewed by them both – I think I just have to accept whatever it is that they’ve put in.

[JB]
I think what intrigues me about the movie and having interviewed actors down the years: a job’s a job, and off they go. We’ve heard about Christopher Lee and how he really believed in the film and fought for it, and Edward Woodward was a fan. What is it about it that seems to have gotten under the skin of those who worked on it?

[LM]
Or those who watched it. Well, what’s got under my skin is simply that it’s taken on this fan base. I think it could have just been something … When I married my husband, it was a long time before he said, I’ve just realised I saw you. He said, I remember if I’d been sitting there and if somebody had actually said that is going to be your next wife … ! He said, because I still remember that scene.

[JB]
That scary girl torturing a beetle!

[LM]
He said he wouldn’t have believed it, but I must remember just to say that Gary, the assistant musical director, he’s the one that has been partly responsible for unearthing it. He saved all the music.

[JB]
And the music’s very folky, hippy dippy?

[LM]
Paul Giovanni, he wrote most of it. He was lovely and he sang ‘Gently Johnny’ and he sang ‘Corn Rigs’ – a lovely gentle voice. Sadly, he died in the 80s.

But Gary’s just written a whole new song cycle, which are going to have myth attached to them, like the Giant’s Causeway in Ireland or whatever. And he says they’re based on the type of folky music that was in The Wicker Man, but it’s not The Wicker Man music. They’re going to release an album with the musicians, some of them who were actually in the original. It’s going to be an album of oldies. So, I’m looking forward. I’m doing that from next week with them. I haven’t met anybody that will turn up for 50 years, 51 years in fact.

[JB]
The afterlife goes on and on.

[SS]
Absolutely. Isn’t it funny that this is a film about death and sacrifice and renewal, and it just seems to live on and on?

[JB]
And it was referenced – I only found this out the other day – in the opening ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics during its tribute to British cinema. Well, thank you very much. I think that is a wrap for The Wicker Man. Thank you Lesley Mackie for your memories, and thanks to movie critic Siobhan Synnot for your expert eye.

And thank you for listening. You can visit Plockton in the West Highlands. It’s a true jewel in the Balmacara Estate, and you can lord it up in Culzean Castle in Ayrshire. But make sure you check on the website for the castle opening times.

That’s all from Love Scotland. Please hit the subscribe button so you never miss an episode. We’ll be back very soon. Goodbye.

And if you’d like to find out more about the star-studded career of National Trust for Scotland properties, look out for a previous podcast called Scotland on Screen.

[AR]
Scotland loves an underdog as well. I think there’s lots of great films that have been made about people coming into communities where they might be a bit of an outsider and being maybe treated with a bit of apprehension at first, but then welcomed by a community. I think things like Local Hero are a great example of that. Or I know where I’m going. And I think actually even something like James Bond for Skyfall, which filmed at Glen Etive and Glencoe. James Bond is a kind of loner. He’s a lone wolf in a lot of ways.

[MV]
Love Scotland is brought to you by Think and Demus Productions on behalf of the National Trust for Scotland. For show notes, go to nts.org.uk and don’t forget to like, subscribe, review and share.

Transcript

Five speakers: male voiceover [MV]; Jackie Bird [JB]; Andy Scott [AS]; female voiceover [FV]; Robyne Calvert [RC]

[MV]
Love Scotland, brought to you from the National Trust for Scotland; presented by Jackie Bird.

[JB]
My guest today is an artist who creates on a grand scale. The word iconic is often over-used. For Andy Scott’s work, that description couldn’t be more apt. In the UK, he’s best known as the creator of the Kelpies, a pair of majestic steel horse heads, each standing 100 feet tall and weighing more than 300 tons.

A powerful merger of art and engineering, they evoke the industrial past of their Central Belt location and have become not only a tourist attraction locally, but emblematic of Scotland globally. And heritage is important to Andy. He’s a supporter of the National Trust for Scotland, a past recipient of our Great Scot Award, and as he now lives and works in LA, he’s on the Board of the fundraising NTSUSA Foundation. Not bad for, as he puts it, a welder from Glasgow.

And I’m delighted to say Andy joins me now from his LA studio. Good evening from us, Andy, and good morning to you.

[AS]
Morning to you, Jackie; it’s a pleasure to see you and chat with you this morning. It’s always nice to take a wee break from the welding through there. So lovely to see you and have a wee blether.

[JB]
You’ve warned us we might hear it coming from next door because you’ve moved out of the workshop.

[AS]
Yeah, yeah, I have an old friend Rob is over helping me. Actually, we’re welding a big Clydesdale horse here, so the equine theme continues. But time is money and nothing stops the wheels of industry, so we’ve got to keep working. I apologise in advance if your listeners hear any noise in the background, but there’s some steel getting bashed together through there.

[JB]
There’s always work going on because you are prolific, and we will deal with that. But before we do, you’ve touched on what is going on next door, so to speak. Describe your workshop for me, the scale and what I would see if I was in there.

[AS]
Sure. This is actually the smallest workshop I’ve had. We had to cut our cloth according to the economic conditions. Los Angeles is extremely expensive here for commercial or industrial property, so we actually had to take on a space that’s quite a bit smaller than usual, but compared to others, it’s got a lower ceiling and a couple of other challenges.

But as I say, trying to find a space that was suitable here – I would have ended up having to work an hour’s drive away from home, which I didn’t want to do. Quality of life decision, I guess. We’ve got nice offices here and good access – we’re in a little area of LA called Glassell Park, which is only about 15 minutes’ drive from home. It’s a long way from Maryhill where I used to work, that’s for sure, but it still feels like home.

[JB]
And you say you’ve got an equine piece of work that’s under construction. Is it the case that you’re just working on one thing just now, or are there lots of skeletons all around the workshop?

[AS]
It’s a good question, Jackie. Usually we’ve got 2–3, maybe more, things, all in different stages of process. Right now, there’s a big Clydesdale through there, which really for me, it’s actually a speculative piece that I’ve been working on for a while. It doesn’t have a home yet, but we’ll worry about that in due course. It’s very nearly finished.

Also, in another workshop, we have a gigantic bird, which is due to go to a soccer stadium in Minnesota for Minnesota United – and it is 90 feet across and 30 feet high. And we had to take on another workshop altogether for that one because it’s so big. We also have a couple of smaller things in clay, which we’re going to turn into bronze. And there’s a few other bits and pieces floating about the place, bits of twisted metal beginning to take shape. But the main one at the moment is the big Clydesdale and the small-scale study for the soccer stadium bird.

So yeah, we’re always spinning loads of plates and trying to make a living out in the middle of it all.

[JB]
It sounds amazing. Now, as you’ve described the scale of the work – self-deprecation aside – as a welder from Glasgow, you’re an artist but you’re not sitting in front of an easel. It must be incredibly physical work.

[AS]
It is, which is why maybe this slightly smaller workshop here in LA is maybe no bad thing because I’m getting too old to be scampering up the scaffolding 40 feet in the air! Yeah, it is physical work. To be honest with you, half the time, if I’m honest, I don’t know whether it’s keeping me fit or killing me … but I guess it does keep me fit! You pick up a few aches and pains and injuries over the year, but I’ve got a few big ones left in me and I do quite still enjoy it when it’s going well. And yeah, it’s too late to change now; it’s just what I do.

I do find, and maybe this is relating to getting a wee bit older, that I’m enjoying equally the clay work, which leads to bronze sculptures. It’s a more cathartic and, in some ways, a more gentle way of working and manipulating material for the sculpture. This steel is, even the way I work, it is very unforgiving; it’s a hard, heavy material and everything involves straining yourself to get things moving and all that sort of stuff. But yes, it’s hard work. That’s what I’m here for. I just get on with it and work hard and do my best – I’ve still got that West of Scotland work ethic.

[JB]
Good on you. Well, you probably told this story a million times, but obviously because the Kelpies are so iconic, I have to talk about their inception, of that scope and scale. Firstly, are you fed up talking about the Kelpies?

[AS]
Not at all! In some senses, they’re the gift that keeps giving. Without getting too philosophical, there was a point where I needed to escape them. And now that they’ve been up for 10 years, I’m able to see them with fresh eyes.

They had a strange effect. I’ll go back in time a little bit, in that when they were completed, work dried up for us completely. And that comes as a surprise for people. But they were so huge, they seemed to put off our usual client base. I think people had the perception that we’d moved onto colossal 100ft installations. I remember for 6, maybe 9, months after they were finished, I was sitting in my old workshop in Glasgow with tumbleweeds blowing through the place.

[JB]
That’s incredible!

[AS]
Yeah, it was a little bit dismaying when it happened. Disappointing, but I began to understand why. Pretty soon, things picked up and we got back on an even keel again, and everything worked out absolutely fine. But they were a very, very demanding project and at times extraordinarily psychologically challenging.

And for a while, it was difficult to talk about them. But the benefit of hindsight and this physical distance, as well as time, has made me see them differently, and I guess appreciate more what we actually pulled off there.

And I have to say, and this is the most important thing, the word is WE because it wasn’t just me. There was an incredible team involved, all the way from the client all the way through to the fabrication guys, the engineers, everybody. It was an incredible team, well over 100 people involved. Sometimes, forgive me if you’ve heard me say this before, but I sometimes feel like I’m the centre forward that scored the winning goal in the cup final. There was a whole team behind us that got us there – and I just happened to be the front man because I dreamed them up, I suppose. But there’s a whole team involved, and to go back to my original point, now with the benefit of time and distance, I can see them differently and appreciate them for what they are or what they’ve achieved.

And now I’ve got a renewed passion for them and I’m reborn, as it were, as an ambassador for them. I hate that sounds all a bit metaphysical, but it was a peculiar project to be part of.

[JB]
That’s the LA influence!

[AS]
Good point, I’m getting all hippy here!

[JB]
Tell me about how the Kelpies came about.

[AS]
So yes, to go to your original question, they came about … Scottish Canals, or British Waterways Scotland as they originally were way back 20 years ago, they were aware of my other equine pieces and they got in touch to talk about a potential project, might or might not happen, and was I interested? It was going to be … they gave me the title of the Kelpies, based on that mythological water horse concept, and asked me if I would be interested and come up with some ideas for them.

And there was no money on the table at that point. And I said, yeah, sure, I’ll give it some thought. I took it in a very different direction from the way that they were thinking. One of their chief engineers had a concept for these mythological sea horses, and it was all a bit wifty-wafty and hippy, and Highlands and Glens and all that, which I hasten to add there’s nothing wrong with all that.

But given the location of where they are in Falkirk, in the Central Belt of Scotland, and my own relationship to the Central Belt and to Falkirk – my father was from that town – I just didn’t think that kind of mythological strand really was appropriate. So, I took it in the direction that you now see, which was more based on Clydesdale horses and the role that the heavy horses played in industry and agriculture and most importantly in the canals, because they would have pulled the canal barges.

I took it in that direction. And I’m obviously delighted to say that my colleagues at Scottish Canals embraced it, and we ran with it collectively. And there they are. So, that’s how it came about. And it took a huge leap of faith on the behalf of the client team of Falkirk Council and Scottish Canals to see it through. I mean, it was a big, big …

And the other thing people forget now is that this was all happening at the time of the big financial crash there, 2007/2008. The sheer – I’ve got to pick my words carefully here – the sheer bravado, shall I say, of the client sticking with it, when people were really becoming increasingly tense about big spends. I’m pleased to say the National Lottery also kept the faith, as it were.

[JB]
Were they always going to be on that scale?

[AS]
They were in my mind. Having visited the site several times before anything kicked off, I looked around and realised that in previous things I’ve said, it’s like Scotland’s Big Sky Country. It’s the flat lands of the Carron and the Forth Estuary. They are formerly floodplains, and the Ochil Hills away in the distance. And they really needed, in my mind, to be at least 100 feet or thereabouts to really have an impact on the landscape. Also, there’s that partnership, if you like, with the Falkirk Wheel, which is also of a colossal scale.

And most importantly, as I say, to do with the sight lines and the visual impact, I really was determined that we should create them at that height. And I’m pleased to say my colleagues at Scottish Canals agreed. I should also add though, at various points when people were beginning to get a bit wary and understandably nervous, there was some talk about reducing the scale. But I’m glad to say we drew a line in the sand and stuck with it. And our funders agreed, and there they are now at that scale. It makes sense in the landscape now when you see them there.

[JB]
Is it true that you almost walked away from the project?

[AS]
Yeah, a number of times, yeah. I won’t get into the background of all that, but it was incredibly demanding, honestly. The bigger the project … if I’m going to do hand signals here, which is no good for people listening on our podcast, imagine an exponential rising curve. The bigger the sculpture gets physically, the steeper the hassle factor gets. And what they might call scope creep – the amount of technological and management and bureaucratic and financial hassles that went with it – just went through the roof. And it was an extraordinarily difficult project at times, to the point where the art was being lost in the melee of – again, I’ll choose my words politely – confusion, shall we say! And it was just becoming too much.

I just thought, look, if you’re not going to do this, just can it; let’s all walk away. But mostly thanks to my wife, Hanneke, she kept slapping me about the head and telling me to stick with it. And by then, we also had a great team involved, and we decided to fight our way through. Now, I’m ever so glad we did, obviously. It was very, very demanding. And I’m sure I’m not the only one who would be saying that from the team. But yeah, we did it. We kept there, we kept fighting away and we got there in the end. And it’s become a major triumph, so it was worth it in the end.

[JB]
A major triumph indeed. You must feel very proud of the fact that it’s on the tourist brochures; it’s at the airport whenever you enter the country.

[AS]
It’s a head rush, yeah!

[JB]
Did it ever enter your mind that they could become visual representations of your country?

[AS]
You know what, Jackie? Forgive me if this sounds big-headed in any way, but they kind of did. I wrote this, it must be going back about 20 years now, I did actually write in the initial reports – that if we did this correctly, they could become iconic emblems of the nation. Those weren’t the exact words because, out of the whole team, I was the only one whose actual job, whose business was sculpture, not on that scale but …

And so therefore I had an awareness of what had been happening around the world with other big monumental sculpture works. The first one that springs to mind is Antony Gormley’s Angel of the North, which is a fantastic, very well-known piece. Anish Kapoor had done some very, very big pieces. There’s other huge works around. Because of my background and where I was coming from in the project, I knew that if we got it right, we could be going in that direction.

So, I kind of did. And I don’t mean in any way for that to sound egotistical. It wasn’t about my ego; it was just quite simply because of the size. If we get this right, it’s going to work – and it turns out that they did. But having said that, nothing quite prepares you for arriving at Heathrow Airport and there they are!

I shouldn’t just say Heathrow. Not only did the Great Britain campaign pick them up, so did VisitScotland and they’ve escalated. They brought about some really funny stories though, I can tell you. There’s one time we had some friends from Philadelphia with us. We took them to Cafe Gandolfi in Glasgow, a favourite place. And when we came out of there, there was a Glasgow taxi completely wrapped in the Kelpies, the way they do. These folks are like, ‘did you plan this?’ And of course, the taxi driver, we get in there and the taxi driver was as proud as punch to have me and our guests from Philly were there and it was just hilarious.

But it was one of those lovely things that have inadvertently arisen from the success. Another time we were in Edinburgh, and one of the Edinburgh trams went past and there they were on the side of the tram, with Edinburgh Castle up above them. And it’s like, holy moly, this is really cool.

And even now it’s hardly a day goes by that we don’t see beautiful images of them on social media. People really do seem to have taken them to heart. As you point out, to see them being used by the media in that way really is a real … I don’t know the right word for it; I was going to say head rush, but that’s too simplistic. I do feel tremendously proud. And again, I’ll say it again, not just for me but for the whole team, because a lot of people put a lot of effort into those things to bring it to reality. And it’s an incredible feeling of vindication and of faith.

A very, very humbling experience to see the way that they’ve been used and adopted by Scotland and the UK. It’s amazing.

[JB]
And a vindication of the power of art, because I suppose community artworks – I’m not at all artistic – but as an outsider, if you are a normal artist, so to speak, and you create a painting and someone comes along and buys it, it’s very, very subjective. Or if you make a sculpture. Public art – I don’t know how much of a thick skin you must have, because it’s out there and the audience is as big and as broad as it can be.

[AS]
Yeah, you need broad shoulders. This isn’t a padded T-shirt I’m wearing! You need broad shoulders, you do. It’s a very interesting subject and we could talk for hours about it. But I’ve always, in my approach to the public, I've always had the audience in mind. And I never go about making these pieces for me. I make them for you or for them, whoever the audience happens to be. Other artists, and they’re perfectly entitled to do it, have a much more esoteric and perhaps self-motivated way of making work. But I personally view my challenge as making something for other people. That is the art for me. That’s the skill, that’s the challenge and I really revel in that.

So, I guess that’s some way of explaining why my work is usually, I guess, what you make of more representational – it’s figurative or animal-based. The prime thing for me is that people can relate to it, the mass public of the UK or any country can see them and identify. And then if they look deeper and think about them deeper, they might say, ‘well, wait a minute, why are there two horses? Why are they Clydesdale horses?’ So, there is an intellectual rigour to them below the surface.

But for me, the instant recognition is a very important part of the process. And also, I’ll be honest, the way I put them together with a welded steel technique, and the actual physical fabrication processes, also adds an element of understanding and, I guess, skill and dexterity, which I think people can really relate to. It’s a real buzz for me, especially when steel workers look at my work and pass favourable comment. And, sometimes, like, Oh, good grief, son, how did you do that? That really gives me a thrill! Public art, doing stuff in public, does bring with it many responsibilities.

[JB]
How did you get into public art? Because you went to Glasgow School of Art and studied …

[AS]
I studied sculpture. I did fine art, basically. In first year in those days they would give you a little taste of all the different disciplines within the art school. As soon as I tried sculpture in first year, I thought this is for me. It was more to do, I guess, with the physicality of the material and the labour.

I was joking earlier about that west of Scotland work ethic. It was actually hard work, and it somehow triggered something in me and became a real passion. And so I studied it for three years. I got my degree in the sculpture department and then they asked me if I wanted to do a post-grad. So, I stayed on for another year, which you could call a kind of professional practice, if you like. It was before they had an MA course at the art school. When I did that, that fine-tuned my skill a little bit. I’m pleased to say I sold out my degree show and my post-grad show, which made me think, oh, hang on, I might be able to make a living out of this.

I’ll never forget selling the first wee piece, the first wee sculpture I ever did. I couldn’t afford bronze; they were made of cement when I think back – cement and plaster! And I sold the first piece and I thought I was Charlie Big Time. It was like £350 and I was like, oh, this is it; I’m Rockefeller!

So yeah, that’s how I started. And then for the first few years out of art school, I turned my hand to a whole range of different things, in amongst it all, trying to make sculpture professionally. And then I guess you could say my break, if you call it that, came in ’97. That was 10 years after leaving Glasgow Art School, when I did the big Clydesdale that’s beside the M8 motorway that some of your listeners might be familiar with. And I guess that really was an opportunity for me to say this is what I can do; let’s go for it.

And I’m very pleased to say that local communities, first of all in Easterhouse and then across the Central Belt, also asked me to do pieces for them. It took me into a whole realm of – you mentioned it earlier on – community-based public artwork, which had many of its own challenges. So that’s basically how I got into the public art thing and it snowballed off that big heavy horse piece beside the M8. And, here we are; there’s no planning to it. I wish there was. It doesn’t conform to any business plans or strategies. God knows how many business plans I had to write for perplexed bank managers over the years! But it’s just a rollercoaster. You never know what’s coming next, and it’s too late now to change course. We’ve just got to keep going.

[JB]
Oh, you’re doing not too badly. We will talk about the life of an artist in more detail in a moment. We’re going to take a break. And when we come back, we’ll also talk, Andy, about your admiration for another Glasgow artist, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, and how your lives have become entwined.

[FV]
Downtime. Rare thing these days. So, a family day out, well, that was a real treat. Seen Crathes Castle 100 times but it still gets me. Stunning gardens. Wee ones going daft in the play park. Good for the soul. So, we signed up to support it, as good souls do.

[MV]
Since 1931, the National Trust for Scotland, a charity supported by you, has been looking after Scotland’s treasured places so we can all share in them. Support us at nts.org.uk

[JB]
Welcome back to Love Scotland. My guest today is Andy Scott. So, Andy, as we’ve covered earlier, you sit in your studio with a big fat cigar and you wait for the commissions to roll in.

[AS]
Oh, yeah, that’s it! Yeah. Yeah. But I’m not driving about my Bentley. If only!

[JB]
I’m still very surprised at what you said, that after the Kelpies, your magnum opus and such has been the reaction, that there was nothing after it. But that’s something throughout your career that, reading your biography, you’ve never taken it for granted. You’ve always been out there hustling, hustling for work. Is that an unfair term?

[AS]
Right, you put yourself out there and see what comes in. Yeah, I guess you could say it that way.

[JB]
You’ve never taken it for granted, even though the talent’s there, the reputation – you can see it on the posters.

[AS]
Well, you see, I don’t see it that way, Jackie. For me, it’s just a job. I don’t want to get all metaphysical again; I guess I’m blessed, if you like, that I have those skills or talent. But for me it’s a job. The steel comes in, I transform it and it’s something else. Hopefully somebody pays for it, and I get it on trucks and cranes, and we get it out there.

One of the first jobs I ever had, I was just out of the art school and I used to teach a wee class on Friday afternoons in Govan reminiscence group, over in Govan. And it was all these retired former shipyard workers. It was the most wonderful experience for me working with these old fellas who’d built … the biggest moving objects on the planet Earth had come from the Clyde. And I just loved it. I used to talk with these chaps and I used to say to them: ‘this feeling of pride you must have had when these things went down the slips’. And they were like, ‘No, no really, son. I was just worried about where the next wage was coming from’. And it always stuck in my head. Not that I’m ever going to … I would never dream of comparing myself to the guys that built the ships. But often it is a job of work for me and I never rest on my laurels. I could never do that. You just never know where the next job’s coming from or what it’s going to be.

[JB]
Well, even though, Andy, I clearly have an untrained eye, I think you’ve managed to hit on something because although it’s steel – cold, hard steel – I’m looking at a picture of the Kelpies behind you. And there is an emotion there. There’s a pride. I take it it’s very subjective – people will look at the Kelpies and they will take what they want from it. And that’s not just in your steel sculptures, because I was looking at your other work, and one that really appealed to me – and I suppose it shows the power of sculpture in any medium – is the little elephant that’s in Princes Street. That’s a sad one.

[AS]
Jackie, that was a very intense project to work on, and one of the most humbling experiences I’ve had. It’s difficult even to talk about really. I’m sure many listeners will have heard of the terrible tragedy that we’ll just call the Mortonhall scandal. For those who don’t know, maybe Google it. It’s an uncomfortable thing to discuss, but it’s basically to do with folks who’d lost babies and infants. There was a group of parents, and Edinburgh Council and those parents came to us, Hanneke and myself, and asked us if we would come up with some designs for some kind of memorial tribute to these lost infants and babies.

We went to the meeting in Edinburgh and it was a lovely meeting. And I said, look, what I’ll do is I’ll come up with some sketches for you. No charge at all. If you don’t like what I come up with, then we’ll call it quits and we’ll wish each other all the best and good luck with your quest. So, Hanneke and I went back through to Glasgow and we came up with some ideas. I have to say, Hanneke was very influential in coming up with a design. We struck on the idea of that adage that elephants never forget. And also the idea that the parents spoke about – the siblings. A lot of these lost kids had had brothers and sisters who again got lost in all this adult talk of grief and trauma and sadness.

I really wanted to create something that these little kids could relate to as well. So, it wasn’t just a memorial for the grown-ups. Between that idea of elephants never forgetting and the idea of a lost toy or a forgotten toy, we came up with the idea of what we call Lullaby. Again, for any listeners who haven’t seen it, it’s in Princes Street Gardens in Edinburgh – it’s a baby elephant, a toy elephant, which is about, I'm going to say 8 or 9 feet high by about 12 feet across, 12 feet front to back, cast bronze by our great partners and friends at Powderhall Foundry in Edinburgh.

And there it sits in the gardens. And the response was just fantastic. The parents, we invited them to Powderhall Foundry in Edinburgh to see it being produced and it was very emotional. It was raw and very powerful. And nothing, no amount of art school training or work as a professional artist, can prepare you for dealing with that type of emotion. The experience of having the ability literally at your fingertips to come up with something which has that amount of meaning and emotion for people is something that I still find quite difficult. As you can tell, I find it quite difficult to find the right words for really.

Luckily for me, I’m better with a hammer than I am with words! But anyway, it was a very, very moving project to be involved in. And the end response from the parents and from our friends at Edinburgh Council really was fantastic. One of the things about it, Jackie, is that it works on different levels. You’ll see people walking along and kids will go and play on it and climb on it, which is exactly what we made it for. The kids can enjoy it. And then you’ll see the parents reading the plaque, the dedication plaque. And you see their facial expression change and you can see in the adults this moment of woe – a real deep moment of recognition and sympathy. It’s really quite profound.

[JB]
Another piece that I’m very interested in is a sculpture of yours that I have to confess I did not know existed until I started chatting to you, and that is of Charles Rennie Mackintosh. Now, it’s not in a very public position in Glasgow. It’s quite out of the way, which I think is a bit of a shame. You have a bit of a relationship with Charles Rennie Mackintosh – how did that start?

[AS]
I guess I’m one of probably many tens of thousands now in Glasgow that do feel that relationship. But when I was a wee boy back in the 60s/70s, my dad was a draughtsman and he was very proud of Glasgow and its architectural heritage. I remember we had this poster on the kitchen door, and it was some squiggly lines and colours. I now know this to be a print of the stained-glass window design of the Willow Tearooms. Then, I just thought this was an entrancing weird magical imagery.

And I remember him telling me these stories about this mythical figure of Charles Rennie Mackintosh. He was the greatest architect that had ever lived. That the people of Scotland turned their back on him, and he died penniless in London. He’d got to France, and the seed was planted in my head.

And then as a little kid, I was about 12 or 13, I got into lunchtime classes at art school. My dad used to take me up there, and it was painting and drawing and pretty basic stuff. But I absolutely loved it, being inside that building. It was just an amazing experience.

And it really fired my imagination and my fascination with Charles Rennie Mackintosh and his role in the city and his story, the quite sad story. Somebody in Hollywood should make a movie out of the love story that’s him and Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh. That started the thing. And then of course, as a grown-up going to the art school and being in that building so much and I have to say, like tens of thousands of my fellow students, taking it for granted – given the circumstances that the building is now.

[JB]
After a couple of fires.

[AS]
Oh, my goodness, yeah, yeah. Heartbreaking. That was really my fascination with Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Margaret. And so, I took it on myself to promote or push the idea of a memorial statue of Charles in Glasgow. And it fell on deaf ears. I was a bit full of myself, I guess, and thought, oh, the council will go for it. Absolutely nothing. They weren’t interested. I was hitting my head against a brick wall.

I’d done little maquettes of it on spec, and they were sitting in my office back in the Glasgow studio. And a colleague, a client called Peter Barton, who worked for Sanctuary Housing, a social housing organisation in Scotland, he’d come into my office to talk about something completely different for that location where it now sits. I had out my sketches, and I’m talking him through it all, and he’s looking at him. Peter’s a lovely guy, but he was quite blunt. And he was like, no, Andy, no, no, no, no, rubbish, next, next. And then he’s looking about my office, and he says is that Charles Rennie Mackintosh? I told him the story I’ve just told you. He said, how much would that cost? And I told him the numbers. And he was like, we’ll do it; we’ll find the money and we’ll commission it.

I nearly fell off my seat. I’d kind of given up on it. And then at the very last gasp Sanctuary Housing stepped in and they commissioned it, which is the reason why it’s in that location. It was their big project. They were redeveloping that whole Anderston area, some fantastic architecture. And that’s why it’s in that out-of-the way location. But as the artist, I’m hardly going to be telling them that’s not where they should put it. And there he stands … and he looks along the road there, along towards the art galleries, I guess.

He sits there on his big steel – or his big bronze, I should say – Argyll chair. The nice thing is it’s actually at the corner of Argyle Street and St Vincent Street – so that’s a little bit of relevance. And it was just a lovely job to do. We made it in the Philadelphia studio and had it cast here in the States, and we shipped it across. And there is, at long last, a sculptural tribute to Charles. And yeah, it looks fantastic.

On a more personal level, that was the part of Glasgow that my mother was brought up. So, it was really lovely for her to go back to Anderston and see a sculpture there. Of course, it’s all changed since those days. There was no Kingston Bridge or anything, but it made a lovely family connection, which I’m very proud of. And she was absolutely tickled pink, as you can imagine.

[JB]
I can! That’s a lovely story on so many levels, but, as I said, it’s not in a central location. And as you know, the Trust is now in charge of Mackintosh at the Willow Tea Room, Sauchiehall Street, just a stone’s throw from the art school. What a pity there isn’t anything there.

[AS]
Well it is, but you never know. I’ve got a wee idea up my sleeve. It’s early days; I won’t say too much just now because it might not come to pass.

[JB]
Oh, go on, tell me. You must tell me!

[AS]
I think … well, my big passion is to have Margaret commissioned. Charles himself said that she – I’m going to paraphrase things and say that Charles himself used to say that – Margaret was the brains in the outfit. It’s a bit like me and Hanneke really! I mean, their’s was a love story for the ages, and yet she is sadly largely overlooked. And actually, one of the designs I did for what is now the Charles Rennie Mackintosh statue did have Margaret in it. But the client for the project just simply didn’t have deep enough pockets to commission two; and we were lucky enough that they did him. So, it’s always been in the back of my mind that Margaret really deserves some kind of sculptural tribute somewhere. And then of course, with NTS, as you say, just taking over the Willow, what an amazing opportunity that would be to have Margaret there.

However, I do realise that there’s a tremendous financial implication on that and it requires a great deal of logistics. So, I’ve got another couple of wee things up my sleeve there that we might be able to pull off doing, related to Charles and Margaret. But it’s early days. I think with the absence of the old Mackintosh building there up the road on Renfrew Street, I think that some kind of symbolic emblem on Sauchiehall Street, so that people know that the Willow’s there. Something that really points people to the Willow because it’s a beautiful building inside and it’s absolutely gorgeous. It’s stepping back in time; it’s fantastic. So, I was so thrilled personally when I found out NTS were going to be taking over that building. And yeah, it just continues my own association with NTS and also with Mackintosh and his legacy. And hopefully one of these days, Margaret will get the recognition that she’s due too.

[JB]
Are there any projects, apart from Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Margaret, that you would love to try out? Do you ever get the chance to do something for yourself? I know you said initially you’ve got something out there that you’re working on that hasn’t been commissioned, but what about doing something for you? Do you ever get the chance to do that? Or are you just working so hard, you’re running so hard to keep up?

[AS]
I guess I’m running, so that’s the way to describe it. You’re running, spinning so many plates or running so hard. I’m sitting here at my desk. I’ve got sketch books all over the place full of little ideas. But, I hate to sound overly pragmatic, you’ve got to pay the bills. You’ve got to feed the beast, and I’ve never really got the time – which I guess is a nice position to be in – but I’ve never really got the time to sit back and fully develop.

This Clydesdale I mentioned at the beginning of our chat that’s in the workshop here, it’s taken 2½ years to get it to this stage! These things don’t just appear overnight. So, in an ideal world, it’d be great to have a few of my own projects taken to fruition. But just now, as I said earlier, I see my art as satisfying the client and the public and the audience for these works. I’m very happy that – I’m very honoured that – I even could still make a living out of that.

[JB]
Well, you’ve certainly done that. Andy, thank you so much for your time and just giving us an insight into the fact that it’s not all sitting back and waiting for the work to come in. You worked very hard for your success, and you’ve been rewarded obviously in terms of global recognition, so long may it continue.

[Whispers] And let’s hope the Charles Rennie Mackintosh or Margaret thing comes to fruition.

[AS]
Yeah, we’ll see. We’ll see. We’ll keep that. We’ll definitely start spinning that plate.

[JB]
Well, thank you so much for your time. Lovely to chat to you. We’ll let you enjoy your day in the sunshine.

[AS]
Thank you very much, Jackie. All the best. Thank you very much. Cheers. Bye bye.

[JB]
Bye. That’s all from this edition of Love Scotland. I’ll be back with another very soon. And like the National Trust for Scotland, our subjects cover the gamut of history, heritage and nature. If you hit the subscribe button, you’ll never miss an episode. From me, for now, goodbye.

And if you’d like to learn more about the influence of Margaret Mackintosh on her husband, search out a previous Love Scotland podcast: The Untold Story of Margaret Mackintosh.

[RC]
For the Vienna Exhibition, there’s photographs of some of the works – the May Queen gets sent. And on the back of the photograph in his handwriting, he says ‘designed and executed by Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh’. Which I think is really important because, since those days, some scholarship has perhaps suggested that she didn’t actually design the work, that she just made it. She was a maker, but he wrote it – so I don’t know how we can argue with that.

[MV]
Love Scotland is brought to you by Think and Demus Productions on behalf of the National Trust for Scotland; presented by Jackie Bird. For show notes and more information, go to nts.org.uk and don’t forget to like, subscribe, review and share.

Transcript

Nine speakers: male voiceover [MV]; Jackie Bird [JB]; Colin McLeod [CM]; Jack Conkie [JC]; second male voiceover [MV2]; four visitors [V1, V2, V3 and V4]

[MV]
Love Scotland; presented by Jackie Bird.

[the sound of a printing press]

[JB]
What you’re hearing is a piece of our industrial heritage. This is the Wharfedale Cylinder Press. Now, the name might not mean much to most of us, but what it did was vital to everyday life in Victorian Britain. This particular Wharfedale is hard at work in the High Street of the Borders town of Innerleithen, just as it was nearly 150 years ago, as part of Robert Smail’s Printing Works.

The shop fronts around may have changed down the years, but the old-world lettering above Smail’s gives a hint that inside is a time capsule: the UK’s oldest functioning letterpress printworks. It’s also crammed with Victorian and Edwardian memorabilia.

The importance of printing in bringing knowledge to the masses can’t be overstated; it was the intellectual Big Bang. The first modern printing press was invented in the 1400s, and by the time Smail’s was founded in 1866, its books, posters, newspapers, postcards and pamphlets were the only methods of commercial communication. Every developing town had to have its own printworks, and Innerleithen, with its burgeoning textile trade, was no different.

In the 1980s, after the discovery of the treasure trove that lay behind its still-Victorian facade, Robert Smail’s was saved by the National Trust for Scotland. It’s still a functioning printworks and I joined one of its regular tours to enjoy the visitor experience.

[CM]
So, welcome to Robert Smail’s. Basically, Robert Smail’s was a printers that stayed in the same family for three generations. It’s originally started by Robert Smail who came to Innerleithen in 1857. At that point he opened a shop just round the corner there.

I’m Colin McLeod and I’m a printer here at Robert Smail’s.

[JB]
So, what have we got here, Colin?

[CM]
These are our guard books. What a guard book is whenever they printed a job, they would stick a copy into one of these books. And they were doing this from 1875 right through to 1956.

[JB]
So, everything that’s been printed in Smail’s has been retained?

[CM]
Yes, because even after 1956, although they were no longer sticking them into these books, they still kept a copy around the office. So yeah, we do have an original copy of every job Smail’s have printed from 1875 onwards.

[JB]
What a revelation that must have been!

[CM]
It’s great. The social history they found here is absolutely amazing.

[JB]
You’ve got one in front of you. OK, show me some of the highlights from this. What sort of things do we see?

[CM]
Woollen mills, easily their biggest customer, kept them going to 1986, to be honest.

[JB]
There was also a newspaper printed here.

[CM]
There was, yes, and that was called St Ronan’s Standard, An Effective Advertiser. And they were printing that from 1893 until 1916 and it was called the St Ronan’s Standard, An Effective Advertiser. There was a print run of about 700 copies per week. It was a 4-page newspaper as well.

[JB]
And the sort of things that would have been in – I see the front page is typical of newspapers of its time because it’s full of advertisements. And there’s a reason for that.

[CM]
Yes, the reason for that is because if you wanted to read any news and gossip which was on the inside of the newspaper, you actually have to buy the newspaper.

[JB]
Ha, ha! Very clever. And there was gossip. Let me have a look. If you turn the page, there was a column. Ah, here we are. Here we are. The St Ronan’s Standard. You’ve got advertisements for local shops. You’ve got the … It’s such close-set type, isn’t it? The words are astonishing. It shows you how much we rely on pictures these days.

[CM]
Yes. I mean, the paper was very expensive so they were trying to use every millimetre of it as they could; just cram it all in.

[JB]
And there’s a column here called ‘Local Intelligence’. What was that?

[CM]
Basically, hot local gossip.

[JB]
It’s a posh way of saying ‘this is for nosy parkers’. If you want to know what’s going on …
Let me try and read a bit: ‘The new Liberal club. During the forthcoming weekend, a conspicuous event in the history of Liberalism in the town takes place.’
It’s not the sort of gossip I’d like to read, but it must have done its job.

[CM]
It’s not very entertaining, is it?!

[JB]
What have you got down here? You have a shipping agency advertisement. What was that?

[CM]
Well, that advert there, that appeared in the vast majority of the newspapers. And as you say, it’s a shipping agency, but it’s for R C Smail’s. Smail’s were also a shipping agency in the early 20th century, booking customers who were normally emigrating to places like Canada, America, South Africa. Companies like White Star, Dominion, etc. We’ve actually got an original docket for every customer that ever booked passage from here as well.

[JB]
Incredible. Do you ever get descendants of people who’ve taken those trips coming here to try to find out some more?

[CM]
Yes! In the past we have had family members get in touch with us or come see us about dates, times, etc.

[JB]
They can see when and how their family, their fathers, their grandfathers travelled to America, the New World, wherever. This is an absolute treasure trove, as you say, of social history.

[CM]
It’s absolutely amazing what they found here.

[JB]
And what are your particular highlights?

[CM]
The posters, to me. Being a printer, I get drawn into the print of it all. We’ve just seen things that were going on at the time – certain posters like this one here that’s raising funds for the Boer War in South Africa, things like that.

[JB]
And what’s the reaction of visitors when they realise that this treasure trove exists?

[CM]
They’re normally shocked. They don’t appreciate what was actually found here.

[JC]
My name is Jack and I’m the compositor at Smail’s.

[JB]
Tell me about Robert Smail who started all of this.

[JC]
Robert Smail came to Innerleithen in the 1850s, and he actually started off with a shoe shop – that was on Hall Street in Innerleithen. But his brother, who was called Thomas Smail, already ran a printworks in Jedburgh. When the textiles industry started off in Innerleithen, Robert Smail realised there was an opportunity for him to make money from the printing trade as well.

[JB]
And Innerleithen was something of a boomtown then?

[JC]
It was considered to be a boomtown at the time because it expanded really rapidly. There were multiple textile mills. It was tweed, and they also made cashmere, and there was a silk mill as well. And so it started off as basically like a really, really small town, just based around the wells. And then in the 1860s it expanded really fast, partly because of the textiles industry and also because of the railway.

[JB]
I think it’s difficult for anyone born into an age post-computers to understand how important the printed word was.

[JC]
Yeah, nowadays it’s really, really fast to communicate via text. We do a lot of typing now, typing emails. But originally it would take … you’re setting each letter by hand, you’re maybe considering what you’re having printed a bit more. It doesn’t just shoot out of the laser printer.

[JB]
So, what was Robert Smail like? He was obviously a canny businessman.

[JC]
We don’t know a whole lot about Robert Smail, but his son who was called Robert Cowan Smail, we’ve got quite a lot of info on him. He was in charge of the printworks from the late 1800s, around 1890, which is when Robert Smail died, up until around the 1950s. It covers the whole turn of the century period. He did things like expand the business into being basically a travel agents. We were post office for a while, and then it was during that time period that they started the newspaper as well. So he added a lot of extra facets to the business.

[JB]
This must have been the heart of the entire community.

[JC]
In a way, yeah, because everybody needed stuff printed. And then we also had the stationer’s shop. Smail’s used to be known as the shop where you could buy anything. It was actually basically a gift shop, which is quite useful for us now as part of the Trust – it justifies it being a gift shop because that’s what it was originally.

And then they also sold books. They carried on selling shoes, they sold fishing tackle. And then they sold what they called fancy goods, which is your gifty stuff. Even up until the 1980s, people used to go in there to buy their comic books, buy stationery; you’d buy all of your pencils and rubbers for school. There’s still people around that remember getting stuff from the Smail’s shop.

[JB]
In terms of the machinery needed here, they clearly kept abreast with what was an ever-changing market because they kept up to date as print evolved.

Ah, you’re laughing! To a point – why is that?

[JC]
The kind of letterpress printing that we use here is basically the oldest kind. It’s what you call handset letterpress, which is where you set each letter in place by hand, and that’s how they would have printed things like the Gutenberg Bible or the sort of books that Caxton printed.

[JB]
That was in the 1400s/1500s!

[JC]
The basics of the typesetting stayed pretty much the same until you move on to type casting machines in the 1890s. We never got that far. We stuck with handset letterpress the entire time. The only innovations are really with the actual presses that print the type.

But our most modern press is 1950s, and the oldest one that we still print with is 1880s – 1886.

[JB]
So, what you’re trying to say …

[JC]
You move backwards and forwards in time depending on the job.

[JB]
OK. The industry was evolving and Smail’s kept up to date to an extent, but any massive capital investment perhaps wasn’t for them.

[JC]
Yes, yeah.

[JB]
OK, you’re a compositor. What is a compositor?

[JC]
Closer to being a graphic designer now, I would say. Although it does have a practical side as well, like a typesetter might also be this thing. You basically set the type.

[JB]
We’re in a workroom just now, and around the walls are cases of letters of every shape and size. And these are the letters that were hand laid onto …

[JC]
It’s called a composing stick. It’s quite difficult to visualise, but it looks almost like a little small metal tray with three sides. And so you can place the type into that little box and it gives you a place to hold it. You’re not going to drop it.

[JB]
And the letters were individually put on, one at a time, by hand. Backwards and upside down. Have I got that correct? And that was hand done by how many people would have worked in here at its peak?

[JC]
Here it was 6. You had 6 trained compositors and then you would have 4 apprentice compositors; and then we had 4 printers and 4 apprentice printers. The printer and compositor jobs were very separate, and they were separate apprenticeships as well.

[JB]
Apart from the textile industry, which was booming at the same time, this must have been a good place to work and it must have been pretty good in terms of local employment.

[JC]
At the peak of the business, that’s around 1900, they employed around 18 people because you would have your printworks staff. You also had to have office staff to do the administration and then you had shop staff as well. And then they would employ paperboys and all that kind of stuff as well. So, it was quite a big employer.

[JB]
We had Robert Smail, who founded it. Then we had Robert Cowan Smail, his son. And that, would you say, was during these peak years, the boom years, the early 20th century. What happened then?

[JC]
Because the kind of letterpress that we use is so old-fashioned, it becomes increasingly not cost-effective. It takes quite a long time to set up. And compared to more modern methods like offset, litho, all that kind of stuff, that are a lot faster and so they’re therefore cheaper. And then you can also print multiple colours with the more modern methods. The key thing that really killed letterpress was the inability to do 4 colour. When people started wanting more images, photographs, that kind of stuff reproduced, we really couldn’t do that.

By the time you get into the mid-20th century, by 1986 say, there wasn’t enough work coming in here to support that big group of staff. And eventually it was just Cowan Smail here, working by himself.

[JB]
Really? So even though the family owned it, and it must have been immensely successful and very lucrative, Cowan stayed a printer.

[JC]
Yes. He actually did an apprentice as a compositor, because even at that point it was still completely separate apprenticeships. But because he owned the business, he could do whatever he wanted. He learned how to use the machines as well, which meant that by the time the business was right at its end, he was setting all of the type and then printing it himself. And by that point he was really printing local traditional stuff – stuff to do with the Border Games that happens here every summer – or jobs for individual people, other small local businesses that would have been having stuff printed here for decades already. They just kept with the same printer.

[JB]
Eventually times became hard. They hadn’t caught up with the newest innovation. Orders started going. Then what?

[JC]
Cowan Smail would outsource some of his printing jobs. If people wanted stuff printed offset, he would go to printers in Edinburgh. They would print the job and then he’d add like 2% profit on top. And that’s how he kept going with that stuff. And then by the time you get to 1986, he was 76 years old and he just decided he was ready to retire. He didn’t have any children to leave the business to, so he just put the whole building up for sale.

[JB]
And I understand it was just a stroke of luck that people who were interested in heritage and retaining heritage stumbled across the building and its contents?

[JC]
It was the Ephemera Society. They’re dedicated to the preservation of the written and printed word. Their logo is Samuel Pepys, and he quite famously collected chapbooks and little printed ephemera. They’re inspired by that. Their founder was a guy called Maurice Rickards. He was here on holiday, I think, and there was a closing down sale sign in the shop window. And he recognised it as having been letterpress printed with quite an old typeface. And so he came into the shop to have a look around and realised that all of the archive material was still here, all of the equipment was still here.

He rescued some of the archives. He took them to Memorial Hall across the road, and then he got in touch with the National Trust for Scotland to ask if they were interested in rescuing the building, otherwise everything would have been chucked out.

[JB]
How wonderful! Standing in this compositing room, I would presume Jack, this really hasn’t changed for about 100 years. Would I be correct?

[JC]
Yeah, pretty much.

[JB]
And you really think we can hear the wind whistling through the rafters. But the fabric of the building, a lot of money was spent preserving it. And it’s just so wonderful to see everything in its place as it would have been a century ago. And for you working here, what does it give to you? What does it bring?

[JC]
It’s quite an unusual job, I think. It’s usually quite difficult to explain to people what I actually do, but I work up here by myself, so I have the whole room to myself most of the time, which is really nice.

[JB]
And do you feel history on your shoulder? Do you feel all the many compositors who’ve come before you?

[JC]
Yeah, and you feel quite responsible for the place as well – you’re careful with the type and the equipment. You don’t want to be the person that breaks that one letter that’s been around for 100 years.

[MV]
Love Scotland; brought to you from the National Trust for Scotland.

[MV2]
Impressive. For a moment I thought she was talking about me. I meant Falkland Palace, she said with a smile. Course you did. The art, the architecture … Scotland’s history can really turn your head. So, we signed up to take care of it; keep it looking dapper.

Since 1931, the National Trust for Scotland, a charity supported by you, has been looking after Scotland’s treasured places so we can all share in them. Support us at nts.org.uk

[JB]
A visit to Smail’s is a hands-on experience, and for one of our group today, a former printer, it was a trip down memory lane.

[V1]
I think it was absolutely brilliant nostalgia. Just take me back to 1965! And the stuff they have here, which I know is a lot earlier, but I’m afraid we had the same. It’s really good.

[JC]
All of the type is stored in these cases. We’ve got about 450 of these in the building. The capitals go in the upper case, the lowercase go in the lower case, and that’s where those terms come from. Originally, you would learn the lay of the case basically by feel. So, you’re setting the type a bit like touch-typing without really looking at your hands. You were supposed to set around 2,000 characters an hour, which is something like one every two seconds! But your apprenticeship was originally 7 years, so it’s a lot of time to practise.

When they started using this kind of letterpress type in Europe, it was around 1450 and they were working in Latin. You’ve got an I instead of a J and a V instead of a U. And then it took about a 100/150 years for them to become separate letters. Our paper was weekly, so you do have a couple of days to get it all set. And you would have 6 compositors working here, so you could split the jobs up between everybody. If you’re trying to print a daily newspaper, you just multiply the number of compositors. There are pictures of, I think, the Scotsman newspaper, and you can just see rows and rows of cases of type with everybody working on the paper at the same time.

And then when they started using faster methods like type-casting machines, things like Linotype caster, Monotype caster, both have keyboards and so you could type the page – and you can type a lot faster than you can hand-set. That meant you had to have less people. So, it would save you some money. I am going to let you guys have a go in a minute.

[JB]
The C doesn’t look back to front, but the ridge is there.

[JC]
Yeah, no, that should be fine.

[JB]
Is that OK?

[JC]
Yes, that’s perfect!

[JB]
Do you see things back to front now? You can read back to front.

[JC]
Sometimes you do, writing by hand.

[JB]
It’s extraordinary.

[V2]
That’s absolutely fascinating. Both the technical history of all the machinery, but just also the social history of everyone’s lives that’s been reflected in the things that have been printed here. That’s brilliant.

[JB]
After minding our Ps and Qs as compositors, it’s time to see the big beasts of the machine room.

[CM]
You’ll start off slowly, over time getting a bit faster and faster.

[JB]
If you had to give me a whistle-stop tour of the machinery around here, in order what would it be?

[CM]
Over here we’ve got our Arab clamshell platen press. We’ve then got one of our Falcon safety presses. And just behind me here we’ve got our Wharfedale Reliance stop cylinder press, or to us just the Wharfedale. And then tucked away over the corner there, we’ve got our original Heidelberg. We went from 1850 all the way up to 1954 with the original Heidelberg.

[JB]
The demonstration you gave us of the clamshell – have I got the name correct? – one of the earliest ones, was absolutely terrifying. The coordination needed, the hand–eye coordination was incredible. And the concentration. How long would someone have worked at that?

[CM]
Well, original letterpress apprenticeship was 7 years. Not so much that it took 7 years, but it did take several years to get very efficient. As you say, eye–hand coordination, because these machines were actually quite notorious.

[JB]
That’s got a sort of treadle, which you operate with your foot, and what are your hands doing at that time?

[CM]
One hand placing one sheet into the bed of the machine, while your other hand is taking the sheet you’ve just printed back out.

[JB]
And how many were you supposed to do in an hour?

[CM]
On the treadle-powered versions you’re doing about 700/800 per hour. If it was a fully powered machine, you were expected to do about 1,200 sheets per hour.

[JB]
And if you lost your concentration for just a second …

[CM]
Yeah, as I said, the machines were very notorious because the print was getting done between two flat metal beds. Very easy to lose your fingers on these machines.

[JB]
And is that what happened on, I dare say, a regular basis?

[CM]
Yes, it was quite a common thing. There was actually a saying originated from these machines and that’s ‘to come a cropper’. It was named after one of the machines that was called a cropper, a flatbed.

[JB]
But apprentices started on that, and they were only 14 years old?

[CM]
Yes, apprentices were 14 years old; that’s where the 7 years comes in. It’s because an apprentice could not earn a full adult wage until he was 21.

[JB]
And what was it like to be a printer in the mid-19th century? Was it a good job to have?

[CM]
It was a very well-paid job, and it did tend to go in families. If your father was a printer, you tended to follow in his footsteps.

[JB]
Watching you take us through all the machinery here, it’s almost like the Industrial Revolution in microcosm, because you start off with a lot of human force and maybe two or three operators – to the last machine, which is the Heidelberg, where, as you said during your demonstration, you could practically sit by and have a cup of tea.

[CM]
Not far off it, yeah. Once it’s set up properly, as you say, you sit back, have your cup of tea. Early machines, you might even have two people running the machines. But on that Heidelberg in the corner, it’s just one – a great machine.

[JB]
And the people who come here, we had a chap on the tour that I’ve just taken who was a printer, and he loved every second of it. What’s the general reaction?

[CM]
Most people do. They absolutely love it. The reaction we get here is absolutely amazing. Even people that don’t know about the printing, they absolutely love it.

[V3]
It was interesting to think what it must have been like to work in a place like that. Just watching that first machine we saw, which required such coordination not to chop your own fingers off, and just thinking people would be doing this 10 hours a day.

[V4]
It was just great to see the skills that have been preserved, seeing the people working here now doing exactly the same physical movements and that they’re using the same knowledge that you needed to work that machinery 100 years ago.

[CM]
I mean, that’s what makes Smail’s unique, because we’re the oldest commercial letterpress printers in the UK, still on its original site. All the machines here, they do still work. We can print on every machine here, which is unique.

[JB]
Oh, I think it’s super and long may it continue for, well, another 150/60 years.

Tours of Smail’s print shops end in late October, but there are workshops over the autumn/winter seasons. You can find more details on the website.

And that’s all from this edition of Love Scotland. As ever, the National Trust for Scotland can preserve our heritage because of your membership and donations. Thank you. Until next time, goodbye.

[MV]
Love Scotland is brought to you by Think and Demus Productions, on behalf of the National Trust for Scotland; presented by Jackie Bird. For show notes and more information, go to nts.org.uk and don’t forget to like, subscribe, review and share.

Transcript

Six speakers: male voiceover [MV]; male singer [MS]; Jackie Bird [JB]; Gerry Carruthers [GC]; Chris Waddell [CW]; David Purdie [DP]

[MV]
Love Scotland, brought to you from the National Trust for Scotland; presented by Jackie Bird.

[MS]
There’s nought but care on ev’ry han’, in ev’ry hour that passes, O
What signifies the life o’ man, An’ ‘twere na for the lasses, O.

[JB]
Robert Burns, the ploughman poet, born in 1759, died in 1796 aged just 37, but whose work during that short life resonates down the centuries. His words have inspired and influenced an incredibly diverse group of people, from William Wordsworth to Bob Dylan, Martin Luther King to J D Salinger, Abraham Lincoln to Nick Patrick, a NASA astronaut who took a book of Burns poetry into space. But who inspired and influenced Burns himself?

No matter how great the talents of an individual, there are always people, places and moments that feed into that genius. Well today, in an effort to cast some light on that, I’ve brought together a couple of people extremely well versed not only in the poetry of the Bard, but on his life and times.

Gerry Carruthers is Professor of Scottish Literature at the University of Glasgow, who has researched and written more pieces of work on Robert Burns than this podcast, quite frankly, has time to list. So, take my word for it! Is that a fair enough description, Gerry?

[GC]
That’s very kind. Thank you.

[JB]
He's joined by Chris Waddell, Learning Manager at Robert Burns Birthplace Museum, which is run by the National Trust for Scotland. The museum is not only the premier place to visit to get the overarching story of Burns’s life, but is a treasure trove of more than 5,000 Burns artefacts, including handwritten manuscripts and – a quote from Chris himself – ‘a pair of Burns’s scabby old socks’. Although you do add, Chris, that if your old socks are in a museum 250 years on, you must have made your mark! Have you examined said pair of socks?

[CW]
Intimately, yes, and they’re very scabby indeed, but they have the hint of celebrity about them. Absolutely.

[JB]
But very, very special. So, the premise of our chat today is loose, gentlemen. I asked you to give me a handful of names that you believe influenced Robert Burns. And from you I got some other poets, I got family members, I got educators. Again, a very diverse group. So, before we start, are any of those names acknowledged as influences by Burns himself, or are they results of retrospective analysis of his life and output? Gerry?

[GC]
I think, Jackie, you can find traces of all the names that Chris and I have given you in the work mentioned, or you can find direct lines of influence in other ways. In some cases, what we’re talking about is correspondence with people that’s now a bit lost, so we wish we had more. For instance, William Tytler, the man who basically schools Burns in Jacobite-ism, we pretty certainly know there is correspondence lost between the two; and if we had that correspondence, we would clearly know a lot more. William Tytler is the man who makes Burns think that the Scottish muses are all Jacobites, as he more or less says. And he is the man who, for instance, writes a book justifying Mary, Queen of Scots, who had been vilified as a female, a Stuart, the despotic Queen, a Catholic. And the revisionism that follows on, especially from Tytler, feeds into Robert Burns, Walter Scott, Frederick Schiller and indeed the kind of iconicity that we have with Mary today.

There’s one wee line where a historian, a lawyer, a song collector is a big influence on Burns and makes an impact on his creative output and his, if you like, Jacobite mentality, because people often wonder, where does that come from? Burns is a Presbyterian boy – how can he be a Jacobite? He makes that choice personally, but there are influences like Tytler and others who make him the Jacobite that he becomes, so to speak.

[JB]
Chris, what’s your view on the sources of the names that you have provided?

[CW]
As Gerry says, a lot of these are names that crop up in letters, but they crop up in poems as well. I mentioned Fergusson and Ramsay because they’re hugely important to Burns. They’re often thought of as a bit of a triumvirate, with Ramsay coming first. And there’s a bit of overlap between the three lives, then Fergusson in Edinburgh and then Burns following on.

And these are three guys who in many ways helped to preserve the Scots language at a time where it’s under threat because of the great political machinations of the 18th century. There’s a movement in Edinburgh contemporaneous with Burns where people are actively hoping to excise the Scottish-isms from their mode of speech. Hume was one of them. And yet here we have Burns lionised when he goes to Edinburgh in 1787 for using that very language and a very popular form of poetry. He’s standing on the shoulder of significant giants, Ramsay and Fergusson.

[JB]
Let’s talk a wee bit more about because we’ve already thrown three names into the mix, some of whom may be known to our listeners and some not. So, let’s talk about the poets that we’ve discussed. Allan Ramsay: now, he was dead before Burns was born. How and when would Burns have come across him?

[CW]
Well, Ramsay was genuinely very popular. There’s a thing about these three poets that’s been mentioned to me by a number of contemporary poets – they would love to have had the notoriety nowadays that Burns, Fergusson and Ramsay had in their own lifetimes. Ramsay sets out in, I have to say, a very prosaic way. He starts life in Leadhills. He goes to Edinburgh. He’s a wig maker and then a bookshop owner. But he starts to compose poetry. He’s the guy who really popularises the Habbie stanza – this stanza that’s the very heart of Scottish poetry. This wonderful rhythmic stanza that’s used again by Fergusson and ultimately by Burns to a degree, that eventually becomes known as the Burns stanza.

But Ramsay uses Scots, and he’s thoroughly unashamed of its use.

[JB]
Although Ramsay became a very successful wig maker, and we talked about Ramsay because he’s also the father of the portraitist Allan Ramsay, but he was lowly born. Is that something that Burns felt they had in common?

[GC]
It might be, but I think what’s really going on, Jackie, is that Burns in 1782 in Irvine is looking for an influence. At this point he’s largely writing poetry in English, but sometimes songs in Scots, and he discovers the poetry of Robert Fergusson. He already knows Ramsay and he thinks there’s Fergusson influenced by Ramsay. Ramsay is the governor. He’s the kind of godfather of Scots poetry, as Chris is indicating. But Fergusson in some ways is a miniaturist, writing more spectacular miniature pieces. Burns discovers Fergusson, begins to write in Scots in poetry from his discovery of Fergusson, and then increasingly reads back to Ramsay and finds also that Ramsay’s a song collector, which is a big influence again on the song collecting.

And the other thing that goes on there that’s very important is religion. Because Burns, he’s got form for speaking out against what he sees as the hardline Calvinists; both Ramsay and Fergusson have got that. And Ramsay does it in the context of Edinburgh where he’s against the Whigs. He’s the man who establishes the first real post-Reformation theatre in Edinburgh – doesn’t last long because the Calvinists don’t like it. He encourages portrait painting, including his son. In other words, he wants Scotland to be inculturated with poetry, with song, with painting, because, rightly or wrongly, he reads it as a puritanical place.

[JB]
So, tell me more about Fergusson, because Fergusson was a contemporary of Burns, who died at a terribly young age, 24?

[GC]
Robert Fergusson is a man who is schooled at the University of St Andrews and he comes out actually of a North East tradition – goes to school in Dundee. And the Scots poetry revival in men like Ramsay and Fergusson is associated as often as not with Episcopalians and Catholics and Jacobitism – and Burns is the man who makes it Presbyterian. Fergusson in some ways has more formal schooling than Burns, but Burns clearly identifies with him – ‘my elder brother in misfortune; my elder brother in the muse.’

And Burns, being a wee bit solipsistic at times, thinks ‘there’s a young dude that was writing poetry and dies tragically young; that’s a bit like me’. And he says that Fergusson and also Ramsay are guys he would like to aspire to. And it’s partly genuine. And it’s partly not genuine because ultimately Bums is a much better poet.

But it’s a modesty topos where they become part of his calling card and part of the context where he breezes into Presbyterian Ayrshire with his first collection and says, ‘right, we’re now going to do the Jacobite Scots poetry thing’. That’s part of the reason that a lot of people are quite hostile to Bums until the end of the 19th century, until they’re suitably able to forget about all those other denominational influences and begin to earth the Scots poetry revival as Presbyterian.

[JB]
Chris, did you want to add anything about Fergusson’s influence?

[CW]
Yeah, just that it’s massively important. Gerry mentions that North East influence and of course there’s an influence of that on Burns as well – his father is from Kincardineshire and the Mearns, Burns’s father. So, he hears the speak of the Mearns in his house in Alloway as he’s growing up. So, there’s this strong thread of a Doric influence going through both of them, even though Fergusson largely grows up in Edinburgh and Burns grows up in Ayrshire. They have this strong background in Aberdeenshire. And that brings with it, as Gerry points out, a whole raft of issues, not least issues that are political and religious as well as linguistic.

[JB]
Was Burns influenced by any female poets or writers?

[GC]
He’s not particularly influenced by any female poet. We’re talking Ramsay, Fergusson on the English side; we’re talking Milton, Dryden, Pope, more than any female. But what I would add in there, which is why I’ve chosen Lady Don, is that Burns has got a very astute sense of the intellectual females around him to whom he can send work, and they can help him finesse it, critique it, etc. The obvious person here is his confidante Mrs Dunlop, for instance. So, there’s a whole bunch of women where – I’m not quite claiming a feminist Burns, although I would almost go down that line – Burns likes talking to females with brains. He’s not remotely sexist in that sense.

[JB]
You mentioned religion a lot, and it does figure a lot in Burns’s work. And his father, is that where it came from? His father was, I think, Chris, in the information that you gave me, you say his zealous Presbyterianism both influenced and indeed caused friction with his son.

[CW]
Absolutely. Burns, like most of the people in that part of Scotland at that time, is a subscriber to the Kirk, to the Church of Scotland; it’s largely unavoidable. It’s this massive powerhouse institution that finds its way into people’s everyday lives, not least through things like the Kirk session, these kangaroo courts that are set up.

But Burns very early on starts to lock horns with the Kirk in a way that feeds into a lot of the scurrilous stuff that people love about Burns: the sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll. I could just point out there were no actual drugs and rock ‘n’ roll, but there was a moderate amount of sex. And Burns finds himself locking horns with a Kirk, being admonished by them, having to sit on the cutty stool in Mauchline.

And of course this is going to have an effect on his father. But there’s other things as well where the petty Presbyterianism of his father creeps in, such as Burns attending dancing classes in Tarbolton as a boy. Burns later writes that he attends these country dancing classes to give his manners a brush. It’s to meet the lassies of the parish as well; there’s no doubt about that. Although he wants to learn to dance, it’s a vital social skill in those days. His father objects to this bitterly, and there’s friction between them as a consequence.

But then again, it’s that same Presbyterian zeal, which manifests itself in a desire for learning, that gets Burns his initial education as well. When Burns is a boy, he and his brother Gilbert are sent off to the local school in Alloway. It closes within weeks due to a combination of financial pressures and the master moving out of the district. So William, who’s very, very active almost as a community leader, catalyses the local families to find a replacement tutor.

The people find this unusual when they approach Burns and they have this notion that he’s this great man of the people, but he has a tutor as well. The tutor was active in the community in teaching many of the children, but it’s driven by William. And that’s that zeal for learning that goes right back to John Knox and his proclamation that every parish in Scotland should have a parish school. That only comes about to lesser and greater degrees, depending on how successful it was locally.

But the Scots have this zeal for literacy. It’s seen as a godly trait to be able to read your Bible. Of course, when the Scots start reading their Bibles, the genie gets out of the bottle. They read anything that they can get their hands on, so that by the time of Burns, Scotland is arguably one of the most literate nations per capita in the world.

About eachy peachy with Sweden, incidentally – they’re Lutherans, we’re Calvinists – but it’s similar processes that have brought them to that point. So, William’s very much a supporter of education, of learning for the sheer beauty of it as a godly trait, and he instills that in Robert. The consequence is that this young man, John Murdoch, is engaged to teach the children in Alloway and to teach the Burns boys. And he’s only 18 when he’s interviewed and given the gig. He’s little more than a boy himself.

[JB]
OK, so before we go on though to John Murdoch, because that is one of your other chosen influencers, let’s not forget Burns’s mum. What part did she play in this? Tell me about her.

[GC]
Well, we don’t know as much as we might want to know about her, Jackie. And it’s the case that a lot of stuff is overly passed down, that supposedly she had a sweet singing voice. Maybe she did. That she and other family members like Betty Davidson, that no one quite knows exactly how she’s related to the Burns or the Burnesses, but she’s in the household – these are tradition bearers who probably are passing on stories and legends and songs.

[JB]
So, his mum was Agnes. Agnes Broun.

[CW]
Agnes Broun, yeah, and she’s a Maybole woman. And as Gerry says, there’s not a lot about her, but one has to assume that the way that Burns writes about the happiness of his youth and the fact that he comes from essentially a stable background, she has some bearing on holding the household together.

Burns’s sister writes about Agnes and describes her in fairly explicit terms. It’s a good-looking woman, a bit inclined to plumpness, I believe – for the 18th century, that’s a terribly politically correct term! Inclined to plumpness, but that she could also have a fierce temper. She also describes her as having light red hair, but dark brows and incredibly dark eyes. So, there’s elements there of a very strong physical link with Burns.

But she’s described as having a sweet singing voice. And of course, people sung all the time. These were the days when families actually spoke to each other, remarkably enough. But they also sung to each other. They would also recite poetry and tell stories. It wasn’t just a conversation-based entertainment of an evening. People entertained each other because it was all they had to do, other than reading their Bibles, of course. And even William would have relented on that occasionally.

[GC]
Agnes Broun had lost her own mother very young and was more or less a surrogate mother to her siblings from about the age of 11 or 12. Later on, she – a bit like Burns’s wife, Jean Armour – is very indulgent, very much into looking after Burns’s illegitimate kids. She’s very much a family woman. It’s slightly strange that Burns never writes to her, but that’s probably because her reading skills were limited; we know she had some. But a very powerful, very loving woman. I know that sounds traditional, but I think in some ways she represents an ideal that Burns always aspired to.

[JB]
Well, let’s take a break at this point, and when we come back, we’ll talk more about the people who have influenced the life and work of Robert Burns.

[MV]
From coastlines to castles, wildlife to wilderness, when you become a member of the National Trust for Scotland, you can enjoy the very best of what Scotland has to offer, as often as you like, and you can help to protect it. You’ll join thousands of others who are all playing their part to care for the places we love, for generations to come. Join us and become a member today. Just search National Trust for Scotland.

[JB]
Welcome back to the Love Scotland podcast where I’m joined by Professor Gerry Carruthers from the University of Glasgow and Chris Waddell from Robert Burns Birthplace Museum. Now, just before the break, we mentioned Robert Burns’s teacher John Murdoch. Many of us can single out a teacher who made an impact on our lives, and Burns was no different. Chris?

[CW]
Absolutely. Murdoch had a significant influence on Burns. They remained friends throughout Robert’s life. Murdoch actually, despite living in very reduced circumstances in London in the latter part of his life, makes it to the grand old age of 77. But he has to leave Ayrshire because of an almost comic element of scandal. He decries a local minister, Dalrymple, who’s actually the guy who christens Burns, isn’t he? He’s described as a great friend of the Burns family and he’s usually respected by Burns’s father. He’s described as ‘Dalrymple mild’ because of his more soft leanings as a moderate, as a new licht in the Church of Scotland.

But in a rather bizarre, possibly drink-fuelled, episode, the young John Murdoch – and this is the actions we bear in mind of a young man who’s perhaps speaking out of turn, because bear in mind he’s only 18 when he’s engaged to teach the Burns children – says some very scurrilous things about Dalrymple. These are picked up publicly. There’s a trial of sorts. And he has to leave. He goes then to London to try and make his fortune. He settles in Bloomsbury, the hub of all literary greatness in London, and for a wee while he makes something of a living teaching French there.

But then a little thing called the French Revolution happens, and suddenly London’s filled with people who can speak French and who can teach it clearly far better.

[JB]
So, it’s not a USP anymore!

[CW]
Yeah, it’s not! He works away doing various things, but he writes to Burns later on. And I think this conveys a sense of the affection that they have for each other. When Burns has been lionised and he’s in Edinburgh, then does his tours in 1787, Murdoch writes to him and points out that he is as respected by the Caledonians of London as he would be by the Caledonians of Edinburgh. The expat community in London has really taken to Burns, to the point where he’s already being recited and quoted at their dinners and meetings and things like that. And Murdoch says something along the lines of ‘I’ve indulged my vanity. I’m pointing out to these people that I was an early cultivator of the genius that is Burns.’

There’s clearly a lot there. These are guys who appreciate each other’s intellectualism, and there’s a genuine friendship that seems to blossom as they enter into adulthood. Murdoch would have been, as all Scots schoolmasters, as all dominees would have been, fairly strict with them.

There’s a wonderful thing that he writes in a letter that always kills me a wee bit. He early on figures Gilbert as the smart one, as the brains, as the more talented one. And he speaks specifically about music, which is a strong element of things curricular in those days. He says Robert’s ear was remarkably dull, and his voice untunable – cannot get him to distinguish one tune from another. Well, go anywhere on Hogmanay and you’ll see that Burns made the grade as a bit of a musician!

[JB]
Everyone loves a report card like that, from a teacher about a famous person, that they were proven very very wrong.

[GC]
Also because, a bit like Burns, he liked to push boundaries. And Chris has mentioned the French thing and his brightness comes out in the fact that he has some success writing pedagogical books in French, etc. But also when he’s tutoring Burns, and Burns has been young and sensitive, Murdoch is horrifying him with the really gruesome scenes from Shakespeare, and the young Burns doesn’t like this. So, Murdoch is always pushing boundaries.

And then Chris has mentioned the outspoken contretemps with Dalrymple, about which again we’d like to know a wee bit more. Goes to London, has the confidence to make it in London, and wants Burns to come to London. Unfortunately, doesn’t happen. ‘See, if you came to this place, this would be great material for a poem’. And there is one of those many opportunities you get in any artistic life where wouldn’t it have been great to have Burns writing about London? But so it goes.

[JB]
There’s a counterfactual there, isn’t there?

[CW]
Oh yes, it’s one of the great ‘what ifs’ in Burns’s life. That familial closeness that Murdoch has with the broader Burns family manifests itself in London when Burns’s younger brother William, who’s a saddler, passes away very young whilst he’s working in London. And Murdoch takes it upon himself to largely oversee his funeral and to be present at it, and to act as liaison between what’s happening in London and with the Burns family back in Ayrshire. So, it’s more than just a teacher-pupil relationship; these guys become friends. But the influence early on – as Gerry points out – he’s introducing Burns to great literature. I think it’s Titus Andronicus, isn’t it?

[JB]
And how old would Burns have been at that time?

[GC]
Oh goodness, very young.

[JB]
Because if we’re saying John Murdoch was only 18, then Burns would have been what?

[GC]
We’ve got probably a couple of early dealings where Burns is about 8 and then a bit later when he’s 12, he gets a bit of exposure to Murdoch. And of course, the other thing that goes on, as well as that sexy stuff, we’ve mentioned religion already and everything Chris says about William Burness, the father, is right, but John Murdoch helps William Burness write the …

[JB]
Let’s just clarify, William Burness is Robert Burns’s dad, but he pronounced the name differently.

[GC]
I think Robert thinks that Burns is a cooler name. The artist for the family formerly known as … ! So, Burns is a bit cooler than the clunky peasant-like Burness, I think. William Burness wants a religious manual written for the instruction of Robert and Gilbert, and the man who feeds into that is John Murdoch. And although there’s a lot of traditional Calvinism in there, there’s also bits of moderatism that one might suspect is coming from Murdoch. For instance, there’s a bit of emphasis on kindness and good works as well as faith alone, where the hardline Calvinists might just want faith.

There’s something between harder-line Calvinism and the newer moderate thing going on. It’s never exactly black and white. And also, Murdoch is a man who thinks about religion a lot, which again I think is why he gets into a fankle with Dalrymple. He’s outspoken, etc. And Burns is watching this and thinking, ‘Oh, you can speak back to ministers?’ And the rest is history.

[JB]
So I can see why, at such a young and impressionable age, having a trendy young teacher who perhaps wasn’t what your dad intended would have made such an influence on Burns. OK, so let’s leave John Murdoch there. Gerry, you mentioned Lady Don: Henrietta Cunningham. Tell me about her.

[GC]
She is the sister of the Earl of Glencairn, James Cunningham, who is one of Burns’s patrons in a number of ways, including getting entry to the Excise Service. And from 1787 in Edinburgh, Burns, as well as the brother, has made the acquaintance of the sister. We again don’t know the precise details – and he starts sending her work.

If you look at the kind of work he’s sending her, he’s not just being a wee bit salacious about it, writing sexy stuff to a woman, but he’s sending her, for instance, ‘Holy Willy’s Prayer’ or ‘The Jolly Beggars: Love and Liberty – A Cantata’. He’s sending her some of the radical work that he only usually shows to blokes, and this is because the Cunningham family have got a lot of brains and he clearly believes … 1787 Edinburgh. He’s still got to be a wee bit careful with men and women. He clearly believes that Henrietta is someone who can receive this stuff. Again, there’s probably lost correspondence, but there’s a whole bunch of what were known as the Don Manuscripts, material that Burns sent to Lady Don, now in Edinburgh University. And that’s a significant corpus of Burns text that tells you a lot about how he was operating and how he was having this intellectual friendship with a semi-aristocratic woman.

[JB]
Now, that’s really interesting: an intellectual friendship, because in terms of women and Burns, his dalliances are well known. Was he able, therefore, to differentiate between women he was sexually attracted to and those with whom who could have a platonic relationship?

[GC]
Sometimes.

[CW]
Sometimes, yeah. And I think there’s an element of overlap there. The classic one that most people know about is Agnes MacLehose or Clarinda. Similarly, she’s a woman from a significantly higher echelon in society than Burns. She’s the daughter of a family of Glaswegian lawyers. She’s decamped to Edinburgh with her husband. When she knows Burns, she and her husband have separated, but he instantly finds in her that intellectual spark, which I think is a bit of an unknown for them ...

[GC]
Well, it is. You’re dead right, Chris. There’s something intellectual going on. I was going to say mental there, but that means something different in Glasgow. But at the same time, Clarinda, Mrs MacLehose is full of religious zeal, and they’re writing poetry to one another. And sometimes it’s like, do you feel the religious zeal? Yes, I feel it. Are you burning with religious …? Yeah, I’m! Clearly burning with something else. It’s classic Freudian sublimation. But there’s a number of things going on there that are formative in Burns’s life and lead ultimately to the great song ‘Ae Fond Kiss’, for instance.

So what we’ve got is time and again, Burns – yes, it’s undeniable; he likes women for their bodies – but he also likes women for their minds. There’s no question of that. And Lady Don falls into that category, among others.

[CW]
And the way that society is ordered then, that intellectualism only manifests itself where women have the opportunity to do so. So, it’s women from the upper orders that he tends to cleave to, and he seeks advice from them. He trusts them. Gerry’s already mentioned Mrs Dunlop, Frances Dunlop. She’s this confidante. She’s an older woman to the point where there’s clearly no sexual element there. But Burns really trusts her. And it’s a relationship that becomes frayed at times because of disagreements that they have. But this isn’t the great Burns throwing his ideas onto the table and expecting these women, especially Frances Dunlop, to fall down at his feet. They will argue back. And I genuinely feel that he takes something from that, Gerry, that ability to engage intellectually – an argument and indeed an agreement.

[JB]
Let’s talk in more general then about the upper echelons of society that he began mixing with when he was in Edinburgh particularly. Many people with lowly beginnings are influenced by people with money or with status, and perhaps they’re overwhelmed sometimes by their education. Did that apply to Burns in any way?

[GC]
Burns genuinely likes a number of aristocrats. There are points when he’s a bit of a crawler because he needs to be to get on. There are points where he explicitly doesn’t like members of the aristocracy and writes political ballads against them in election campaigns, etc, etc. There’s a whole mixture of these things.

One of the things he enjoys on his tour of the Highlands and elsewhere is being received in his first flush of celebrity by aristocrats who want to know him. And for a while, with many of these folks, there is a kind of equilibrium where it’s a meeting of minds. Status is very nice: you’ve got a big posh house so you can give me a nice dinner, you can give me resources. But actually, the thing that’s really going on is the artistic thing, where you can introduce me to so-and-so who’s also a song collector or whatever. So, he has that engagement.

He also has what my late parents would have called a good going foot, where he’s more or less happy introducing himself to people from all walks of life because he’s got this promiscuous sympathy – that phrase I probably over-use – where he’s interested in everything. Like many writers, he’s nosy and he wants to get into lives of all kinds and all statuses.

[JB]
Chris?

[CW]
Yeah, absolutely. He draws inspiration from all echelons of society. Burns is as happy in Poosie Nancy consorting with the prostitutes and ploughmen there, as he is in the literary salons of Edinburgh.

[JB]
He was a social chameleon.

[CW]
Very much so. But he uses that chameleon-like ability to great effect in his work in that he’s able to portray a very broad swathe of Scottish society at that time. Following on from what Gerry says, he goes to Edinburgh, he goes on his various tours – initially the Borders in spring 1787, then the Central Highlands and the Highlands proper. And he does become a wee bit of a dancing bear, but a lot of it is very much on his terms as well. Burns is benefitting from this. He’s savvy; he knows he’s benefitting from it.

Burns is a man of ultimate ambition. He wants to be recognised as a poet. He knows he’s a great poet. There’s no doubt about that. And he has this almost carefully managed image. Burns striding up and down the Royal Mile is an image that I often have in my mind, with his blue frock coat and his riding boots and his hair kept in a ponytail, which was unfashionable at that time, but with a ribbon. He knows what he’s doing.

He didn’t decide he was the heaven-taught ploughman, but he certainly does ascribe to that as time goes on. And he knows it’s beneficial to him and he knows it’s working, especially with those people. And crudely speaking, he can be seen as a bit of rough, but I think there’s a genuine appreciation of his intellectual capacity and his abilities as an artist as well among those people.

[GC]
And if he’s a chameleon, we retrospectively impose lots of different contradictory qualities on him. It’s a truism because it’s true that you can make him into anything you want politically. But one of the reasons when he dies that some people say basically he was a Tory was because if you look at the second edition of Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, the so-called Edinburgh edition of 1787, it’s dedicated to the Caledonian Hunt in Edinburgh.

There you’ve got that semi-aristocratic society. It’s the upper nobs. He knows what he’s doing – that’s the group to which he wants to appeal. And he knows that they, rather than the peasantry at that point, can broadcast his name, his fame – can do things for him. And that’s fair enough, I suppose.

[JB]
Before we leave the aristocracy, if we had to nail it, what did those particularly influential women, how did they influence him? Or was it just a case of such was his thirst for knowledge that he just wanted to learn from them … and quite fancied a few of them too?

[CW]
I think he quite fancied them. But they act as genuinely useful sounding boards for Burns. And that’s, I think, the thing he takes the most from. He does write poems about them, especially Agnes MacLehose. It’s a funny one. I think there’s this notion that we think about in terms of this sexual conqueror, but that’s a relationship that, as far as we know, goes unconsummated. It’s conducted largely on paper and there seems to be a sense of real affection, to the point where it becomes really flowery. These letters are flying back and forwards with classical sign-offs on them. The caddies are carrying them across Edinburgh. This is texting!

[GC]
He’s speaking to these ladies when their aristocratic brothers are possibly a bit too snooty to condescend. So, there’s an nudge there to people who are educated, which is it’s easier speaking to these aristocratic women than it is to men. I think there’s a lot … again, I don’t want to get a cliche here about feminine reception, feminine sympathy, but in some ways many of these women are more receptive. You look at the women who are receptive to Burns intellectually – Agnes MacLehose, Mrs Dunlop, Lady Don, and there’s at least a dozen others. There’s something going on where there is a meeting of minds. And again, partly that is because Burns is a poet who’s interested in some of the traditional female themes.

And I know that’s a bit stereotypical, but Burns isn’t being stereotypical about that. He knows that women very often, as he found in his own family, are singers of songs, are tradition-bearers, and he’s getting some of that from them too, as well as other things.

[JB]
So, we come back to his mum then, Agnes. Gerry, you’ve given me some names. We are running out of time. If I gave you the names William McGill, William Tytler (the historian that we’ve sort of talked about already) and Captain Robert Riddell, which would you choose as most influential and why?

[GC]
In some ways, Jackie, I think they’re equally influential, but the one that I am drawn to – which doesn’t necessarily mean that we should go there but maybe we will – is Captain Robert Riddell. He is the man who owns Friars Carse, the house along the road from Burns when he takes his farm, Ellisland, from 1789. And he again is minor gentry, and they become bosom buddies. He is a man who is a historian, who’s a song collector. And to some extent, there’s a creative partnership going on there, which has never properly been acknowledged.

We see that to some degree in the Glenriddell manuscripts, where Bums gifts to Riddell and his family some of his work, and he’s adding more work into it. Clearly, there are discussions going on that we’ll never be privy to because they’re not recorded, not even in correspondence, where Riddell is collaborating with them. Indeed, there are several airs written by Riddell that Burns sets to music. So, we’ve got the romantic myth of the individual writer working alone, but with guys like Riddell, we should bear in mind the collaborative thing.

I’m going to be making quite a lot of that riff when I edit the poetry for Oxford University Press in a couple of years – that Riddell is one of his creative partners.

[JB]
You’re nodding furiously, Chris.

[CW]
Yeah, absolutely. He’s hugely significant in that latter part of Burns’s life. If I can indulge myself with a plug for the museum here, Burns famously gifts to Riddell the interleaved Scots Musical Museum, which puts down a lot of his working notes as to how a great many of these songs, airs and poems come about.

So, there’s a strong collaborative element. And I think it’s reflective of the notion that Burns was never that tortured artist. He’s gregarious, he’s garrulous, he likes to be around people. He’s a people person, if I can use that somewhat irritating phrase – but it’s people from all echelons of society.

We often think that the upper echelons of society will exploit the lower. I think Burns is able to kick it into reverse a wee bit at times. He’s able to be that dancing bear. He’s able to flirt not just with individuals, but with an entire group of people in 18th-century Scotland, and he does it very well. At times, he’s the guy that they want him to be, but he ultimately benefits out of it in terms of the doors that it opens for him – those minor nobles who are genuinely influential in literary circles.

From the outset when Burns goes to Edinburgh, he starts to try desperately to meet people. He writes to Dr John Moore, the famous autobiographical letter. Moore’s a man who’s influential in literary circles. Burns sets out to gain success in the way that modern people set out to gain success.

[GC]
Patronage is something you need to succeed as a poet, and that’s what he’s in search of wherever he can get it. Why wouldn’t you be?

[JB]
From the people that we have discussed, and perhaps we haven’t even touched on the answer to this next question, is there a towering influence? And if so, who would you both say?

[GC]
I think in poetic terms, and this might not go down well in all circles, there’s no question for me that the man who teaches Burns to think poetically in didactic moral terms is Alexander Pope – and his poetry and his letters are replete with references.

Pope isn’t the only one we’ve mentioned. Ramsay and Fergusson, hugely influential, but in many ways I think the poet who is most influential is the Englishman Alexander Pope. And why not? That is the influence if you have to pick out one, in terms of aesthetic terms for me.

[JB]
I get the feeling that you’re agreeing, Chris.

[CW]
There’s signs that Gerry and I’ll argue about, but not Robert Burns. I know when I’m going to get beat, let’s be honest. Pope’s massively influential on Burns and from a very early age as well. He’s there on that Murdoch-inspired reading list. And if we look at some of his earliest, the one I’ve quoted already, song composed in August ‘Now Westlin Winds’. It’s replete with Popian influences. Pope composes a piece called ‘Windsor Forest’. It’s an Augustan description of the Thames Valley; it creates an Elysium out of the Thames Valley.

But Burns does that thing that Scots writers do. He does it, but he takes a more demotic approach to it. He very cheekily uses phrases that are almost identical to Pope, but he casts this whole thing as happening somewhere in Ayrshire, somewhere around about Alloway or Mauchline or Tarbolton most likely, going by the time it was written. And he does it with a lassie on his arm far by.

[JB]
And that is the Burns twist.

[CW]
And that demotic approach to poetry also goes to his appreciation of those writers. He mentions Ramsay and Fergusson in a number of poems. He mentions them almost as a pairing, and he mentions them in these epistolatory poems to Lapraik and to William Simpson. It’s almost as if he’s saying, ‘Oh, by the way, I’ve read these guys as well.’ He’s throwing it in there.

[GC]
And the verse epistles also. Everyone thinks that’s what farmers in Ayrshire did. No, they didn’t. The verse epistle form he’s taking from Alexander Pope because that way of speaking and urbane, cultivated, widely cultural fashion he’s getting from Alexander Pope. We forget these influences and that’s fine because we do see Burns writing verse epistles, but the lineage of that is in writers like Alexander Pope, Dryden, and also Ramsay and Fergusson.

The other thing he gets from Pope also is a preferential option for the Stuarts, because Pope is also a Jacobite.

[JB]
We have run out of time, but I’ve got one more question for you both, and we’re sort of turning the tables. We’re talking about the people who influenced Burns. I’d like to ask is there a piece of poetry or lyrics from Burns that has supremely influenced you both. Chris?

[CW]
Absolutely. I was a late developer in many ways, but especially about in finding Burns. I grew up in a house that was filled with books, but there wasn’t a book of Burns in my house. I went to a school in East Kilbride called Hunter High and the school motto was ‘The man’s the gowd’. Yet in five years of English, I didn’t get taught one single line of Burns.

I started reading Burns when I was in my late 20s, when I was a countryside ranger, because in a moment of dreadful homesickness, I was working in the Cotswolds and I went into a bargain bookstore and picked up the Lomond edition, which is where a lot of us start. The Lomond Complete Poems and Songs of Burns. And I opened it at ‘The Holy Fair’.

‘The Holy Fair’ is this wonderful acidic polemic against the local clergy, this ongoing battle, which I know is a particular area of interest for Burns. And it’s a funny read, but the opening verse is wonderful nature poetry. I’m always banging this drum that Burns isn’t appreciated as a nature poet.

[JB]
Go on, give us the opening verse.

[CW]
Upon a summer Sunday morning,
When Nature's face is fair,
I walked forth to view the corn,
And sniff the caller air.
The rising sun, over Galston Moors,
With glorious light was glinting;
The hares were hirpling down the furrows,
The lav’rocks they were chanting
Fu’ sweet that day.

Fu’ sweet indeed. This is Burns as a boy, alive and enjoying the countryside before he goes off to the Holy Fair and gets involved in the various flesh pots that leads him to …

[JB]
OK, from flesh pots, Gerry, what would you?

[GC]
So, there’s a number of fancy pants academic answers I could give to this, but if I really boil it down, if you said to me that everything that Burns wrote was going to disappear except for one piece, the one piece I would hold onto would be Tam o’ Shanter because it’s his greatest performance in Scots.

It’s a great mock epic and it contains within it, in miniature, a lot of his different signatures that you get elsewhere across his oeuvre. So, everything else has been destroyed, I would keep Tam o’ Shanter.

[JB]
And is there a particular stanza there that just gets you going?

[GC]
All of it. And in fact, the answer here means that I can’t recite any particular bit of it. It’s the shifts between different voices. It’s the shifts between moods that you need to have in totality. It’s a great organic work where he’s all over the place a wee bit, mimicking Tam and his supposed drunkenness – so, it’s the totality of the poem that is wonderful.

[JB]
Well, perhaps in the future we will devote an entire podcast to Tam o’ Shanter, because I’m sure it could take it … and then some. That is all we’ve got time for, gentlemen – thank you so much. I hope we’ve thrown some additional light on the life and work of this complex and talented man whose work has meant so much to so many.

As I said at the start, whether you’re a Burns expert or a newcomer, the Burns Birthplace Museum in Alloway run by the National Trust for Scotland should certainly be a port of call. And, you can say hello to Chris! It exists and its collections are growing because of you, because of your support, your membership and your donations. Thank you.

Archive collections from the museum are now available for everyone to explore online. Just head to the Trust website for more information. So, thank you once again to Professor Gerry Carruthers.

[GC]
Thank you.

[JB]
And to Chris Waddell.

[CW]
Thank you.

[JB]
Thank you both. Until next time on Love Scotland, goodbye.

And if that has whetted your appetite for all things Burns, there are plenty of other podcasts about the Bard. Just take a look on the National Trust for Scotland Love Scotland podcast feed.

[DP]
The poet was no teetotaller, not at all. Sometimes he overdid it, there’s no question of that. Sat with his friends on the evening hours in the taverns of Dumfries or Ayr or whatever. But he was no alcoholic. His behaviour and what was observed about him do not support that.

[MV]
Love Scotland is brought to you by Think and Demus Productions on behalf of the National Trust for Scotland; presented by Jackie Bird. For show notes and more information, go to nts.org.uk and don’t forget to like, subscribe, review and share.